“Someday,” Sam Ryan told me, “I’ll turn around and he’ll be gone. It’s the nature of the beast.”
Laconic, moody, Max had not said one word to me in over a year, though often I’d spotted him staring at me, a look I had trouble understanding. He rented a room at Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house. Strange, how the single men of town gravitated to Mrs. Zeller’s huge home: Mac, Homer Timm, and even new city editor Matthias Boon. You rarely saw Mac in town. A man with a flat pancake face, unlovely, pocked and dented, he had a cruel scar that led from his left eye down into the tremendous drooping walrus moustache that he lacquered so thoroughly it shone like polished wood. In the morning when I arrived at the city room, he was already in back, clamoring away at the presses, hauling trays of type, banging and knocking, and sometimes cursing so profanely I blushed. At night when I left, he’d still be there.
Now, seeing him disappear into the midnight woods, I trembled. I wasn’t afraid. I walked the night streets of Appleton alone all the time. It was the way he looked at me in the city room, a look so hard and steely that I always wanted to confess. But to what? I hardly knew.
City Park closed in around me now.
“Home,” I muttered to Esther. “I want to go home.”
Chapter Five
At eight o’clock the next morning, a brisk shiny Thursday, I pushed open the heavy oak door of the city room, stepped down those five stairs. Matthias Boon huddled at his desk, face nearly touching the blotter, a green-tinted lamp casting an eerie glow over his block-like head. He didn’t say a word as I sat a few feet away in my chair, but he coughed-loudly and sloppily, pretending consumptive, I assumed-and squinted at me. He stood, stretched out his arms, and disappeared into the back printing room, where I could see the giant Mac, glistening moustache on that beefy face, pausing a second, staring back at me. I heard him make a smacking sound as he spat chewing tobacco into a spittoon.
Boon thrust some copy at him, hardly civil, stepped back into the city room, and regarded me silently.
“Miss Ferber.” He returned to his seat.
I rifled through some news clippings, shuffled them on the wobbly pine table that served as my desk, pushed into a corner where the smell of decaying wall mice seemed never to dissipate. As correspondent to the Milwaukee Journal, I rewrote copy to send on. The cramped, cluttered room was too ghastly, early mornings, so I reached over to switch on another lamp. Five pushed-together tables or desks, and a chicken wire mesh fence surrounded Sam Ryan’s cubicle with the roll-top desk-God knew why! Chicken wire! And beyond the room Mac’s domain, where he churned out copy, handbills, flyers, notices, and ultimately the afternoon edition of the Crescent.
I pecked at the ancient Oliver typewriter, clacking and pinging.
The image of Harry Houdini shadowed the room, though Boon would never mention his name…or my interview. But I waited for my punishment.
Boon stood, let loose a phlegmatic spasm so loud that the tomcat, luxuriating in the pressroom doorway, yipped and fled. He approached my table, grunted something. Purposely, I looked down, steely eyed, at the keys of the Oliver as he dropped a slip of paper onto my table: my daily assignment sheet. I scanned it rapidly and noted that my allotment of stories had been dramatically-cruelly? — diminished. This had been the pattern for weeks, almost as though I’d show up one morning to find a blank sheet facing me, a piece of unadulterated white paper that signaled my departure from the Fourth Estate. Low man on the totem pole, I already received the detritus of newsworthy runs. When Boon was hired, Sam told me the veteran editor would serve as mentor to me. What he didn’t know was Boon’s intense dislike of women in the newsroom.
“Mr. Boon, there’s a scant day’s reporting here.” I thumbed the sheet. “You’ve even removed the county courthouse from my route.”
“Unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary?” I echoed. “I’ve been doing…”
He cut me off. “Miss Ferber, your embellished account of real-estate transactions strike many as a little too fanciful for something so…prosaic.”
I sputtered. “Embellishment?”
“Is there an echo in the room?” His lips curled up.
I stood, tired of this nonsense. “You seem, sir, to be purposely reducing me to…”
“What? Miss Ferber? Tears? Reducing you to tears?”
I found my voice, waved the sheet at him. “I doubt, sir, if any woman would allow you to reduce her to tears. That would give you too much…value.”
“You don’t report news, Miss Ferber. You tell stories.” He weighed his words carefully. “You like to describe people, Miss Ferber.”
“And you have a problem with that?”
“Yes, when you’re writing about Samuel Gottlieb arguing a property line with his neighbor Josiah Pholner. Lord, you dealt with Harry Houdini as if he were a character in a novel.” He looked away. “Enough. Just attend to the items on that sheet and all will be happy.” He pointed to the sheet I was still waving at him and turned his back on me. I smashed my fist down on the table. He flinched, but he busied himself with some papers. At that moment I glanced toward the pressroom: Mac, giant-like, arms folded, towered in the doorway, silent, severe, watching Matthias Boon. When I caught his eye he turned and disappeared behind his linotype machine and boilerplate.
My throat was dry.
Within minutes, the other members of the city room drifted in. Matthias Boon left the office without a word to anyone, off for breakfast at Platz’s. He’d be back in a half hour, doubtless with a smear of clotted cream on his bushy moustache or a trace of strawberry marmalade on a sleeve cuff. Certainly with an array of poppy seeds speckling his protruding front teeth.
Still seething, I surveyed my office mates. Sam Ryan, owner and proprietor, had arrived with his sister Ivy, and as they unbuttoned their jackets, they were mumbling about some domestic travail. A man in poor health, Sam would drift in and out of the office, often losing his temper, swearing a blue streak, then apologizing to no one in particular. Sam was really old, a wiry sparrow of a man, a rabble-rousing Democrat from pre-Civil War days, a fiercely political soul. With his wire Ben Franklin eyeglasses and his dimpled chin and his flaky bald head, he seemed genial, a soft touch, but I knew he harbored a fierce and fishwife temper. He’d thunder at any mishap in the city room, the spotting, say, of a typographical error in some trivial copy, crumpling up paper balls and hurling them willy-nilly over ducking heads. He’d fought for the Union and on the Fourth of July wore his tattered blue uniform, decorated with ribbons of the Grand Old Army, marching behind the off-key fife and drum corps.
He was watching me, doubtless puzzled by my flushed face.
“Morning, Edna,” Miss Ivy said. Sam’s sister was a plump roly-poly spinster, older than her brother, with a duck’s ungainly waddle, pebbly-bright gray eyes lost in folds of strudel-flaky skin, salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a gigantic knot. Her head struck me as a doorknob waiting to be turned. Terribly efficient as the Crescent’s bookkeeper and solicitor of advertisements from the likes of the Woodsmen of the World and the Knights of Columbus, she occasionally proffered homespun wisdom, delivered in a twittering voice, about the happenstance irritability of men. “You know how men are,” she’d say. Now and then she advised me to find a job more suitable for a young woman in the new world. “This,” she’d point to the city room, “is no man’s land.” Then she’d laugh. “I mean no woman’s land.”
“Miss Ivy. Morning.”
“Loved your interview with Houdini.”