Tiffany Street (3 page)

“I have,” I said. “He told me I can tell you anything.”

“Then let me tell you what he told me,” said Dr. McCarran. “It may make things simpler, and probably speed them up. I understand you have to be in the Federal Courthouse on Walnut Street at two-thirty.”

“Seb doesn’t seem to have left anything out,” I said.

“Good actors rarely do,” said Dr. McCarran. “Here is what Seb told me. You have a son named Jack. He has just graduated from Harvard. He has gone to the University of Indiana to work for his masters in fine arts. His New York draft board has told him that they are forbidden to grant any more graduate school deferments. Your son Jack’s draft board told him before he went to Indiana that, if he did go, he would be in the Mekong Delta in three weeks. Is that correct?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “As Jack reported it to me, the draft board said two weeks.”

“Close enough,” said Dr. McCarran.

He lifted a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses that hung around his neck on one of those couturier braided ropes. He set the glasses on his nose, and looked at me exactly coldly but with a sort of clinical interest. As though up to now he had been going through a boring duty he had promised to go through for a friend, but now his own emotions had been engaged. My stomach reacted with a small tremor. He
was
Osgood Perkins!

“This is obviously difficult for you,” Dr. McCarran said. “It’s easier for me. May I continue?”

“Please,” I said.

My mother did not learn English until I was almost eighteen. But she learned me my manners. In Yiddish. Thanks, Ma.

“Seb says you don’t want that boy killed in the Mekong Delta,” Dr. McCarran said. “Is that correct?”

I looked at him for a couple of moments. I decided that nothing would be gained by hitting him. Even though I knew just how to do it. Corporal Isherwood had taught me the blow during a commando course I had to take in Kent a month before D-day.

“Strike for the bahstid’s jug,” Corporal Isherwood had barked at his dozen uneasy pupils. “It’s where these bahstids are vulnerable. Get them while they’re too confident to protect themselves. Make your choice. The nuts or the guts. The nuts is more decisive. But the guts is closer. Straighten you hand, palm flat, and swing like this, like you wuz cuttin’ the bahstid’s air flow. Which is what you’ll be doon. Easy. Sharp. Hard. That will take care of the bahstid.”

I never got a chance to put Corporal Isherwood’s instructions into practice. By the time I got to Caen the bahstids were all running like crazy from Patton’s tanks. Just as well. I doubt that I could have done what Corporal Isherwood urged.

So I said, as calmly as I could, to Dr. McCarran: “No, I don’t want that boy killed.”

Dr. McCarran said, “Seb tells me he has told you in confidence about my service with the draft board during the last war.”

“He has,” I said.

“Please forgive the next question,” Dr. McCarran said. “Are we both agreed on the phrase ‘in confidence’?”

The bahstids. Even the best of them. They had to close the shutters.

“Completely,” I said. “Except for my wife and my son. I will have to tell them, of course.”

“Of course,” said Dr. McCarran. “Okay, then. During the last war, I served as one of the chief medical advisers to General Hershey. The average citizen is quite savage about the draft. Understandably so. Since the days of Crassus nobody has looked with delight on a system that can take a son, a husband, a brother, a lover, perhaps even just a nice neighbor, from his normal routine and shove him into an enterprise where he may very probably get his head blown off, and often what gets blown off is worse than his head. Anyway, if you don’t look with delight on something, you begin inventing ways to circumvent it. The best way is to wet the bed.”

“What?” I said. What would you have said?

“The army does not like to draft men who wet their beds,” Dr. McCarran said.

The effects of human speech are, of course, as unpredictable as the effects of nuclear fission. I have no doubt that to Dr. McCarran his simple statement was no more startling than the dropping of The Bomb over Hiroshima had been to the pilot of the
Enola Gay.
We were fighting a war. When you fight a war you have to win. The methods are not your concern. You just follow orders.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s wrong with wetting the bed?”

Dr. McCarran gave me a look that had in it patience, because he was obviously a decent human being, but the look had in it also a number of not quite definable elements. They belonged to that area in which people with specialized knowledge, people like doctors, come to know so much about the human condition that they find it difficult to discuss the condition with even well-intentioned dumbbells.

“There is nothing wrong with wetting the bed in a private bedroom,” Dr. McCarran said patiently. “In a barracks, however, a large chamber inhabited by dozens of men, wetting the bed is a disruptive act. It is a subject for ridicule. Ridicule destroys discipline. The army looks with disfavor upon the disruption of discipline. In fact, the army looks upon the destruction of discipline the way the priests of your race, Mr. Kramer, look upon the desecration of the Torah. The army wants men. But the army does not want men who wet their beds.”

Another good thing about N.Y.U. Law School. It teaches you to put things together. It did in 1933-1937, anyway.

“So if you tell the army you wet your bed,” I said, “the army will not draft you?”

Dr. McCarran nodded. But I noticed his face looked troubled.

“Not quite,” he said. “If to stay out of the army all a young man has to do is say he wets the bed, we would never have an army. It’s an easy lie. So the army employs doctors.”

The troubled look cut deeper furrows into Dr. McCarran’s marvelous Osgood Perkins face.

“I was one of those doctors,” he said. “The way I got to know Seb was that many actors, friends of his, wanted to stay out of the army, and they knew about the bed-wetting bit, but they didn’t know how to, how shall I put it, yes, they didn’t know how to activate it into plausibility.”

I gave that a bit of thought. Dr. McCarran had obviously grown accustomed to visitors or patients who, at this point, needed a bit of thought. He pulled the fat silver stopper out of an expensive Abercrombie & Fitch thermos jug and poured himself a glass of ice water. He did not offer one to his visitor. I understood why he did not. At this point in a puzzling situation the visitor did not want ice water. Why waste time?

