I'll Take Manhattan (5 page)

“I don’t understand,” he said to the
Times
receptionist. “I simply do not understand.”

“We have as many copyboys as we can possibly use and we have a waiting list,” she repeated patiently.

“But I have years of newspaper experience. I’ve
run
a newspaper. All I’m asking for is an entry-level job—I didn’t ask to be city editor.”

“Look, Mr. Amberville, the
Times
promised all its copyboys when they went into the service that their jobs would be waiting for them when they got back. God knows they didn’t all get back, but those who did were the first ones to be hired. Then there were the former servicemen who were graduated from journalism schools. In fact we have copyboys who
taught
at journalism schools. It’s too bad you never graduated from college. Then, of course, the other former officers …”

“Any Marine Colonels?”

“We have a former General, Mr. Amberville, only one, but he
was
a General.”

“Air Force?”

“How did you know?”

“It figured. Those fuckers.
Sorry
, Miss!”

“I’d be glad to put you on the waiting list?” she offered, suppressing a giggle.

“I don’t have the time to wait. But thanks anyway.” As he left the
Times
Building, Zachary Amberville passed an eager group of schoolchildren about to start the tour. He turned aside, and, for the first time in his life, bought a copy of the
Daily News
and opened it to the pages of want ads.

The Five Star Button Company had prospered mightily through a war in which metal and fabric and leather were rationed, yet buttons could be made out of almost any nonessential material. “Change Your Buttons, Change Your Look,” had been their slogan and they sold many millions of buttons made of feathers and pom-poms and sequins. They made a superior button, Mr. Nathan Landauer explained to Zachary, a button that you could count on, a button that you could be proud to wear.

“I’m sure of it, sir,” Zachary answered, looking around
the walls of the office on which cards hung, onto which models of hundreds of different buttons were pinned.

“It’s just that the job seems a little, well, not exactly what I’d expect you to be looking for,” Landauer continued, admiring the Marine Air Force Colonel’s uniform, the four rows of medals, the military haircut.

“It’s running a paper, isn’t it, sir?”

“Yes … if you call a house organ for a button company a ‘paper’—frankly I’ve never thought of it that way … just an extra service for our customers, Colonel, and a way to make our employees feel a part of one big family.”

“But you publish it every month, you use a regular union printer in New Jersey, there’s an office and a part-time secretary that goes with the job, and the salary is sixty-five dollars a week?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d like the job, sir. Very much.”

“You’ve got it, Colonel.”

“Call me Zack. I’ll be back in an hour. Just going to change into something more comfortable. Change my buttons, change my luck.” Nathan Landauer looked after him wistfully. Those were the best-looking buttons he’d seen in a long, long time. Nathan Junior, proud as he was of him, had spent three years in the Navy, as a simple seaman, and if he had a decent button on his uniform he’d never so much as showed it to his father.

“Nat,” Zachary Amberville said to Nathan Landauer, Jr., between bites of pastrami on rye, “don’t you want to do something more with your life than make buttons, even if it’s more than a living? More than a very good living?”

“What else can I do? It’s a family business and Pop expects me to take over for him when he retires in five years. I’m the only son in the family and he built that business up himself from absolutely nothing. It’s the biggest button business on Seventh Avenue. I’m trapped, Zack. I just can’t break his heart. He’s a good guy.”

“He’s a great guy. But you’re not trapped. You can run the business with one hand tied behind you, and with the other …”

“With the other?”

“You can become a partner in a magazine.”

“Indian say, ‘Never invest in show business.’ ”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Didn’t you see
Annie Get Your Gun
? Ethel Merman asks Chief Sitting Bull how he got so rich and he says, ‘Indian never invest in show business’ … magazines are show business as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know fuckall about them.”

“Do you know belts? Do you know about bows? Do you know braid? Do you know hooks and eyes and fake flowers and snaps and crochet trim and …”

“You can’t walk down Forty-sixth Street without picking up a notion about notions, Zack, it’s all part of Seventh Avenue … a garment has to have something besides buttons on it even if Pop would never admit it. Yeah, sure I know a little, but so what?”

