Tiffany Street (26 page)

“How much work she’ll be able to do today, God alone knows,” Mrs. Halpern said. “But she said I should wake her up at eight o’clock so she can get to the office. Two hours sleep. After yet yesterday only five hours. Benny, can you believe it?”

I was beginning to. Nevertheless, when I took Mr. Bern’s vici kids down to the lobby, I skipped the ruggle and cuppa cawfee. Instead, I went across the street to the phone booth in Liggett’s, looked up the number in the phone book, and called the office of Gold-Mark-Zweig, Inc., on Mosholu Parkway.

“Gold-Mark-Zweig, good morning.”

I recognized the voice of Grace Krieger. So I disguised my own. “Miss Halpern, please,” I said.

“Who is calling, please?”

Through the phone booth door and the plate-glass window beyond, I could see the huge sign on the gray building on the Seventh Avenue corner:
NOBODY IS IN DEBT TO MACY’S.

“This is the Macy’s shoe department,” I said. “Miss Halpern ordered a pair of shoes from us two weeks ago, and she said I should call her at her office when they came in. They’ve just come in, but I’m afraid they’re not exactly the color she wanted, so I thought I’d better talk to her before I send them back. May I talk with her, please?”

“Not today,” Grace Krieger said. “Miss Halpern won’t be in today.”

“How about tomorrow?” I said. “May I call her tomorrow?”

“If you don’t mind wasting a nickel,” Grace Krieger said. “Miss Halpern doesn’t work here anymore.”

I hung up and called the Halpern house. Mrs. Halpern said I could reach Hannah at her office. She had gone to work an hour ago. So I knew that either Mrs. Halpern or Hannah was lying about whatever it was that was happening. By now I had no difficulty with deciding in my own mind which of the two I could believe. I settled for Mrs. Halpern, and wasted no more nickels on Hannah.

I concentrated on trying to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Sebastian Roon. I got nowhere, except with working on and building up to rather large proportions the suspicion that my mother was covering for him. There could not, it seemed to me, be any other explanation for what was happening.

Every night, when I came home from C.C.N.Y., Sebastian Roon was out. Every morning, when I left for the office, his—or rather, my—bed was empty and had not been slept in. Every noon, when I called my mother, she said he had come in soon after I left, slept for a few hours, and left the house just before I called. The third day I called at eleven. My mother said Sebastian had just gone out. The fourth day I called at ten. He had just gone out. The fifth day I called at nine. He had just gone out.

“After less than two hours’ sleep?” I said.

“He’s a big boy,” my mother said. “I should go counting how many hours he sleeps?”

“How about the jazz bow business?” I said. “Without sleep, he can’t be giving you very much help.”

“Who needs help?” my mother said. “I know how to run my own business.”

That night, when I came home from C.C.N.Y., I took one more stab at it.

“Ma,” I said as I munched my slab of honey cake and sipped my glass of milk, “I just thought of something.”

“What?” my mother said.

“Maybe Seymour has found another place to sleep?”

She looked up from her account book and gave me a long, cool stare. I had the feeling that she was trying to decide whether or not to let me in on something she knew. The decision went against me. My mother shrugged.

“Who knows?” she said, and went back to her account book.

Saturday morning I decided there was only one way to settle the confusion with which I had been living. I called the Halpern house. Hannah was out, of course. Mrs. Halpern was friendly, as always.

“I may not get a chance to call again today,” I said “So would you mind giving Hannah a message for me, Mrs. Halpern?”

“Mind?” she said. “For you, Benny, anything.”

“Tell Hannah I’ll meet her under Goldkorn’s clock tonight,” I said. “Regular time.”

Regular time was not, of course, seven-fifteen, the time Hannah and I had agreed upon when we arranged our first date almost a year ago. Regular time was seven sharp, the time I always arrived at Goldkorn’s clock and always found Hannah waiting under it. On this Saturday I arrived at Goldkorn’s clock at a quarter to seven. Hannah was not under the clock. I settled myself against the tall iron pillar on top of which the clock sat. Waiting was all that was left for me.

Goldkorn’s clock was enormous. Four feet across from the nine to the three. Sitting twenty feet in the air, on the pillar against which I leaned, Goldkorn’s clock could be seen and read clearly all the way up to Bronx Park and all the way down to Grand Concourse. The digits were as big as the identification numbers on the chests of long-distance runners, and the hands could have been used as baseball bats.

