Last Respects (47 page)

At seventeen I had never before been in a position to give my parents a present. In fact, it had never occurred to me to do so. Or even to feel it was necessary to take a crack at it. I was preoccupied with my own life, which I see now was almost doltishly simple, but in those early years seemed hopelessly complicated. Besides, my parents were a couple of illiterate peasants from Central Europe. Immigrants. My father had fled from the Austrian conscription machinery of Emperor Franz Joseph; my mother, from the serfdom of a dairy farm on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary. They had met on East Fourth Street in the slums of New York, married, and spawned me. This was a reason for me to feel indebted to them? Today, in 1971, recalling how Sebastian Roon in 1930 caused this book to start to happen, the answer to that question is yes. In 1930, no. Not because I am a bastard. Or was. At seventeen, as I recall, I was probably indistinguishable from most seventeen-year-olds: not much of anything. A bundle of what I suppose can be described as protoplasm, trying to stay afloat—God, how at fifty-eight the brilliant metaphors assault the tip of a ball-point!—in a turbulent sea of economics and sex.

Economics in 1930 was Maurice Saltzman & Company, where I worked. Sex was Hannah Halpern, where I—well. Well?

Well, why not?

Boy! When I think back—but I’d better not. Let’s stick to the fact that I was the youngest employee of Maurice Saltzman & Company, Certified Public Accountants.

I don’t know why. I mean I don’t know why I was the firm’s youngest employee. I was not hired because of my age. I was hired because I could do a number of things that in 1930 a firm of certified public accountants wanted or had to have done daily in their offices but did not want to pay more than one employee to do. As achievements, these things I could do were hardly noteworthy.

For example, I could arrive in the offices at 224 West 34th Street shortly before eight o’clock every morning. And I mean every. Including Sunday. M.S.&Co., as it was known to intimates, worked a seven-day week. I did it without difficulty.

Got out of my bed at 5:30 in the Kramer family flat on Tiffany Street in the Bronx. Ablutions. Not much shaving as yet. Dressed fast. Helped by my mother. She was fussy about my appearance. She was proud of my job with M.S.&Co. She wanted me to look spic and span. I did. Nobody exported from Asia to the Chinese laundries of the Bronx ever washed and ironed a shirt the way my mother did. Or put on a kitchen table a breakfast so sensible for a young man who could not afford the cost of a downtown lunch.

My mother understood staying power. It was the rubric that had kept her afloat from the Carpathian Mountains to Tiffany Street.

Having been set afloat for the day, I trotted off to the 180th Street-Bronx Park South subway train at 6:30. Not too crowded at that hour. I usually managed to find a seat. I preferred one in the little cab at the rear. By the time the train cut across the Harlem River into upper Manhattan the train was jammed and to the surface of my mind came that uneasy problem: chivalry versus comfort. An awful lot of little old ladies were on their way between 6:30 and 7:00 from the Bronx to the sewing rooms of the garment center. They posed a problem for a nice Jewish boy, raised by a tough-minded lady like my mother.

She had started to teach me about life when I was just barely old enough to listen. Or hear. Three? Four? Five? Not much older than five, anyway. Her basic lesson applied to almost all aspects of daily existence. For going to work in the morning, it went as follows: “A boy must always stand up in the subway and give his seat to a lady. But only if he sees her.”

In the little cab at the back of the subway car you didn’t see her, or anybody else. Your nose was buried in Volume II—
Revocable Trusts, Amortization of Capital Expenditures, and Ancillary Depreciation
—of the La Salle Extention University Course in Higher Accountancy.

I had at that time about as much interest in Revocable Trusts, Amortization of Capital Expenditures, and Ancillary Depreciation as Rin-Tin-Tin had in the sunspot theory of economic cycles. Most of the country, however, was trying to keep its nose above the rising flood of Herbert Hoover’s depression. I had been fortunate enough to land this job with a firm of certified public accountants, and I did not want to be fired.

To put it bluntly, my enrollment in the La Salle Extension University Course in Higher Accountancy was an activity that would have been described a decade later—after the Japs dumped the Sixth Avenue El back on us at Hickam Field and I began to rub elbows with the vocabulary of the U.S. Army—as brown-nosing.

I did not want my boss Ira Bern (the “Co.” of M.S.&.Co.) to think I felt about accountancy the way my mother felt about suckling pig. I wanted him to feel I sat at his feet. It would not be straining accuracy to say I did.

One of my daily tasks as an employee of M.S.&Co. was to take Mr. Bern’s shoes every morning at ten o’clock to the bootblack in the lobby of our office building. It sounds demeaning, of course, and there may be some who think it was. I did not. Mr. Bern was a generous and an expansive man. Every morning when he took off his shoes and handed them to me, he also handed me a dime.