“
Trimming Trades Monthly
. A new magazine.”

“You leave me less than overwhelmed. Condé Nast you’re not, my friend.”

“It could serve a need. Thousands of garment manufacturers in this country making thousands of different kinds of garments, and none of them knows what’s new, what’s happening, what’s available in the trimming trades.”

“Somehow they seem to struggle along all right without being up to date, haven’t you noticed?”

“Sure, and they didn’t need the wheel either until someone thought of it.”

“
Trimming Trades Monthly
 … would it have color photos of pretty girls wearing nothing but little knitted pussy wigs?”

“No, Nathan Junior, with your filthy Navy mind, it would not. It would have information, ads, stories about what’s happening on Seventh Avenue, where the trimming trades are going, what the designers are using this month, maybe even next month, what’s happening in Paris, how the various companies are doing, who’s changing jobs, who’s getting promoted, ads and more ads. In black and white, on medium-quality paper so the print doesn’t come off on your hands, but nothing too fancy, and a large, handsome picture of your father on the first cover.”

“And, as the sun sets slowly over the beautiful downtown garment center, I begin to see what you want, Colonel, sir. And here I’ve always thought you loved me as a fascinating lunch date.”

“You’d own half.”

“How much would it
cost
?”

“We’d need at least fifteen thousand dollars, before we could begin to make money, according to my best estimates. I don’t think we’d pick up enough subscribers for—oh, at least six months to begin to make a profit and, of course, I’d have to quit my job at Five Star to spend my time getting ads and writing the magazine, so I’ve included my salary in there.”

“How much would you invest of this fifteen thousand dollars?”

“The idea and my salary. I wouldn’t get paid until we made a profit.”

“What would you live on?”

“There’s plenty of room in your apartment, two can eat as cheaply as one, girls are willing to go Dutch, and I walk to work anyway.”

“I’d put up
all
the money?”

“Who else?”

“
You’d
be editor?”

“Who else?”

“Christ, I know I’m an easy lay … but what am I supposed to get out of this? Besides half of the nonexistent profits?”

“You’d be publisher. Every magazine has one, God knows why. And you’d own half of the magazine, you’d be more than a button manufacturer, when you met a new girl and she asked you what you did for a living you could say, ‘I’m a publisher, my pet.’ ”

“What if she asked the name of the magazine?”

“You’d be on your own … lie, say anything you like … and when you finally meet a girl who really loves you then you can tell her. But I can’t change the name, Nat, it’s got to tell you what the magazine’s about or nobody will go for it.”

“
Playboy
. I’ll tell them it’s called
Playboy
,” Nathan Junior said dreamily.

“That’s a lousy name for a magazine, Nat. But suit yourself. Let’s go visit your bank before it closes.”

Trimming Trades Monthly
broke even in four months and soon Zack Amberville was able to pay himself a salary of a hundred dollars a week. Since he still lived at Nathan Junior’s he sent most of it back to his mother.

Minnie was in her first year at Dana Hall Junior College and Cutter, at fourteen, was going to Andover. Sarah Amberville had found a job in a gift shop and between her modest wages and Zachary’s earnings they were able to send the younger children to the best of schools, in spite of the fact that neither of them had won scholarships. In fact Minnie was lucky to get into Dana Hall, hardly a center of intellectual ferment, but she was so pretty and droll and happy that nobody minded that she never could better her C average, try as she would. Cutter, on the other hand, had a good, if lazy mind, but he chose not to work too hard at his studies, chose it coldbloodedly, because boys who were too bright were always menaced by unpopularity and he wanted popularity above all.

Cutter Dale Amberville, even in his cradle, had shown that he was going to take after the Andersons. He had grown quickly into a tall, exceptionally blond boy with the Swedish blue eyes of his ancestors, a fine-looking youth with an evil, ugly worm living and growing in his heart. He had despised growing up on the edge of poverty. As long as he could remember he had known that he was one of the poor Cutters, the poor Andersons, the poor Dales and the poor Ambervilles, in a small community in which the four families were all cousins to some degree and in which these distinctions of wealth were closely calculated and never mentioned.

