From Publishers Weekly
A new, gleeful exuberance infuses Mallon's latest novel, in which he turns his talent for fastidious historical detail (Dewey Defeats Truman, etc.) to the elaboration of a comedy of errors set in Manhattan during the 1920s. Bandbox is the name of a successful monthly magazine for men, the first and best of its kind until the recent defection of its star editor, Jimmy Gordon, to establish the rival Cutaway. The narrative centers on the cutthroat competition between the two magazines, a suspenseful battle in which two Bandbox editors secretly defect to the other magazine, providing inside information that allows Jimmy to scoop his old boss and win the ratings game. The narrative is a tad slow getting started, since Mallon must introduce each name on the masthead and succinctly describe their various duties. All his characters are colorful and fully dimensional, however, especially Bandbox's aging editor-in-chief, Jehoshaphat (variously Joe, or Phat) Harris, who seems closely modeled on the legendary Harold Ross of the New Yorker. In addition to the magazine staff, there's a Hollywood star chosen to be the subject of a cover story. She's a foul-mouthed nymphomaniac called Rosemary La Roche, who trails chaos in her wake. Mallon adroitly establishes the atmosphere of the Jazz Age, dropping such names as Al Jolson, Leopold and Loeb, President Coolidge, George M. Cohan and the crime boss Arnold Rothstein. The latter is a pivotal character, because when his goons kidnap a kid from Indiana who has come to New York because he idolizes Bandbox, the plot acquires the elements of a thriller. Prohibition, police corruption, a court trial, in-house intrigue, the narcotics trade, animal rights, two gentle romances and several surprise revelations propel the plot, not to mention one of the best features Mallon's ability to convey the deadline-obsessed mentality of a monthly magazine. Mallon has never before employed his wit and humor to such good effect; he writes with comic brio, indulging in clever repartee and nimble farce. To quote the closing sentence: "What do we do for an encore?"
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Mallon is, to steal one of the many effervescently clever phrases tossed about by his irresistible Jazz Age characters in his delicious sixth novel, "absotively posilutely" a pleasure to read. A master of insightful and uniquely focused historical novels, Mallon crisply conjures the carpe diem lawlessness of 1920s New York in this scintillating tale about a down-and-dirty rivalry between two magazines. Bandbox, brainchild of seasoned editor Jehoshaphat Harris, is a pioneering and wildly successful GQ -esque publication (also a critic, Mallon has written for GQ ). But Harris' unscrupulous protege, Jimmy Gordon, has launched a hip competitor, Cutaway, forcing Harris into a vicious life-or-death battle. As the flinty veteran and the arrogant pretender square off, Mallon sets in motion all manner of intrigue, capers, publicity stunts, blackmail, romance, and heroic moments involving a gay and dissolute cover boy, a nebbishy rewrite man, inept spies and mobsters, a cute rube from Indiana, a terrifyingly lustful Hollywood diva, and a very proper copy editor made of tougher stuff than anyone realizes, one of several women of valor. Strongly plotted and laced with witty wordplay and covert social critique, this tale of ambition, betrayal, and love is pure joy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
A new, gleeful exuberance infuses Mallon's latest novel, in which he turns his talent for fastidious historical detail (Dewey Defeats Truman, etc.) to the elaboration of a comedy of errors set in Manhattan during the 1920s. Bandbox is the name of a successful monthly magazine for men, the first and best of its kind until the recent defection of its star editor, Jimmy Gordon, to establish the rival Cutaway. The narrative centers on the cutthroat competition between the two magazines, a suspenseful battle in which two Bandbox editors secretly defect to the other magazine, providing inside information that allows Jimmy to scoop his old boss and win the ratings game. The narrative is a tad slow getting started, since Mallon must introduce each name on the masthead and succinctly describe their various duties. All his characters are colorful and fully dimensional, however, especially Bandbox's aging editor-in-chief, Jehoshaphat (variously Joe, or Phat) Harris, who seems closely modeled on the legendary Harold Ross of the New Yorker. In addition to the magazine staff, there's a Hollywood star chosen to be the subject of a cover story. She's a foul-mouthed nymphomaniac called Rosemary La Roche, who trails chaos in her wake. Mallon adroitly establishes the atmosphere of the Jazz Age, dropping such names as Al Jolson, Leopold and Loeb, President Coolidge, George M. Cohan and the crime boss Arnold Rothstein. The latter is a pivotal character, because when his goons kidnap a kid from Indiana who has come to New York because he idolizes Bandbox, the plot acquires the elements of a thriller. Prohibition, police corruption, a court trial, in-house intrigue, the narcotics trade, animal rights, two gentle romances and several surprise revelations propel the plot, not to mention one of the best features Mallon's ability to convey the deadline-obsessed mentality of a monthly magazine. Mallon has never before employed his wit and humor to such good effect; he writes with comic brio, indulging in clever repartee and nimble farce. To quote the closing sentence: "What do we do for an encore?"
