“Go to sleep,” I said.
“Can we see Saint Nicholas when he comes?” the children asked.
“You got to be asleep,” I said. “You got to be asleep when he comes. You can’t see him unless you’re unconscious.”
“Father knows,” mamma said.
I pulled the covers over my mouth. It was warm under the covers. As I went to sleep I wondered if mamma was right.
The New Yorker, December 24, 1927
Tom the Young Kidnapper, or, Pay Up and Live
A kind of Horatio Alger story based on the successful $30,000 kidnapping in Kansas City of Miss Mary McElroy, who had a lovely time, whose abductors gave her roses and wept when she left, and whose father said he did not want the young men to go to the penitentiary
I WOULD admire to walk with youse to a small, dark cellar and manacle you to a damp wall.”
The speaker was a young American, of perhaps twenty-five years, with a frank, open countenance. Betty Spencer, daughter of old Joab Spencer, the irate banker and the richest man in town, flushed prettily. Her would-be abductor flushed, too, and stood twisting his hat in his hands. He was neatly, if flashily, dressed.
“I am sorry,” she said, in a voice which was sweet and low, an excellent thing in woman, “I am sorry, but I am on my way to church, for my faith is as that of a little child.”
“But I must have sixty or a hundred thousand dollars from your irate father tonight—or tomorrow night at the latest,” said Tom McGirt, for it was he. “It is not so much for me as for the ‘gang.’ ”
“Do you belong to a gang?” cried Betty, flushing prettily, a look of admiration in her eyes. In his adoring embarrassment, the young kidnapper tore his hat into five pieces and ate them.
“My, but you must have a strong stomach!” cried the young lady.
“That was nothing,” said Tom, modestly. “Anybody would of done the same thing. You know what I wisht? I wisht it had been me stopping a horse which was running away with you at the risk of my life instead of eating a hat.” He looked so forlorn and unhappy because no horse was running away with her that she pitied him.
“Does your gang really need the money?” she cried. “For if it really does, I should be proud to have you kidnap me and subject me to a most humiliating but broadening experience.”
“The gang don’t work, see?” said the young man, haltingly, for he hated to make this confession. “They’re too young and strong to work—I mean there is so much to see and do and drink, and if they was working in a factory, say, or an old stuffy office all day, why—” She began to cry, tears welling up into her eyes.
“I shall come with you,” she said, “for I believe that young men should be given hundreds of thousands of dollars that they may enjoy life. I wear a five-and-a-half glove, so I hope your manacles fit me, else I could easily escape from those which were too large.
“If we ain’t got ones your size,” he said, earnestly, drawing himself up to his full height, “I’ll go through smoke and flame to git some for you. Because I—well, you see, I—”
“Yes?” she encouraged him, gently.
“Aw, I won’t tell youse now,” he said. “Some day when I have made myself worthy, I’ll tell youse.”
“I have faith in you,” she said, softly. “I know you will pull this job off. You can do it, and you will do it.”
“Thanks, Betty,” he said. “I appreciate your interest in me. You shall be proud some day of Tom the Young Kidnapper, or Pay Up and Live.” He spoke the subtitle proudly.
“I’ll go with you,” she said. “No matter where.”
“It ain’t much of a basement,” he said, reddening, and twisting an automatic between his fingers. “It’s dark and the walls are damp, but me old mother ain’t there, and that’s something. She’s no good,” he added.
“I know,” she said, softly. They walked on slowly down the street to a nasty part of town where an automobile drew up alongside the curb, and they got in. Four young men with frank, open countenances were inside, their faces freshly scrubbed, their dark hair moistened and slicked down. Tom introduced them all, and they put away their automatics, and took off their hats, and grinned and were very polite. “I am quite happy,” Betty told them.
