Last Respects (53 page)

“Mr. O’Casey,” said L G. Roon. “This is a pleasure.”

Even in my damaged state I sensed something wrong in Mr. Roon’s words. No. Not in his words. His words, on checking back, seemed okay. What was wrong was the look on his face. And the strange tone of his voice. He could have been Jesus, unexpectedly a sudden stickler for the amenities, telling Pontius Pilate what a pleasure it was to be brought before the Procurator of Judea, and apologizing for the imposition of getting him out of bed in the middle of the night

“If it’s a pleasure, like you say,” said Edmund Lowe or Mr. O’Casey, “you’d invite a guy to sit down.”

His voice disappointed me. Edmund Lowe never sounded like that. Not even in the early talkies. Edmund Lowe was a gentleman.

“So sit down,” said I. G. Roon, and he pulled out a chair between himself and me. Until this moment I had not even noticed it was there. “Take a load off,” I. G. Roon said. “And have a snort. Seb?”

Sebastian reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his silver flask. To my surprise, before he had unscrewed the cap George had materialized with another coffee cup. He set it down in front of Mr. O’Casey. For some reason, not very clearly thought out, I felt it would help in my confused condition if I counted the ice cubes in Mr. O’Casey’s cup. I made the attempt. I failed. The amber fluid splashed down out of Sebastian Roon’s silver flask on probably two, perhaps more, ice cubes. Mr. O’Casey raised his cup.

“Here’s to business,” he said.

I. G. Roon’s eyebrows ascended toward his widow’s peak, and almost made it. “Business?” he said. “What business?”

“I thought I heard you and your nephew here discussing the rabbit’s fur business,” Mr. O’Casey said.

I. G. Roon shook his head. His face looked sad. He might have been responding to a toast by George V in honor of the Kaiser’s skill as a woodcutter at Doom.

“You and your thinking,” he said. “If you did less of it, Mr. O’Casey, you wouldn’t have to spend so much of your life chasing after me in restaurants where I’m having a pleasant little lunch with my nephew and his friend.”

“Oh,” Mr. O’Casey said. “So this is just another one of your pleasant little lunches with your nephew?”

“And with my nephew’s friend,” I. G. Roon said.

“What is your nephew’s friend’s name, may I ask?” said Mr. O’Casey. In a tone of voice,
I
may add, that Edmund Lowe, who was a gentleman, would never have employed.

“Seb,” Mr. Roon said. “What’s your friend’s name?”

“Franklin Kramer,” said Sebastian Roon.

“No, not Franklin,” I said. “Benjamin.”

And that was the last thing I did say. Or the last thing I remember. About Shane’s restaurant, anyway. The next thing I actually knew, I was lying on the couch in the file room of the Maurice Saltzman & Company offices on 34th Street. My head ached. All my insides bubbled. The taste in my mouth seemed to have been scraped from the rusted plates of the
Leviathan
in dry dock. I wanted to die. Mainly because, among the three people standing over me, was Sebastian Roon.

“He’ll be all right,” Roon was saying to Mr. Bern and Miss Bienstock. “I’m afraid I miscalculated his capacity for spirits.”

Miss Bienstock’s expression of perplexity deepened to pandemonium proportions. “Spirits?” she said. “What spirits?”

“That chap from the insurance company,” Sebastian Roon said. “O’Casey. He stalked us to this restaurant. Shane’s on Twenty-third Street.”

Ira Bern looked troubled. “Anything?” he said tensely.

Sebastian Roon laughed. “Nothing at all,” he said. “My uncle and I had finished the York transaction before O’Casey arrived.” He laughed again. “Poor Mr. Kramer.”

“Mr. Who?” Mr. Bern said.

Sebastian Roon nodded toward me. “He is your Mr. Kramer, is he not?”

Miss Bienstock, without losing the grip on her look of perplexity, said, “You mean Benny.”

“I suppose I do,” said Sebastian Roon. “Yes, he did say his name is Benjamin. Well, he did nobly. He was most helpful to me and my uncle, and we’re both grateful, we really are, Mr. Bern.”

“You are?” Mr. Bern said.

“Indeed yes,” said Sebastian Roon.

“But what should I do with him?” said Ira Bern, staring down at me.

Sebastian Roon looked thoughtful. “Why don’t you simply let him sleep it off?” he said.

