It was a Wednesday when the call came into the Herald. A Wednesday morning in the hottest week of July, and Pete Wonicke was sitting at a desk that didn’t feel like his.
Back in May he’d paid Horowitz twenty bucks to trade and the desk still felt strange to him, although it had been over two months now. His new desk was near enough to the secretaries that he got a heads-up on anything that came through on the main switchboard and needed someone assigned to it. The other reporters, the ones who’d been here a while, all had sources among the local cops or snitches they had on retainer. So occasionally they’d get a call, disappear for a couple of days, and come back with something. Pete knew the only way he’d get a start on a decent story was with luck.
He’d gone for a beer with Terry DeWitt the night before, and they’d ended the night in a dark basement bar in the Bowery. There was a line four deep at the bar, and a layer of blue smoke at head-height that wrapped the room in gauze and made Pete’s eyes water. It was the kind of place he would never have gone to if it had been up to him. Terry DeWitt had been at the Herald for almost eight years, and six at the Courier before that. He’d earned respect. There was even talk of him getting a regular column. He was the kind of guy Pete needed to know.
Terry had left the bar at midnight and Pete wound up taking three games of pool off a guy called Lucky with a missing finger and a wad of tobacco between his cheek and his back teeth. He’d still had a buzz on when he’d woken a few hours later, fully clothed and sticky on top of the sheets. He’d made it to the office feeling remarkably well—first to arrive for the day shift, like always—but now the buzz was fading and it was time to admit the hangover knocking on his skull and tell it to take a good slug at him and then leave him in peace.
Pete stretched out his legs and kept sifting through the overnight bulletins in search of the start of a story, kept one eye on what was going on around him. Head throbbing, he was struggling to focus over the clatter of typewriter keys, ringing phones, the rise and fall of voices, and, above it all, the hum of the stark strip lighting. He pushed his hair off his forehead and fanned himself with a notebook. The newsroom smelled, as it always did, like a cross between a locker room and a cheap diner: the smell of men who didn’t bathe too often mingled with the odor of stale clothes, cigarettes, and fried food. Today it was making him nauseous.
He wondered if he could talk one of the girls in the typing pool into running down to Brooke’s and getting him a root beer float. He reached into his jacket for his wallet and felt the crackle of his mother’s latest letter, and sickness rose in his belly and daubed his skin with sweat.
Janine kept walking back and forward between the boss’s office and the copy machine, and he could feel her glances against his neck. Pete kept his head bowed over his bundle of papers, his mind drifting to something sweet and cold and fresh. To the clink of a long spoon against an old-fashioned sundae glass, the thick yellow foam where ice cream meets soda.
He continued flicking through the bulletins and made occasional notes. His mind kept drifting to the folded white square in his pocket. Overlaying the familiar feeling of suffocation was a more recent sensation of relief at the distance between the world his mother’s letters brought back and his own life here in New York.
She wrote every week on flimsy white paper that she bought at the stationery store in town. Every time he felt the thinness, the cheapness, of the paper she used, he thought he should buy her a box of something nice. Thick paper the yellow color of fresh cream. Or something with a watermark and a wash of faint lilac, or pale blue notecards with a border of flowers. Something from a store in Manhattan: he could ask them to wrap it and send it to her, and he could reward himself for spending money he didn’t have by imagining her face when she opened it.
And then he would think of how her letters made him feel. And he hated himself every time he thought of how he knew, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to bear reading his mother’s words written in her neat, careful hand on paper meant for rich city women.