Bob at the Plaza (8 page)

“Don’t I know it.” He grinned as he squeezed my arm lightly. “Who else?”

“Harpo Marx hung out there once in a while.”

“Really? Wasn’t he the mute one in the Marx Brothers movies? Didn’t he just beep a horn?”

“That’s him. Harpo could talk, but apparently he had such a strong New York accent he didn’t want to talk on stage or in the movies. George S. Kaufman sat in at the Table, too. He collaborated on some of the Marx Brothers scripts and won a couple of Pulitzers for plays he co-wrote, like
You Can’t Take It with You.
”

I continued to recite my winter discoveries about the Round Table as we made our way into the hotel and were seated at a corner table by the very puzzled hostess who did an outsized double-take when I walked in for the second time in three hours. David craned his neck examining all the corners of the room as I talked. “And there was Alexander Woollcott. He’s not so well known now, but he used to be a big-shot critic, writer, and radio commentator in his day. He co-wrote that play,
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
and he’s the guy who said one of my favorite lines of all time. ‘All the things I like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.’”

David chuckled while he studied the wine list. After careful consideration, he ordered a bottle of German riesling, or Riesling Qualitatswein Trocken Gold Cap Rheinhessen Siefersheim Vom Porphyr, as they called it in this high-priced restaurant. Then he nodded at the menu sitting by my plate and said, “Speaking of fattening, why don’t we figure out what we want?”

I thought the fixed price pre-theater dinner looked great and seemed a relative bargain for Manhattan, so I decided quickly.

While we enjoyed our wine and waited for the server to take our order, I kept up my Circle narrative. “A couple of editors and columnists made the Round Table roster, Heywood Broun and Franklin Pierce Adams, but I don’t know too much about them. And Edna Ferber. She wrote some amazing novels, like
Show Boat, Saratoga
Trunk,
and
Giant.
Her novel
So Big
won a Pulitzer in the Twenties.”

“I think I’ve seen some of those movies,” David commented. “Didn’t Rock Hudson star in one of them?”

“
Giant
, I think, but I’m not sure. And finally”—I followed David’s eyes as he tracked a nearby waiter—“there were two Roberts in the Circle. Robert Sherwood, a very tall, skinny guy, wrote a number of plays, like
Waterloo Bridge
and
The Petrified Forest
, won a handful of Pulitzers, and wrote speeches for FDR during World War II.”

“Impressive,” David murmured, only half-listening. “But didn’t you say there were two Bobs?”

“Yes, I did,” I said after a long pause. “The second Bob―Bob Benchley―puzzles me.  He started his career writing some of the funniest short essays I’ve ever read. Then he moved on to cameos in a few movies and starring in a bunch of short films. He didn’t think much of his writing though, which makes me sad because so much of it is hysterical. Benchley once said that it took him fifteen years to discover that he had no talent for writing, but he couldn’t give it up because by that time he was too famous. People still debate about whether he or Aleck Woollcott once said, upon arriving home with a group of friends on a rainy evening, ‘Let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.’ I vote for Benchley. Oddly enough, he was a complete teetotaler until his thirties and then he pretty much became an alcoholic.”

I guessed that David had, probably in self-defense, stopped listening to my monologue a couple of minutes ago. He had his dinner order ready to go as soon as the waiter stopped by. Since my mind was so deep in the Twenties, though, the waiter surprised me, and it took me a minute to return to reality. I placed my order, and then I decided I just couldn’t postpone my plans any longer. “Would you excuse me, David? I just want to freshen up before our dinners get here.” I stood and, ever the gentleman, David rose as well. Such beautiful manners. I never tire of them.

Once I walked past the corner, just out of David’s view, I slipped on the ring. Nausea smashed into me. Monumental nausea. Thank goodness I had an empty stomach, or it could have gotten messy. I closed my eyes to focus on controlling my insides and, when I opened them, mist surrounded me.

Cold, wet mist, the kind of damp that penetrated straight to your bones. Fog with movement in it. Not the waltzing motions I’d noticed in the fog that became my ghost ball. This movement reminded me of plants blowing in the wind. Bowing toward each other, then leaning away. Eventually, as my nausea lightened, I could see that the bowing motion was actually people sitting at the diminutive tables of the lounge leaning in to talk to one another, and then straightening in their chairs. Silverware chinked against china. Glasses of illicit Prohibition booze glimmered as well-dressed ghosts raised them to their lips.

