The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (7 page)

“Black shoes,” Ponce agreed.

Sandra snorted again. “I have to get back to the theater,” she said.

Brass turned to Schneider. “Could you change the locks on the apartment?” he asked. “Don’t clean up inside yet.”

“I’ll do that,” Schreiber agreed.

“Thank you Normy,” Sandra said.

“I hope your mother’s okay,” he said.

“So do I,” she said.

We dropped Sandra off and returned to the office; Brass to his great oaken desk to stare out at the Hudson and seek inspiration for his next column, and I to my tiny cubicle with its large but ancient Underwood to resume answering letters, one of the more important and occasionally more interesting parts of my job. Brass believes that all mail from his readers that can be answered should be answered, and that the answers should be concise, honest, courteous, and grammatically correct.

We keep a log of what subjects the letters are on and what column they are in response to, if it’s possible to tell. In today’s mail there was a letter from a man named Pruex in Iowa who had read that “they” were going to saw Manhattan Island loose from its moorings, tow it into the harbor, and then tum it around and bring it back so that the Battery would be at the north end of the island and Washington Heights at the south. He claimed to be “apprised and acquainted with the use of the two-man cross-cut saw,” and could supply his own partner, and wanted to know to whom he would have to apply to get a job. He did not say where he had read this information or who “they” were. I wrote him back that Mr. Brass would certainly look into it and that any information concerning the renovation of Manhattan Island would appear in his column, which Pruex should keep reading regularly.

There was also a missive from a gentlemen named Dochsmann, given name at the moment 279894, who was a guest of the state of New York’s resort facility at Sing Sing for the next eight to twenty years. In three neatly typewritten pages, he claimed a complete lack of connection with the actions for which the state had awarded him his rent-free home on the Hudson and asked Brass to look into it. We averaged two or three letters a week much like this, except that most of them were not typewritten but were laboriously printed in pencil on lined paper, and Brass took them seriously. He and five companions, including another journalist, a retired judge, a police inspector, a detective-novel writer, and one of New York’s leading defense attorneys, made up the Second Chance Club, which gave some few people convicted of serious crimes one last shot at proving their innocence. It also gave Brass enough material for four or five columns a year, but he might well have done it anyway.

All the Second Chance letters were looked at by all the members of the club. If four of the six agreed, then the case was looked in to by a private detective or a reporter paid for by the Club. If there was something to it, it came before the group again, and if all six agreed, they took up the case. Of the fourteen cases they had handled so far, six men had been retried and freed, two had been pardoned by the governors of their states, two had been determined by the Club to actually be guilty, one had been found guilty at his second trial—although the Club collectively still believed him to be innocent—and three were still pending.

I had a personal letter in the stack, from a young lady named Elizabeth who was now in Switzerland at a very expensive clinic becoming cured of some very personal problems, one of which, according to her father, the senior senator from New Jersey, was me. I didn’t much care for the senator either.

Elizabeth had been gone a couple of months and was probably not coming back, at least not to me, but I was not yet over her or our relationship. When I thought of her, I still felt as though a healthy, energetic mule had just kicked me in the stomach, but luckily I didn’t think of her more than about twice a minute. We had both agreed before she left, even without her father’s prodding, that separation was the wisest course. Unless I had jumped on the next boat to Switzerland, where I don’t speak any of the languages and would be unemployed, separation was unavoidable; but it did feel slightly better to have been consulted. Along about six-thirty, when I was beginning to consider calling it a day and wondering what to do with the evening, Gloria the Ice Princess came to the doorway of the little cubicle I like to call an office. “How would you like to take me out tonight?” she asked. “To the theater?”

“Be still my heart,” I said, making a vague gesture toward the appropriate area of my chest.

She smiled a chill smile. “Mr. Brass wants us to talk to the gypsies in a couple of shows and see if we can get a line on Two-Headed Mary; find out what she’s been doing, who she’s been talking to. He’d like us to see if we can pin down the last time anyone actually spoke with her.”

“Gypsies,” for the benefit of you who are not denizens of the Great White Way, are the boys and girls in the chorus lines of Broadway musicals.

