THE HENNA DECADE What May Happen to Our Age When Thomas Beer Catches Up to It

1

They put William Anderson in jail and Suzanne Lenglen tottered into the club-house with a heart-attack.

There was a pistol shot in 1922 and across silver screens from Hollywood to Lynn, Massachusetts, a resentful wraith barred attachable curls snuggling on movie lapels. “William D. Taylor has been killed,” a young detective announced to his lavender mother at their California supper. And his mother smiled, for she was to hear Marion Talley before nervous wreckers dragged to earth the old Metropolitan, like avid vultures of architectural progress.

On the same border of the Pacific a blue-eyed foreman said, “Not guilty,” and Roscoe Arbuckle walked out into obese freedom, cleansed with hyssop by two words from a drowsy jurist on a stool by his predecessor’s desk.

2

A little boy, stooping on Central Park West, pressed cracked knuckles into creole mud and snapped roseate marbles in what passed for straight lines, while across the country in Dayton men slid against turbid waters and the National Cash Register served corporate coffee to clammy survivors. The little boy’s knuckle-pressing ceased, like young leaves which refuse to burn. His father raised brown glove to lift soft fedora. “Put away your marbles,” he said to the little boy, “Warren Harding has been nominated.”

3

Through easy October the short French statesman in silk gloves forgot the late war in onion soup for breakfast. A very large peanut crackled in the Southern fist of Irvin Cobb and his bearded companion hailed a brown-and-white taxi. Together they swept the folio-studded Brentano’s, discussing Twenty-third Street. The clerk smiled. His father had been mayor of Seattle. Would Twenty-third Street ever reach to Seattle? But Cobb had lost the large peanut and his bearded companion had lost his garter, and they left Brentano’s to stand in dual proximity watching the slightly paralytic progress of a Number 8 Fifth Avenue bus. In the distance, the verdant blob of Thorley’s hung like a mossy acorn—green sin on a purple republic.

4

Milt Gross stood talking with Ring Lardner and another on the steps of the American Indian Museum. He had under his arm a bulbous bundle and this dropped incontinently to the granite pedestal as he shrugged his shoulders. “A peckage skelps,” he said. “Heendian skelps, witt blad.” Lardner raised a thermal eyebrow. “What of it?” he asked, and in Chicago two young Jewish psychopathics drew up to the curb in a Dodge looking for someone to give a ride to. That night the Alabama delegation in the steaming reaches of Madison Square Garden threw twenty-five dogged votes for Oscar Underwood.

5

Standing, occasionally sitting, Lutitia lay in the window seat of the Colony Club.... A blonde reticence sat beside her. In the right hand of the blonde reticence swirled a cup of tea. In her left, a copy of November’s American Mercury. From its greenish covers H. L. Mencken spoke impatiently of the native Americanus, while George Nathan dug sadistic pins into American colleagues. Herbert Parrish disparaged the American God and words of bile were Leland H. Jenks’s dole for the American Constitution and its interpreters. Fiction jetted from between these cynical rocks with gloomy disclosures of American small-town unpleasantries. Yes, Lutitia, or rather....

So while Irving Berlin, a wispy figure fingering the black notes on a piano in West 46th Street, sang “Not for just a year, but always,” the tugboat, crazily bearing Mayor Hylan’s Welcoming Committee, pugged to greet, with beaver boisterousness, the New Year, a rough beard swinging low over rhinestone studs.