The cellar in which the young gang manacled Betty to a wall was, as Tom had promised, dark and damp, but the chains which fitted around her wrists were very nice and new and quite snug, so she was quite content. Two of the boys played tiddlywinks with her, while the others went out to mail a letter which she had written at the gang’s dictation. It read: “Dear Father—Put a hundred thousand berries in an old tin box and drop it out of your car when you see a red light on the old Post Road tonight, or your daughter will never come home. If you tell the police we will bite her ears off.” “That’s nice,” said Betty, reading it over, “for it will afford Father an opportunity, now that I am in mortal danger, to realize how much he loves me and of how little worth money is, and it will show him also that the young men of this town are out to win!”
Betty was kept in the cellar all night, but in the morning Tom brought her chocolate and marmalade on an ivory-colored breakfast tray, and also a copy of Keats’ poems, and a fluffy little kitty with a pink ribbon around its neck. One of the other boys brought her a table badminton set, and a third, named Thad the Slasher, or Knife Them and Run, brought her a swell Welsh pony named Rowdy. “Oh,” said Betty, “I am so happy I could cry,” and she jangled her manacles. Several of the boys did cry, she looked so uncomfortable and so happy, and then Betty cried, and then they all laughed, and put a record on the Victrola.
That night, Betty was still chained to the wall because her old father had not “come through.” “He’s holding out for only forty grand,” explained Tom, reluctantly, for he did not wish her to know that her father was stingy. “I don’t guess your father realizes that we really will make away with you if he don’t kick in. He thinks mebbe it’s a bluff, but we mean business!” His eyes flashed darkly, and Betty’s eyes snapped brightly.
“I know you do!” she cried. “Why, it’s been worth forty thousand just the experience I’ve had. I do hope he gives you the hundred, for I should like to go back alive and tell everybody how sweet you have been and how lovely it is to be kidnapped!”
On the second morning, Betty was sitting on the damp cellar floor playing Guess Where I Am with Tom and Ned and Dick and Sluggy, when Thad came in, toying with his frank, open clasp knife, his genial countenance clouded by a frown.
“What is wrong, Thad,” asked Betty, “for I perceive that something is wrong?” Thad stood silent, kicking the moist dirt of the floor with the toe of his shoe. He rubbed a sleeve against his eye.
“The old man come across with all the dough,” he said. “We—we gotta let you go now.” He began to cry openly. Tom paled. One of the boys took Betty’s chains off. Betty gathered up her presents, the kitty, and the table badminton set, and the poems. “Rowdy is saddled an’ waitin’ outside,” said Thad, brokenly, handing tens and twenties, one at a time, to his pals.
“Goodbyeee,” said Betty. She turned to Tom. “Goodbyeee, Tom,” she said.
“Goo—” said Tom, and stopped, all choked up.
When Betty arrived at her house, it was full of policemen and relatives. She dropped her presents and ran up to her father, kindly old Judge Spencer, for he had become a kindly old judge while she was in the cellar, and was no longer the irate old banker and no longer, indeed, the town’s richest man, for he only had about seven hundred dollars left.
“My child!” he cried. “I wish to reward those young men for teaching us all a lesson. I have become a poorer but a less irate man, and even Chief of Police Jenkins here has profited by this abduction, for he has been unable to apprehend the culprits and it has taken some of the cockiness out of him, I’ll be bound.”
“That is true, Joab,” said the Chief of Police, wiping away a tear. “Those young fellows have shown us all the error of our ways.”
“Have they skipped out, Betty?” asked her father.
“Yes, Father,” said Betty, and a tear welled up into her eye.
“Ha, ha!” said old Judge Spencer. “I’ll wager there was one young man whom you liked better than the rest, eh, my chick? Well, I should like to give him a position and invite him to Sunday dinner. His rescuing you from the flames of that burning shack for only a hundred thous—”
“I didn’t do that, sir,” said a modest voice, and they all turned and looked at the speaker, Tom the Kidnapper, for it was he. “I simply left her loose from the cellar after we got the dough.”
“It’s the same thing,” said her father, in mock sternness. “Young man, we have all been watching you these past two days—that is to say, we have been wondering where you were. You have outwitted us all and been charming to my daughter. You deserve your fondest wish. What will you have?”
