Tiffany Street (20 page)

So now I knew how much an old employee of I. G. Roon, Ltd., had earned each week.

“Thanks,” the old lady said.

She picked up the bills, rolled them into a tight sausage, and did something my mother always did with paper money. She lifted her skirt and stuck the roll of bills into the top of her stocking. Seb moved across to the old man and repeated the performance.

“Thirty-six,” he said at the end.

So I knew which of the two old people had seniority.

“This is the last?” the old man said.

“I’m afraid so,” Seb said.

“Then he’s gone, is he?” the old man said.

“This morning,” Seb said. “Heart attack.”

The old man nodded as he gathered the money and jogged the bills into a neat packet.

“Your uncle was not a bad man,” he said. “He was near with the dollar, but he was not a bad man.” He looked up at one of the framed pictures of rolling countryside. “Those rabbit ranches in Australia,” the old man said. “Solid gold, once. Solid gold, now. It wasn’t your uncle’s fault men stopped wearing hats.” He put the money in his pocket. “Any last things you want done here?”

“You’re very kind to offer,” Sebastian Roon said, “but it won’t be necessary. Mr. Bern tells me all the last things will be done by the Receiver in Bankruptcy.” Seb put out his hand. “Goodbye.”

The old man took Seb’s hand and shook it. Seb walked over to the old lady and put out his hand.

“Goodbye,” he said.

The old lady looked down on Seb’s hand as though he were showing her a rare geological specimen. She stared at it for a couple of moments. The specimen obviously held no interest for her. She turned back to the desk and picked up her pen.

“Let’s go, Benjamin,” Sebastian Roon said quietly. On the way across the outer office he picked up a rubber band from a bowl on the table near the door. Out in the hall, while we waited for the elevator, Seb snapped the rubber band around the remainder of money he had removed from the cashbox in the inner office. He tossed the small bundle in the air and caught it as we stepped into the elevator.

“Well, there’s the lot,” Seb said. “One hundred and seventy-six quid, give or take a few bob. Odd, how life works out. I’ve been a good boy, and I’ve played my cards correctly, and I haven’t blotted my copybook, and this bloody business, which I came to this country in the hope of some day owning, the whole damn things has gone up the spout. I’d probably have been better off if I’d remained in Blackpool.”

I felt the way I used to feel in school when I read a question on an examination paper. Uneasy. Not because of the death of Mr. I. G. Roon. I had learned on East Fourth Street that death was a fact of life. Kids were born. People died. Next! What made me feel uneasy was the way Sebastian Roon was wrapping it up. From the moment he had arrived in the Maurice Saltzman & Company office, up to this moment in the elevator going down to West 21st Street, it was as though he had been conducting a privately worked out funeral. The old lady in black, the old man wearing the black stocking sleeves, had they been rehearsed? And what kind of talk was that about how life works out? From a young kid? I, too, was young. How life works out? Christ almighty, I was only too acutely aware that my life had not even started working.

The elevator stopped. We walked out into the street. Sebastian Roon looked down toward Seventh Avenue, then up toward Eighth. He spoke without looking at me.

“Don’t you believe a bloody damn word I’ve just said,” he said quietly. “Nobody is better off in Blackpool.”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Probably go back to where nobody is better off,” he said. “Blackpool. I haven’t sorted it out yet. You see, my uncle was spread pretty thin, as you probably know. Your firm regularly audited twenty of his companies, but they didn’t seem to have any substance. No offices, no employees, no bank accounts. So far as I was able to figure out, they existed in the files of Maurice Saltzman & Company and nowhere else. Even the fees for auditing their records, the money came from the I. G. Roon, Ltd., bank account. I used to sign the checks every month. Only last month I made it a point to go over all the balance sheets. Not a farthing. So it’s probably back to Blackpool, but I’ll start the journey by going over to Shane’s. They’re open seven days a week, you know. But their intelligence service may nod a bit on Sundays, so they can’t possibly yet know that my bloody uncle has turned up his toes. I intend to order up the most expensive funeral meats in the larder, and put it all on tick. The old sod is dead, but his credit at Shane’s is still alive and kicking. Benjamin, won’t you join me?”

