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Cigarillos are best! They’ll remember the goddamned message. Merchandising by irritation, Jack!”
    â€œIrri—Are you out of your mind? Make your potential customers mad at you?”
    Herb grinned. “The Levy brothers like it. They see the point. Your potential customers may be irritated by the message, but they’ll goddamn well remember it. The Levys will sign a six-month contract to sponsor a Geraldo Cigarillo Hour. These guys sing the message, they sing another song or two on each show, and we fill in with a band and somebody like the Wisecrack Guys and Betty.”
    â€œSix—Well . . . what do you call this kind of shit? I mean singing the message. What do you call it?”
    Herb shrugged. “The musical message, say. Why just have some mellifluous announcer intone the message when you can have—”
    â€œAll right, all right! Have you signed these guys?”
    â€œFifty dollars a week.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œApiece.”
    â€œApiece?”
    â€œThey sing for us. Messages. Songs. Whatever. Not just on The Geraldo Cigarillo Show.”
    â€œWhat are they called?”
    â€œThe Bronson Brothers.”
    â€œJesus Christ!” Jack exclaimed. “From now on they’re . . . the Harmonics, the Tone Brothers, the Mellow Fellows. Something. Mellow Fellows. How you like that, guys?”
    The Bronson Brothers nodded solemnly.
    â€œOkay. And put the ‘hmmmm’ back in, at the beginning and the end. If we’re going to be memorable, we may as well be memorable. ”
T WO
    A BOUT SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE BABY WAS DUE , K IMBERLY’S belly grew and she began to look pregnant. Her mother started to spend a lot of time at the house. And they found a nanny, an English girl from Lambeth named Cecily Camden. She movedinto a room the Lears prepared for her on the third floor of the house.
    The house, unfortunately, had only one bathroom, on the second floor, plus a toilet and a basin in a closet off the kitchen. Cecily would use that closet except when she bathed, which she could do only in the second-floor bathroom. She had been in the house less than a week when Jack accidentally walked into the bathroom and saw her in the tub. She smiled and grabbed a towel to cover herself but didn’t shriek, and Jack apologized and backed out in no great hurry.
    â€œI’ve got to go to New York this week,” he told Kimberly over dinner the same evening. “If you weren’t so far along, I’d take you with me.”
    â€œWhat’s the occasion?”
    â€œWell, you know how Herb’s a man of enthusiasms. His latest is for a vaudeville comic who’s playing in the Earl Carroll Vanities. He thinks we should try to book the guy to come up to Boston and do a weekly radio show, half an hour of his jokes and routines. He doesn’t work cheap, and I can’t even think of signing him until I see his act.”
    Kimberly shrugged. “You’ve got the Wisecrack Guys. How many comics can you use?”
    â€œHerb says they’re a pair of amateurs compared to this guy.”
    â€œWhy would he leave the Earl Carroll Vanities to come and work on a Boston radio station?”
    â€œBeing in the Vanities is great. But it’s not permanent. The guy’s bread and butter is vaudeville, but the movies and radio have all but killed vaudeville. Like a lot of vaudevillians, he’s been casting a nervous eye on radio.”
    â€œYou think it’s really worth your time to go all the way to New York to catch this act?” Kimberly asked skeptically.
    â€œI promised Herb I would.”
    â€œWhat’s this comic’s name?”
    â€œJack Benny.”
Three
    K IMBERLY INSISTED HE PACK WHITE TIE AND TAILS, PLUS HIS collapsible top hat, to wear to the theater in New York. There, where she couldn’t see him, he went to the Vanities in a darkgray double-breasted suit.
    Herb went with him. He’d reserved