(Publishers Weekly )
Mallon's fizzy new novel is set at a men's magazine during the Jazz Age—and a raging newsstand war. The aging but irrepressible Jehoshaphat Harris has made Bandbox into a roaring success, but now his right-hand man has left to start a rival magazine and the future of Harris's venture is in jeopardy. As photo shoots go awry, profile subjects go berserk, and writers go on benders—some things don't change—the novel, like its main character, never lets the energy flag. Mallon, in his other books, has gravitated toward previous eras out of an affinity for something like reticence. "Bandbox," then, is a real departure: antic, stylized, and up-tempo. The dialogue has a Kaufman-and-Hart crackle, and the story boasts more lotharios, floozies, mobsters, and wised-up dames than an M-G-M double feature.
(The New Yorker ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
(Publishers Weekly )
Mallon's fizzy new novel is set at a men's magazine during the Jazz Age—and a raging newsstand war. The aging but irrepressible Jehoshaphat Harris has made Bandbox into a roaring success, but now his right-hand man has left to start a rival magazine and the future of Harris's venture is in jeopardy. As photo shoots go awry, profile subjects go berserk, and writers go on benders—some things don't change—the novel, like its main character, never lets the energy flag. Mallon, in his other books, has gravitated toward previous eras out of an affinity for something like reticence. "Bandbox," then, is a real departure: antic, stylized, and up-tempo. The dialogue has a Kaufman-and-Hart crackle, and the story boasts more lotharios, floozies, mobsters, and wised-up dames than an M-G-M double feature.
(The New Yorker ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
From the author of Henry and Clara, a dazzling, hilarious novel that captures the heart and soul of New York in the Jazz Age.
Bandbox is a hugely successful magazine, a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder. Edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, the magazine has a masthead that includes, among many others, a grisly, alliterative crime writer; a shy but murderously determined copyboy; and a burned-out vaudeville correspondent who’s lovesick for his loyal, dewy assistant.
As the novel opens, the defection of Harris’s most ambitious protégé has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But there’s more to come: a sabotaged fiction contest, the NYPD vice squad, a subscriber’s kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Fosse’s Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the novel races from skyscraper to speakeasy, hops a luxury train to Hollywood, and crashes a buttoned-down dinner with Calvin Coolidge.
Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap and poi-gnant book that brilliantly portrays the gaudiest American decade of them all.
Bandbox is a hugely successful magazine, a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder. Edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, the magazine has a masthead that includes, among many others, a grisly, alliterative crime writer; a shy but murderously determined copyboy; and a burned-out vaudeville correspondent who’s lovesick for his loyal, dewy assistant.
As the novel opens, the defection of Harris’s most ambitious protégé has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But there’s more to come: a sabotaged fiction contest, the NYPD vice squad, a subscriber’s kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Fosse’s Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the novel races from skyscraper to speakeasy, hops a luxury train to Hollywood, and crashes a buttoned-down dinner with Calvin Coolidge.
Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap and poi-gnant book that brilliantly portrays the gaudiest American decade of them all.
About the Author
Thomas Mallon is the author of the novels Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Two Moons;
In Fact, a collection of essays; and the nonfiction books Stolen Words, A Book of One’s Own, and Mrs. Paine’s Garage. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and other magazines, he lives in Washington, D.C.
In Fact, a collection of essays; and the nonfiction books Stolen Words, A Book of One’s Own, and Mrs. Paine’s Garage. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and other magazines, he lives in Washington, D.C.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube.