“I’ll have Scotch-and-soda, sir,” said Tom. “And your daughter’s hand.”
“Ha, ha!” said the kindly old Judge. “There’s enterprise for you, Jenkins!” He nudged Jenkins in the ribs and the Chief nudged back, and laughed. So they all had a Scotch-and-soda and then the Judge married his blushing daughter, right then and there, to Tom the Young Kidnapper, or If You Yell We’ll Cut Your Throat.
The New Yorker, June 10, 1933
How to Relax While Broadcasting
THE EVENING I went up to the studios for my first radio broadcast I got off by mistake at the sixteenth floor instead of the seventeenth. I decided not to wait for the elevator but just run up the stairs to the seventeenth floor, because elevators in broadcasting buildings are always crowded with small Italian musicians carrying ’cellos; furthermore, when the “Up” sign above the elevators in these buildings lights, the operator of the car that stops for you usually says “Down,” and before you can think, you find yourself on the first floor again without any way of getting back up, because you surrendered your pass to the man at the desk in the lobby the first time you went up.
I walked to a door on the sixteenth floor marked “Stairs” and stepped out into a cold, dark staircase shaft and walked up one flight. I found that the door on that floor wouldn’t open. It was after seven o’clock in the evening and the door had been officially locked. I hurried back down to the sixteenth floor and discovered that the door there had locked behind me, too. I began to beat on it and kick it. From far off a faint voice came to me finally, saying, “Cut that out!” The only thing to do was walk down fifteen flights to the main floor, which I did, but the door out into the lobby was also locked and nobody answered my screams and poundings. Screaming and pounding is “not radio,” as the broadcasting people say.
I went down into the basement, which was dark and gloomy, and hunted for the elevator shaft. I found it, but there was no bell to push, so I sat on an old chair until the car came down. The operator was surprised to see me and asked me for my pass. I told him I didn’t have a pass. He thought a while and then asked if Mr. Hayman knew I was down there. I said I didn’t think so. He was pretty much alarmed by that, but he took me up to the seventeenth floor after warning me never to come down to the basement again without a pass.
There was nobody on the seventeenth floor who under-stood my case, although the people I talked to were patient and courteous. They said the seventeenth floor was entirely given over to the business department and had no studios or microphones. What I probably wanted was the twenty-seventh floor. Up there I found some people I had met before, but they were pretty busy and seemed to think it was the wrong night. I sat down in a chair, and presently a man came up to me and asked me if I was Mr. Totherer. I said I wasn’t sure and he said to follow him. I was shown into an office where there were some officials I knew and some friends of mine. One of the officials was denying a story somebody had been telling about a man who fell dead in front of the microphone. It seems he had merely had a stroke.
In a little while I was led, in a solemn march, to a small and lonely studio, heavily draped and silent. I took out a cigarette, but saw a sign saying “No Smoking,” so I put the cigarette away again. Some men in the glassed-in control-room began to look at me. I could see their lips move, but I couldn’t hear anything. A man tiptoed into the room where I was and shook hands with me and tiptoed out again. He never came back. I walked over to a regular microphone such as I had talked over once or twice before and had got used to, but someone led me away from that and said I was to talk over a table microphone, because it would help me to relax. This turned out to be a table about the size of a card table with a microphone set innocently in its centre, face up, more or less like an ashtray. Its studied simplicity caused me to tighten up slightly and I mentioned this to a man. “Be at your ease,” he said.
I stood over the table, grasped its edges firmly, and leaned down toward the microphone. Someone grasped me. “No, no,” he said. “You just sit down at the table as if you were sitting in a chair at any table, and talk.” I sat down, trying to remember how I sit in a chair at a table, especially a card table at which nobody else is sitting. “Relax,” said someone, with a note of command. I slumped back in the chair and placed on the table the papers I was going to use and began fussing with them. “Shhh!” somebody hissed. “Don’t rustle them! This is a very highly sensitized mike which picks up every slightest sound. It would sound like a waterfall if you rustled them.” I began to drum my fingers on the table top, but a courteous official put his hand on mine and stopped that. “Tapping would sound like cavalry crossing a bridge to your listeners,” he explained. “Just take it easy.” I leaned back in my chair and adjusted my tie, doubtless giving the effect of someone trying to take a leather belt away from a bulldog.