T
AKE A FOOL’S ADVICE,
my mother used to say. And then she would casually drop into your lap a ladleful of wisdom for which Benjamin Franklin would have fought to obtain the rights. For inclusion, that is, in
Poor Richard’s Almanack.

“If there’s two people in the house,” I remember my mother saying one day, “always let the other person answer the telephone.”

She said this at a time when Alexander Graham Bell’s invention was to her life not unlike what the Beagle was to Darwin. Every day was a revelation. I don’t think my mother had ever used a telephone until I paid to have one installed in the Bronx apartment on Tiffany Street.

I thought my mother would be pleased by this electronic addition to our life. Not only because it provided a rather spectacularly new contact with the outside world, but also because it was a visible symbol to relatives and friends that the Kramer family had moved up the economic and social ladder. Visible symbols were important to my mother. I have felt for years that she practically invented conspicuous consumption single-handed. My mother had always been a snob. William Makepeace Thackeray, take note. My mother had been a snob even when we were very poor down on East Fourth Street. I see now that living with a telephone, while it may have pleased my mother, confused her. Perhaps it even frightened her. Yes, I think it probably did. I remember coming home late at night, after my long day in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company, after my classes at C.C.N.Y., and asking if anybody had called. My question was silly. I didn’t really expect anybody to call me. As I have indicated earlier, I had left all my friends behind on East Fourth Street. Without telephones, of course. And I had made no new friends during my months on Tiffany Street. There had been no time. I was always downtown. Just the same, the Kramers now had a telephone, and I had seen enough movies to know that when you came home you asked whoever was around if anybody had called you while you were out. Usually, it was a butler. But the Kramer family had not yet made it up to butlers. I had to lean on my mother.

This was easy to do. She always waited up for me with “something to go in your stomach,” as she put it. And it was always something good. Food does not always depend on the shop it came from. The best depends on the feeling with which it is prepared.

My mother prepared mine for me the way legendary French chefs, according to their memoirs, prepared his for Louis Napoleon: with love. That’s why my mother was always around. It took me some time to grasp that there was something wrong in this. On East Fourth Street she had rarely left our tenement flat. Aside from her daily shopping expedition to the Avenue C pushcart market for the ingredients of our evening meal, I don’t remember that she ever went out into the street except for an unusual reason. A visit to Dr. Gropple, for example. Yet there had seemed nothing wrong in this. I don’t really know why. My guess is that my mother was doing what most women on East Fourth Street did.

It was a place where a good deal of life was lived outdoors. By children, who went to school. By men, who went to their jobs. But not by women. They stuck close to what it seems foolish to call the family hearth. Some hearth. A black cast-iron coal-burning stove in the kitchen. Nonetheless, I feel the image is accurate. Women stayed home because that was where women belonged. Up in the Bronx, on Tiffany Street, my mother stayed home for what struck me long after we moved there as a different reason. My mother on Tiffany Street in the Bronx was not unlike Pocahontas on Ebury Street in London.

In the social sense she had moved upward. But in the emotional sense she had moved into
terra incognita.
On East Fourth Street my mother had known the boundaries of what she was afraid of. On Tiffany Street there were no boundaries. A large, sprawling, shapeless world poured itself away in all directions from the tight little block of yellow apartment houses to which we had moved from East Fourth Street. So she stayed home. And when I came home Saturday night after my lunch at Shane’s and asked my foolish question about whether anybody had called, there she was, with plates full of food, trying to pretend I had not asked a foolish question.

“Yes,” she said casually. Her notion of casually was to look up at the ceiling as she spoke. “This afternoon, when I put this honey cake in the stove—eat the piece on this side first, it has a nice
rindle
—a man named Reibeisen called.”

“Reibeisen?” I said.

What else could I say? In 1930 a reibeisen in Yiddish was a grater. I’m sure it still is. On it you could then, and probably still can now, reduce raw potatoes to the batterlike material from which
latkes
are made.

“Yes, Reibeisen,” my mother said. “What’s the matter? You don’t know anybody named Reibeisen?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“So a telephone it’s a thing you pay for only to receive calls from people you know?”

I thought about that for a moment. The answer was, of course, yes. Or so I had always believed. Why would strangers call you on the phone?

