The telephone woke me around ten-thirty in the morning. I normally didn’t get to bed until four, so it was still dawn on my personal clock, and I growled a sour hello which was meant to say, what’s the idea of waking me up at this hour of the night, you idiot?
“This is Mrs. Johnston,” said a voice of command and, to put me in a more humble mood, it added, “Mister Dorsey’s secretary.”
Gunfire in the next room couldn’t have brought me wide awake faster. Neither Mrs. Johnston nor Buck Dorsey had ever telephoned me at home.
I sprang out of the sheets, sat at attention on the side of the bed waiting for something awful, and with great respect asked fierce Mrs. Johnston, “How are you?”
Without bothering to answer, she said, “Can you have lunch today with Mister Dorsey?”
It was not a question, of course. It was a command.
I said I thought I could have lunch with Mr. Dorsey, since it was my day off.
“Will Hasslinger’s be all right?” she announced.
I said Hasslinger’s would be fine.
Hasslinger’s would actually be dreadful if I had to pay for my share of the lunch. It was one of Baltimore’s best restaurants and was priced accordingly. I had never eaten there, never dreamed of eating there, and never even wanted to eat there, not at those prices.
Mrs. Johnston suggested a time.
I said it was a perfect time for me, and she said, “Good-bye,” and hung up.
I bolted a cup of coffee and spent a lot of time trying to assemble a presentable wardrobe, in the meantime worrying and wondering about what was about to happen. And something was about to happen, no doubt about that. Buck Dorsey did not take lunch with drones on the local staff. With Tom O’Neill, yes. Maybe once in a while even with Ed Young. With local reporters and rewrite men, never. Something was up, possibly something bad, but I couldn’t think what that might be. I had been working well lately and had made no disastrous mistakes to endanger my job. In any case, Buck Dorsey wouldn’t take me to lunch to fire me, would he?
Working for the guild had given me a small reputation as an office sorehead, but certainly nobody could consider me a menace in Ellis Baker’s league. On the guild’s negotiating committee, I had been little more than a warm body at the table, making almost no contribution to the union cause. Still, was it possible that Buck Dorsey wanted to caution me to mind my step in the union department? Highly improbable. He rarely acknowledged my existence in the office, surely he wouldn’t take me to lunch to lecture me on the need to be discreet. Or would he? I remembered that strange lecture he had once given me on good taste.
I took a taxi to Hasslinger’s. The occasion was too big to be approached by streetcar. I would probably never lunch with Buck Dorsey again. I wanted to cut a good figure. Suppose Buck Dorsey should see me arriving at Hasslinger’s. If he did, by God, he would see me arriving by taxi, the way Tom O’Neill would arrive. Sometimes you had to squander money to keep your self-respect.
He did not see me arrive, but on getting out of the taxi I was far too excited to lament the dollar needlessly spent. I stepped out into a golden noon in November. Hasslinger’s, occupying a corner on Charles Street one block from Pennsylvania Station, had big windows facing west and south. These were flooding the room with sunlight when I entered. It was a large, open room, rather plain and masculine, skillfully undecorated, and richer in feeling because of its simplicity, or maybe because of that soft golden sunlight suffusing it.
A man in formal black greeted me. I told him I was to meet Mr. Dorsey of the Sun.
Ah yes, of course. Mr. Dorsey.
Mr. Dorsey was clearly a familiar and important man here.
This way, please. And he led me toward what was obviously a choice table near the center of the room. Buck Dorsey was already there. I was late. I had kept Buck Dorsey waiting.
I didn’t care. Amazingly, I simply didn’t care. There was no explaining it. The man I’d been yesterday would have cared ridiculously, would have turned pink with embarrassment, would have apologized and apologized until Buck Dorsey was forced to say, “For heaven’s sake, man, don’t have a breakdown, you’re not late, I just happened to get here a few minutes early.”
Today I was not even mildly flustered. So I was late and had kept Buck Dorsey waiting, and it mattered not at all to me. Tom O’Neill couldn’t have been cooler about it. When I reached the table, Buck Dorsey stood, waved me to the other chair, and said, “I happened to get here a few minutes early, so…”
So he had ordered a drink. It was a martini, and not on the rocks. The custom of serving a martini with ice cubes was still unborn. Buck Dorsey’s was a clear, icy liquid in a stemmed glass with nothing to dilute its power. He waved. A waiter appeared.