In a moment an announcer came in and said we were all ready to go. “Okay,” I said, standing up. “Let’s get out.” He smiled with calm assurance and said no, he meant that we were about to start the program. Everybody but him tiptoed out of the room. I sat down at the table again. I could see them all watching me from the control-room. Somebody in there raised his hand sharply and let it drop sharply. I expected to hear the faint hiss of lethal gas escaping into the chamber, but instead the announcer started to talk. I creaked nervously in the chair at this, and the listeners heard, along with his calm announcement, the sound of a buckboard falling over a cliff. Finally he pointed a finger at me. I sat bolt upright and began to talk to the ashtray. . . .
When it was all over everybody tiptoed whisperingly into the room and congratulated me on being only five seconds too slow—not bad for a beginner. The record is one five-hundredth of a second. I got up and started out of the room, but a man followed me and took me by the arm. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Let’s all go out and get a drink,” I said. “But you haven’t got time,” he said. “All this has just been the rehearsal.” I must have tightened up horribly at that, for he said soothingly, “Take it easy. You got plenty of time to relax in.” He looked at his wristwatch. “You got four minutes.”
The New Yorker, May 5, 1934
E. B. W.
ONCE, a few years ago, a gentleman came to the offices of The New Yorker and asked for E. B. White. He was shown into the reception room and Mr. White was told that someone was waiting for him there. White’s customary practice in those days, if he couldn’t place a caller’s name, was to slip moodily out of the building by way of the fire escape and hide in the coolness of Schrafft’s until the visitor went away. He is not afraid of process servers, blackmailers, borrowers, or cranks; he is afraid of the smiling stranger who tramples the inviolable flowers of your privacy bearing a letter of introduction from an old Phi Gam brother now in the real estate game in Duluth. White knows that the man in the Reception Room may not be so easy to get rid of as a process server—or even a blackmailer; he may grab great handfuls of your fairest hours, he may even appropriate a sizable chunk of your life, for no better reason than that he was anchor man on your brother’s high school relay team, or married the sister of your o
ld girl, or met an aunt of yours on a West Indies cruise. Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club. His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie’s and be recognized only by his friends.
But to get back to the particular caller whom we left waiting in the reception room. On that occasion, out of some obscure compulsion, White decided to go out and confront the man and see what he wanted. “I’m White,” he told the stranger he found sitting alone in the room. The man rose, stared for a long moment at the audacious fellow in front of him, and then said, with grim certainty, “You are not E. B. White.” White admits that his hair leaped up, but it is my fond contention that his heart did, too. I like to think that he was a little disappointed when he realized, as he was bound to, that the man was wrong. I like to insist that he resumed his burden of identity with a small sigh. (Where the remarkable interview got to from the tense point to which I have brought it here I shall leave it to my memoirs to tell.)
In the early days of The New Yorker the object of this searching examination signed his first few stories and poems with his full name: Elwyn (as God is my judge) Brooks White. I cannot imagine what spark of abandon, what youthful spirit of devil-may-care prompted a poet who loves to live half-hidden from the eye to come out thus boldly into the open. He didn’t keep it up long; he couldn’t stand that fierce glare of polysyllabic self-acknowledgment. For some years now he has signed his casuals and his verses merely with his initials, E. B. W. To his friends he is Andy. It was a lucky break that saved him from Elly or Wynnie or whatever else one might make out of Elwyn in the diminutive. He went to Cornell, and it seems that every White who goes there is nicknamed Andy for the simple if rather faraway reason that the first president of the University was named Andrew White.