On the morning of Valentine’s Day, the skies were dark, plump with impending rain and thunder. Despite some red Cupid silhouettes pasted to the walls, the atmosphere on the Graybar Building’s fourteenth floor was less amorous than it had been for most of the past two weeks. Clothes that had cushioned trysts inside the Fashion Department’s closets had been hung back up. The girls had returned to their typewriters, the young men to their layout tables. Even last week’s indoor-golf equipment had been restored to its proper shelves and purposes. Keyboards clicked; razors trimmed photographs; fresh proofs ejected themselves from the pneumatic mail tubes—even though Harris probably wouldn’t be in for another hour. On their first day back from England, custom dictated that Spilkes, Fine, and Montgomery first make a series of late, individual entrances. After they’d each served up a couple of anecdotes about the boss’s behavior abroad, it would be all right for Harris himself to sail down the main corridor.
At 10:05, it was still only Nan O’Grady, Norman Merrill, and Allen Case getting off the elevator.
“Nope,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, with a reassuring smile. “He’s not here yet.”
“I knew it,” said Nan, still clutching some of the bon voyage streamers she and her companions had flung toward the caged little koala, who’d departed from a dock at the end of West Forty-fourth Street.
“Jesus,” said Chip Brzezinski, noticing the colored ribbons. “What’d you do? Go down to the pier and welcome them home?”
“That’s stupid even for you,” said Nan, who with the possible exception of Hazel was less of an apple-polisher than anyone at the magazine.
“Hey, O’Grady,” cried Hazel. “Come look at somethin’.” Nan tucked the streamers into her pocket and approached Harris’s office. Hazel, who was chatting with Daisy, pointed through the open door to the boss’s desk: “Tell me what you think.”
Nan went in and read the letter from John Shepard’s mother.
Hazel called to her. “You remember him, don’t you?”
“He came up to me at Oldcastle’s,” said Nan. “He asked whether I thought Stuart would be offended if he introduced himself.”
“I know he spoke to the judge,” said Daisy. “But all I can recall for sure is that the poor thing had never really kissed a girl.”
“Did he tell you that?” asked Nan.
“No, but I remember noticing how he ate one of the shrimp. You could—”
“Please,” said Nan. “I’ll use my imagination.” She turned to Hazel. “Are you showing that letter to everybody?”
“Yeah. If people like you and Becky know, then Himself may feel shamed into doing something.”
“He wouldn’t be shamed by us?” asked the countess, wounded that Hazel didn’t credit her with the same moral persuasiveness.
“No, not by us,” said Hazel, untroubled by her own exclusion.
“I’ll needle him about it,” promised Nan.
Daisy went back to reading a newspaper story on John Nicholas Brown, born America’s richest baby in 1900 thanks to the death of his father while Nicky himself was still in the womb. Now a young man of extreme eligibility, Brown was combining in Daisy’s mind this morning with the lost John Shepard, and the two were stirring up memories of her own rich young count, the lovely, wheezing Antonio. Despite her sympathy for Mrs. Shepard out there in Indiana, Daisy knew how important it was for these sensitive boys to be pried from their mamas. She wondered for a moment whether John hadn’t taken the extreme measure of disappearance to elude an overzealous maternal grasp.
“Could you take a look at this?”
The Wood Chipper had once again come up to Nan, before she could start back to her own desk. He handed her a brief fashion piece—two badly typed pages about the advisability of a short man’s wearing a low, narrowly pointed collar. Nan took less than thirty seconds to make her way through the text’s shaky grammar and ask Chip why he’d produced this effusion.
“Just trying to pitch in,” he answered. “I figure we need all hands on deck with everything that’s going on here.”
Nan narrowed her eyes, knowing his motives had to be as mixed as his metaphors.
Chip looked away, hoping she wouldn’t guess that the squib was something he’d worked up for Jimmy Gordon. This was going to be his week, he felt sure. At least one of the crises facing Bandbox should provide him a chance to be so useful to Jimmy that Chip Brzezinski would finally be invited aboard Cutaway. He would hit the ground running with this little piece of copy on collars.
“Maybe I should show it to Case,” he muttered, when Nan failed to say anything more.
“Don’t,” she responded. “He’d be able to make it sound even more like you.”
Norman Spilkes, still wearing his overcoat, came suddenly into view. He made a fast approach to Hazel’s desk. “Is he in?” the m.e. asked.
Hazel shook her head no.
“How was your trip?” asked Nan.
“I learned to rhumba,” Spilkes answered, before noticing the Wood Chipper. “I’ll tell you more later.”
Once left alone with Hazel, he tried again: “Has he called?”
“Nope,” she answered.
Spilkes wondered when he’d be able to tell Harris about yet another problem that Andrew Burn had just imparted in the elevator: Wanamaker’s was shifting three-quarters of its menswear ads from Bandbox to Cutaway.
A couple of the catastrophes that Spilkes had become acquainted with since arriving home last night seemed soluble enough. First, put an end to the fiction contests: treat the fiasco of the current one as a big boy-are-we-embarrassed joke, and hold it in reserve against Sidney, a weapon to be deployed once he again got too big for his fancy flannel britches. Second, realize that the solution to Newman’s problem was even easier: fire him. But there was nothing easily done about all these numbers. Jimmy’s magazine had made it past the dangers of infancy. It was now another mouth for the economy to feed, and even in this boom there were only so many readers and advertisers to go around. Cutaway needed to be strangled in its playpen, but the tot seemed well on its way to committing parricide before that could be accomplished.
Hazel’s voice halted Spilkes’s dark train of thought. “If you find him before I do,” she said, “give him these.” She handed the managing editor two powder-blue slips of paper—one message asking Harris to report to the police commissioner’s office “as soon as possible,” and another requesting that he visit Hiram Oldcastle “IMMEDIATELY.”