Given the mundane inquiries that did make it into the paper, Maddie wondered just how fatuous the others could be. But it didn’t matter. She had a desk. She had a job. As she sliced open the envelopes that arrived daily, a Sisyphean array of petty complaints, she imagined a future self explaining to someone young, someone worshipful, how it all began. Maybe to Seth, maybe a roomful of college girls. “They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Well my journey of not even fifty steps, from the ‘Helpline’ desk to the real newsroom, began with a thousand paper cuts.”
At night, Ferdie rubbed cream into her hands and worried over the damage she was doing to her lovely nails. Maddie told him, with a confidence that felt different from her old confidence: “I won’t be opening the mail forever.”
Mr. Helpline
Mr. Helpline
I never asked for an assistant and it scares me when they suddenly announce I need one. They put me in the “Helpline” job four years ago when I started making—let’s call them mistakes. Nothing fatal or libelous. I got confused one day, said that a local banker who was getting an award had gone to Crown University in Long Island. No, I had never heard of such a place, but that’s what it sounded like to me. Damn young people mutter and mumble so much these days. Okay, so it was Brown University in Rhode Island. They caught it before it went into the paper. Isn’t that what the copy desk is for, to spot that kind of error? They sent me to an audiologist, but my hearing checked out fine. I told them that I had a couple of drinks at lunch that day. It’s not like other reporters didn’t do it. We’re an evening paper. Final street deadline was two p.m. You filed, allowed the editor his tinkers, fought the good fight, then went to lunch. I like Connolly’s, practically across the street. Decent fish sandwich. Came back, did the interview. It could happen to anyone. I promised I wouldn’t drink anymore. I didn’t tell them that I hadn’t had a drink that day.
They bought it. But they eased me out of the column, gave it to that snake in the grass Bauer. Oh, such a nice man, with his nice stories about his nice family. I’d rather gouge my eyes out than write that sentimental crap. They gave me the “Helpline” column and a good editor and, from time to time, took surreptitious (or so they thought) sniffs at my breath.
If only there were something there to smell. I’d rather have gin or vodka on my lips. But I guess when the brain starts to go, it doesn’t rot in a way that creates an odor.
My doctor says there’s no sign of dementia. He forgets—ha, ha, the doctor I asked to diagnose my dementia, he forgets things—that I’ve been there, I’ve seen it close up. It took my mom, and don’t tell me these things don’t run in families. She started just the way I did. A mental slip here, a mental slip there. My doctor says forgetting things isn’t the real issue. He asks me if I recognize the people in my life, if I ever forget basic words. So far, so good. But if that’s the case, why did they give me an assistant? Train her, they said. She’s eager. Not young, but eager. They can’t fool me. She’s almost forty, who starts working at a newspaper at that age? I wonder if she’s a nurse, or someone hired to spy on me. It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. The union makes it hard for them to fire me, but the union can’t protect me if I make a big mistake, if I’m really sick. You can drink yourself to death in a corner of the newsroom, Ned Brown is doing it as we speak. That’s okay. But if I show up here without my pants on one day, I’m out. Luckily, it’s hard to make a big mistake running “Helpline.” A monkey could do it. As long as he wasn’t getting senile.
The assistant’s first week, I can’t figure out what to do with her. I’m in a corner of the office, the better to be forgotten. They manage to carve out a little spot for her, which irritates me. I am used to my privacy, to speaking on the phone without being overheard. I send her to fetch coffee, which takes up, oh, maybe ten minutes total every day. Finally, I turn the mail over to her, tell her to screen it. I say: “That will give me that much more time to work on my immortal prose.” She laughs. She’s the kind of woman who laughs at men’s jokes even when they’re not funny.
The real joke is, I have the stupidest column in the paper, but it’s also the most popular. You can’t believe the mail it generates, and yeah, I confess—I wasn’t getting to all of it. I read until I had enough problems to fill the space. Four columns a week, I need at least twelve good questions. And they have to be consumer complaints, things I can do something about. I’m not Dear Abby, but you wouldn’t know it by my mail.
I don’t think anyone lives long enough to imagine his next decade accurately. You get to thirty and you think you know what forty will be like, but you don’t, then comes fifty and boy does forty look good. I’m fifty-eight right now and I’m not going to pretend I have a clue what my seventh decade will be, other than disappointing. Because every decade so far has been less than I hoped; why should the next one be different?
I’ll confess this, too: I have a system for culling my mail. Typewritten over handwritten, masculine handwriting over feminine handwriting, cursive only, no jailbirds, I don’t care if they have photographic evidence of the cops framing them. I’m here to fix traffic lights and find out why you can’t return a pair of shearling gloves to Hutzler’s if the tags are still attached. (The store agreed finally to take them back for store credit. I guess Hutzler’s thought the gloves were shoplifted, and yeah, they probably were. Mr. Helpline isn’t here to make moral judgments.)
So I give the eager beaver the mail. She does a good job, maybe too good. She catches on quickly, this one. She gets what makes a good question, learns to recognize the duds. She works the phones before she shows me the letters, making sure there are answers. She creates a whole new category—easy problems that don’t rate a column mention but can be addressed by a quick phone call. I don’t like that at first, but then I decide—why not? I still follow up, I still write the column, and it’s my style that makes it popular. My style and the fact that it’s one of two things in the papers that’s actually trying to help people. The other is obits. You won’t catch me saying this around the newsroom, but people are right that newspapers prefer bad news to good most of the time. Bad news sells papers. There is no Happy Valley Gazette.
Ambition comes off this one like heat. Where did you come from? I want to ask. Didn’t you have a husband, pretty as you are? Is Bob Bauer trying to get into your panties? You wouldn’t be the first, the way I hear it. Mr. Family Man, Professional Nice Guy. There are no nice guys in this business, but you’ll learn that soon enough.
I make her start bringing me my lunch.
June 1966
June 1966
“Okay, scoop—we’re going to let you try out your training wheels.”
Calvin Weeks, the assistant city editor, loomed over Maddie, an ominous piece of copy paper in his hands. Only two weeks into her job, Maddie already knew the legend of Calvin Weeks and his “black beans,” which he usually shoved into reporters’ mail cubbyholes at the end of his shift. He typed these missives on carbon paper, keeping the originals for himself and bestowing the smudgy duplicates on the reporters. Perhaps those smudges were why they were called black beans, but no one really knew. Calvin Weeks had been an assistant city editor for almost twenty years and he had been dispensing black beans for nineteen of them.
“There’s a reason he’s been in that job for so long,” Bob Bauer had told Maddie. “You’ve heard of the Peter Principle. This is the Cal Corollary, the newspaper’s version of the Hippocratic Oath. First, do the least harm. That’s why he’s on the three-to-eleven shift. If a big story happens late, the overnight editor takes over. If news breaks during the day, the big bosses are here. Weeks is a traffic cop at best, directing the flow of copy.”
It was three thirty p.m. Maddie’s workday ended in ninety minutes. That should have been all the excuse she needed not to slip her neck into the noose that Cal was holding. “I’m off at five.”
“I’m sure Don won’t mind if I borrow you.”
Mr. Heath nodded, a master surrendering his servant. Did he have the power to do that? Who was her true boss? Maddie should probably figure that out.
“There’s a little party this afternoon,” Cal continued. “Normally, we’d just send a photog. But with all the Negroes being so upset these days, the big boss thought it was a good opportunity to generate a little goodwill, show that we don’t only write about the riots and muggings.”