[Dorothy Parker 02] - Chasing the Devil Read online

  “Shall we stop in at Freddy O’Malley’s for a shot? Or do you want to wait to see Santa?” asked Aleck.

  “Hell, no! Santa’s not coming to my place this year!” I said testily. I’m Jewish and, anyway, I’ve been a naughty girl.”

  “Then come along, my naughty little yenta.”

  Aleck folded in the legs of the stepstool and popped it into the old carpetbag Woodrow Wilson likes to sleep in. I told Jane we’d be at Freddy’s on 38th Street if she and Ross wanted to stop in for fortification before heading up to Edna Ferber’s apartment and the Thanksgiving feast.

  We had started on our way when there was a sudden roar from the crowd, and I turned to follow Aleck’s gaze up into the sky. The huge elephant balloon had been released and was rising up quickly over the buildings along Herald Square. Children were pointing and waving and laughing at the sight of the gigantic flying elephant.

  We watched, transfixed, and after a few moments the Toy Soldier was released to the stratosphere. As the brightly colored figure began its rapid ascent into the blue, so, too, rose the sound of chattering children, not unlike the hysterical cawing of thousands of blackbirds descending upon crops of dogwood berries in Central Park this time of year. Soon cheers and whistles burst forth from thousands of onlookers. Just as Aleck and I were about to make our way from the crowd-lined street, a procession of midgets, from the current show at the Hippodrome and dressed as Santa’s Elves, guided Santa’s sleigh with the accompanying jingle of sleigh bells. Another roar of delight sprang from the spectators as a rotund, jovial, cherry-cheeked Santa came into view, Ho-Ho-Ho-ing as he waved to his little fans.

  The noise proved too much for the Central Park Zoo’s lion, immediately preceding Santa’s float, nervously pacing in its cage. It answered the roar of the crowd with a startling one of its own, sending the children closest to the street into screaming fits of terror! And as if that wasn’t enough to put an end to the morning’s festivities, the giant gas-filled elephant exploded to smithereens above our heads, the horror of which was only compounded when the Toy Soldier, so grotesquely human, followed suit!

  It was too late for Felix, I’m afraid, because moments before the elephant defied the laws of gravity and the toy soldier-boy waved his deathly farewell while soaring “over the top,” the big cat, too, had been sent on his final journey. The sudden realization of the fate awaiting Felix struck every last soul on the street, and there fell a sudden hush upon the onlookers; Santa’s waving hand froze in position, the jingle bells stopped jingling, and even the lion’s roar was reduced to a shameful growl as all held their collective breaths for the dreaded, but imminent explosion.

  It was not a pretty sight when it happened; the children, who’d whined and whimpered as their parents tried to shield their innocent young eyes and ears from the inevitable, let loose bloodcurdling, ear-shattering screams when the blast rang out.

  Black-and-white rubber rained down from the sky to land like flattened carrion on the street.

  “I’ll have to mention the slaughter, too, in my letter to Straus,” said Aleck, as we shuffled past the pathetic, mourning families, coping with loss and the death of fantasy.

  The crowds seemed to press closer as we edged our way toward the side street off Seventh Avenue. I held Woodrow Wilson close to my chest as Aleck guided us toward an opening in the crowd.

  There was pressure at my back and I began to stumble forward, but a grasp at the shoulder righted my balance. Aleck no longer had hold of my hand, and for a moment I panicked when hands gripped my shoulders. I was literally pivoted around to come face-to-face with a startling figure.

  Light, almost white hair, wildly swept atop a pale head, a beard of several days’ growth, speckled with spittle, and eyes! What eyes! A lizard’s eyes! The strange ice-blue orbs bore into mine with an expression so crazed that I was struck motionless where I stood. Had Woodrow Wilson not whimpered in fear, I’d have thought I was overreacting, but my dog’s whine only confirmed my own sense of peril.

  As quickly as I’d been seized, I was released.

  I was recovering, trying to pull myself together, both figuratively as well as literally, for my hat was askew and my scarf yanked from inside my coat in the shuffle, when I looked around for Aleck, and called out his name.

