Tiffany Street (11 page)

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.

“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.