The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [30]
Another agent on the fourth floor, and the most sedate one in the building, is a woman named Maida Van Schuyler, who books stag shows for conventions and for the banquets large corporations give in honor of newly elected vicepresidents or retiring department heads. Mrs. Van Schuyler, a tall, flatchested woman with fluffy white hair, was at one time a singer of arch numbers like “I Just Can't Make My Eyes Behave” and “Two Little Love Bees Buzzing in a Bower.” As such, she recalls, she lent a touch of class to New England and Ohio vaudeville around 1912. The walls in an anteroom of her office are hung with numerous framed mottoes, such as “What Is More Precious Than a Friend?” and “Seek for Truth and Love Will Seek for You.” A plain young woman sits in the anteroom and takes the names of visitors in to Mrs. Van Schuyler. When Mrs. Van Schuyler does not wish to see them, she sends out word that she is terribly sorry but one of her bestbeloved friends has just passed away and she is too broken up about it to talk. If the visitor waits around a minute, he may hear a loud, strangling sob. Mrs. Van Schuyler, who is very much interested in spiritualism, often says that she would like to retire from the stagshow business and become a medium. “There isn't a dime left in this lousy business,” she remarks. “The moving pictures have spoiled it, just like they did with vaudeville.”
Every now and then, one of Mrs. Van Schuyler's shows is raided but the detectives give her advance notice because she provides the entertainments for a number of police banquets. “We have to make a pinch, Mrs. Van Schuyler,” they say apologetically, “because the shooflies are working in our territory and we can't let a big brawl like this run without getting turned in.” Shooflies, as all the world knows, are policemen in mufti assigned to make a secret check on the activities of other policemen. Within a week or two after the raid, which never results in a conviction, the friendly detectives return and say, “It's all right, Mrs. Van Schuyler, we got the shooflies taking now.” With this assurance, Mrs. Van Schuyler can go ahead with her business. She seldom employs the ordinary entertainers who wander around the Jollity Building, but relies on specialists whom she lists in a large card file. “It is a highly specialized field of entertainment, darling,” she tells gentlemen who are negotiating with her for their organizations. “Our girls must have poise, discretion, and savoy faire.” To old friends like Morty Ormont, she sometimes says less elegantly, after an allnight party with a convention of textbook publishers or refrigerator salesmen, “You ought to seen those apes try to paw the girls.”
Performers on their way to see one of the agents on the fourth floor are sometimes frightened by wild fanfares from an office occupied by an Italian who repairs trumpets. A musician who brings a trumpet to the Italian always blows a few hot licks to demonstrate that the instrument is out of true. When he calls for the trumpet, he blows a few more to see whether it is all right again. Once a swing dilettante stood in the hall for half an hour listening to the noises and then walked in and said that it was the best band he had ever heard and he wanted it to play at a rent party he was giving for some other cognoscenti.
Not all the transients in the Jollity Building halls are entertainers making the rounds of the agents. There is a fellow known as Paddy the Booster, who sells neckties he steals from haberdashers, and another known as Mac the Phony Booster, who sells neckties which he pretends to have stolen but are really shoddy ties he has bought very cheaply. Naturally, Paddy looks down on Mac, whom he considers a racketeer. “It takes all kinds of people to make up a great city,” Jack McGuire sometimes tells Paddy, trying to soothe him. Also, every