The Henderson Equation Read online

  “I never implied otherwise,” she said, lighting another cigarette. He watched her grope for control, then turned his eyes away.

  “I trust your judgment, Nick,” she said, a hint of pleading in her voice. “Just as Charlie did.” She paused, letting the reference to Charlie take effect. “You believe that, don’t you, Nick?”

  “Yes,” he said after a while, but his long pause had added a note of tentativeness which she ignored, perhaps hoping to dispel the tension. She stood up and went behind her large desk. Opening a drawer, she took out a hand mirror and patted her hair.

  “You are coming to the game Sunday?” she asked, examining her face in the mirror.

  “Yes.”

  She turned away, a finger poking at an eyelash. Then without looking at him she said, “And bring Jennie.”

  “Jennie?” He had no time to control the reflex. She had caught him with a dart outside his field of vision. Rooted to the spot, he waited for more to come.

  “Come on, Nick. Isn’t it time you came out? It’s no secret, you know.”

  He remained silent, turning to go, a stammer caught on his tongue. He felt her eyes on his departing back.

  “Don’t be so damned inflexible,” she called after him, her meaning unmistakably clear.

  5

  In the elevator, he felt the anger glow inside his gut. He looked at the bank of buttons and pushed “B,” hoping that the cab would descend without interruption. But he was not to be spared. On the editorial floor, Bonville emerged, his thin face scrupulously searching Nick’s in his myopic way, as if investigating for skin blemishes.

  “I’ve put the defense copy on your desk,” he said, insensitivity proclaiming itself in the face of Nick’s obviously distraught look. “Landau said he wouldn’t put it in type without your final okay.” The word okay was belched out with contempt.

  Nick grunted and looked above Bonville’s head to the lighted floor signals. When the elevator opened at ground level, Bonville stepped aside, an obvious act of deference, a deliberate nurturing of arrogance. When Nick didn’t move, he shrugged, the beginning of a sneer arranging itself on his features as he proceeded out of the elevator cab. Nick made a mental note to rip the hell out of his editorial, already convinced of his suspicion that Bonville had reached far beyond the agreed-upon parameters.

  On the basement level, Nick stepped out into a massive forest of heavy paper rolls, the pulpy smell heavy in the air. Vaguely recognized by the workmen who handled the paper, he walked down the long corridors, like trails through a forest. He hadn’t been down here in months. He wondered why he had come here now, a small figure roaming in the midst of these oversized cylindrical stumps. Perhaps he had come seeking recall for some moment of time past, hoping like Proust to find some epiphany in the scent. Was he looking for Charlie in these groves? When he had traversed the long length of the area, he found an exit and mounted a metal staircase, his leather soles clacking on the steps. Opening a door on the next floor, he found himself confronted with the skeletal massiveness of the press, a vast superstructure laced with latticed stairwells. There was an awesomeness not only in the technological puzzle of the devices but in the size of the huge rollers. Even the sounds of tinkering seemed portentous, tiny signals heralding the cacophony, as the oiled and inked maws waited for the ingestion of words. He felt humbled in its presence. Did the captain of a huge ship derive the same humility facing its complicated entrails, knowing in his heart that despite the dependence on technology, despite the crew, despite the exigencies of weather and the unpredictability of the ocean, the ultimate responsibility of all lives depended on his own fallible judgment?

  In the end, what was all this technical acrobatics in the face of man’s will and spirit? Just another pile of shaped alloys, a junk shop of potential ruins for future scholars of antiquity. The smell of ink permeated the huge cement cavern, reassuring somehow, like the paper rolls below, a clue, perhaps, that man could still perceive the power of it and in that perception was, therefore, still in control. Could Gutenberg have imagined it back in that German cellar? The power of the word! Of course Gutenberg knew, beginning symbolically with the Bible as if to confirm the reverence of his pursuit. A wrench fell nearby, clattering to the cement floor. He looked up and saw a man, oddly hatted in the special fold of copy paper, the badge of the pressman. The man shrugged in apology.

