White Collar Girl by Renée Rosen

Author:Renée Rosen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Biographical, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780451474971
Publisher: NAL
Published: 2015-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

• • •

I hardly slept that night, and the next morning I woke before my alarm to the steady sound of raindrops pelting my bedroom window. It was one of those gunmetal-colored days. Everything was gray and gloomy, and I could see the clouds moving overhead with nothing behind them except for more bleakness.

By the time my attaché case and I headed down to the International Amphitheatre at Halsted and 42nd Street, the drizzle had changed over to an ominous downpour filled with thunder and lightning. It was as if the city were rebelling against this onslaught of delegates with their bad suits and their conventioneer antics.

The first morning Mrs. Angelo had me do a piece on the convention organist. He was a young man from Palos Park. Just twenty-two years old. When I interviewed him, he told me he had memorized more than two thousand political songs and military marches.

“Before this convention is over,” he said, “I bet you I’ll have played Chicago from Pal Joey at least two hundred times.”

As soon as I finished that up, I moved on to the next assignment: the eighty switchboard operators in the convention telephone center. Political warfare was going on inside the amphitheater, and here I was, down the hall, talking to a roomful of women in matching blue uniforms. They had undergone hours of special training for this with Illinois Bell, which included speech and elocution classes. The supervisor explained that their main responsibilities were to place calls, connect incoming calls and take messages for the delegates. How Mrs. Angelo expected me to make an interesting piece out of this was beyond me.

Next I was scheduled to interview the New York governor’s secretary for White Collar Girl. The rewrite desk was standing by back at the city room. Higgs was working ’round the clock, awaiting updates so he could knock out the stories as they were called in. He had to have been as bored with my topics as I was.

I finished up early for the day and so I flashed my credentials and sat in on a press conference. Marty and Walter were sitting across the way, looking at me as if to say, What the hell are you doing in here?

“I’m not trying to step on anyone’s toes,” I explained afterward. The three of us were standing in a crowded hallway. Reporters and photographers were chasing down the press secretaries, hoping for statements. “I just had some free time and was curious. . . .”

“Spare me.” Walter stuffed his pipe in his mouth, shook his head in disgust and walked away.

“Walter, c’mon—”

He ignored me and kept walking.

“Aw, don’t worry about him,” said Marty. “He’ll cool off.”

“Honestly, I don’t want to cause problems. I just wanted to sit in and listen. That’s all.”

“Then be smart. Watch how you go about it. That’s my only advice.”

After Marty left, I went to a pay phone and called Jack, asking if we could meet for a drink. Twenty minutes later I found him waiting for me in a dark corner of Marge’s Pub, a dive up on Sedgwick.

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