My gaze darted to the corner dining room, home of the Vicious Circle. Bob? Would I find him there? Gradually I stumbled toward the back, pausing now and then to let my stomach catch up with me. I could barely function through the motion sickness but, at long last, I made it to the doorway and looked inside.

Chapter 8

Anything Goes?

There they were, the famous members of the fabled Round Table. Thanks to my reading I recognized a few of the faces and figures. The woman must be Dorothy Parker, and the very large man with the round glasses could only be Alexander Woollcott. I couldn’t identify several of the men, but I swear to goodness Harpo Marx sat there, complete with a curly wig and his horn. Finally I saw Bob, passed out with his head on the table, snoring softly and drooling, just a bit.

“Bob!” I exclaimed in happiness.

Everyone else at the table turned to me as one, as if I’d interrupted a very important conversation.

“May we help you?” a man with big ears said in a frosty tone.

“I’ve been looking for Bob for months,” I gushed, not able to hold myself back. “I’ve missed him so much.”

“And who, pray tell, are you?” drawled the ghost I suspected of being Dorothy Parker, arching one eyebrow as if she smelled something vaguely unpleasant.

A wave of nausea, the worst yet, washed over me and I stumbled from the doorway to the table. I tried to catch myself from falling and, when I threw out my hand, I accidentally thumped Bob’s back. Immediately the nausea vanished, as if someone had ripped a drape back from a sunny window. I blinked a few times and took my hand away from Bob, but the nausea returned as soon as I stopped touching him. Lightly, I returned my hand. Jarred by my slap to his back, Bob swiveled his head and slit open his eyes.

“Rosie? Is that you, Rosie?” he slurred.

Keeping my hand on his back, I bent down and whispered, “It’s me, Bob. I’m taking you home.”

Bob swung his head back to the circle, smiled, and muttered, “It’s Rosie,” before his eyes drifted shut.

“Rosie who?” one of the men asked.

“It’s Roz, actually, but sometimes Bob calls me Rosie. Especially if he’s had too much to drink.” I gave Bob a worried look. “What’s going on with him?” I asked the people around the table. “What have you done to him?”

“What have
we
done to him?” Alexander Woollcott repeated irritably. “I think the question should be, ‘What did
you
do to him?’ He’s been like this since he got here. We’ve hardly had a coherent word out of him.”

“I didn’t send him away. My sister Angela did. I want him to come back.”

“What do you think?” Dorothy asked. “We’re just going to let him walk out with you after what you’ve put him through? Try again, sweetie pie.”

I doubt I’ve ever heard that endearment spoken with more vitriol. My research had nailed it. Dottie could, indeed, be a very nasty lady.

“But I think Bob would want to come with me. If he wasn’t so drunk, he’d tell you himself.”

Bob snorted in his sleep, and I rubbed his back.

“He’s one of our brightest lights,” Aleck said. “The master of whimsy. Why should we let him go back to the boonies with you? His talents are wasted out there.”

“I don’t think so,” I responded. “We have a lot of fun talking. We have the best dinner conversations.”

“Well, duh, sweetie pie,” Dorothy snarled at me. “What do you think this”—she motioned to the circle of faces around the table—“is all about? Some say we invented the game of scintillating conversations.”

I pulled up a chair and sat down, keeping one hand on Bob’s back. “Look, I’ve got to get back pretty soon or my date’s going to tear the place apart looking for me. What can I do to persuade you to let Bob come with me?”

“Actually,” the big-eared man who had first spoken to me said, “we can’t
let
him go anywhere. His boss, Clive, decides where Bob goes. We could probably have a few words with Clive on Bob’s behalf, but that wouldn’t guarantee anything.”

“Besides,” Dorothy said, “why should we help you out at all?”

“Maybe Bob would be happier with her for a while,” Harpo chipped in, with an accent so strong it took me a while to decipher his words. “Let’s face it, with all the drinking he’s been doing lately he must be pretty miserable here. It might help Bob.”

Silence fell over the table while the ghosts considered Bob, unconscious in their midst. 

“We could play a few hands of poker for him,” a voice chimed in from the back. A gust of laughter blew through the group. “Winner gets Bob.”

Aleck laughed and said, “Not a bad idea.”

“Why, yes,” Dorothy added, “you’d have to win his favors. Like the knights of Ye Olde Round Table. Very fitting―I like that idea.” She glanced at Aleck, wicked mischief in her eyes. “I think we should have a contest.”