“Not necessarily,” I said. In Yiddish. My mother did not speak English. When I feel that my light is not shining as brightly as I could wish in the auditorium of the world, I remind myself that I know how to say “not necessarily” in Yiddish.

“Did this Mr. Reibeisen leave his number?” I said to my mother.

“Would I let a man call here and not ask him to leave his number?” my mother said. “Of course he left his number.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s have it, and I’ll call him back.”

“Not so fast,” my mother said. “Give a person a minute to think. I have it in my head.” She closed her eyes. “It begins with like a Susskind?”

“Susskind?” I said. “Ma, I doubt it.”

“I’m the one who answered the telephone,” my mother said. “So he doubts it.”

“All I mean,” I said, “I don’t think there’s a New York telephone exchange named Susskind.”

“What’s like it, then?” my mother said.

I considered what did not seem a very large problem until you tackled it. What, indeed, is like a Susskind?

“Susquehanna, maybe?” I said finally.

My mother nodded with approval. Her brilliant son, valedictorian of his class in Thomas Jefferson High School, had come through again.

“That’s it,” she said. “Susquehanna.”

Susquehanna is not an easy word to say in Yiddish. But my mother managed. Even though the way she managed it would probably have been confusing to the New York Telephone Company.

“Susquehanna what?” I said.

“What what?” my mother said.

“The numbers,” I said. “After the word Susquehanna there have to be numbers.”

My mother’s examination of the ceiling became more intense. When my mother examined a ceiling she brought to my mind, which was even then earnest but untidy, an image: Marie Antoinette studying the jewel case on a top shelf, trying to decide whether diamonds or rubies were more appropriate for a ride in a tumbril

“Well, then, all right, Susquehanna,” my mother said. “At least we have that settled.”

“Yes, but the numbers,” I said. “I can’t call Mr. Reibeisen back unless I have the numbers that go with the Susquehanna.”

“Don’t I know that?” my mother said. “What do you think I am? A stupid greenhorn?”

Stupid? My God, no. Given the proper education—or even any education—my mother could have guided Einstein to the only correct method for splitting the atom long before General Groves was appointed to the Manhattan Project. But my mother had been given no education. And pride had prevented her from seeking it at a time when she could have had it for the asking.

If you went to school at night, as most immigrants on East Fourth Street did, you were making a public confession that you were ignorant. My mother was not a confessor. My mother was a battler. She did not go to night school. She made it all up out of her head as she went along. And when I say all I mean all. Everything.

What God had in store for you. Why the price of potatoes on the Avenue C pushcarts was the result of a conspiracy among the “bosses.” How many ounces there should be in a pound. The longest distance between two points. Why you should add lemon to soap when you wash your hair. How to answer a telephone. Everything.

“Of course you’re not stupid,” I said. “And it’s a little late to discuss whether you’re a greenhorn. You’ve been in this country for twenty-five years.”

“Thirty,” my mother said. “The president was Tiddy Roosevelt.”

“Teddy,” I said.

“What’s the difference?” my mother said.

I didn’t bother to answer that. Many of my mother’s questions defied the polite q. and a. of simple logic.

“Never mind the difference,” I said. “Just give me the numbers after the Susquehanna.”

My mother resumed her contemplation of the ceiling. She was not, of course, seeking answers in the unevenly painted plaster. Hungarian girls, when they are no longer girls, tilt their eyes toward heaven quite frequently. It smooths the jowls.

“It begins with a two,” my mother said. “A two to begin.”

“Susquehanna two,” I said. “Okay. Susquehanna two. And then?”

“A seven,” my mother said. “Could it be this Mr. Reibeisen he has a Susquehanna, and a two, and then a seven?”

“Possibly,” I said. “Seven happens to a lot of people.”

“But after a two?” my mother said. “And first a Susquehanna?”

“No,” I said. “I must admit that’s more rare.”

“What’s with the rare?” my mother said.

“It’s like, say, unusual,” I said.

Getting a phone number out of my mother was not unlike reeling in a tarpon. If you wanted the fish it was foolish to make waspish remarks to the rod and reel. If you wanted the fish you played the game. Patience was not always rewarded, but it was the only highway to possible success.

“If we have the Susquehanna and the two and the seven,” I said, “okay. But we still have to get two more numbers.”