Last Respects (52 page)

“Or would you prefer soda?” Sebastian Roon said.

“Er,” I said.

I may not be spelling that correctly. But I didn’t really say “Uh.” I simply heard myself utter a sound that was popped out of me by my confusion. Not stupidity. Confusion. I knew about Prohibition and bootleggers and speakeasies and the fact that there were people who drank various forms of alcohol every day as regularly as they consumed food. I did not know this from personal experience. I knew it from reading newspapers and seeing Emil Jannings movies in which he played the boss bootlegger who is unaware until the second reel that his own syndicate has supplied the hooch for the wild party at which his son, a clean-cut college boy, drinks his father’s product and goes blind for the remaining three reels.

My personal experience with alcohol was not unlike that of pretty nearly every kid who was raised on East Fourth Street, and probably similar to that of most seventeen-year-olds who in 1930 lived in the Bronx.

The only alcoholic beverage even a practiced revenooer could ever have found in our house was sacramental wine. My father made it himself from blue Concord grapes that were peddled from pushcarts in our neighborhood every summer. Once a year, at the Passover Seder, I was given a timbleful of this aromatic sweet brew. The timbleful was part of the ceremony. It was also part of a rather primitive but effective method of child control. The ceremonies at a Passover Seder are lengthy; once the excitement of the first stages wears off, children at the table tend to become restless. With a small dose of sacramental wine coursing through their very young veins, however, they are inclined to become sleepy. At this point they are carried off to bed and the adults continue the complicated ceremony without the sort of interruptions that are more appropriate to a park playground.

My only other contact with alcohol occurred once a year in the synagogue during Rosh Hashanah. Boys were called up at regular intervals to chant a short section from the Torah. When my turn came I never knew what I was chanting, but I knew how to chant it. Rabbi Goldfarb had seen to that. When I had satisfactorily uttered the appropriate decibels of sound, the cantor tweaked my cheek—the gesture was known as a
knip
—to display his approval, and the
gobbe,
or sexton, led me to a table in a corner of the synagogue for my reward: a sliver of golden yellow sponge cake dipped into a small glass of booze known as
brohmfin.

Half a century of more complicated living has placed me, and my palate, in contact with many beverages, but I’ve never encountered anything quite like the
brohmfin
doled out by the
gobbe
of my father’s synagogue. I have a feeling it was some form of whiskey, homemade of course, but I seem to recall my father on one occasion saying disapprovingly that they—whoever “they” were—had made this batch, of which he disapproved, with an inferior type of prune. So perhaps it was not whiskey.

Whatever it was, it tasted like what I suppose Victorian novelists had in mind when they wrote of a character who had suffered the tragedy of pride-shattering humiliation that he had been forced to drink a draught of bitter aloes. Those characters should have had a crack at the
brohmfin
that was the house drink in my father’s synagogue. They would have run back to bitter aloes as though they were heading for a chocolate malted. I never complained, however, about the taste of what I was offered in my father’s synagogue. Gulping that piece of alcohol-soaked sponge cake was a sign of manhood.

(Footnote for Arab statesmen: in the virility sweepstakes Jewish boys win their spurs early.)

I certainly felt I had won mine long before that day in Shane’s when I found myself staring at the two ice cubes in my coffee cup. The problem was, however, the place in which I was doing my staring: a restaurant on West 23rd Street, dimly lighted, hushed, with red and white checked tablecloths, waiters in red mess jackets held together by silver buttons, and gutted deer—or bouquets of head-down grouse—hung at the door.

There was nothing about this place even remotely reminiscent of the other places in which I had previously consumed alcohol. I did not know what to do. What Sebastian Roon did was not helpful. He lifted his cup.

“Skoal,” he said.

I wondered why. The only ones I knew were P.S. 188, J.H.S. 64, Thomas Jefferson High, and the 23rd Street branch of C.C.N.Y. None of these seemed at this moment the proper subject for a toast. However, I did not want young Mr. Roon to think I was as backward as I felt I lifted my cup.

“School,” I said.

He drank. I drank. And I had the immediate feeling that death had come to carry me away.

The moment the amber fluid slid past my epiglottis I was seized by the sort of coughing fit out of which Fatty Arbuckle used to squeeze a six-minute sequence.

