Nothing but a Smile (31 page)

Reenie snorted. “Get
you!
Mr. Modest! Like I've never seen either one of you a billion times.”

Sal pointed out that her friend had never had a husband before. Especially one waiting downstairs, all alone.

Reenie Keeney née Rooney felt a glow inside that she knew was only partially due to the champagne Keeney had smuggled in in his peacoat to spike the orange juice for a toast.

True, it wasn't the grand shindig she'd dreamed of as a little girl. Hell, it wasn't even the swank little luncheon that elderly aunt of Chesty's sprang for when
they
got hitched, Sal and Wink,
back before Christmas. This little crepe place, though cute enough, was hardly the Palmer House.

But life wasn't all about following plans. Especially these days. If the world had learned anything in the years since Pearl, it was that.
Life is what actually happens,
she kept telling herself now,
not what should
ideally
happen.

The place was crowded and clattering with dishes and chatter, and they had to lean close, even at the little table, to be heard over the din.

It was a joyful din, though, and she wanted Wink to know she really truly
was
happy. They'd made honeymoon plans for next weekend, and she told him about this now—the cabin Gil Elvgren had up in Wisconsin. “Forever he's being saying if I ever made it legal, he'd let me borrow the place.”

Wink was having trouble disguising the jealousy in his eyes, but she suspected it had less to do with wanting her back so much as wanting to be pals with Gil.

“Not your brother's?”

She reminded him that he and Sal honeymooned there and gave him the crinkled nose she'd been perfecting lately, cribbed from Miss Myrna Loy. “That might feel kind of … strange. Don't you think?”

“You could change the sheets, I suppose,” he said, dry as Utah, so she stuck out her tongue at the evil little wisenheimer. He leaned in close and whispered in her ear, “What happened to him being ‘the pirate'?”

“Hush it,” she said. “The big galoot's grown on me. I'm proud of him, I can count on him, he makes me laugh … He's a noble beast.”

“You love him?”

“Just watch me.”

She knew on some level she'd only mentioned Gil's cabin to Wink to try to top him—maybe that was even the reason she'd accepted the pinup painter's kind offer—and she chided herself now for giving in to that sort of pettiness. She needed to let that kind of stuff go and just worry about manipulating her own man from now on.

So she gave Wink a smile and a kiss on the cheek, then rubbed the lipstick off with her thumb and patted him there with a little slap, and he smiled back, looking just a little sad, which was—she knew—something they could both live with.

Sal was giving her the high sign to join her in the powder room, so she rose, and the two of them negotiated the crowded tables with their arms looped together as if they were back on the playground, wearing each other's ribbons. Sal was stroking her arm frenetically, clearly excited for her, or at least pretending to be.

In the powder room, through the stall, Sal said, “So— congrats and all, but I guess this throws your dream of marrying a Daddy Warbucks who'll put you through art school right out the window.”

“Just a slight change of plans,” she said, and laid out her new scheme: how she'd send Keeney off to art school free on the GI Bill—he could take night classes up at Navy Pier, maybe, after closing the news shop for the day, then he would come home and teach her everything he learned. His writing and drawing hand was still intact. Even if it turned out he had no real artistic talent, he could still take detailed notes.

Of course, this new plan wouldn't leave her with a sheepskin, but she thought she had enough contacts in the business that skills and gumption just might be plenty to land her a job— another chance—even if the men
were
back and the girls' time
was
supposedly over.

“Sounds like a doozy of a plan,” Sal said, and they flushed in unison.

Washing up at the sinks, it felt like they were back in junior high, standing side by side in the bathroom there, and she felt she could admit now that she'd first gone out with Keeney just to rile Wink—and when she told her, Sal didn't look all that surprised—but once she'd given the guy a chance, she found he really cracked her up and he was sweet as hell. “And he reminds me of that kid in
The Best Years of Our Lives,”
she said. “Not just the prosthetic hand. Well, mostly that. But anyway, I'm serious about this one. For once. Might even stop dating other guys— hell,
anything
could happen!”

