The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (2 page)

We chatted over a range of subjects while Brass finished his steak, and Cholly his tea. We discussed the attempted assassination of “the Kingfish,” Senator Huey Long, last night in Baton Rouge. Some doctor had accosted the senator in a hallway in the state capitol and put a couple of bullets in his stomach. The doctor had promptly been blown away by three of the Kingfish’s State Police bodyguards. Some people thought it was political; Long’s populist Share the Wealth clubs were rising in membership and popularity, making him a powerful contender for the presidency in the next election. It was an open question as to whether the Republicans or the Democrats were more scared of him. The opinion of the local reporters, a cynical lot, was that he had hopped out of the wrong bed.

“I don’t know why the guy shot him,” Cholly ventured, “but I been reading about how funny it was that he went everywhere with his bodyguard, even into the Senate. But now I guess it ain’t so funny no more.”

We talked about the Max Baer-James J. Braddock title bout at Madison Square Garden a couple of months ago (Braddock won on a decision after fifteen rounds; Baer was gypped, Cholly asserted. Brass, who had had a ringside seat, agreed. I missed that one, but I agreed on general principles: I had met Max Baer and I liked him) and the Joe Louis-Primo Carnera bout two weeks later in the same arena (Louis K.O.’d the ex-champion in the sixth. He might become the next Negro World Champion, according to Cholly, if Braddock, the bum, agrees to fight him. Brass and I had both been at that one. Brass agreed with Cholly. I am no judge of such things, but from what I saw anyone climbing into the ring against Mr. Louis had better have made out his will and said goodbye to his nearest and dearest). The conversation then switched to the decline of the American theater for a little while, until Benny Goodman and his boys were making their way back to the bandstand. Then Cholly-on-the-Corner got up, solemnly shook hands with Brass and me, and departed.

“Well, what are you going to do?” I asked Brass.

“About what?”

“About Two-Headed Mary. Are you going to do a mention about her being gone?”

“Of course,” Brass told me. “‘Philanthropist panhandler missing.’ My readers will eat it up. If she doesn’t reappear soon I can do a paragraph on it once a month for the next year. Then, on the first anniversary of her disappearance, I’ll write a full-column ‘Mysterious Disappearance’ story. Feature writers will add her to the pantheon of perpetual missing persons like Judge Crater and Ambrose Bierce. We can have the whole country out looking for her. Boy scouts in Topeka and volunteer fire departments through Ohio and Indiana will send out search parties to examine deserted quarries and peer down closed mine shafts. I wonder whether anyone has actually ever been found in a deserted quarry or down a closed mine shaft.”

Brass sipped his brandy and contemplated the follies of the human race. “But it will probably amount to very little. The odds are that Mary is just sleeping off a binge in some Bowery hotel or smoking the dream pipe in one of those dives off Mott Street, and she’ll show up in the next few days on her own.”

“Maybe she’s been carried off by Indians like Evangeline, or has ran off with her secret lover like Aimie Semple McPherson or stolen a bunch of money like Billie Trask,” I suggested. “That should be good for some copy.”

“‘Evangeline’ is a poem by Longfellow,” Brass corrected me with the sigh of a long-suffering pedant. “You’re probably thinking of Virginia Dare, who was the first English child born in North America. She vanished with the rest of the settlers on Roanoke Island sometime before 1591.”

“That must be the lady I meant,” I agreed.

Benny Goodman blew a tentative E-flat.

“And the fact that Miss Trask was working in the box office of the Monarch Theater and disappeared at the same time as the box-office receipts doesn’t mean she took them. There are several other explanations for her disappearance and the vanishing money that are not being considered by the authorities, or by my fellow journalists.”

“They might have information you don’t,” I suggested.

“I’m sure they do,” Brass agreed. “They must know the color of the girl’s eyes and hair, her weight, the names of her intimates, and what small town in Indiana, or wherever, she’s from. But they don’t know, and neither do you nor I, whether she has that money.”

This was part of an ongoing discussion between us. We’d been following the case in the papers and speculating on it since the story broke. The consensus was that Trask had taken the money, but Brass has never been a consensus player. “She’s been gone two weeks now,” I said. “My bet is when they catch up with her, she’s got the missing dough in her girdle.”