I thought uneasily of the penny ante poker games of my youth. I’d always had a hard time remembering whether a full house beat a royal straight flush. Plus, I didn’t have the little cheat sheet of winning hands I’d written up years ago and, somehow, I didn’t think this group would want me asking them what cards beat what in the heat of the moment.

“I don’t know how to play poker very well,” I said.

“Maybe,” Dorothy said silkily, “we could think of another game you could try.”

Suspicious, I studied her, but eventually I conceded and said, “Okay.”

“Have you ever heard of a game called ‘I Can Give You a Sentence’? We play it all the time here.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s easy. We’ll give you a word, and you use it in a sentence.”

That sounded doable. Maybe too doable? Where was the gimmick?

“The trick is,” Dorothy continued, “you have to use the word as if it were a phrase in the sentence, not the straightforward word we assigned. If you get three out of three, maybe we’ll talk to Clive and help you get Bob back to the Finger Lakes.”

Floundering, I asked, “I don’t suppose you could give me any examples?”

“Now what kind of fun would that be?” Dorothy cooed.

“Come on, Dottie, play fair,” Aleck interjected. “Here’s an example. Let’s say I had to use the word ‘Demosthenes’ in a sentence. I could say, ‘Demosthenes can do is bend and hold the legs together.’ See how it works?” Noticing the complete bewilderment on my face, Aleck sighed and repeated the sentence in a patronizing voice, parsing it for the slowest kid in the class. ‘De-mos-the-nes—the most the knees—can do is bend and hold the legs together.’ Now do you get it?”

The lightbulb flipped on over my head. “Oh. Sort of,” I replied, nervous.

“Okay, let’s think of a word,” Dorothy said.

The spirits at the table put their heads together and I heard a subdued muttering. Bob, still asleep but restless, turned his head so that he faced me.

“We have it,” said a short man with big ears and a bigger mouth. “Use the word ‘meretricious’ in a sentence as if it’s a phrase.”

“‘Meretricious?’ That means ‘false,’ right?”

“Right, but it doesn’t really matter what it means. You have to use it in a sentence as if it’s a phrase,” Aleck said, bored.

All of a sudden, Bob reared up in his seat and yelled, “Happy New Year!”

I giggled and patted his back.

“Thanks, buddy,” I murmured.
Thanks for nothing.
Dorothy Parker’s black basilisk eyes stared at me like a cat’s—no motion, no life in them. The others at the table froze, waiting for me to make a fool of myself.

“Meretricious, meretricious,” I muttered, my eyes wandering the room for inspiration.

“Happy New Year!” Bob yelled again.

“Okay, buddy, settle down,” I said, rubbing his back. But his phrase stuck in my head and out popped my sentence, “I walked around at the holiday party wishing people a meretricious and a Happy New Year.”

Most of the ghosts laughed, but Dorothy glared at me and threw out my second word before I could even savor my victory.

“Horticulture,” she snapped.

“‘Horticulture?’ That’s a strange word for this game,” I said, playing for time. A distant bell rang in my memory and a phrase from my readings swam into my mind, but then darted away like a startled goldfish.

“Horticulture. Horticulture,” I muttered, trying to pin down that elusive memory.

Bob lifted his head from the table, sat back in his chair and rubbed his face. He looked like he was sobering up a bit.

He glanced at me and muttered, “Think, Roz, think.”

I looked at him for help, but his eyes fluttered closed and his head rolled back down to his chest.

“Your time is just about up,” Dorothy said cheerfully.

“You never said I had a time limit on these,” I protested.

“We make up the rules as we go along. That’s what makes the game so much fun. Give up?”

“Never,” I said, studying my snoring trophy. My anger shoved that shy goldfish back into my mind and I shouted my answer, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think!” I glanced triumphantly at Bob.

He snorted in his sleep and drooled a little more. Dorothy sat back in her chair, crossed her arms tightly in front of her chest, and glared at me.

“Last question,” Aleck said as he glanced at Dorothy. “How about we return to the Greeks?” She thawed enough to throw him a sly smile and nodded slightly. Then Aleck turned to me. “Give me a sentence using two proper Greek nouns as phrases,” he intoned.

“Two words? That hardly seems fair. Besides, you said you’d give me the words!” I protested.