These hands, which were moved by some sort of electrical mechanism, did not move smoothly and imperceptibly, like the hands of a watch. On Goldkorn’s clock it was never, say, ten and a half minutes after the hour. On Goldkorn’s clock it was always either ten minutes after or eleven minutes after. The electrical mechanism sent the minute hand forward in jumps, a full minute at a time. If you were anywhere within ten feet of the clock, you could hear the heavy muffled thump as the hand moved.

When I took up my position under the clock that Saturday, the minute hand was on nine. A quarter to seven. When I heard the thump overhead, I did not bother to look up. I knew it was fourteen minutes to seven. Fourteen thumps later I did not look up. Seven o’clock on the button. Then I looked up to Bronx Park, and down toward Southern Boulevard. No sign of Hannah.

Fifteen bumps later there was still no sign of her. So I knew for certain what I had suspected from the beginning: she was not coming. I remember that night, only a month ago, the night Sebastian Roon showed up on Tiffany Street for the first time. I had arrived under the clock five minutes after seven. Hannah had bawled me out for being late.

The clock overhead bumped again. Sixteen minutes after seven. Time to go home. Nobody was going to bawl out anybody under Goldkorn’s clock tonight. Still I lingered.

Another bump. Another. And another. Nineteen minutes. Just one more bump, I decided, and then—

And then a curious thing happened.

A taxi came out of Vyse Avenue, turned into 180th Street, eased up to the curb at my feet, and stopped in front of Goldkorn’s clock. I couldn’t make out who was inside, but I could see hands moving forward, across the back of the front seat, and the driver turning toward them, and I realized the fare was being paid. A moment later the door opened and a fat woman, in a series of panting jerks, as though she were saddled with a heavy knapsack, started to heave her way out. There was something familiar about the movements, but I did not recognize Mrs. Halpern until she stood up on the sidewalk and the cab pulled away.

Then I realized why I had not recognized her. Mrs. Halpern, like my mother, was not a taxi rider, and I had never seen her except in her own kitchen where, like my mother in our kitchen, she always wore a housedress covered by an apron. Here, on the sidewalk under Goldkorn’s clock, Mrs. Halpern was wearing a blue silk dress with white flowers embroidered at the neckline, and an Empress Eugénie hat.

“Benny!” she cried. “Thank God you waited! Hannah said you’re always here by seven o’clock, so she gave me money to take a taxi from the ship, but it was traffic from downtown there by the dock, Benny, such traffic I never saw, and I got scared you wouldn’t be here, and even though I knew I could call you up at home and tell you what Hannah said, I knew it would be nicer if I told you straight from the ship, like Hannah wanted.”

“The ship?” I said.

Mrs. Halpern nodded and smiled happily and poured out a stream of hopelessly disorganized facts that clearly were not disorganized to her. So I thought I’d better listen and place them in some sort of order that would make them comprehensible. It took a bit of doing, but I managed it I was so pleased with my achievement that I did not immediately grasp the extraordinary nature of the story.

More or less coherently, it went like this:

Seven days ago, the night John Barrymore came striding out of the shadow of the silent screen in, and as, General Crack, Hannah had been offered a job in England. The story, which Mrs. Halpern had heard only late this afternoon, when Hannah asked her mother to come to the ship to say farewell, was that my firm, Maurice Saltzman & Company, had a client over there who manufactured hats made from rabbit hairs raised in Australia by another client of Maurice Saltzman & Company. The English firm was in trouble, and had appealed to Maurice Saltzman & Company for an American bookkeeper to come over and straighten out its records. Only an hour ago, on board the ship that was taking her to England, Hannah had told her mother that I had recommended her for the job, and the reason her movements had been so erratic in recent days was that all week she had been busy with passports, steamship tickets, buying clothes, and packing. Indeed, Hannah had been so busy, she told her mother, that she had forgotten to tell me the hour her ship was sailing. She was kissing her mother goodbye out on deck when Hannah remembered.

“She felt so terrible,” Mrs. Halpern said, “honest, Benny, she started to cry, and she gave me money for a taxi because she said she wanted me to say goodbye for her, not on the telephone, but real people talking face to face, and Hannah said I should hurry, because she knew you’d be waiting under Goldkorn’s clock. So I hurried, and Benny, look, here I am.”