“Are we to be permitted to actually see a show?” I asked.

“Sandra Lelane sent Mr. Brass house seats for tonight’s performance of
Fine and Dandy
,” Gloria told me. “He can’t go since he and Winchell and Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker and a couple of dozen other journalists and magazine types are dining with the Honorable Fiorello LaGuardia tonight, and Hizonner might say something notable or quotable, so he has passed them along to us. We are to start our research after the show.”

Gloria had a dinner date with a girlfriend and then had to run home and change clothes. I couldn’t see why; the blue frock she was wearing looked sufficiently elegant to me, but then men never understand these things. I would have to change clothes myself anyway. For most men, a plain dark suit would do for the theater, unless it was opening night, but Brass believed in the old virtues like wearing evening garb to evening events: dinner jacket, boiled shirt, black bow tie and all. And I, as his amanuensis and dogsbody, could do no less. We arranged to meet at the theater.

I addressed an envelope for my last letter, added it to the stack, took a sheet of three-cent stamps out of the drawer, and spent a minute licking and pasting. Then I draped a cover over the Underwood, donned my coat and hat, thrust my afternoon’s work down the mail chute, and allowed Mel the elevator boy to take me down to the lobby. I crossed Tenth Avenue to Danny’s Waterfront Café on the corner of Fifty-ninth right across from the
World
building, where I sat down to the roast beef dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and okra and a couple of Danny’s fresh-baked rolls.

After the main course, I had a slab of apple pie and chatted with the boss. Danny is about a one-third owner of Danny’s, and is gradually buying the other two-thirds from her father, Manny, who claims that he is retired. He comes in two or three times a week to be helpful, which consists of telling Danny what she’s doing wrong and how she could do it better, and every night she prays to God that he’ll get himself a hobby or a new girlfriend, or be struck dumb. Occasionally, when he’s being very helpful, she prays that he’ll get hit by a truck.

We traded gripes for a while, then I got up and put a couple of quarters on the table. “Keep the change,” I said.

I went home to put on my monkey suit.

Pinky, my next-door neighbor, followed me into my room. A retired circus clown in his mid-seventies with a story for every occasion, most of them involving circus people and their tenuous relationship with the mundane world outside, he had become a close friend in the two years I had been living in the rooming house. “So how’re you doing, already?” he asked, perching on the edge of my bed.

“Not bad,” I said. “You?”

“Can’t complain. Can’t complain.” He held both hands up, palms toward me. “Look at this,” he said. “Maple syrup and vinegar. Wonders, it does. Two tablespoons three times a day.”

“For what?”

“The rheumatism.” He waggled his fingers at me. “Just a touch, but it was slowing me down. A clown needs his fingers. Can’t make balloon animals without your fingers. But this stuff—maple syrup and vinegar, with just a touch of cod-liver oil for the emulsification—does the trick. Fellow at Clown Hall told me about it. Syd Lester. Great walkabout clown. Been using the stuff for years. Swears by it. He’s ninety-two. Says he’s only eighty-four, but he’s ninety-two.”

“Clown Hall?”

“The Automat over on Seventy-ninth off Broadway. Lot of circus folk hang out there. We call it Clown Hall. You ought to come by some afternoon while we’re chewing the fat. Lot of stories there. Lot of material for that column your boss writes. ’Course if you ask questions, they clam up; it’s the way they are. A fellow could learn a lot if he keeps his ears open and his mouth closed. Come on over with me sometime, I’ll introduce you around.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.” I adjusted the knot on my bow tie and stood back to admire the result in the mirror over the dresser.

“You going somewhere?” Pinky asked.

“Going to see a play.
Fine and Dandy
at the Royal.”

“Seen it,” Pinky said with feeling. “Many young girls running around in skimpy costumes. Yaketta yaketta. Dancing. Step-kick, step-kick, like that. The Charleston. Skirts flying. Showing a lot of leg clear up to the pupik.”

“That sounds right,” I agreed cautiously, deciding not to ask him where one kept his or her pupik.

“I liked it.” He nodded. “Gets the blood moving. When you’re my age it’s not a bad thing to get the blood moving every once in a while.”

