“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
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
“Miss Ivy. Morning.”
“Loved your interview with Houdini.”
Byron Beveridge, sitting across from me with his malodorous cigar, puffed away while reading copy. Debonair, tall, lanky, a local Company G Spanish-American War veteran, he customarily threw his legs across his desk so that I faced the patched soles of his boots. He fancied himself a man about town, some dandy or bon vivant. Arriving late, he made a big to-do about removing his fashionable three-button cutaway frock coat and bowler hat. Blond and pink cheeked, he adopted a rugged, blustery demeanor and liked to brag about female conquest.
Nodding to Miss Ivy, I left the city room, notebook in hand. As I walked on the wide-planked sidewalks of College Avenue, I began my routine stops. Before long, I stood in front of the poster announcing Houdini’s appearance at the Lyceum. Those massive chains around his body; those piercing eyes, challenging. What would he think of my interview when it appeared? Gripping my notebook, I headed up College Avenue.
Later that afternoon, already finished typing my morning copy, I met Esther for a sarsaparilla at Neumeister’s Drug Store. Esther would tag along on my weekly stop at the high school to gather information about drama productions, oratory contests, the honor society, athletic meets. As we walked, I buzzed about my interview with Houdini, and Esther, wide-eyed, told me I was the luckiest girl in Appleton. I beamed.
Both of us liked to drop in at the old
