Harry Bingham - Glory Boys

It was five-thirty on a Friday afternoon. Larry Ronson’s head disappeared beneath his desk with a long drawn-out liquid gurgle. After pausing a second for effect, he poked his head out around the corner and said, ‘Miss Hooper, will you marry me?’ Annie tutted and pulled her eyes away from him, a slight blush rising into her freckled cheeks. ‘Silence will be taken to mean yes.’

‘Larry, don’t be silly.’

‘Elope with me then. We’ll live in sin in some crumbling Mexican palace with our sixteen children and spend our time writing rude postcards to Ted Powell.’

‘It’s five-thirty, anyway,’ said Annie, looking around for her coat.

‘That doesn’t settle the question.’

‘I’m off home, I mean.’

‘Women today! So practical! Whatever became of romance? I’ll dance with you down Broadway by the light of the silvery moon.’

‘It’s raining.’

‘Streetlights. Silvery streetlights.’

Annie had her bag and her coat, and was settling a little cloche-style hat on her head. ‘I’ll see you Monday.’

‘OK, how about a drink? I want to get so boiled I won’t be able to find my feet.’

Willard had been expecting Annie to refuse one further time, but this time she paused. ‘Well…’

‘Excellent. Anyone else? Leo? No? Can’t tear yourself away, I presume?’ Leo McVeigh’s massive red head peered briefly up from his paperwork. He looked at Ronson, unblinking and expressionless, the way a butcher looks at a bull, the way a bull looks at anyone. He said nothing, just put his head back to his work and continued writing, his heavy black fountain pen moving evenly across the paper. Ronson opened his hands in a kind of what-can-you-expect-from-football-players gesture. ‘Ignacio, old chap?’

Iggy Claverty glanced up briefly. ‘You know an Ignacio, do you?’

‘Iggy, you chump, I was asking if you wanted to come and toast the Eighteenth Amendment in a sea of alcohol.’

‘Can’t. I’m already drowning. Sorry.’

He waved his hand at the stack of brown files on his desk. He’d had a bad day that day. Willard had heard his swearing and sweating over some transport problem in one of the Dakotas. The stack of files in his ‘out’ pile was still much smaller than the stack of those on the ‘in’ side.

‘Mr Thornton?’

Willard was about to echo Claverty’s refusal and for the same reason, but the thought of an evening getting royally drunk was more temptation than he could handle.

‘I’m in,’ he said. ‘Just let me get these damned things bundled up for the weekend.’

He swept the files that still needed to be dealt with into his briefcase – then glanced at Hughes, then at Ronson. So far Ronson had asked everyone to come except poor old Charlie Hughes, who was blinking away behind his spectacles, watching everything. Ronson clearly had no intention of asking Hughes. Hughes, equally clearly, had no intention of asking to come.

‘Charlie,’ said Willard, ‘want a drink? Annie and Larry and I are going to get pickled.’

‘Thanks, no, it’s OK, I need to finish up, then get home. You folks go. Enjoy!’

Willard winced. Hughes always managed to get things a little bit wrong. People like Willard didn’t use phrases like ‘enjoy!’. He couldn’t have explained why not, but the right sort of people never said that, the wrong sort of people did. But Willard was glad he’d asked. He was irritated by the way Ronson treated Annie Hooper as his own property. Annie would appreciate Willard’s courtesy to the less fortunate. She had already made a handful of admiring comments about Willard’s glamorous past, to which he’d responded with carefully offhand modesty.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

They went. First to a hotel that Willard knew about, where you could get anything you wanted as long as you didn’t mind it served in a coffee cup. Then to a speakeasy off Broadway, where the drink was cheaper. To get in, you had to walk down a set of grimy, unlit steps to a shuttered steel door. Just inside, a watchman peered out to check the new arrivals weren’t cops, before the door was unbolted and Willard and the others whisked inside. Once in, they drank cocktails because they wanted hard liquor, and because the cocktails were a way of disguising the taste of the grain alcohol, the industrial alcohol, and the under-brewed green moonshine which invaded every bottle of ‘honest-to-God, straight off the boat’ Scotch whisky in New York. Then finally, drunk as Irishmen on payday, they stumbled out into the street.

‘I must say, Annie, you’re a very good sport,’ mumbled Willard. ‘A very damned good sort. Ha! A damned good sort of sport! A sporting sort with a sort of –’

‘There!’ said Annie, pointing. ‘A burger place. Joe’s Burgers. Aren’t you starving?’

Ronson followed her unsteady arm with an unsteady eye. ‘Not necessarily a burger place,’ he objected. ‘Maybe that’s the fellow’s name. Mr Joe Burger. I should think the poor old gooseberry gets rather annoyed with people knocking him up and asking him for burgers. Poor old Mr B.’

The three of them swayed over to the burger stand. Annie hadn’t drunk as much as either of the men, but she was every bit as sozzled. Willard and Ronson fought over which of them would be allowed to take her arm, and only declared a truce once Annie gave her left arm to Willard and her right one to Ronson.

Willard had enjoyed the evening, but he’d enjoyed it the way a prisoner on death row gets a kick out of a postcard from outside. Even now, drunk as he was, Willard felt his lack of freedom. Willard’s salary, net of Powell’s deduction for interest, left him hardly any better off than Annie. Unlike her, he had the use of a company apartment and the part of his father’s twenty-five thousand he hadn’t already spent. But he wasn’t an Annie, a mouse content with crumbs. With a kind of reckless defiance, Willard had changed his spending habits almost not at all. In the past two weeks alone, he’d spent six hundred dollars on clothes, thirteen hundred dollars on new furniture, another few hundred dollars to have the seats in his Packard re-upholstered in pale calfskin. Before too long, his bank account would be as dry as a busted fuel tank. What he’d do then, he didn’t know – he refused to think about it.

And that wasn’t all. Six weeks since starting work, he was no further ahead. His loan was not a nickel smaller. His chance of repaying it not a hundredth of a per cent higher. All his life, Willard had known there were two sorts of people: the rich and the not-rich, the free and the unfree. He had always been of the first sort. Had been. He was the second sort now. He and his two colleagues stood in line, under a light July rain, belching and privately regretting their last cocktail.

‘I must say,’ said Ronson to Willard, ‘you’re a lot better than our last fellow.’

‘Hmm?’

‘You know. Martin. Our late-lamented colleague. Esteemed and lamented.’

Even in his drunken state, Willard pricked up his ears. Arthur Martin had been the fifth member of the Powell Lambert ‘engine room’ before Willard’s arrival. Willard had inherited his desk, his paperwork and even his company-owned apartment. All Willard really knew of the man was that he had been killed in an auto accident shortly before Willard’s arrival at the firm.

‘So, when was the auto smash? When did the poor fellow die?’

‘Eh? You know,’ said Ronson. ‘You know.’

‘Gentlemen, please,’ said Annie, using her chin to point to a gap that had opened in the line ahead of them. The two men frog-marched Annie forwards until they had caught up.

‘I don’t know,’ said Willard. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t ask, would I?’

‘Well…’