Cutter looked down on his father’s choice of career. Why pour your heart into a newspaper which obviously would never make any money? What kind of man would make such a choice? But the disregard he felt for his father was mild compared to the absolute repudiation he felt toward his brother whenever he was forced to realize that he was being supported by Zachary. However, he considered
himself too far removed from the ordinary to go out and get a job himself. He was related to all of the best families in town; it was unthinkable that he should find himself delivering their groceries or standing behind a counter making sodas for them. Nor had his mother ever suggested such a thing, for she wanted Cutter not to know the struggle that Zachary had shouldered.

Sarah Amberville never suspected how Cutter felt about his brother, never knew that Zachary had always seemed sickeningly, terrifyingly all-powerful to her youngest child. Cutter judged him with contempt, mixed with baseless fear. Zachary was a violent, insufferable, potentially dangerous wind who swept into the quiet house whenever he could find time and filled it with his boisterous, laughing, uncouth presence, immediately becoming the center of his mother’s and father’s total attention. It seemed clear to Cutter that their pride in this almost-stranger, this loud, brash, bold brother who hadn’t lived at home since he, Cutter, was five, left his parents no room to remember that he was alive, much less be interested in him.

Bitterly he would return, time and time again, to dozens of memories of his childhood, telling them to himself like a rosary. There had been the time when he was eight and had the leading role in the school play but all his parents could concentrate on was the fact that his brother had gone off to fight in the war. For the next four years, no matter how popular he was in school, no matter that he became a junior tennis champion of Massachusetts, his parents were constantly waiting, every minute of every day, for news of their other son, the war hero, the fighter pilot. And when the war was finally over had his mother finally turned to him? No. Never. Not once. What could a teenaged boy bring home to show his mother that would compare to a letter from Zachary telling her of the new magazine he was creating in New York? To a copy of the magazine itself?

Cutter Amberville had always been so sure that Zachary had sucked up for himself all that was worth having that he turned secretive and bitter, not giving his parents a chance to become involved in his life. The heavy, omnipotent
shadow of his brother had, Cutter
knew
, deprived him of the love and attention that would rightfully have been his. He’d been shoved aside, to the margin of his parents’ life, and he interpreted his brother’s generosity as bones thrown to a dog. The more Zachary gave him the more he owed him and the more Cutter owed his brother the more he hated him, with a passionate, permanent hatred that was deeper than any love he would ever know, the hatred that only early, unspeakable
envy
of one sibling for another can inspire.

At Andover, Cutter said as little as he could about his family. He certainly never intended to admit that his fees were paid by a mother who worked and a brother who edited a magazine with a name of which he was ashamed. He concentrated on developing his personal popularity within the school, using flattery as his weapon of choice. He cultivated the ability to ask those subtle questions that put other boys in the best possible light and, at an age when self-centered boasting was the rule, he learned the power of the person who would listen and admire. The worm in his heart was his teacher. He was excellent at sports but his marks were deliberately average. Quickly he became an accomplished courtier who bothered to cultivate only the boys whose parents were both rich and powerful. His good looks were highly finished, with strong, natural distinction, and a bred-in-the-bone strength. His well-cut hair covered a long, strongly shaped skull; Cutter’s blue eyes could hold those of others with a steady, sincere expression, and he had trained himself not to use too often that practiced smile that seemed so charmingly natural.

Zachary was proud of the serious, striking teenager, although he found curiously little to talk to him about on the rare occasions when they were together, for now his brother’s school holidays and weekends were invariably spent visiting in some home where young Cutter Amberville was regarded as a most welcome guest.

One autumn Monday of 1948, Nathan Landauer, Jr., walked into the offices Zachary had rented, with a combination
of fearful joy and deep embarrassment on his pleasant face.