“Goddammit!”
The cry of pain that filled the office came not from Cuddles, whose head still lay asleep on his desk, but from the tube. Its ultimate source was the office of Joe Harris, the editor-in-chief. At this late, sozzled hour, Harris had mistakenly fed the interoffice mail chute not the translucent canister containing his angry communication to Cuddles, but the still-half-full, six-dollar quart of hooch he was regularly supplied with by the countess in the fact-checking department.
Harris glowered for several seconds at the undispatched canister, before giving in to the impulse to open it up and look once more at what had enraged him in the first place: a photograph of Leopold and Loeb, smiling, each with an arm around the other, perched on the edge of an upper bunk in the Joliet State Prison, both of them avidly regarding the latest issue of Bandbox. The thrill killers held it open with their free hands, like a box of candy they were sharing on a back-porch swing.
Would make a great ad, said the inked message on the back of the photograph, whose bold penmanship Harris recognized as belonging to Jimmy Gordon, up until eight months ago his best senior editor here at Bandbox. “I think of you as a bastard son,” he’d once told Jimmy in a burst of bibulous sentiment. Now, as editor-in-chief of Cutaway, the younger man was his head-to-head, hand-to-throat, competition. If Harris didn’t think of something, this picture of those two murderous fairies reading Bandbox—the magazine that had made goddamn Jimmy Gordon, and remade Jehoshaphat Harris—would be plastered to the side of every double-decker bus crawling up Fifth Avenue.
Rummaging his bottom drawer for another quart of vodka, Harris—a great curator of his own life story—managed to consider, yet again, with prideful amazement, how only five years had passed since Hiram Oldcastle, the publisher, had said, “You want it? It’s yours,” giving him the Bandbox job as if it were the keys to a jalopy. “An overpriced rag for overaged pansies,” Oldcastle had called the dying men’s fashion book, which had somehow never evolved out of the tintyped, stiff-collared days of McKinley. Harris would be the magazine’s last chance before Oldcastle killed the sclerotic monthly and concentrated on his more robust publications, like Pinafore, for the “young miss”—edited by Harris’s girlfriend, Betty Divine—and the shelter book, Manse.
“Give me six months,” Harris had said.
“Take a year,” Oldcastle had replied, sounding almost guilty about the eagerness with which the new editor wanted to take charge.
It took Harris one business quarter to bring Bandbox to life, to hit upon a formula that lured young men and advertisers back to a magazine no one had paid attention to for years. He kept the fashion—even made it fashionable—then butched up the rest of the production, adding a slew of stylish articles about all the sports, politics, crime, money, and movies that went into the current age’s cocktail. Newsstand buyers and subscribers were now deciding they craved the camel-hair coat on page 46 just as much as they needed to sleep with the screen siren or buy the radio stock described a few pages away. The table of contents might sometimes seem a tasteless whipsaw—“New Hope for the Shell-Shocked” sitting right above “Look Terrific for Under Two Hundred”—but the magazine’s turnaround had been so successful that by the spring of last year, Condé Nast decided he could not leave a whole new field to his usually more downmarket competitor, Oldcastle. Last March he had announced the start-up of Cutaway, exactly the sort of clothes-and-journalism book Harris had concocted; and on April 30, he had named Jimmy Gordon its editor.
Jimmy Gordon: who had brought in most of Harris’s expensive new writers; who had three bad story ideas for every good one, but so many of each that, with Harris as a filter, every issue of Bandbox still abounded with first-rate stuff. Jimmy Gordon, who was now stealing not only Harris’s formula but every keister not nailed down to the swivel chairs here on the fourteenth floor of the Graybar Building. He’d pried away three of his old writers, a photographer, and two production assistants, and had even made a run at Mrs. Zimmerman, the receptionist. But the real prize for Jimmy was Harris’s readers and advertisers, whom he would surely keep wooing away if he managed, with stunts like this Leopold and Loeb picture, to undo the makeover of Bandbox. Things could turn around so quickly—hadn’t Harris himself proved it?—that the older editor would be left with a shrunken subscriber base consisting chiefly of the perfumed boys you saw gazing at each other across the tables of the Jewel cafeteria.