  Nick retreated to the stairwell and moved upward, pausing briefly on the next level, from which the stacked and folded papers would in a few hours fan out over the world, bound in wire, loaded into trucks, carrying the word, a mirror of the world, his world, in that moment of time. His faltering confidence returned as he moved upward still another floor to where the words were processed, the shrinking bank of linotypers cranking out their metal slugs of words, thrashing arrogantly in the last throes of obsolescence. He walked past the ungainly machines toward the area where the new technology was encroaching, where the new word-processing equipment was in smooth action, keyboards clicking out the sentence visible on their electronic consoles. He was more recognizable here, and he nodded to familiar faces when eyes strayed from the consoles as he passed. He had fought hard for the installation of the new equipment, despite the unions and his own impatience with their reluctance, bucking all the way through the long negotiations that had, toward the end, interrupted the flow of words. An army of editorial workers sweated over tapes, the photographed type, the paste-up. Lines of people stood along the proof racks, fitting together the ads, pasting, reading, proofing—an endless process. He watched the clock as the hands moved relentlessly toward imposed deadlines, finite time that controlled the rhythm of his life. The clock was so embedded in his head, he did not need the graphic view of time to respond. He ducked quickly through a door and pounded upward toward the editorial rooms, swinging open the door to the brightly lit center of his life.

  His brief tour had refreshed him, validating once again his relationship to his work. It was a ritual that Charlie had woven into his own life in the days when it was possible to know by first name even the humblest paper handler, the shiest typesetter.

  “We are all cogs,” Charlie had told him. “Never forget that.” Surely even Myra had felt the same sense of awe. Of course, there was a mystique about this business. Henderson’s allusion was the instinctive reaction of the outsider who saw only the power of it, the muscle itself encased in the supple skin, not the blood and tissue that fueled it.

  The city room was teeming now, the typewriters clacking in wild crescendos, counterpointed by the persistent ringing of telephones. He headed for his glass cage past lifted eyes.

  “A half hour to budget conference,” Miss Baumgartner reminded. He waved at Landau as he passed. In his corner Gunderstein typed, engrossed in still another telephone probe.

  Bonville’s editorial nagged at him from the top of the Lucite desk. Pencil in hand, he began to read it hurriedly, emasculating the persistent line, sculpting it to the proportion of his own vision, feeling joy in the doing, flexing his power. When he had finished, he waved to a news aide who responded quickly and took the copy from him.

  “Bring it to the editorial copy desk,” he commanded. The young man took it and left quickly. Picking up the phone, Nick punched out Jennie’s extension.

  “Get ready, kid, we’re having a coming out party.”

  “A what?”

  “A coming out party. We’re going to the ball game Sunday. The royal box.”

  “Nick. Are you all right?”

  “It’s a command performance. By order of the queen.”

  “As a twosome?”

  “A dynamic duo. You and me, babe.”

  “Christ, Nick. I don’t think I’m ready for it.”

  “Then get ready,” Nick said, his voice lowering. “It’s the moment of truth.”

  The tour of the plant had dissipated his depression and hearing Jennie’s voice had exhilarated him.

  Despite ominous signs in the heavens, he told himself
, all was still well on the planet. Not that he had discounted the blip on the radar screen. Myra was, unquestionably, moving into a more militant phase of her management, her confidence buoyed by the paper’s recent string of phenomenal successes.

  Looking back now to his nine years as executive editor, the years before that when he had walked gratefully in Charlie’s shadow, he applauded his, their, instincts in building a sturdy ship with a tight tiller that responded only to their special touch. The mechanism was a complex, Rube Goldberg concoction, each part oddly fitted by his and Charlie’s own hands. At each terminal of movement, where the joints fitted smoothly together, Nick had carefully honed his own special fittings. Landau, managing editor; Madison, Metropolitan editor; Domier née Gold, Lifestyle editor; Peterson, Editorial Page editor; Prager, Sports editor; Phillips, World editor. The others he had created—like Gunderstein, even Gunderstein, and all those special correspondents burrowed into the White House, the Hill, the Defense Department, the Treasury, and into every major foreign capital of the world. A single faulty part could injure the whole.