“It’s good at any age,” I said.

“As I remember, the girls in the side-show in the Hays Traveling Circus and Carnival showed a lot more than that,” Pinky said. Many of his best stories started with “As I remember.” And he remembered everything.

“’Course most of them wasn’t that good-looking. But when they’re young and pretty near naked, a fellow don’t notice their looks in any kind of detail. I remember there was this one girl—Flossie, we called her—who joined the show in Cleveland back in ’sixteen or ’seventeen. She—”

“I’ve got to go,” I said, grabbing my black Homburg—Homburgs were in this year, toppers were passé—and heading for the door. “Finish your story when I get back.”

“I will,” Pinky promised. He smiled. “I think I’ll just spend some time thinking about Flossie, now that I’ve got her on my mind.”

I got off the subway at Forty-second Street and, after performing my usual obeisance to Times Square, walked up Broadway to Forty-fourth. The sights, sounds, and smells of the Great White Way fill me with a sense of wonder no matter how many times I experience them. This great outdoor cathedral to Mammon and the arts is vibrant and alive twenty-four hours a day, and the bright lights drive away the night. When I first arrived in Gotham fresh from Ohio, the hayseeds still scattered through my hair, I could stand for an hour at a time in front of the
Times
Building and stare uptown, past the giant billboards, past the brilliantly lit marquees for the Paramount, the Loews Criterion, the Loews State, and feel a part of the great, vibrant living organism that is Broadway.

Now that I am a native New Yorker—having been here four years—I still stop and stare, and I am still awed. As I walk past the Rialto and the Nora Bayes and the Schubert and Broadhurst Theaters, I remember all the clichés and feel all the trite emotions that playwrights are always putting into plays about the theater. Kids from all over America do come to New York every year trying, hoping to make it in the theater. Most of them find other jobs or go home in a few years, crushed or strengthened by the experience according to what they brought to it and just what hand was dealt them. Some of them make it big, some make it just enough to keep trying, and some keep trying regardless. Broadway is a lure and a trap and a soul destroyer, and yet it is a myth-maker and a spirit-lifter and a magical land and the greatest place in the world for those with enough talent—or luck—to make their mark. But enough about me.

It was about quarter past eight when I got to the Royal Theater. The audience was just beginning to drift in to take their seats. Gloria was already there, having an earnest discussion with the man behind the will-call window in the corner of the lobby. She was wearing a dark blue evening dress that looked prim and proper at first glance, but managed to suggest several improprieties at second or third view. She turned around as I walked over to her and nodded to me.

“You look swell,” I told her.

She eyed me from hat to shoes. “You’ll do,” she said. “Let’s go in.” We passed into the theater and were ushered to our seats.

“Nobody out front has any clear memory of the last time they saw Two-Headed Mary,” Gloria told me in an undertone, sounding annoyed. Gloria has an elephantine memory, and small respect for the failings of others.
She
would have remembered.

The curtain went up on
Fine and Dandy
, and we were thrust a decade back, to a fantasy vision of the carefree days of yore, when every office boy could become a king and every shop girl a queen; when life was a glorious cycle of song, to crib a line from Miss Dorothy Parker, and we didn’t yet have even fear itself to fear. The songs were sprightly and the dances exuberant. The beautiful carefree flappers sang and danced with their ardent beaux and had no troubles that a kiss wouldn’t cure, and, for an hour and a half, neither had we. The show was an unabashed pastiche of Twenties musicals; a romantic fantasy with overtones of early Cole Porter and the Gershwins and a hint of George Cohan, and a patter song that owed a debt to Gilbert and Sullivan. What plot there was, was subordinate to the joy of the moment, and the audience reveled in a yesterday that never was.

John Hartman, the male lead, was better than good, he worked hard, moved well, and sweated charm. But the audience made it clear that it was Sandra Lelane that they had come to see. Sandra danced until she couldn’t possibly have had any breath left, and stopped and sang, her clear soprano easily reaching to the back of the house. And the audience gave freely of its applause. Once or twice she sang and danced at the same time and she did both with the grace and presence of a born star. She was alternately ethereal and earthy, and always infinitely desirable.