Whatever I had swallowed came right back up in a fine spray. My forehead went down like the cutting section of a guillotine and banged against the red and white checks. My eyes blurred with a sudden cloudburst of tears. And my knees, hurtling upward to ease the sudden stiffening of my esophagus, hit some sort of metal fastenings on the underside of the table. With two results: the table rocked, and I screamed.

When I had smeared away the tears, the pain in my knees was receding, my coughing fit was simmering down to a series of rasping, unpleasant gasps, and I saw that a third person was sitting at our table.

“You must sip,” Sebastian Roon said, “not gulp. This is my uncle.” He waved toward the man who had joined us during my seizure.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, still bubbling with gasps and tears as I put out my hand. “I’m sorry.”

Sebastian Roon’s uncle took my hand. He shook it, laughed, and said to his nephew, “He’s pleased to meet me, but he’s also sorry.”

So I knew the head of I. G, Roon, Ltd., was a wise guy.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said through a nervous giggle. “I meant I’m sorry about, you know, all the, well, the coughing and the noise. I guess I swallowed the wrong way.”

I. G. Roon laughed again and said, “Or the wrong stuff.”

So I knew something else. I hated this man.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

I found myself embarking on another nervous giggle, and shifted to a stab at a laugh. It came out all right, I think, but it also made me hate myself. Brown-nosing is never a pleasant activity. There are times, however, when it has to be done. The year 1930 was one of those times, and I did my share. But I was able to put a poultice on my pride by choosing the areas where I could tell myself this detestable activity was necessary.

Ira Bern, for example. Getting his shoes shined. Fetching his hot pastrami sandwiches. Damn it, I had been valedictorian of my class at Thomas Jefferson. I had won a bronze medal from
The New York Times
in an oratorical contest about the Constitution of the United States. Dean Foote had said I could have a scholarship to Long Island University, to N.Y.U., or to Harvard if I was able to pony up the living expenses.

Well, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even accept the scholarships on condition that I would take one of those waiting-on-table jobs with which the flower of American manhood, from Frank Merriwell to Justice Brandeis, seems to have worked its way through college. What the Kramer family needed in 1930 was not a scholarship to Harvard but a nice steady flow of Yankee bean soup coming in over the window sill every week, and so I had to get a job.

Fair enough. When my father had needed a job to support his family, he had gone out and got one. So I went out and got mine. It was a good enough job to have enabled the Kramer family to move from East Fourth Street to the Bronx, and I was not complaining.

I really wasn’t. I enjoyed the sense of achievement it gave me. Besides, I was moving ahead scholastically at C.C.N.Y., and I had the satisfaction of detesting the rich kids in my Thomas Jefferson graduating class who had gone on to college. They gave me something I had never had when we were all young: a goal. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to show the bastards.

I had no doubt I could. And if the process of showing them meant brown-nosing a man like Ira Bern, okay, I could do that, too. But I. G. Roon? Where did he fit into the contract?

I never really got a chance to find out. By the time my jumping gut, and my carefully concealed fury, were under control, I noticed that Sebastian Roon and his uncle had apparently forgotten completely that I was sitting at the same table with them.

They were leaning forward, foreheads almost touching, talking in a way that reminded me of one of those Conrad Veidt spy movies. They seemed to be exchanging information of a confidential nature in a manner they felt or hoped would not arouse attention from people nearby. They were talking. They were uttering sounds. But it was as though they were studying to be ventriloquists. Their lips did not move. Not much, anyway.

“No, Danbury Hat is out,” Sebastian said. “I talked with Maltz twice. They can’t meet the eight-fifty price.”

“Can’t or won’t?” I. G. Roon said sharply.

“I think they can’t,” Sebastian said. He seemed to be talking to his own cuticle. “I told them we wouldn’t come down, and they had until this morning to come up. I told them if they didn’t accept before I met you for lunch, we’d go to York.”

“Did they?” I. G. Roon said.

“No,” Sebastian Roon said. “Not a word.”

“So?” I. G. Roon said.

“Bugger it, I thought,” Sebastian Roon said. “Why wait for lunch? At ten-thirty I called York.”

“Which one?” I. G. Roon said.

“Irving, I think,” Sebastian said. “Yes, Irving. He’s the one with the lisp, isn’t he?”