Hazel Snow buzzed Harris from the outer office.
“It’s a bad time!” he shouted.
Hazel ignored him. “Mr. Lord and Miss O’Grady here to see you,” she said, indifferent to anything but her desire to go home. Through the intercom Harris could hear the squeaky sound of Hazel putting on her galoshes.
“You picked the worst possible moment!” he shouted to Richard Lord and Nan O’Grady once Hazel had ushered them in.
The English art and fashion director looked at his expensive shoes, still unscuffed at this late hour, and whispered, “It’s about Lindstrom, I’m afraid.”
“What about him?” Harris asked, in a voice that made plain, for all its volume, that he would rather know nothing new concerning Waldo Lindstrom, the handsomest young man in New York, and Bandbox’s most frequent cover model now that photographs were replacing illustrations. Harris would be more receptive to tidings of this Adonis were Lindstrom not also an omnisexual cocaine addict who had escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary a few years ago at the age of twenty, and whose work for Oldcastle Publications depended on frequent payments from Harris to the NYPD’s vice squad.
“He never showed up,” murmured Lord, while he adjusted the two points of his breast-pocket handkerchief.
“Find his pusher!” bellowed Harris. “Call the morgue! Why are you bothering me? And why are you bothering me?” he continued, turning his eyes and anger to Nan O’Grady, the copy chief, whose lower lip had begun to tremble. A tear wobbled in the lower reaches of her left eye, ready to drip down her powdered cheek and cut a line that would run parallel to her straight red hair.
“It’s Mr. Stanwick’s piece on Arnold Rothstein.”
Max Stanwick, a successful writer of hard-boiled mystery novels, now also wrote features for Bandbox on the nation’s ever-burgeoning crime wave. The fact-checkers sometimes muttered that he had made no discernible shift from the methods of his old genre to those of nonfiction, but Stanwick’s pieces were immensely popular and the occasion for some of Harris’s more memorable cover lines: lend me your ears had announced Max’s recent report on a spate of loan-sharking mutilations in Detroit. Harris trembled at the thought of losing him to Jimmy Gordon, who had brought him to Bandbox in the first place.
“And what’s the problem with Stanwick, Miss O’Grady? Some people in his piece saying ‘who’ instead of ‘whom’? They’re gangsters, Irish.”
Nan, who until two years ago had edited lady novelists at Scribner’s, and who had taken this better-paying job to help support the mother she lived with out in Woodside, forced her lower lip to stiffen. The tear in her left eye sank backwards without spilling. She glared at her boss. “It’s not a question of subject versus object, Mr. Harris. It’s a question of . . . schvantz.” She pronounced it with the lilting precision of a lieder singer.
“Whose schvantz?” Harris wanted to know.
“Mr. Rothstein’s, apparently.”
Harris hesitated for only a second. “Well, keep it in!”
Nan, her lower lip now fully retracted, held her ground. “I assure you that it’s in no known style book, and I guarantee you that within a week of publication, a half-dozen of your precious advertisers will have protested its use in—”
“More schvantzes all around!” cried Harris, suddenly on his feet. “And the balls to go with them! This is a men’s magazine! Out! And close the door behind you!”
After Harris watched a trio of departing forms—Hazel’s among them—through the frosted glass of his door, he allowed himself to sit back down and light a cigar. He looked out the fourteenth-floor windows of his corner office to the vertical world aborning all around him. The Bowery Savings Bank loomed in the southeast, and a few streets over, close to the river, he could see the absurd new towers of Tudor City, in whose tiny apartments his aging pals had taken to stashing their chorines and tootsies. Directly across Lexington Avenue, and also one block south, squares of earth were roped off for the great excavations now sprouting the Chrysler and Chanin buildings.
It all made Harris dizzy. From his long-ago days on the Newburgh Messenger until this past fall, when Oldcastle had moved the company a few blocks up from its old quarters and into the gleaming new Graybar, Harris had always climbed a single flight of stairs to reach his job. Now every morning and evening his stomach endured the fast jumps and drops of the Graybar’s elevator, the trip made worse if he happened to be sharing the car with Jimmy Gordon, who’d be on his way to and from the Graybar’s fanciest fl...