  A few feet ahead a commotion: I glimpsed Aleck’s familiar ivory-headed cane as it rose in the air. The crowd pressed in closer, alarmingly, but I forced my way through toward my friend.

  With the flash of sunlight on steel, I glimpsed the blade of a dagger.

  I screamed.

  Voices raised up all around me. A scuffle further along sent people staggering and shouting. I pushed through the crush, searching frantically for Aleck. But by now people were in a panic, rushing, pushing toward me, away from danger, and it was all I could do to move onward in my search. I glimpsed the wild shock of light hair as the man with the startling face pressed forward in escape.

  Finding my friend at last, I was relieved to see that he was unharmed. But in his hand he held a bloodied dagger, and another man lay prone at his feet!

  Police whistles sounded along the street.

  Aleck dropped the dagger and kneeled to assess the victim’s injuries. He loosened the man’s scarf and there, revealed, was a clerical collar. His overcoat was unbuttoned; blood oozed from his chest. Aleck was speaking frantically to the wounded man.

  “Stop him!” I heard the man say with a fervent hiss. Aleck moved in closer to better hear.

  “Who?” asked Aleck. “Stop whom?”

  “. . . save him . . .”

  “Tell me his name! Who did this to you?”

  “Save him . . . .”

  But it was too late. Just as a policeman arrived at the scene, the man fell dead in Aleck’s arms.

  Macy’s Parade Flyer

  When pigs fly

  Marching to oblivion

  In memoriam

  Jane and Ross

  Chapter Two

  I hate happy people.

  Perhaps I should rephrase that statement.

  I am suspicious of people who wear a smile all the time—people who laugh when nothing humorous has been said. The glass-is-half-full-look-on-the-bright-side-everything’s-going-to-be-all-right-it-could-be-worse-God-doesn’t-give-you-anything-you-can’t-handle-when-a-door-closes-a-window-opens Pollyannas make me puke.

  On what planet are they living? What do they know that I don’t know? More to the point: What they are hiding?

  Are these people blind to the tragedies of this world? Or are they so self-involved that they simply cannot see the inequities and torments that plague the human condition? Sometimes everything isn’t going to be all right. Sometimes things can’t be worse, and sometimes God, if one entertains the possibility of His existence, crushes a person, and they die because they can’t handle what He’s meted out. As the sky falls in on those smiling idiots, do they bother to run for cover? You bet!

  I admire people who’ve suffered, yet move forward with courage. But always putting a brave face on misfortune is dishonest; it proves only that you don’t trust your friends with your very real concerns, or that you believe they might think less of you for your failings. Such people reek of pride; so superior to others that they won’t admit disappointments, losses, and tragedies. Who wants to be friends with an automaton? Who wants to be friends with a person who refuses to see your sadness, who goes around pitching platitudes like “When a door closes a window opens”? Sometimes when a door closes you’re trapped, and you just yearn for a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.

  Edna Ferber is a happy woman.

  I have struggled; therefore, we are only fair-weather friends.

  Edna writes big, fat, overblown potboilers. I imagine she types away at the speed of light, so content in her characters’ miserable circumstances that her fingers fly along the keys, with frequent breaks for rubbing palms together in diabolical delight of the schemes in which she has ensnared them.

  Like a sp
ider spinning her web.

  And as if her wretched tale is not enough, she wraps up the whole thing with an improbable, sappy, happy ending! In life, there are no happy endings—just temporary reprieves. And for the lie of the happy ending, she wins the Pulitzer!

  I don’t hate Edna Ferber; in many ways, I marvel at her success. She tolerates me because Aleck and FPA (Frank Pierce Adams) are her friends and they adore me. She knows that I know that she knows that her novels are nothing more than cash-cows that pay for her beautiful furnishings in her Central Park West apartment at the Prasada. I, by contrast, who have never cared much for acquiring things, and wish only to create works of literary art, view her prolificacy as prolixity. And so, I find her good humor difficult to stomach for very long.

