New York - The Novel

father seemed like a Yankee Wall Street type, handsome and blue-eyed. The mother was wearing a pearl choker and a fur. She looked about nervously. Salvatore thought he’d seen her before. He tried to remember where.
    “I just hope, Charles,” she said, “that there isn’t going to be a police raid. It would be so embarrassing.”
    The young man laughed and told her not to worry, but she didn’t look too happy.
    Then, to Salvatore’s surprise, Paolo leaned over toward their table.
    “Forgive me, ma’am,” he said smoothly, in a voice Salvatore had never heard before, “but I think I can put your mind at rest.”
    Salvatore observed with amazement. He had never seen his brother like this before. The Paolo he had known since his childhood, who still spoke with the hint of an Italian accent, had suddenly disappeared. In his place was an elegant man who sounded like an uptown lawyer.
    “Oh,” said the lady, looking pleased, “I’d be so glad if you would.”
    “Well,” Paolo smiled, “there are two reasons. The first is that, if the police were going to raid this establishment, I would already know about it. The second is that, two tables behind you, is the mayor of New York.”
    Her husband looked at the table in question, gave a huge grin to Paolo and burst out laughing. For there indeed was none other than James J. Walker, the charming Irish mayor of New York, who did as he pleased in all matters, including wine, women and song.
    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 wastempted, 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