She made a big show of giving her a wink, catching Sal's reflection in the mirror, trying to be bawdy about it. But she could see in Sal's face that she'd known her too long to fool her. She couldn't hide the fact that she was hooked.

Without rubbing it in or teasing her, Sal turned to her and put her arms around her, and they had a good, squealy, girly, hokey cry.

“So why'd you call me in,” she said, “if this is about my husband?” She was seated across from Bob, the photo editor, in his office in the Tower. She hadn't been in for almost a year and a half, since trying to show him Chesty's last photos of the cake flour, but the office looked exactly the same, even down to the half-eaten sandwich—possibly a Reuben—he appeared to be using as a paperweight.

Bob cleared his throat. “Your husband, Sal—and by the way,
all the best on that, best wishes or whatever you're supposed to say … Seriously, I mean it, babe. Anyway, he's
rumored
to have once beaten a certain top ad exec here in town to a bloody pulp over a trifling, so—”

“Pushed
him only,” she said. “And the bastard was
molesting
my best friend.” She knew the
molesting
part was wrong, but as long as the story was getting distorted, what the hell.

“Anyway, there's no sense inviting trouble. So we're telling
you
this, and you can explain it to him. If you choose. Or don't. The arrangement we've had with him the past couple months has been a little unusual, so frankly, I don't even need to give this much explanation. He'd just stop getting checks and—”

“Wonderful! So continue this big favor of an explanation and actually
explain
it, Bob!”

“Right. Okay. So the Pulitzer Prize committee, as you may or may not know, does not
officially
announce finalists, Sal, just the actual winner of each category,
but …
” Here Bob took a moment to smirk, as if feeling self-satisfied with his ranking as one of the newspaper trade's inside elite; one of the boys, privy to the straight scoop. “In February of this year, we learned that Wink's shot—the one that caused that little bit of a dustup, you remember? Back the spring of last year—May of ‘46, this would have been….”

“I
know
the shot, Bob.” She'd created the assignment for Wink, for cripes' sake. And it was the only “straight” photo he'd ever had published. Of course she knew the shot. It was still pasted to the front window of their shop. It had become the thing Keeney and Reenie pointed to as the cupid's arrow that brought them together. The shot was
the
shot.

“Anyway, just a couple months ago, in February, we learned it was up for the prize. Which was great news for the paper, except, well, Wink wasn't actually on staff, so …”

“But that amateur just won that category, didn't he? With the lady leaping to her death in a hotel fire? The Georgia Tech student, right? Andy Hardy or—?”

“Arnold
Hardy, his name is. Fucking lamebrain, siren-chasing luck-out artist … Twenty-six lousy years old! You believe that?”

She believed it, because that actually made the guy just about the same age as Wink, but she didn't offer up this information. Besides, she got Bob's meaning—age wasn't really the issue, but a perception of seriousness or professionalism.

As if to confirm this, he said, “If we'd known the committee would consider any jackass who could get his mitts on a camera, no press credentials whatsoever—something that just gets sent out over the AP wire … !”

She could see now what they'd been up to, thinking they had to establish Wink's official credentials, get him tied to the paper as a staffer since the time they'd published his photo.

She suspected, though she kept it to herself, that perhaps the paper's own actions rather than any flaw in Wink's photo had more to do with the judges' final decision. It easily could have been partly a matter of that pussyfooted stance they took, publishing the picture one day but running that apology a few days later, immediately disavowing themselves of any of its editorial content. Not exactly a bold move that would go down in the annals of heroic journalism.

She looked past Bob at the blue of Lake Michigan, out his magnificent window, imagining how high they were, how awful it would be to fall even at a fraction of this height. What must it have been like for that poor woman in the winning photo—no matter how unimpressive Sal had personally found the hotel fire shot.

“You think,” she asked, “the judges picked it because the woman died? Is that what makes it so compelling? Because, frankly, Bob, maybe it's just me, but I didn't really—”

“She
didn't
die! That's what kills me! She's been in hospitals since December, yes, but that caption the AP ran—that's a blatant lie! And the Pulitzer committee put the same hooey in their
own
press release when they announced the award! ‘Girl Leaping to Her Death' my ass!”

