New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [350]
With a smile to the lady, and a respectful nod toward the mayor, Paolo rose to leave.
“Would you really know if the place was going to be raided?” Salvatore asked as they came out onto the sidewalk.
“Course I would, kid. The cops are all taken care of—Lucky Luciano pays the police over $10,000 a week.” He chuckled. “That lady had some nice pearls, whoever she was.”
“Actually,” said Salvatore, “I just realized. I know her.”
“Well,” said Rose to Charlie, “when you take us out to lunch, it’s always an adventure.” This wasn’t a compliment. And because he knew that, Charlie laughed.
The last time he’d taken his parents out, it was to the Algonquin Hotel. They had quite enjoyed that. After all, it was not even a block from Fifth Avenue, on West Forty-fourth Street. The Harvard Club was just a few doors down, and, better yet, the New York Yacht Club, that nexus of his mother’s summer at Newport, had its magnificent city clubhouse almost beside it. “Why,” as his mother declared, “I must have been within yards of this hotel a hundred times, and never thought to look inside.”
The great feature of the Algonquin was the big table at which, every day, the literary luminaries of the city met together. He’d pointed out the writers Benchley and Sherwood, the critic Dorothy Parker, and Ross, who’d just started his New Yorker magazine that year. Rose was especially pleased about seeing Ross. People were starting to talk about the New Yorker.
As Charlie glanced around the speakeasy, he wondered if there was anyone, apart from the mayor, that he could point out to his mother. “That’s Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poetess,” he said, indicating a strikingly beautiful woman sitting in one corner. “She won a Pulitzer Prize.” He was tempted, but decided not to add that she liked to sleep with interesting people of either sex. He had enough trouble with his mother as it was.
Rose Master didn’t approve of Charlie’s desire to be a writer. He understood. “You can buy pictures, but people like us don’t paint them, dear,” she’d once told him when he was a boy, and it was almost the same with writing. A professor could write history of course; a gentleman of leisure might write a memoir. During the war, one of the distinguished Washburn family had even been a war correspondent for The Times of London. That was different. But to live in lodgings in Greenwich Village, make undesirable friends, and hang about Tin Pan Alley, trying to write plays and songs, was a shocking waste of a life for a young man with everything to live for. When he confessed that he’d like to write like Eugene O’Neill, she’d been appalled. “But he’s a drunk,” she protested. “And his friends are communists.”
Charlie also suspected that his mother’s fear was not only that he’d permanently adopt a bohemian lifestyle, but that he wouldn’t be able to make a decent living.
Strangely enough, his father had been his secret ally. William had given him a job in his office, but the work was very light, and as long as he turned up for a few hours each day, his father didn’t seem to mind.
“Making money’s quite boring, really,” William had said. “I have more fun with my car.”
Though this was probably true, Charlie reckoned that his father must be making a fortune, on top of the fortune he’d inherited.
Most people they knew seemed to be doing well. For although, at the Great War’s end, there had been the usual post-war recession, it hadn’t lasted long. And once it was past, in New York at least, the Roaring Twenties had begun.
It was an amazing time to be a New Yorker. Europe, devastated by the war, was still on its knees. The British Empire was severely weakened. London was still a great financial center, but New York was now richer and more powerful. All over America, helped by anti-trust legislation and other safeguards, modest enterprises had blossomed. American