“Goddammit!”
The cry of pain that filled the office came not from Cuddles, whose head still lay asleep on his desk, but from the tube. Its ultimate source was the office of Joe Harris, the editor-in-chief. At this late, sozzled hour, Harris had mistakenly fed the interoffice mail chute not the translucent canister containing his angry communication to Cuddles, but the still-half-full, six-dollar quart of hooch he was regularly supplied with by the countess in the fact-checking department.
Harris glowered for several seconds at the undispatched canister, before giving in to the impulse to open it up and look once more at what had enraged him in the first place: a photograph of Leopold and Loeb, smiling, each with an arm around the other, perched on the edge of an upper bunk in the Joliet State Prison, both of them avidly regarding the latest issue of Bandbox. The thrill killers held it open with their free hands, like a box of candy they were sharing on a back-porch swing.
Would make a great ad, said the inked message on the back of the photograph, whose bold penmanship Harris recognized as belonging to Jimmy Gordon, up until eight months ago his best senior editor here at Bandbox. “I think of you as a bastard son,” he’d once told Jimmy in a burst of bibulous sentiment. Now, as editor-in-chief of Cutaway, the younger man was his head-to-head, hand-to-throat, competition. If Harris didn’t think of something, this picture of those two murderous fairies reading Bandbox—the magazine that had made goddamn Jimmy Gordon, and remade Jehoshaphat Harris—would be plastered to the side of every double-decker bus crawling up Fifth Avenue.
Rummaging his bottom drawer for another quart of vodka, Harris—a great curator of his own life story—managed to consider, yet again, with prideful amazement, how only five years had passed since Hiram Oldcastle, the publisher, had said, “You want it? It’s yours,” giving him the Bandbox job as if it were the keys to a jalopy. “An overpriced rag for overaged pansies,” Oldcastle had called the dying men’s fashion book, which had somehow never evolved out of the tintyped, stiff-collared days of McKinley. Harris would be the magazine’s last chance before Oldcastle killed the sclerotic monthly and concentrated on his more robust publications, like Pinafore, for the “young miss”—edited by Harris’s girlfriend, Betty Divine—and the shelter book, Manse.
“Give me six months,” Harris had said.
“Take a year,” Oldcastle had replied, sounding almost guilty about the eagerness with which the new editor wanted to take charge.
It took Harris one business quarter to bring Bandbox to life, to hit upon a formula that lured young men and advertisers back to a magazine no one had paid attention to for years. He kept the fashion—even made it fashionable—then butched up the rest of the production, adding a slew of stylish articles about all the sports, politics, crime, money, and movies that went into the current age’s cocktail. Newsstand buyers and subscribers were now deciding they craved the camel-hair coat on page 46 just as much as they needed to sleep with the screen siren or buy the radio stock described a few pages away. The table of contents might sometimes seem a tasteless whipsaw—“New Hope for the Shell-Shocked” sitting right above “Look Terrific for Under Two Hundred”—but the magazine’s turnaround had been so successful that by the spring of last year, Condé Nast decided he could not leave a whole new field to his usually more downmarket competitor, Oldcastle. Last March he had announced the start-up of Cutaway, exactly the sort of clothes-and-journalism book Harris had concocted; and on April 30, he had named Jimmy Gordon its editor.
Jimmy Gordon: who had brought in most of Harris’s expensive new writers; who had three bad story ideas for every good one, but so many of each that, with Harris as a filter, every issue of Bandbox still abounded with first-rate stuff. Jimmy Gordon, who was now stealing not only Harris’s formula but every keister not nailed down to the swivel chairs here on the fourteenth floor of the Graybar Building. He’d pried away three of his old writers, a photographer, and two production assistants, and had even made a run at Mrs. Zimmerman, the receptionist. But the real prize for Jimmy was Harris’s readers and advertisers, whom he would surely keep wooing away if he managed, with stunts like this Leopold and Loeb picture, to undo the makeover of Bandbox. Things could turn around so quickly—hadn’t Harris himself proved it?—that the older editor would be left with a shrunken subscriber base consisting chiefly of the perfumed boys you saw gazing at each other across the tables of the Jewel cafeteria.