I did some thinking. What had happened to Sebastian Roon was bad, and I felt sorry for him. But I felt sorrier for myself. The death of his uncle, Miss Bienstock had implied, might mean the death of all I. G. Roon’s mysterious companies such as Grantham Estates, and Seb had just pretty much confirmed that. If that was all true, then the death of I. G. Roon may have killed Maurice Saltzman & Company. If it had, Benny Kramer was also dead. Rent on Tiffany Street came higher than rent on East Fourth Street. In 1930, Tiffany Street was no place on which to be unemployed.

“Over at Maurice Saltzman & Company,” I said, “we also work a seven-day week. I think I’d better get back to the office.”

“I could call Mr. Bern and tell him I need your services for another hour or two,” Seb said. “The way I did on Friday.”

“That was on Friday,” I said. “I don’t think it will work today.”

Sebastian Roon gave me a sharp look. As though he had been moving along and talking to someone familiar, a person he had known for a long time, and it suddenly occurred to him that he had been talking to a stranger. He exploded with one of those wonderfully infectious laughs that, years later, would lay the ladies in the aisles. Among other places.

“How right you are,” he said. “Nothing is going to work from now on. Except Shane’s, and I rather imagine that will work only for a few more hours.” Sebastian Roon put out his hand. “It was a pleasure knowing you,” he said.

I took his hand. It was bony and muscular. He squeezed hard. It hurt, but I didn’t mind.

“Damned decent of you to let me use your bed last night,” he said. “First good night I’ve had on American soil. Do give my very best to your mother. She’s quite a person. I’ll be seeing you.”

It was one of those phrases. Come to think of it, it still is. Like: “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.” I haven’t heard that one for years. In 1930, however, it was big stuff on East Fourth Street, and there were still a few wits who used it on Tiffany Street. So, when Sebastian Roon said I’ll be seeing, you, the words made no impression. A discharge of polite syllables under cover of which people parted and went their separate ways.

I went back to Maurice Saltzman & Company. Mr. Saltzman was gone. Mr. Bern was on the phone screaming at Mr. Shimnitz. Miss Bienstock said a bankruptcy audit had come in through the Irving Trust just a few minutes after I left the office with Sebastian Roon. Would I go over to 498 Seventh Avenue? Feld-Korn Frocks, Inc. Mr. Karp, our top senior, and Bill Breiner, our top semi-senior, could use an extra hand with the audit. The Irving Trust wanted a report by tomorrow. We would probably have to work through the night.

We did, and the Irving Trust got its report, and promptly rewarded Maurice Saltzman & Company with another audit. I began to breathe more easily. I sensed no feeling of disaster in the office as a result of the death of Mr. I. G. Roon. Perhaps Mr. Bern had screamed his back payments out of Mr. Shimnitz. Perhaps the fees for the two Irving Trust audits of that week were larger than usual. Perhaps Grantham Estates and the other I. G. Roon companies were in better shape than Sebastian Roon had thought. I don’t know. I know only that there was for the staff a curious sense of unreasonable but hysterical prosperity.

All in all, it was quite a week. I could hardly wait for Saturday night to roll around so Hannah Halpern and I could dig into those Gabilla’s knishes. As it happened, I did have to wait.

When I came into our Tiffany Street kitchen at six-thirty on Saturday night, I almost fell into a scene as improbable as the meeting in which Aunt Betsey Trotwood, with the terrified David Copperfield crouched behind her chair, faces up to Mr. Murdstone. Except that this scene took place not in Dover but in the Bronx. The language being exchanged by the participants was, therefore, Yiddish.

“Show me your book, Mrs. Groshartig,” my mother was saying.

She was saying it to a plump, middle-aged woman in a blue and white checked housedress. I had never seen her before. I wondered where she had come from. Not from very far, was my guess. Not in that dress, shielded by a grease-spattered apron. Mrs. Groshartig could have been a neighbor who had dropped in for a cup of chicken fat. But here on Tiffany Street I had never seen a neighbor.

“My book?” she said.

Mrs. Groshartig sounded as though my mother had asked to see her appendectomy scar. “Yes, the book,” my mother said.

They sat facing each other across the kitchen table. On the north side of the table, between them, sat Sebastian Roon. He was the only one of the three who was smiling. It was the same smile he had used when on the telephone from his uncle’s office he had arranged with Mr. Bern for me to be freed for the lunch at Shane’s and, again, the previous Saturday night, here in our kitchen, when he had demonstrated to my mother a better way to do Mr. Lebenbaum’s jazz bow “turning.” It was the smile that had accompanied Seb’s “
Voila!
”

“The book?” Mrs. Groshartig said again.