“What do you want to drink?” Buck Dorsey asked.
For me it was breakfast time. I never drank at that time of day. I rarely drank anything stronger than a beer even in the evening, except weekends. Still—“I’ll have a martini.”
“Any preference about what kind of gin?”
Normally I would have said, “It doesn’t matter,” but in the nick of time I recalled what John Wood had once said about Buck Dorsey: “Such an Anglophile that the only gin he’ll drink in his martini is House of Lords.”
And now Buck Dorsey was asking did I have a preference about the gin for my martini.
“Yes,” I said. “House of Lords.”
We made conversation stiffly, but there was no sense of danger in the air. Buck Dorsey seemed relaxed, possibly even happy. My martini was brought. He watched with concern while I sipped it.
“Is it dry enough?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s fine,” I said, then wondered if that wasn’t a mistake. Buck Dorsey, I realized, was finicky about the dryness of his martinis and probably sent many back to be made drier. Too late, I saw that he probably would have thought better of me if I’d said mine wasn’t dry enough and sent it back for improvement.
“You sure?” he asked, while the waiter hovered. The waiter was probably used to taking back martinis from Mr. Dorsey’s table.
Now, though, I knew I had missed the moment for sending it back. Having pronounced it fine, I would look indecisive if I changed my mind.
“It’s just right,” I said.
We began working on the martinis, with Buck Dorsey making small talk at first, then asking about my family. He had been well briefed and knew Mimi and I had a new baby, born a few days after the election.
It was amazing how cool I was, how quickly I sensed that Buck Dorsey intended to do something rewarding for me. The martini seemed to increase the calm self-confidence I had felt ever since walking into that streaming golden sunlight. Perhaps he was about to give me a significant raise, I thought. Now seemed the time to show how much I needed one.
Yes, it was our second baby, I said. Our first was a little girl. This one was a boy. We’d named him Allen after an uncle of mine who had been good and generous to my mother and my sister Doris and me back in the Depression when times had been so hard. Of course, trying to keep up with the bills nowadays, well, sometimes Mimi and I felt as if the Depression had never ended.
“What did you make of the election?” Buck Dorsey replied.
I took the hint and stopped talking about the hardships of life for a Sun man. I was not foolish enough to tell him how I felt about the election, however, because I had him figured as a plutocrat, therefore a Republican, therefore probably ecstatic about General Eisenhower’s victory over Adlai Stevenson.
It was wiser to finesse political talk with anecdote, I thought, so told him about going with Mimi to vote just four days before Allen was born. The polling place was in a private house up two dozen steep cement steps, and Mimi so big she could hardly—
Buck Dorsey had signaled the waiter for a second martini. “You like another?” he asked.
I nodded yes and went on about election day.
—well, I knew Eisenhower was going to swamp Stevenson when I saw ambulances outside that polling place. They were bringing in people on stretchers to vote, and on the sidewalk there were old people in wheelchairs waiting to be carried up those steep cement steps to vote. I knew then it was Ike by a landslide because nobody who is happy with the status quo leaves the hospital to vote. I’d said to Mimi, this isn’t an election, it’s a murder, and she needn’t feel she had to struggle up those steps to vote because whatever she did, Eisenhower had it locked up, and—
The fresh drinks were there. I wondered if I had been talking too much, but Buck Dorsey seemed to be giving me his full attention as we laced into the second round of martinis. Then he started talking about his plans for adapting the Sun’s news coverage to deal with a new government in Washington. I ought to have been amazed but wasn’t, thanks no doubt to the gin, because he was discussing his managerial problems as openly as if he were discussing them with Neil Swanson.
There was nothing very startling or very interesting to me in these problems, which dealt chiefly with shifting assignments for famous by-lines in the Washington bureau, but I listened judiciously, nodded now and then, and clucked when it seemed appropriate, until, lifting my martini glass, I noticed it was empty. So was Buck Dorsey’s. What a good time we were having, sitting in the golden sunlight at Hasslinger’s, discussing high management policy while an obliging waiter brought us these marvelous drinks.
“Shall we have one more?” Buck Dorsey suggested, signaling for the waiter, who arrived with menus.
“Two martinis,” said Buck Dorsey, waving the menus away. Then, to me: “Tell me what you think of the paper these days.”
Under the sway of the gin, my calm self-confidence had become suicidal self-importance. So when Buck Dorsey asked me what I thought of the paper I actually started telling him what I thought of the paper.