  And he was the fuse, the spark of connection through which the special energy flowed. It was quite true, he told himself with candor, that the fuse was replaceable, but not so simply dislodged, and if dislodged, not so simply replaced, and if replaced, not exactly replicated. Try extracting a note from a Bach fugue and watch the symmetry, the special balance, fall apart, he reasoned. He found security in that, despite Myra’s power over his future. The question was: did Myra understand the actual limits of her power? Only he knew where all the pieces fit in this intricate mechanism. She was clearly changing, moving into a new dimension. He would have to watch her carefully.

  Playing favorites was an old newspaper game. It had destroyed Hearst, bringing him to the final abyss of his own megalomania. It was not enough for Hearst to want to make presidents; in the end he had wanted to be president. The ultimate power trip. Surely Myra could be deflected with such sound examples. But hadn’t someone tried to dissuade Hearst?

  The logic of his arguments, by then, had softened his suspicion. There was, after all, some good horse sense in the old girl, as the matter of himself and Jennie had testified. It was futile to be clandestine. His initial instinct, as his love for Jennie became apparent to himself, had been that it might diminish him in the eyes of the people at the Chronicle, a revelation of vulnerability. His was an example to be set. A newspaper was no place for interlocking passions. Emotion, especially that one, could distort judgments.

  But despite the relief of their impending “coming out,” Nick, with that persistent questioning of questions, determined to watch for minefields ahead. Better to be cautious than exploded, he thought, remembering arduous detours in France to avoid the tricky patterns of German mines. Why had Myra chosen exactly that moment to tender the invitation? Was she simply playing on the insecurity of a man in love with a girl thirty years his junior? Was this in Myra’s mind when she released her well-aimed dart?

  “Don’t be so inflexible,” she had said, another echo to his journalist-trained ears which trapped the inner monologue. Listen to what she is saying, he reminded himself.

  6

  The Parker house on Massachusetts Avenue, a William Hobson Richardson travesty with turrets and cupolas, was a landmark even in the old days. In a city that made architectural judgments of people’s worth and eccentricities, the house was a fitting residence for a banker turned newspaper owner. Mr. Parker, George Albert—it was his statement of himself to have others think of him in terms of three names—was solidly built, a pocket watch and Phi Beta Kappa key always displayed on the vested, large expanse of belly. If this wasn’t enough to make his antecedents suspect, there were always the pince-nez glasses and the high black shoes that attested to his resistance to contemporary styles, as if pre-World War I were his permanent era. Nick’s first brief view of him with the oak panelling as background in the library of his home, standing near a crackling fire, one hand on the edge of a leather winged chair, dark pinstriped vested suit, pince-nez removed but visible in the fingers of his right hand, had given him a completeness of view that subsequent casual encounters could never erase.

  “Father, this is Nick Gold, a newspaperman friend of Charlie’s,” Myra had said, as if the identification as a newspaperman were necessary ingratiation.

  “Ah yes,” Mr. Parker responded. He was preoccupied. But Myra had planted a kiss on his cheek and the old man responded in kind. To Nick, it had been a brief photograph, a flicker of the lens. He had no idea that more than a quarter of a century later he would be contemplating that still clear print.

  He had been invited down for the engagement party. By then Charlie was in the Washington bureau of the News, a post granted as therapy by McCarthy after Charlie had been found drunk and spinning on the huge globe in the lobby of the New York building. Somehow the air of Washington had worked a cure. Charlie, sensing the destructive power at work, went on the wagon, and his letters to Nick testified to returning health and an interest in Washington that absorbed his energies.

  “This place is a howl,” he wrote in a clipped, hurried prose beaten out between deadlines on thick, pulpy copy paper in pica type with capitalizations rampant. “Attended my First Presidential News conference. Harry is a feisty bugger, a Real hayseed, but lotsa moxey. I didn’t have the Balls to ask him a question although They tell me that some of the questions are Rigged in advance. Personally, I think that’s Horseshit, but old hands here say that FDR, who they call his Imperial Highness, used to plant questions among friendly news-buffs to get a point across. Anyway, I feel damned good, now that I’m off the Goddamned juice. It was a good Move, getting down here, even though I Bucked like hell. I miss you, you old Bastard. You’ll probably go to hell on a sled now that I’m not around to Blow your nose. Oh yeah. I’m getting laid a lot. There’s lots of girls down here from Pennsylvania and Ohio. The girls from those dumb shit towns (like the one you came from) Fuck the best. Don’t take my word for it. It’s been validated by big Shirley. She runs a wonderful little cat house on 16th Street. The Best whores come from Ohio, she says. I said I know that, because I know you.”

