Mort—he said he’d fire me if I ever called him Mr. Morton—said that the telephone was a curse except when you needed it, like when a reporter didn’t have time to get back to the office to file a story. There were days I went home with a terrible stiff neck from taking dictation with the receiver between my ear and my shoulder. You have no idea how heavy those things used to be.
I did all the typing for the older reporters who refused to learn how. The younger ones used two fingers but they were fast. The guy who covered the courts was faster than me but he was also a terrible drunk. Sometimes he’d come in an hour before deadline, type his story, and pass out at his desk. I couldn’t believe that anyone that pie-eyed could write so well.
But one day he was just too far gone and turned in a real mess. Mort told me to clean it up as well as I could and he’d finish it. Let me tell you, I slaved over those two pages and I was a nervous wreck when I turned them in. Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.
“That’s how it’s done,” he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.
Not that he wanted me to be a reporter. God forbid! Mort disliked women reporters. “They always stick themselves in the middle of the story. The stunt girls show off how brave they are, pretending to be a lunatic or a housemaid, and the sob sisters tell you too much about the murderer’s clothes and nothing about the gun.”
He didn’t have such a great opinion of men reporters, either, and there were plenty of bad examples in that newsroom: not just drinkers but married men who kept asking me out to dinner. Mort said if he saw me with any of them he’d fire me on the spot. “Not that I expect you to be here very long,” he said. “The smart ones leave fast and the good-looking ones go even faster, so I figure I’ve got you for six months, tops.” Then he asked if I’d met Sam Gold in sales. “Nice boy, not married, one of your tribe. You could do worse.”
“Don’t be such a yenta,” I said.
“I’ve been called worse things than a matchmaker.”
That time I said, “Ha!” Obviously, I wasn’t Mort’s first Jew.
He and I had what you would call a mutual admiration society, which is why he kept me away from the women’s pages, or, as Mort called it, “The goddamn ladies’ room.” He hated the stories about clothes, cooking, makeup, parties and teas, women’s clubs and charity events. “Fluff and nonsense.” But it was popular with readers, and the society types followed that genealogy column the way my nephews read about the Red Sox.
Except for the columns, the whole section was written by two middle-aged women who never took off their hats. Miss Flora, who was tall and fat, and Miss Katherine, who was tall and skinny, could turn out copy faster than anyone in the newsroom, which was a good thing, since the women’s pages kept growing. The soap companies and department stores wanted their advertisements to run next to stories their customers would probably read. Mort used to mutter, “Pretty soon they’re going to have to change the name of the paper to the Goddamn Ladies’ Home Journal.”
But nobody hated the section more than its editor, Ian Cornish. His nickname was The Bantam because he had red hair and a voice like a trumpet. I once saw him stand on top of his desk and holler, “I am in hell.”
He was about thirty years old with nice green eyes and a cleft chin like Cary Grant’s, but I’ve never cared for pale men with red hair. I think they look like shrimp that have been boiled and peeled.
Cornish had been sent to “the hen coop,” as he called it, as punishment for a fistfight he’d had with someone upstairs. He figured he’d be called back to the news desk after a few weeks, but when he realized he was stuck with the ladies he started coming in late and never spent more than two or three hours in the office. Flora and Katherine were so good at their jobs it didn’t make much difference, but when two more pages got added to the section, Cornish had to produce something, too.
Serena hadn’t turned anything in for months, so he started a new column about women’s clubs, parlor lectures, and private salons. Those were like book clubs today, but more formal. The toniest ones competed with each other for famous guest speakers.
Cornish called his column Seen and Heard, under the name “Henrietta Cavendish,” and he didn’t write one single word. It was all copied straight out of the morning papers, which he cut up and left all over his desk as if he was daring someone to catch him. He got away with it for so long, it was clear that none of the higher-ups were reading his column. Not even Mort.
I didn’t have anything to do with the women’s section. Flora and Katherine didn’t need help and Cornish could type, or he could until the day he showed up with his right hand in a sling from punching someone who called him Mary, because of where he worked.
Mort wasn’t happy about sending me over there. He had four daughters and he treated me as if I were his fifth. He thought Cornish was a weasel and warned him to be a gentleman or he’d break the other hand.
But Cornish was all business. He handed me copy to type without a “please” and took it back without a “thank you” and never looked me in the eye.
The first time he said two words to me was the day he gave me a piece of fancy stationery, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as if it were a dirty handkerchief. “Type this right away,” he said. “Her Highness, Serena, has decided to grace us with her wit and we’ve got twenty minutes to rip up the section and fit it in.”
I said, “Well, she is the best writer in the section.”
He seemed surprised that I could talk. “You may be right, but she’s a royal pain in the ass. She writes whenever she pleases and I have to put up with it because the public likes her and so does the publisher. It’s a damn shame she’s rich because if she was hungry she might be a real spitfire.”
That column wasn’t one of Serena’s best. Most of it was about the engagement party of a young woman who was probably a friend since it didn’t contain a single sly or snappy word. Katherine or Flora could have knocked it off in five minutes.
I know it’s not nice to enjoy someone else’s failure, but Tessa Thorndike never called me, and I took more than a little pleasure in how mediocre her writing was. Not very nice of me, but you won’t hold that against your dear old grandma, will you?
After a few weeks on the women’s pages, I had to agree with Mort that it was a big waste of time: freckle-removal recipes, tips on sweet-smelling breath, hemline “news,” and society drivel.
Cornish’s column was the worst: a stolen list of “intimate” events with a roll call of the women who went to “lovely” teas and listened to “intriguing” lectures in “charming” homes. It didn’t matter. Seen and Heard was almost as popular as the genealogy column and for the same reason: people like seeing their names in the paper.
Cornish’s hand healed fast, thank goodness, but a few days after I went back to my regular job, Mort called me to his office. He was holding the telephone and said that Cornish was calling in sick and Katherine was at home with a dying mother, which meant I would be spending the whole day in the hen coop with Flora.
“He wants to talk to you.”
When I picked up the phone he said, “Is this Baum?” That was the first time Cornish had ever used my name. “You’re going to write my column today.”
“Me?”