Just then, a voice yelled my name, and I jumped.

“Roz, are you back here?” David’s transparent form strode into the room and through the table. “I don’t see her,” he said, turning to another ghostly shape in the doorway.

“Tick-tock, Roz,” Dorothy said nastily, tapping her watch with one pointed nail.

“Okay, fine, fine.” I tried to concentrate while David, wandering through the middle of the table, again yelled my name, his voice getting more and more worried. I covered my face with my hands but kept my foot in contact with Bob’s so my nausea wouldn’t return. Bob slept heavily, his face buried in the table again.

Two proper Greek nouns. This game was insane. But then vaguely, in the back of my mind, an image of my father grew. A memory of a stroll we’d taken one bright Sunday afternoon, Dad and several of his many kids. We walked on the railroad tracks that summer day, hopping from one railroad tie to the next. Dad told us some of his favorite jokes, chestnuts by then but side-splitters when he’d been a child, just about the same time the Circle had been at its height. I slowly took my hands away from my face, looked straight into Aleck’s bespectacled eyes, and recited:

“A professor of Greek history walks into a tailor and holds out his torn pair of pants. ‘Euripedes?’ asks the tailor, reaching for them. ‘Yes. Eumenides?’ answers the professor as he hands the pants to the tailor.”

Got-cha,
I thought, staring triumphantly at them.
You sons of bitches. Not too shabby for going toe-to-toe with the Algonquin crew
.

“Technically, you didn’t use them in one sentence,” Aleck said in a persnickety tone.

“Technically, I did pretty damn well considering you didn’t give me the words
and
you made me use two of them,” I said angrily. “Two words, two sentences. I won your stupid game. Now, are you going to play fair and help me get Bob back?”

“Sweetie pie, you forget, we make the rules in this game,” Dorothy said in a saccharin-coated steel voice. “Frankly, since you needed to use two sentences I think we should require a bonus round.”

A rubber horn blew, and I jumped.

“Come on, Dottie, that’s not fair,” Harpo said in his heavy New York accent. For someone who had a reputation as the only listener at the Round Table, he held his own when it came to talking.

“Shut up, Adolph,” Dorothy snapped, and turned to me. “This time, though, let’s play it a little differently. Roz, let’s see just how much you know about our little group. I’m going to give you a phrase, and you tell me what those words mean to one of the people sitting here.”

I’d never imagined myself an expert on the Round Table. Never in a million years. I’d just read a few books to see if I could figure out Bob’s identity. I heard David calling my name in the distance, an edge of panic in his voice, which added even more to my distraction.

“Look, could we just wrap this up?” I said to the ghosts around the table. “I think my date’s on the verge of calling the police. I have to get back to him.”

“Just tell me why this phrase is noteworthy,” Dorothy said. “‘Ducking for apples.’”

A cold shiver ran down my spine. I knew this. And I was so angry at the way Dorothy played with me, like a cat with a tiny mouse, making up and changing the rules all along the way. I couldn’t resist taunting her a bit, stupid though it might be. My mother always said I had a real knack for cutting off my nose to spite my face.

“Why, Dottie,” I said, smiling gently. “What a brilliant choice to sum up my thoughts about the quality time we’ve spent getting to know each other tonight.

“The phrase,” I continued, “concerns you, and your not-inaccurate evaluation of your life’s work.” The smirk on Dorothy’s face vanished. “The story goes that you walked into a Halloween party where the guests played the old-fashioned game of ‘ducking for apples.’ You asked your host what they were doing and after he told you, you responded, ‘There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.’ Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to make the same comment on my experience with you kind folks this evening,” I said bitterly.

“Bitch,” Dottie responded.

“Holy Mackerel, cat-fight!” a heretofore quiet man in the corner piped up.

“Get out,” Dorothy said.

“But I won,” I protested. “I want Bob back. You folks said you’d help me.”

“Look, Roz, you’d better leave before she throws you out,” said the big-eared ghost. “We’re going to have to talk this over. We’d have to intercede with Clive, Bob’s boss, and that will be tricky. We’ll get back to you.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but we will. You’d better leave now,” he said.

I glared at them. To their credit, a few of the tricksters looked away, embarrassed at sending me off empty handed. But Dottie just stared at me, stone-faced. I leaned over my prone friend, gave his back a pat, and kissed him on the temple. “Take care of yourself, Bobby. I’ll see you soon, I hope.”