Holding aloft his silver-pencil trophy, Jimmy Gordon looked down from the dais and decided that the applause, sweet as it might be, couldn’t compare with the sight of the empty Bandbox table down front. Its only occupant was an identifying centerpiece, a fishtailed stack of the magazine’s brand-new mendacious issue. Jimmy had imagined what it would feel like watching Joe listen to his speech, but the absence of his vanquished rival—too scared to show!—felt even better.
He looked out across the whitecaps of napery in the ocean-sized dining room. Everyone was here: the bespectacled old brass of the Saturday Evening Post and Century; the upstarts, nearly as young as himself, from The New Yorker and Time. Four years working for Joe had kept him one of the crowd; eight months on his own had him up at this lectern.
“Cutaway,” he intoned, “will shine its light not only on the fashionable and famous, not only on the achievers and the record-breakers, but also on the sad overreachers who drag down our age with their dishonest graspings.”
As he ladled these words over the industry assembled at his feet, a squad of well-tailored young men infiltrated the four dozen breakfast tables, passing out the just-printed May number of Cutaway, which Jimmy had not wasted on a centerpiece, but held in reserve for this moment.
THREADBARE!
shouted the cover line.
JOE HARRIS AND BANDBOX
CREATE A TAILOR-MADE FRAUD
A Special Investigation by Paul Montgomery
Jimmy continued his slow, sonorous remarks while the diners flipped to the opening graf of the lead article, which read:
For a good part of our dapper, kinetic decade, Joe Harris’ revitalized Bandbox has been filling up the American man’s mind along with his armoire. Only lately, faced with a stiff breeze of competition from this magazine, has Bandbox resorted to pulling some thick lamb’s wool over its readers’ eyes.
Jimmy took a long pause to let everyone scan the accumulated evidence, as well as Paulie’s brief peroration against “an alliterating fantasist’s corruption of youth, and a whole magazine’s mockery of the once-proud NYPD.”
The susurrus in the ballroom became a loud buzz; editors sprinted to the Bandbox centerpiece to see just what Joe Harris had perpetrated. Jimmy watched the commotion and felt he was making commercial and artistic history. People would be talking about this occasion years from now, the way they still recalled the Armory Show and The Rite of Spring’s premiere. He waited for the noise to die down enough that he could tell everyone how Cutaway now stood as “the only magazine in this new awards category.” And while he waited, he could see, just outside the room, through two open doors, the smoke from a photo flash.
The buzzing did not abate, but the smoke quickly cleared, and once it did Jimmy’s eyes were greeted by the sight of the Shepard kid leading a three-man parade through the ballroom, all the way to the Bandbox table, which had been denuded of its May issue. Behind the kid marched the unmistakable form of Joe Harris, and behind that a figure recognized from the newspapers as Captain Patrick Boylan.
“There’s no centerpiece,” said Joe. He was taking note of an opportunity, not a lack. “Shep, get up there.”
John Chilton Shepard, by now accustomed to orders of the most inexplicable kind, bounded up onto the tablecloth in his newly shined shoes. The crowd, not knowing what to think, began to quiet down.
“Captain?” said Joe, pressing his luck. “Want to make Commissioner someday?”
Boylan, who’d already been persuaded against his better judgment to come uptown with this man, narrowed his eyes.
“If you want to,” advised Harris, “you’ll stand up on that table and hoist the kid’s arm into the air.”
Boylan glared at this detestable Barnum for one moment longer, until ambition once more overrode caution.
The crowd, noting that something had gone very wrong with Jimmy Gordon’s expression, fell almost silent when Boylan’s feet joined Shep’s somewhere in the small space between the water pitcher and the coffeepot. And then, accustomed by the age to throwing ticker tape and applause at a new hero every day, it began to clap, first in a slow, rhythmic wave, and finally—once Harris, rising like Tunney from the Long Count, joined Boylan and the boy atop the table—in a thunderous, whooping storm of half-comprehension and complete delight.
With one arm holding Boylan’s wrist, and the other pulling Shep’s hand even higher, Harris looked out into the audience, where he saw Betty mouthing the words “Felicity Shunt” to a confused reporter, and the figure of Cuddles Houlihan, leaving the hall like a man who’d completed his work.