While I did, the new martinis arrived, as well as menus, so fortunately we both lost the thread of my criticisms in a lengthy discussion of food. When we had finally ordered, the third martini was pretty well gone, and Buck Dorsey said he thought he would have a beer with his lunch, and would I like one, too? I said I would, and Buck Dorsey said, “What beer do you like?” to which I said, “Whatever you’re having is fine with me.”
To which he said, “No, you choose the beer.”
My mental wiring may have been fouled by the martinis, but my internal alarm system went off, and I instantly suspected that Buck Dorsey was testing me and that choosing the wrong beer could be disastrous for me. Maybe the gin had even given me new cunning. It took only a fraction of an instant to realize that choosing most of the local beers, beers like Gunther and Arrow, would be the end of me. I did not especially like beer, knew little about it, and drank it simply because I thought newspapermen ought to drink beer and because it was cheap. I vaguely knew there was a local beer that might be marginally acceptable to a connoisseur like Buck Dorsey, but couldn’t remember which it was.
In the next fraction of an instant I realized that the way to score big with Buck Dorsey was to order an imported beer. The trouble was that I had never drunk an imported beer and could not think of the name of one. In 1952 imported beer was a rare, almost unknown commodity in America. A few European companies were just beginning to test the market. Occasionally one of them might run an ad in one of the higher-brow magazines. James Thurber, E. B. White, and S. J. Perelman had made me a devoted reader of The New Yorker, and now, with Buck Dorsey waiting for my decision, I remembered seeing way in the back of a New Yorker a small ad for an imported German beer I had never heard of. It was called Lowenbrau with an umlaut o.
“I’d like a Löwenbrau,” I said, hoping my German pronunciation was right.
“Two Löwenbraus,” Buck Dorsey said to the waiter, then smiled at me man-to-man—or was it like a father who was proud of his son?—and said, “I certainly admire your taste.”
The food came, and the beer, and when we started to eat, Buck Dorsey said, “How old are you?”
I said I was twenty-seven.
“How would you like to go to London?” he asked.
The question was so preposterous that at first I did not absorb its implication. It was as though he had asked if I would like to go out to Cleveland for a few days and cover an Urban League convention. Well, I said, a little hesitant, we had just had a new baby, and I wasn’t sure it was a good time to go off and leave Mimi alone.
“Could I think about it a little while?” I asked.
Buck Dorsey was looking at me very strangely, and as the full weight of the great announcement he had just uttered broke over me, I understood why. He was sending me to London. The managing editor of the Sun had invited me to lunch and spoken to me like an equal because he intended to send me to London, and instead of fainting with joy, I had asked if I could have time to think it over.
“I mean, how long would you want me to be away?” I said.
“Probably two years,” he said. “That’s the usual assignment for men we put in the London bureau.”
The full wonder of it was now spreading through my gin-soaked sensibilities. He was making me the London correspondent. “Chief of the London Bureau,” as the title had it.
“Of course, once you get there and find a place to live, you’d move your family over with you,” he was saying.
In my shock I must have muttered something about not being able to afford to move my family to London because he laughed and said, “Don’t worry about money. Uncle Abell will pay for everything.”
“Uncle Abell?”
That was his private way of referring to the Sun, which was owned by a handful of wealthy Baltimoreans organized as the A. S. Abell Company.
“Everything?”
“Everything,” he said.
I said if he was truly serious of course I would go, then resumed eating whatever it was the waiter had brought, trying to behave as though my whole world had not just been turned downside up. Buck Dorsey was talking about the coming coronation of young Queen Elizabeth, which would be the great story during my time in London, but I was now too excited to pay close attention. I was going to escape the drudgery of the local newsroom, after all. I was going to cross that chasm and pass into the glorious world where the correspondents saw their by-lines spread across the front page and sent cables saying, BUCK, SEND FIVE THOUSAND IMMEDIATELY.
It was the awesome, fearful, mysterious Buck Dorsey who had done all this for me. And all the time I had thought he hadn’t even noticed my existence. What a lovely man he was. Just as great a newsman, I thought, as Ed Young, only in a different way. As we sat in the golden sunlight eating food I would never remember, he paused in his talk about the coronation, looked past me into the remote distance, and said, “I wish somebody had asked me to go to London when I was twenty-seven years old.”