She hadn't heard any of that before, but she supposed Bob would know the facts, if anyone would. And it did sort of affect the way she thought about the picture now, knowing the subject in it had survived.

“Why don't you just offer him a real job?” she said. “He might take it.”

“We talking about the kid in Georgia now or your new hubby?”

“Wink,” she said, knowing he was kidding.

“Well, besides the fact we got staffers coming out the gills since the war's over and never mind the stars probably just aligned right for your guy, once in a lifetime, with that marine-with-a-hook-for-a-hand lucky shot which he couldn't top in a million tries, there is
also
—”

“That's talent,” she said. “Not luck.”

“Besides which, there is
also
the little insurmountable problem that your new husband, Sal, handsome and lucky and possibly talented though he may be,
is
reputed to be a smutmonger. This business up at North Shore Beach. The
Tribune
has an illustrious and elevated history of—”

“North Shore Beach happened
before
you put him on the payroll! What are you talking about, North Shore Beach? That was last
September.
You started giving him all that supposed back pay well after that, sometime in February, just two or three months ago! You knew about the beach thing back in February.”

Bob shrugged. “True, but … Sal, come on. In February, the guy was a contender for the fucking
Pulitzer”

She turned at the sound of Dickie what's-his-name at the open door—the one who'd once called her in one evening just to try to get cozy. He was dressed more respectably than she'd ever seen him, and she suspected he'd been given a promotion since she'd last been in.

“Whereas today,” Dickie said, “he's just a troublemaker who takes dirty pictures on the beach.”

He took it pretty darn well, she thought. He was awfully quiet, sitting on his stool in the darkroom, swiveling a little and picking at his fingernails.

She had such an urge to kid him, though, just to get some kind of reaction out of him. “You want to say
shucks
or
drat
or something,” she said, “you go right ahead, honey.”

He snorted a half-passable laugh and hugged himself a little. After a long moment he said, “I've been sitting here listening to everything you're telling me, and I get it, I do, only … I'm trying like hell to feel bad about it or mad, and well, all that's really sticking to me is (a) I got paid almost a whole year's worth of salary for doing nothing and (b) I came close to winning a Pulitzer—a goddamn Pulitzer, Sal—for the first real photo I ever published. Only decent photo I ever made, you ask me.”

She told him it wasn't the only decent photo, nor was it the last.

“That's pretty wild, though, isn't it? First time out?”

She had to admit, it was. There were staff photographers all over the country, working for years, who never won a Pulitzer, nor probably came close—though just knowing about being a finalist was pretty special, too. They weren't supposed to know that, and she reminded him of this. He might never have known
he even came close. “Which is why I was a little unsure about telling you,” she said. “I didn't know if it was a glass half full or—”

He pulled her in and hugged her. After a time, he told her, almost whispering now, “When I got to do cartoons, in the service, I kidded myself, but I used to daydream about one day winning one of those. For political cartooning, you know? And then Mauldin got one in ‘45 for
his
war stuff….”

“Maybe you will,” she said. “For
this
now. This is your field now, Wink—photography. It really is. You kidding me?”

He shrugged, looking about ten years old. “I guess if I can come close this early in the game, I've got a pretty good shot of pulling it off before I kick, right?”

“Right.” And she truly meant it. She had this feeling, just talking about what lay ahead, that there would come a day when photojournalists talked about the saphead editor who once canned Wink Dutton, and the young kids wouldn't even believe it.

“I've got this real urge to be mad at the paper, like they were trying to trick me, because they were a little tricky about it all, but how did it hurt me any? Them not bringing me in for meetings, letting me pitch other stories? The time I wasted sending in a few spec shots here and there on my own? Maybe … But mostly they were just trying to trick the Pulitzer, right? But even if they
were
pulling a fast one, I guess I can't really gripe too much about that.”