“While you’re waiting,” he used to say, “get yourself a cuppa cawfee and a ruggle.”

A cuppa cawfee was—well, I guess it still is—a cuppa cawfee. A ruggle, however. Now then.

A ruggle in 1930 was and may very well still be a piece of pastry called Danish, probably with good reason, although so far as I knew it was invented by Jews in places like Poland. It was steeped in cinnamon, studded with raisins, chewy as taffy, shaped like a crescent, and pleasurable beyond the erotic vocabulary in the Song of Solomon.

While Mr. Bern’s shoes were being shined, I would sit at Mr. Rothman’s brown marble counter in the section of the office building lobby then known as a coffee pot, and I would dunk.

A nickel ruggle in 1930 had in it eight dunks. Once in a while, as an experiment in the extension of delight, I did manage to stretch this to nine. I am certain others have made the same experiment, but my life has not provided me with opportunities to compare these experiments. Speaking for myself, from my own personal experience, I can say unequivocally the experiment did not pay off.

Shortly after the eighth dunk, Mr. Bern’s shoes always looked like the mirrors in the penny peanut machines on the IRT subway platforms. I do not exaggerate. You could see yourself, you actually could, in the gleaming mirror-like pieces of leather across the toes.

Mr. Bern had been a poor boy. A Fifth Streeter, actually. Born and raised one block up from my own native land: East Fourth Street. He had made it, as Fifth Streeters tended to do, and as a result he had certain peccadilloes. Shoes, for example. He couldn’t stand brown. Black was Ira Bern’s color, and a custom bootmaker on 48th made the shoes for him at $55 a pair—1930, remember—out of sheets of vici kid imported from Spain.

I did not then know what vici kid was. I still don’t know. I am certain it would be easy enough to find out. A phone call to
The New York Times
would do it. Or could do it in the days when the paper sold for two cents, and on that they could afford to maintain a twenty-four-hour-a-day free information telephone service. Even if they still do, I would not make that call.

Vici kid to me is the black leather at which the Italian boy in the bootblack shop at 224 West 34th Street pummeled away every morning from 10:00 to 10:15 while I dunked a Rothman’s ruggle into a cuppa Rothman’s cawfee. I’ll settle for that.

The good moments of life, I have learned, are always memories. I have never known better ones. I will stick with what I’ve got.

What I’ve got next adds up to a somewhat breathless period. Five minutes, perhaps. Somewhere between 10:15 and 10:30 every morning in the offices of M.S.&Co. at 224 West 34th Street in 1930. These were the minutes that started when I came back upstairs into the office with Mr. Bern’s gleaming shoes, and the moment when I learned how Mr. Bern was going to dispose of my day. What made this period breathless was that Mr. Bern did not himself know what he was going to do with me. Until, that is, he faced the problem. Which was always minutes—moments, actually—before the problem had to be solved.

Mr. Bern was not a bad man. He was not even a stupid man. I see now his trouble was that he shared with the rest of the human race what Shakespeare grasped when he set himself the task of explaining the complexities of the heir to Elsinore. Most human beings are as indecisive as one of those tropical storms the National Hurricane Center makes such floundering efforts to track. For a man who was operating a firm of certified public accountants with twenty-two staff members who had to be paid every Saturday at noon, it was clearly hell on wheels.

Mr. Bern was a small, natty, nervous man with the sort of toothbrush mustache that Adolf Hitler was just about to spring on the world. Mr. Bern always seemed cold. I don’t mean cold as in Heathcliff. I mean cold as in Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd. Physical cold. Thinking back on it now I realize Mr. Bern spent a great deal of his time shivering.

In 1930 Mr. Bern was somewhere around forty. Now that I am fifty-eight I understand, or think I understand, things that did not even pluck at my attention in 1930. Now, today, if I were running a firm of certified public accountants with twenty-two staff members who had to be paid every Saturday at noon, I think I would do as much shivering as Mr. Bern did. Probably more. Friday night I could hear myself, sleepless, asking myself, sleepless: “Where is the damn money going to come from?”

Well, in theory, from clients. Maurice Saltzman & Company had quite a few. Dress manufacturers, hardware merchants, fabricators of leather goods, several cafeterias, shops on Grand Street that sold novelties and on Grand Concourse that sold wedding gowns, a locksmith, and many I remember not by what they sold to the public but by the faded and troubled faces of the men and women who owned them. In short, M.S.&Co. had enough clients to meet the payroll of their twenty-two man staff.

If they hadn’t, the staff would never have grown to twenty-two. Or, having got there, the number would have been reduced as Mr. Bern and his partner lost clients. Ira Bern’s problem was that he and his partner could never tell the precise moment when their firm had lost a client.