She sounded the way she looked. Uneasy. Or stupid. Perhaps both.

“The book you take to Mr. Lebenbaum when you bring back the ‘turning,’” my mother said.

It was obvious that she was making an effort to be patient and friendly. I knew her well enough to understand what that meant. My mother was engaged in the process of cajolery. She did not suffer fools easily.

“May I, Mrs. Kramer?” Seb said.

My mother nodded. Seb turned the smile on Mrs. Groshartig. It might have been a tranquilizer. The plump woman seemed to stop quivering.

“What Mrs. Kramer is referring to, Mrs. Groshartig,” Sebastian Roon said in impeccable Yiddish, if there is such a thing, “is the book in which is recorded your relationship with Mr. Lebenbaum, if I make myself clear. Do I?”

It was obvious from Mrs. Groshartig’s face that no bells had been rung. The smile on Seb’s face did not change. Even then, he had stage presence. But he did hike himself forward an inch or two in his chair.

“Let’s take it one step at a time,” he said. “Mrs. Groshartig, you do work for Mr. Lebenbaum, do you not?”

“I go every day to his store on Intervale Avenue,” the plump woman said. “He gives me a bundle ‘turning.’”

“You bring the bundle home to your flat, do you not?” Seb said.

“Downstairs,” Mrs. Groshartig said. “Here on the first floor.”

So she
was
a neighbor! They did exist on Tiffany Street as they had existed on East Fourth Street! It was merely that here on Tiffany Street, instead of screaming through their open windows, they cowered behind locked doors.

“And in your flat,” Seb said, “downstairs on the first floor of this building, you work on the bundle until all the ‘turning’ is completed. Is that correct, Mrs. Groshartig?”

The tranquilized look of confusion on her face seemed to break up. Mrs. Groshartig giggled at this charmer from a land across the sea.

“
Avodde
,” she said. Esperanto, or Yiddish, for “of course.” “Otherwise why would a person walk all the way over to Intervale Avenue and schlepp home a bundle it takes the
koyach
out of a person just to lift it.”

“Why indeed?” said Seb. “Now, then, having completed the bundle of ‘turning,’ Mrs. Groshartig, the next morning you carry it back in its finished state to Mr. Lebenbaum on Intervale Avenue. Is
that
correct, Mrs. Groshartig?”

The giggle swung toward my mother. “This is some
vitzler
you got here, Mrs. Kramer,” the plump woman said.

“Wait, wait,” my mother said. “When this
boychik
really gets started with the jokes, you’ll
plotz
.”

“Don’t, Mrs. Groshartig,” Seb said. “Not quite yet. There is one further point. Thus: when you bring the completed ‘turning’ into Mr. Lebenbaum’s store, he counts your work. Again correct, Mrs. Groshartig?”

“He has to count it,” the plump woman said. “Another person he wouldn’t trust if it was his own father.”

“We musn’t criticize,” Seb said. “Sound business practice is something that must be admired. Having counted your work, he multiplies the number of pieces you have brought in by the price he pays you per piece. That; too, is correct, Mrs. Groshartig, is it not?”

The plump woman nodded. “A nickel a
shtikl,”
she said.

Even to me, who had been hearing this phrase all my life, it sounded funny in connection with the piecework rates for making jazz bows. The phrase was usually encountered in delicatessen stores, lettered as a sign on a small wooden spatula stuck into a bowl of two-inch lengths of knubbleworst sitting on top of the counter. These were what is known as a
nosh.
Something to nibble at while you watched the proprietor put together your hot pastrami sandwich.

“Good-good,” Seb said. “And after Mr. Lebenbaum has done his multiplication, and he reaches the figure you have earned, what does he do with this figure, Mrs. Groshartig?”

The plump woman dug into the pocket of her apron and came up with a small notebook from Woolworth’s.

“What should he do with it?” Mrs. Groshartig said. “He writes it down here in my little book.”

Seb swung the smile toward my mother. “
Voila!
” he said.

“What?” my mother said.

“Your witness, Mrs. Kramer,” Seb said.

My mother took the notebook from Mrs. Groshartig and thumbed the pages.

“So all right,” she said. “A nickel a
shtikl
is correct. Right?”

“Mrs. Kramer,” the plump woman said. “You know it’s correct. You also work for Mr. Lebenbaum. We all get paid the same.”