“I doubt if she wears a girdle,” Brass said. “Remember, she was a dancer in the
Lucky Lady
company until she hurt her leg.”

“Well, at least I was right about Aimee,” I said.

“At least,” Brass agreed. “Let’s hope Two-Headed Mary has a secret lover; I could do something with that. But right now I’m going on to the Stork Club. With luck somebody whose name is known to the common man will be throwing drunken punches at someone even more famous for insulting his wife or girlfriend, or Roosevelt, or the League of Nations, or Gypsy Rose Lee, and I’ll have the opener for a think piece about the vagaries of human conduct. I feel like doing a think piece, it requires so little thought. You go on home, if you like.”

So here it was a hair before one in the morning and my workday was ending. This is not a complaint. I value my job; and not just because in this month of our Lord September 1935, almost six years since the day immortalized in the
Variety
headline,
WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG
, an employer still doesn’t have to advertise a job. He just has to go into a dark corner, make sure there is nobody in earshot, and whisper quietly up his sleeve: “I need someone to sweep the floor and lift heavy objects. I can pay ten dollars a week.” Before he can make it to the front door, four hundred people will be lined up outside, politely, quietly, hopefully.

But I not only have a job, I have the job I wanted: amanuensis and legman for Alexander Brass. My name is Morgan DeWitt and I have worked for Brass since the week I arrived in New York four years ago with my suitcase in one hand and my diploma from Western Reserve College in the other, determined to write the Great American Novel before I was thirty. I am still working on the novel. I have five years to go. Wars have been fought and won, dynasties have fallen, obscure army corporals have risen to lead great countries in less than five years; so I still have a chance with the novel. Besides, would it be so bad if I didn’t finish it until I was thirty-five?

Brass has warned me that working for him will ruin my writing style. He has also said that any writer who is conscious of his style as he writes is an inept farceur. I suppose both could be true. But I like my job. The hours are lousy, the working conditions vary from elegant to dangerous, the pay is barely adequate, even for a young single man with an English degree from a small college in Ohio as his only reference, but I have learned more about life—about people—each week I’ve worked for Brass than I would in ten years of doing anything else. I have dealt with gangsters and their molls, politicians and their molls, stars of stage and screen, con men, kept women, kept men, nightclub owners, nightclub singers, nightclub crawlers, doormen and princes, whores and princesses, and have discovered no universal truth, no rulebook for understanding humanity. But I have learned, faster and more directly than I could have elsewhere, that it is presumptuous for any man to assume that he understands any other man well enough to write about him; and ridiculous for any man to assume that he understands any woman.

Brass and I separated at the door; he grabbed a cab to the Stork Club and a night of listening to stars and starlets and would-be stars and their press agents and sycophants whispering boozy secrets in his ear. I raised the collar of my raincoat and pulled my hat down against the cold drizzle and headed for the 57th Street subway entrance. One of the city’s saving graces is that the streetcars, buses, and subways run all night. The other is that, though New Yorkers know that their city is the center of the known universe, they are not at all stuck up about it.

* * *

Twenty minutes later I was home, which is a room in a brownstone rooming house on West 74th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. I share the house with an ever-changing assortment of actors, actresses, dancers, singers, musicians, playwrights, waiters, waitresses, and other recent arrivals who are going to make it big in this city without a heart, or die trying. Sometimes reality is surprisingly trite. There is also a young lady who reads cards and tells fortunes at various restaurants around town, a retired New York cop who works as a guard at the Museum of Natural History, and a small-time bookie who works out of a cigar store on Broadway and 86th. My next-door neighbor is a retired circus clown named Pinky. An ever-changing slice of life, my rooming house.

There is a shared living room where people of the opposite sex can entertain each other, since propriety and Mrs. Bianchi, the landlady, discourage the mixing of the sexes in any of the upstairs rooms; brief visits with the door open are barely permitted. The room has an upright piano (no playing after 10:00 P.M.), a couple of couches, a few overstuffed chairs, some beat-up wooden chairs, a writing desk, and, at the moment I came into the house, a uniformed patrolman in deep conversation with Maureen, our resident card reader, on a couch in the corner. Since they were holding hands and gazing meaningfully into each other’s eyes, I didn’t think Maureen was in any great danger of getting arrested for fortune-telling, so I tiptoed upstairs and fell into bed.