  When Aleck and I arrived at Edna’s for Thanksgiving dinner several hours late, we were greeted warmly, handed martinis, and immediately seated at the dining room table. As I’d telephoned from the police station earlier to tell Edna we had encountered “a problem,” and were being interrogated at the precinct, she’d graciously offered to send her lawyer over to post bail for my release, certain I had committed some crime. She didn’t quite get the remark I’d hissed into the receiver, and came back with, “I beg your pardon?”

  She’d wanted to serve dinner soon, and we were holding things up: “The gravy is congealing and the turkey toughening, you see,” and it was all she could do to keep the stuffing from drying up.

  “Stuff it, Edna.”

  “The bird is stuffed,” she said.

  She couldn’t see me roll my eyes.

  “Oh, put a sock in it.”

  “A sock?”

  “Awwwhhh, crap! Put a wet rag on it, would ya, Edna?”

  “Oh, all right,” she said.

  She must have taken me literally, because between the numerous questions posed by the dinner guests to Aleck, who held court as usual, we dined on the most succulent fowl, drowned with the richest gravy and the most divine chestnut stuffing I’d ever tasted in my life. The guests oohed and ahhed their compliments on the fine fare through indistinguishable grunts.

  A voracious school of piranhas had descended upon the fixings in their usual Round Table feeding frenzy, sloshing gravy (Ross and Heywood Broun), spilling the Riesling (Groucho and Zeppo), flinging globs of cranberry sauce onto the crisp white linen tablecloth (Ross, Heywood, Groucho, Chico and Bunny Wilson), knocking over water glasses (Aleck and Frank), and gnawing and sucking the carcass clean in no time (all of the abovementioned). I began to think that Harpo might be the only male to leave the beautifully appointed table unsullied, until, while waving his spoon to make a point in the conversation, it flung from his fingers and splashed into the pumpkin pudding, sending an orangey dollop into the eye of our hostess.

  Edna was, if annoyingly buoyant, a terrific cook, and despite her sudden expression of despair, a good sport to our faces (although I doubted she’d ever invite us en masse to dinner again). To her surprise, Woodrow Wilson displayed the best table manners of the whole lot; he quietly ate all the lovely turkey and potatoes on the plate she had presented to him and licked the plate clean, leaving not a spot on the parquet, before curling up to sleep beside the fire.

  “What is your secret?” asked Jane Grant. “This has to be the best turkey I’ve ever tasted.”

  “I told Edna to stuff it,” I chimed in.

  “But, of course, I’d already done that, you see . . .”

  “So I told her to put a wet rag on it.”

  “Yes, well,” replied Edna, nervously watching a fine crystal wineglass teeter toward extinction. “Sometimes your suggestions are very clever, Dorothy,” said Edna, oblivious to the true meaning of my words.

  “What’s this about a rag?” asked Jane.

  “Never mind that,” said Frank, sometimes referred to by his initials, FPA. “I want to know more about what happened this morning.”

  “I’ll tell you what happened! A couple-hundred- thousand kids watched Felix bust a gut right before their eyes,” said Ross.

  “I wasn’t asking you, Dopey!” said the newspaper columnist. “I was talking to Aleck and Dottie about the murder.”

  “What do you call what happened to the Toy Soldier, Frank? A ride in the country?” said Zeppo, taking Ross’s side.

  “Awww, stuff it, Zeppo!”

  “Yeah, stuff it!” said Harpo.

  “Throw a wet rag on it!” said Chico.

  When it dawned on her at last, Edna shot me a burning glance that a wet rag would not extinguish.

  “Why’re you all picking on me?” whined Ross, in his most pathetic victim’s voice.

  “The turkey’s picked clean, Ross, and what better carcass to pick on than yours?” said Aleck.

  Harold Ross has always been the butt of Aleck’s acid tongue. It had been the case since they met during the War as writers for Stars and Stripes.

  Aleck had introduced himself as “dramatic critic for the New York Times.” The image of the pudgy, puffed-up, and pretentiously pompous Woollcott reporting about prancing, dancing chorines for a military newspaper produced a hearty laugh.

  “What kind of sissy-boy job is that?” Ross had asked.

  Not to be belittled, Aleck had haughtily scrutinized the gawky, disheveled figure before him and replied gaily, “You know, you remind me a great deal of my grandfather’s coachman.”