  He was considered a political maverick by the News desk people who began to detect Democratic bias in his copy, definitely too Left for the News Republican posture.

  “I’m surrounded by Paid Republican agents, snobs,” he wrote to Nick. “They say that Truman is on his way out anyway, so why the fuss. Nick, you just can’t believe this place. They actually run the country from Here. It’s a Land of Pygmies, with occasional Giants like Marshall. I interviewed him the other day, the old Commander. Never realized what a tall man He was. And I really admire Acheson. God, I love it here. Except for not having you around, old Buddy. I’m as happy as a pig in shit. Met a girl, too. Her father’s the publisher of the Chronicle, a hind-tit paper, which after meeting him, I’m convinced has Integrity. The old man drips with it. He scares the shit out of me. But Myra, that’s the gal’s name, dotes on him. You should see the House they live in. It’s as big as a Fucking Embassy. They entertain a lot and I’m hobnobbing with the Rich and Powerful. I’m kissing a lot of asses, Nick. You should see me. You’d piss in your pants at me in a tux. I think I’m in Love with Myra.”

  The letters began to be more infrequent and except for an occasional brief conversation on the telephone, Nick hardly heard from Charlie at all. By then, Nick was immersed in his own affair with Margaret, who had just been promoted to assistant movie reviewer. It was mating time for both of them, a time when male friendships pale.

  “I’m engaged,” Charlie finally wrote. “She’s one hell of a gal. I’ve become pretty fond of the old man, who’s trying to get me to quit the News and come work for the Chronicle. It’s a stuffy old rag and I hate the thought of being the Son-in-Law, but Myra’s working on me as well. I think I’m about to surrender. We’re having an engagement bash at the old homestead, where I have become a regular moocher. I practically live th
ere. Let’s face it. I was born for Luxury. They change the Fucking towels twice a day, not weekly. That in itself is a cultural shock. As for you, you Bastard, I’m expecting you down here for the Bash. Just hop the Congressional Friday night and we’ll pick you up in Myra’s Lincoln. Prepare to be impressed. We’ll put you up in the Mansh.”

  He had, of course, jumped at the invitation.

  His first glimpse of Myra was at the wheel of a big cream-colored Lincoln with the Capitol in the background, a glistening whiteness in the Washington sunset. Even seated, she was clearly tall and slender, with long athletic legs. Her delicate white fingers clutched the big wheel as he slid in beside Charlie.

  “So you’re the famous Nick,” Myra said.

  Myra had driven them through the city, pointing out the Capitol, the Senate Office Building, the old House building, the Library of Congress. The big car rolled quietly through the Mall, past the National Gallery and the turreted Smithsonian and on into the deepening glow of sunset, the Washington Monument soft and pink in the reddening sky. Swinging into Fourteenth Street, she moved the car expertly through traffic, then turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue to give him a special view of the White House. By then the lights had gone on and the fountains danced in front of the Georgian porticos.

  “There she is,” Charlie had said, “the big house.”

  “Is Harry home?” he had asked.

  “Up there,” Charlie pointed, “on the third floor.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he had said, a lump forming in his throat. They remained silent until the car drove into the driveway of the Parker house.

  Despite a certain amount of wiseacre banter, Charlie seemed genuinely changed, more secure, happier, the bad memories gone. Because he loved Charlie, he could welcome his friend’s good fortune while feeling sadness at the ending of their youthful chapter.

  Charlie had taken him through room after high-ceilinged room to a large Tudor-styled, beamed billiard den, a kind of clubby relic of a life-style only lived by those of Mr. Parker’s age and station. On one wall a heavy oak credenza exhibited hunting guns, ominous in their splendor of shined gunmetal and stocks, and one of which, years later, would explode a shell in Charlie’s troubled brain. In his memory, Nick had always invested them with a kind of inner life. Had they been so lovingly cared for all those years so that they could be used with such abruptness? Who had taken such care?