To compensate for the late hours, I usually don’t arrive at the office until between ten and ten-thirty. Brass tries to make it by eleven. Normally after I get up and ablute, I make a small pot of coffee and spend the next hour at the old Underwood on the desk under my window, working at my novel—can’t be a novelist without writing a novel. But this morning I stared at the last page I had done—thirty-two—and decided to put aside the manuscript and let it age. Perhaps it would improve with age. It was a slice-of-life story called “So Breaks a Heart—A Saga of Broadway.” It was about a young man who works for a famous columnist and what he learns about life and women and other things and how he has his heart broken by a girl who loves him but cannot be faithful to any man.

It was autobiographical, but it was sappy and it didn’t read true. I think the reason truth is stranger than fiction is that when it is written as fiction, it is not believable.

When a random stranger—say someone you meet at a party—finds out you’re a writer, even a would-be novelist like myself, one of the first questions is always “Where do you get your ideas?” My friend Bill Welsch, a regular contributor to
Black Mask
, claims they are mailed to him on postcards from a fellow in New Jersey named Bodo. The truth is that ideas for plots and characters are constantly flung at you by life, and your job is merely to catch them, sort them, and throw back the ones that are undersized. It isn’t the ideas that are the problem, it’s arranging them in a lifelike and realistic manner within the story. The task is one of selection, organization, and staying far enough removed from the material so that it will read like the truth. Truth in fiction is an artfully contrived facade.

I considered the problems of being a writer as I got dressed, and wondered whether
The Writer
or
Writer’s Digest
would be interested in an article by one of America’s major unpublished novelists.

I washed, brushed, and dressed in a brown single-breasted suit that said, or at least strongly implied, “man of the world,” and had set me back thirty-five dollars, and was headed downstairs, trench coat over my arm, by quarter to nine. I walked along Central Park West, observing the pigeons, sparrows, squirrels, small children and their nannies, and other fauna, and thinking over the state of the world and trying to decide what sort of book to attempt next. Starting a novel is easy. Taking it to completion is, for me so far, a distant goal. Perhaps I should switch to short stories or squib fillers for newspapers. Who knows—I might write the Great American Squib.

My thoughts moved, mercifully, on to the missing Two-Headed Mary. The lady was a true Broadway character of the sort that Damon Runyon might write about. Telling her tale would present certain problems in delicacy and restraint, but Alexander Brass had solved worse. In his coverage of the Hall-Mills case a decade ago, he had managed to convey what the minister and his choir singer were doing in their time alone together with mostly biblical references, and without getting more than a couple of dozen letters from readers whose sensibilities were offended (but who nonetheless had read every word). Theodore Garrett, Brass’s man-of-all-work, had done a montage of those letters, and it hung in the entrance hall to Brass’s apartment.

Brass had two people working for him in his office on the sixteenth floor of the
New York World
building on Tenth Avenue and 59th Street. There was Gloria Adams, his researcher and copy editor, who doubled as the receptionist when there was any receiving to be done; and there was me. Gloria, whom I privately think of as the Ice Princess, is blond, five-foot-two, beautiful, and of indeterminate age. She can’t be as young as she looks, and she looks far too young to be as knowledgeable and self-assured as she is. (If Gloria were to read that last sentence she would red-pencil it heavily and write something about “balance” in the margin. But I think it means what I think I want to say, so I think I’ll just leave it alone.)

I got into the office about ten-thirty, nodded hello to Gloria, who was behind her desk in the front room, carefully hung up my tan British trench coat, which gives me that air of elan that I otherwise lack, and tossed my dark brown fedora on the hat tree. Gloria looked over my suit and gave me an approving nod. She thinks that people should always dress as though they are in imminent danger of meeting their maker, and will be judged 20 percent on their good works and 80 percent on their tailor. “Are there any news?” I asked her.