  It was the beginning of their love–hate relationship.

  Later, while in Paris, Aleck introduced Ross to Jane Grant, a society reporter for the Times. Ross was immediately smitten, and although he never intended to live in New York after the War, he did so to be near Jane. Stateside once more, Ross and Aleck resumed their rather odd, rather deprecating friendship. Ross was editing The Home Sector, but dreamed about publishing his own magazine someday. Last winter he did just that when The New Yorker debuted to less-than-rave reviews. Harold Ross may look like a tramp, but under those rags is an exacting and excellent editor. But as it appears now, it’s doubtful the magazine will see another year of publication, even though lots of us have been contributing to the weekly in hopes that it will eventually find its readership.

  “All of you behave yourselves,” said Edna, knowing her remonstration held little impact on the men.

  “Aleck picked up the dagger,” I said. “That’s why we were dragged down to police headquarters.”

  “Outrageous, really, that the police would think that I’d stab a good man of God with a stiletto!”

  “A stiletto was the next logical step up, I suppose, after shooting all those bad actors with your vitriol,” I said, trying to lighten his dark mood.

  “Once the police looked me over they knew I couldn’t have thrown the dagger.”

  “Because you throw like a girl?” asked Ross.

  The table shuddered and the crystal clinked as Jane kicked Ross in the shin under the cloth. He flashed a frown at her smiling face.

  Aleck pointed a beaky nose at Ross. “Thank you, Jane, for my retort!”

  “What ‘good-God-man’ was murdered?” asked Harpo.

  “A priest!” said Aleck. “Father John O’ Hara from some little town down South.”

  “A priest! But why?” asked Edna. “Why would anyone kill a priest?”

  “He couldn’t find a rabbi?” said Heywood Broun.

  “Was the stabbing random? Some act of a madman wielding a knife in a crowd?”

  “I don’t know, Edna,” I said. “But Father O’Hara spoke to Aleck before he died, and it appears the priest may have known his killer.”

  All eyes turned toward Aleck, who paused, a fork of pumpkin pie hovering midway off his plate. “He said, ‘stop him; save him.’ ” Aleck looked genuinely shaken as he uttered the words, but immediately found comfort in the forkful of pie.

  “So he wanted you to stop his killer and then save him,” said Jane. “A final act of forgiveness . . .”

  “He was a priest! Salvation was the commodity he sold, for crissake!” said Ross.
/>   “Looks like he made an exit while trying to make a sale,” said Groucho.

  “Have they caught his killer?” asked FPA.

  “Not yet. Dottie’s description of a man she saw fleeing the scene wasn’t exactly what the police had in mind when they asked her what he looked like,” said Aleck. “What was it you told the detective?” He didn’t wait for me to reply: “‘He was a tortured soul with eyes like drowning pools.’”

  “Well, yes,” I interjected. “It was a God-awful, frightening face.”

  “And she knows a God-awful frightening face when she sees one,” said Groucho, and everyone turned on cue to stare at him. “I wasn’t referring to myself.”

  Everyone turned to stare at Heywood Broun.

  “Actually,” said Groucho, “I was referring to Ross, you nincompoops, but the majority rules: Heywood’s got him topped, I’d say.” (I remembered the time a few years back, when Heywood stood outside the Gonk after lunch, cap in hand, waiting for Aleck to join him. A woman passerby stopped, looked over the bedraggled, unkempt creature, and placed a dime in his cap so that he could “have a good meal.”)

  Aleck took the moment to shovel in a forkful of pecan pie.

  “They hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about,” he continued after a gulp of coffee, “so she said he looked like the figure in Munch’s The Scream, but that didn’t help, so she offered to draw a picture.”

  “Oh, Lord, I can only imagine. I’ve seen a few of your sketches, my dear Dorothy,” said Bunny, chuckling.

  “Yes, Munch-ish, and I don’t mean Benedictine!” said FPA.

  “Well, borrowing Mary Shelley’s description of Frankenstein seems farfetched, so I thought a good pictorial rendition might work,” I said. “Wait! Where’s my purse?”