Hazel Snow buzzed Harris from the outer office.
“It’s a bad time!” he shouted.
Hazel ignored him. “Mr. Lord and Miss O’Grady here to see you,” she said, indifferent to anything but her desire to go home. Through the intercom Harris could hear the squeaky sound of Hazel putting on her galoshes.
“You picked the worst possible moment!” he shouted to Richard Lord and Nan O’Grady once Hazel had ushered them in.
The English art and fashion director looked at his expensive shoes, still unscuffed at this late hour, and whispered, “It’s about Lindstrom, I’m afraid.”
“What about him?” Harris asked, in a voice that made plain, for all its volume, that he would rather know nothing new concerning Waldo Lindstrom, the handsomest young man in New York, and Bandbox’s most frequent cover model now that photographs were replacing illustrations. Harris would be more receptive to tidings of this Adonis were Lindstrom not also an omnisexual cocaine addict who had escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary a few years ago at the age of twenty, and whose work for Oldcastle Publications depended on frequent payments from Harris to the NYPD’s vice squad.
“He never showed up,” murmured Lord, while he adjusted the two points of his breast-pocket handkerchief.
“Find his pusher!” bellowed Harris. “Call the morgue! Why are you bothering me? And why are you bothering me?” he continued, turning his eyes and anger to Nan O’Grady, the copy chief, whose lower lip had begun to tremble. A tear wobbled in the lower reaches of her left eye, ready to drip down her powdered cheek and cut a line that would run parallel to her straight red hair.
“It’s Mr. Stanwick’s piece on Arnold Rothstein.”
Max Stanwick, a successful writer of hard-boiled mystery novels, now also wrote features for Bandbox on the nation’s ever-burgeoning crime wave. The fact-checkers sometimes muttered that he had made no discernible shift from the methods of his old genre to those of nonfiction, but Stanwick’s pieces were immensely popular and the occasion for some of Harris’s more memorable cover lines: lend me your ears had announced Max’s recent report on a spate of loan-sharking mutilations in Detroit. Harris trembled at the thought of losing him to Jimmy Gordon, who had brought him to Bandbox in the first place.
“And what’s the problem with Stanwick, Miss O’Grady? Some people in his piece saying ‘who’ instead of ‘whom’? They’re gangsters, Irish.”
Nan, who until two years ago had edited lady novelists at Scribner’s, and who had taken this better-paying job to help support the mother she lived with out in Woodside, forced her lower lip to stiffen. The tear in her left eye sank backwards without spilling. She glared at her boss. “It’s not a question of subject versus object, Mr. Harris. It’s a question of . . . schvantz.” She pronounced it with the lilting precision of a lieder singer.
“Whose schvantz?” Harris wanted to know.
“Mr. Rothstein’s, apparently.”
Harris hesitated for only a second. “Well, keep it in!”
Nan, her lower lip now fully retracted, held her ground. “I assure you that it’s in no known style book, and I guarantee you that within a week of publication, a half-dozen of your precious advertisers will have protested its use in—”
“More schvantzes all around!” cried Harris, suddenly on his feet. “And the balls to go with them! This is a men’s magazine! Out! And close the door behind you!”
After Harris watched a trio of departing forms—Hazel’s among them—through the frosted glass of his door, he allowed himself to sit back down and light a cigar. He looked out the fourteenth-floor windows of his corner office to the vertical world aborning all around him. The Bowery Savings Bank loomed in the southeast, and a few streets over, close to the river, he could see the absurd new towers of Tudor City, in whose tiny apartments his aging pals had taken to stashing their chorines and tootsies. Directly across Lexington Avenue, and also one block south, squares of earth were roped off for the great excavations now sprouting the Chrysler and Chanin buildings.
It all made Harris dizzy. From his long-ago days on the Newburgh Messenger until this past fall, when Oldcastle had moved the company a few blocks up from its old quarters and into the gleaming new Graybar, Harris had always climbed a single flight of stairs to reach his job. Now every morning and evening his stomach endured the fast jumps and drops of the Graybar’s elevator, the trip made worse if he happened to be sharing the car with Jimmy Gordon, who’d be on his way to and from the Graybar’s fanciest fl...