Most small businessmen in 1930 tended to think of their accountant’s monthly fee the way Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp thought of the bill from their wine merchants. They had every intention of paying it. Really, they had. But they had so many other unpaid bills that the wine merchant tended to be assigned a pretty low niche on their list. While most of Mr. Bern’s clients were prompt in paying their rent and telephone bills, they tended to run behind in paying their monthly fees to Maurice Saltzman & Company.

What drove Mr. Bern crazy was the gap between cajolery and threat. Every morning when I brought his beautifully shined vici kids back into his office he was on the phone playing one or two highly dramatic roles.

First role:

“Lennie, for God’s sake, you think I’m a bank? You haven’t sent me a dime since May. Not a dime. Five months behind, Lennie. Five audits. You know what that means? Twenty weeks I’ve been paying out salaries to my staff. Twenty weeks, Lennie. Where do you think I get the cash to pay my men? You think I got a printing press in the cellar? I make my own ten-dollar bills? For God’s sake, Lennie, you’re one of my oldest and one of my most valued clients. I take care of your books like they were my own. My father should get such attention from me as you get. Be human, Lennie. Have a heart. You can’t pay the whole bill? So all right. Send a check on account. But for God’s sake, Lennie, send
something!
”

One of my most crucial duties as an employee of M.S.&Co. was helping, every morning between 10:15 and 10:30, to get Mr. Bern back into his freshly shined shoes. He had small feet, but Mr. Bern was a vain man and his shoes were smaller than they should have been.

Vanity of vanities, sayeth the Preacher, but the Preacher uttereth not a syllable about tight shoes. With the help of a shoehorn I managed to get Mr. Bern back into his, but I had to do it on my knees. The task was simple enough. A matter of mere leverage. But it was much simpler when Mr. Bern on the phone was playing the first of his two dramatic roles: cajoling.

For this performance he employed only the upper registers of his voice and the hand with which he was not holding the telephone receiver to his ear. When Mr. Bern was playing the second of his dramatic roles, I had trouble. For this performance he employed his feet for emphasis.

“Mr. Shimnitz? This is Ira Bern.”

Stamp of right foot, narrowly missing Benny Kramer’s left hand.

“Ira Bern, Maurice Saltzman & Company. Right. Now, Mr. Shimnitz, I think you should be informed that I am running a business, not an eleemosynary institution.”

Stamp of left foot, not quite missing the knuckle of Benny’s right hand. A small scrape. Not enough to worry about. Even in those days I did not infect easily.

“Do you realize what it means, Mr. Shimnitz, when you are callous enough not to pay one of my bills promptly? Let me tell you, Mr. Shimnitz, let me tell you what it means. It means you are striking a blow at the faith of the average citizen in the country’s movers and shakers. We are in the depths of a depression, Mr. Shimnitz. Are you aware of that? The leaders in the White House don’t know their ass from a hot rock how to get us out of it, Mr. Shimnitz. To be blunt about it, Mr. Hoover is a
putz,
Mr. Shimnitz. Do you know that? Well, Mr. Shimnitz?”

Stamp of right foot. Edge of vici kid toe scrapes Benny’s thumb. Slow, hot, searing pain starts up hand and wrist.

“Well, Mr. Shimnitz, the country knows it. Oh, boy, do they know it, Mr. Shimnitz. The people who make up the country, the men selling apples on street corners, the poor bastards on the bread lines, do they believe in their leaders? Mr. Hoover? Mr. Curtis? The rest of those jerks down in Washington? Does the guy in the street believe them? You bet your ass, Mr. Shimnitz, they don’t. And after you bet your ass, Mr. Shimnitz, you can bet your bottom dollar. What they believe in is the people who are still in a position to pay their salaries. People like me, Mr. Shimnitz. I’m no Herbert Hoover. I’m no Charlie Curtis. I’m just a common ordinary garden-variety American, Mr. Shimnitz. I’m just plain Ira Bern a certified public accountant with a staff of twenty-two. Ira Bern, a simple Paul Revere type patriot. And it’s people like you, Mr. Shimnitz, who are cutting the ground from under the feet of the great patriots of this country. Yes, patriots. People like me, Mr. Ira Bern, who are fighting to prevent the revolution. I am fighting to prevent it for every decent American citizen, including deadbeats like you, Mr. Shimnitz. But you’re acting like a man who doesn’t deserve it. You’re acting like a slob, Mr. Shimnitz, and for slobs a Paul Revere don’t lay down his life. Unless you put a check in the mail at once, unless you clear up your bill but I mean pronto, Mr. Shimnitz, no member of the staff of Maurice Saltzman & Company will ever again show up in your lousy office. As of this moment, Mr. Shimnitz, you can go get yourself a new accountant.”