“Actually, it’s a cleft palate,” I. G. Roon said. “But go on. What happened?”

“He’d take the whole New South Wales shipment, he said.”

I. G. Roon’s voice rose slightly. “The whole shipment?”

Small scream on first syllable:
ship.

“Yes,” Sebastian said. “On condition that we let them have all of North Adelaide in the spring at the same rate.”

I. G. Roon scowled. I. G. Roon’s scowl was not pleasant.

“The son of a bitch,” he said.

“Yes, quite,” Sebastian said. “That’s how I reacted. But I suppose being a son of a bitch is part of his game.”

“It sure is,” I.G. Roon said. I wondered how he came to have a nephew with a British accent

He scowled down at the red and white checked tablecloth. I was surprised to see he, too, had a coffee cup in front of him. When had it been placed there? My explosive reaction to the dose of amber fluid Sebastian Roon had fed me, it suddenly appeared, must have consumed more time than I thought. It had also, it seemed obvious, either dulled or for a few moments at least blacked out my powers of observation.

“What do you want me to do?” Sebastian Roon said.

I. G. Roon lifted his coffee cup and took a long, slow sip, scowling as he did so at the small pitcher of water in the middle of the table. The way he did it I found interesting. The only executive I’d had an opportunity thus far to observe at close range was Ira Bern. I. G. Roon was the second. That is, if you didn’t count the man who with brilliant dexterity put together the pastrami sandwiches at the take-out counter in Lou G. Siegel’s, and it seemed to me reasonable in this context not to count him.

Ira Bern, a Fifth Street boy I admired and envied, never seemed to think. Or rather he never seemed to pause for thought. He reacted. Usually explosively. I. G. Roon, on the other hand, did not seem to react at all. When he said about Irving York with the lisp or the cleft palate, whoever Irving York was, “The son of a bitch,” Mr. Roon had sounded not unlike the counterman at Lou G. Siegel’s when he said, “Mustard or mayo?”

But it wasn’t the sounds I. G. Roon made that plucked at my nervous and at the moment somewhat disheveled attention. It was his physical appearance. The way he looked. I. G. Roon could have been mistaken for Arthur Rackham’s painting of the Mole in the copy of
The Wind in the Willows
from which Miss Kitchell used to read aloud every Friday afternoon to her classes in P.S. 188.

There was that same overall impression of black hair, much too much of it. The sharp snout. The leaning-forward stance. Even the curiously old-fashioned gold-rimmed eye-glasses that had to be called spectacles. What else? And the odd, ambivalent feeling that you were in the presence of either a delightful little creature from the animal kingdom, or Jack the Ripper in not very skillful disguise.

“If we’re over a barrel,” I. G. Roon said, “we’re over a barrel. It’s not a comfortable situation to be in, but it’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than having every goddamn rabbit’s hair from our New South Wales ranches go rotten because the people of this lousy country are quitting wearing hats, the dumb bastards, I hope they all die of double pneumonia.”

I tried to bring him into sharper focus by squinting through my still tear-blurred eyes. Had he meant what he said? Or was it just the flamboyant rhetoric of an irritated man? Before I could do much toward arriving at an answer to this question, I became aware that the light had changed. Not too noticeably, of course. There wasn’t much to begin with. But I sensed that something had come between me and Sebastian Roon’s uncle in the illumination provided by Shane’s restaurant for its clientele. I looked up and saw Edmund Lowe.

Long lean jaw. Slicked back India-ink black hair parted in the middle. Impeccably knotted tie. Man of the world skirt-chaser. Dandy. Fop. I don’t mean that he was really Edmund Lowe. But he sure as hell looked like Edmund Lowe. Especially in the scene from
What Price Glory?
where he was fighting with Victor McLaglen over what I had been taught by Miss Kitchell, a remarkable person but a modest lady, to think of as Dolores Del Rio’s favors. I thought of them often.

“Gentlemen,” said Edmund Lowe.

And a curious thing happened. I. G. Roon stopped looking like Moley in
The Wind in the Willows.
He became a dead ringer for my old
melamed,
Rabbi Goldfarb on Columbia Street. An absolute dead ringer, including the obsequious smile reserved for parents in the throes of negotiating the price of a bar mitzvah.