She threw her arms around me and gave me a fierce kiss.

“That’s from Hannah,” Mrs. Halpern said. “She said I should do it, and I should tell you why I was doing it, and you would understand.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Halpern,” I managed to say. “I understand.”

Mrs. Halpern kissed me again, not so fiercely this time.

“That one is from me alone,” she said. “Because you did such a wonderful thing for my Hannah.”

“It was nothing,” I said.

Through the rolling mass of my emotions, which reminded me of angleworms squirming in a bottle, came a brightly lighted sliver of cynicism: perhaps I had spoken the truth; perhaps it
was
nothing.

“Nothing he says,” Mrs. Halpern said to Goldkorn’s clock. “Benny,” she said, “you should have seen Hannah’s face on that ship. Like she was born again. It would have done your heart good, Benny.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. I walked Mrs. Halpern down Vyse Avenue to the stoop of her house, where she kissed me again.

“Oh, Benny, Benny,” she said with a joyous smile. “What a wonderful boy you are!”

It was not much, but it was something, to know that at least one member of the Halpern family thought so.

“Good night,” I said, and walked slowly in the dusk to Tiffany Street

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table working on her account book.

“I saved you soup and
kiggle
and a nice piece chicken,” she said, getting up. “I’ll warm it good so you’ll enjoy.”

So I knew she knew. My mother never fed me on Saturday nights.

“Thanks, Ma,” I said.

“Take off the jacket and the tie,” she said. “A good piece chicken you must eat it in comfort.”

She made no attempt to stop me when I went into my room. I took off my jacket and tie and came back out into the kitchen. My mother had set out enough food to carry my old East Fourth Street boy scout troop through a Labor Day weekend camping trip to the Palisades. I suddenly felt famished. I cleaned the plates.

My mother never mentioned Sebastian Roon. It was as though the young Englishman had never been with us. Or had never existed. But he had left his mark. He had given my mother her basic grounding in English, and she moved ahead steadily. Occasionally she would ask me to explain a difficult word. There was no deference in her request. It was not Benny Kramer asking Miss Bongiorno a question in class. My mother asked as an equal. That pleased me.

Also, my mother’s jazz bow business prospered. Soon she allowed me to keep not three but five dollars a week out of my Maurice Saltzman & Company pay envelope. And, of course, I owed that to Sebastian Roon. But I managed to restrain my gratitude. I kept it to myself.

One day, as she was cooking my breakfast, my mother asked how much time Mr. Bern allowed me for lunch every day.

“I don’t have a regular lunch hour,” I said. “If I’m working away from the office, I usually do what the other men on the staff do. I go out, have a sandwich, walk around for a while, and then come back to work. A half-hour. An hour. Like that. If Mr. Bern keeps me in the office for the day, I grab a bite when I’m out on an errand for him or Miss Bienstock. Why do you ask?”

“I’d like to buy a spring coat,” my mother said. “I’d like you to come with me.”

She had long ago lost the capacity to surprise me. Now it came hurtling back. My mother had never owned a spring coat. Her few clothes were functional, almost primitive. She made most of them herself. They had no style. She was not a good seamstress. But she was good enough for her purpose, which was protection from the elements. In the winter heavy she used to say, in the summer light.

“Why do you want to buy a spring coat?” I said.

“It’s coming soon spring,” my mother said. “In America, it comes spring, you buy a spring coat.”

It had taken an Englishman to lead her, after a quarter of a century of immigrant darkness, onto the bright road of Americanization.

“Why do you ask about my lunch hour?” I said.

“I want you to come help me,” she said.

“On my lunch hour,” I said, “I don’t think I could get up to the Bronx and then back to work. It’s an hour on the subway each way.”

“Who said the Bronx?” my mother said.

I got it. “You mean downtown?” I said.

“What else?” she said. “You want something good, you have to go downtown. Everybody goes to buy downtown.”

It was clear that she meant everybody who was in America.

“Is there any particular store you have in mind?” I said.

I was absolutely certain she had. Until she knew, my mother would never have asked me to accompany her. She did not mind unanswered questions, so long as it was somebody else who did not know the answer. My mother did not like to be tagged off base.