“The problem, then,” I said, “would seem to be how to convince the army doctors, when a man says he wets his bed, how to convince the army doctors he is telling the truth. Is that correct?”

Dr. McCarran was so clearly pleased with me, that I was pleased with myself.

“Mr. Kramer,” he said, “you have not only put your finger on it. You have poked a hole right through it. Bull’s-eye!”

“So you worked out a system,” I said. “How to check on men who say they wet their beds to find out if they are lying, or if they really do wet their beds.”

“Precisely,” said Dr. McCarran. “I am not proud about this. But I wanted my country to beat the pants off a son of a bitch named Hitler. I hated that louse. I still do. I would have done anything to help. What I was able to do was track down poor kids who said they peed in bed but actually didn’t. Isn’t that insane?”

I could see from his face that he intended it to be a serious question. I had come to him about a problem that had been shaking the hell out of me. I saw that in his attempt to help me solve it, I was shaking the hell out of him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If you saved some kids from dying, it can’t be insane.”

“Because you want me to save your son from dying,” Dr. McCarran said.

He could have been behind the A&P counter asking me how many bunches of asparagus I wanted.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I don’t want that kid to die. Any more than my parents wanted me to die in the war that was yours and mine. But my parents didn’t try to stop me. My mother and father would have considered it a dirty thing to do what I’m doing here today. You see, my mother and father were immigrants. They had escaped from Europe on the run. With murderous bastards like Hitler breathing down their necks. My mother and father made it. Others didn’t. My mother and father understood why it was necessary to fight savages like Hitler. They were proud to have their son in that fight. Their son is still proud that he was. But I’m not proud of this war. I’m ashamed of it. We’re not wiping out an evil like Hitler. This time we’re the evil. I don’t want my son to be a part of it. He’s going to die some day. Everybody dies, including you and me. But I’m damned if I’m going to let him die as a part of this plague. To save him from that I’ll do anything, Dr. McCarran.”

Dr. McCarran stared at me for a moment, or a minute, or an hour. I don’t know. My heart was hammering so hard I couldn’t count time.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Sebastian Roon vouches for you.”

“He is my son’s godfather,” I said.

“Your son couldn’t have a better one,” Dr. McCarran said.

He lifted the green blotter on his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was not a letterhead. Just a sheet of white paper. And I could see it had about twenty or thirty typewritten lines on it.

“These are the questions I worked out during the crusade against Hitler,” he said. Not without irony. “To check the veracity of a boy who told his draft board doctor he peed in bed. And I’ve written down the answers. All your son has to do at his physical exam is rattle off these answers.”

Osgood Perkins—no, sorry—Dr. McCarran bowed his head.

“Christ Almighty,” he said to the green desk blotter. When he lifted his head, I was relieved to see he was not crying. “It’s a pretty rotten way to live,” he said. In a voice so low that I could only just barely hear him. But I did. “Teaching kids how to convince draft board doctors that they pee in bed. Wouldn’t that have made Osler proud of us?”

I didn’t answer. I just took the sheet of paper, stood up, and went to the door. I made it because he held my elbow all the way.

“Tell your son to memorize these simple questions and answers,” Dr. McCarran said. “He won’t be drafted.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I walked back to the Federal Courthouse. One of the most puzzling things about being alive, I have learned slowly, is that there are times when you don’t know what the hell is going on inside your own head. Emotions are too complicated to sort out. They make you feel rudderless. I hate that. I like to feel I am in control. I like to feel I know where I am going. The infuriating truth is that I rarely do. For such moments I always carry the copy of
Bleak House
given to me by Miss Anna Bongiorno in J.H.S. 64 when I reached the semifinals in the New York
Times
oratorical contest on the Constitution in 1924. I did not make it into the finals, but I still have that copy of
Bleak House.
I never leave home without slipping it into my overnight bag. Even before I pack my razor and toothbrush.

You can always, I have found, buy a toothbrush. Or find a barber. But copies of
Bleak House,
I have discovered, are difficult to come by on short notice. So I carry my own, and in spare moments away from home I lean on it. The book gets you through. Art always does. Good art, anyway, and
Bleak House
is up there with the best.

It got me through a long wait in the Federal Courthouse on Walnut Street until I was called to the stand. After half an hour of foolish questions, Mr. Schlisselberger’s Philadelphia lawyer asked if I, as an experienced and well-known New York real-estate lawyer, would or could—no lawyer ever uses one word when two can be squeezed in—tell the court if any new theaters had been built in the Times Square area.

“Not in my time,” I said.

The defense attorney leaped to his feet. “And what, sir, if I may ask,” he thundered (he was a basso, like Ezio Pinza), “what is your time, sir?”

Without thought, because it was simple fact, as much a part of my life as my home address, I said: “April fourth, nineteen thirteen, the day I was born, until today.”

Pause. Defense attorney plops back into his seat, frowning furiously. I wonder why. The judge, a man who has hitherto been for me faceless, leans down from the bench. He proves to have a marvelous face. Plump, but not fat. Lined in a good way. The best way. Like a marbled steak. The lines underscoring the obvious fact that the face has been used. By thought. By worry. By preoccupation with the human condition, which is always troubling and never good. All these lines came together in a friendly smile, the whole head framed in a neatly tended mop of thick white hair.

“Mr. Kramer,” the judge says to me gently, “that’s the only time any of us can testify to.”

So I’m doing it.

The decision was not made. It happened. I caught the four o’clock Metroliner back to New York. I had the afternoon papers. And I had
Bleak House.
But I did not read. I stared out the train window. As anybody who has been subjected to this ride can testify, there is not much to see. Yet the unattractive roadbed from Philadelphia to Penn Station held my attention. I was not, of course, seeing the dreary landscape. I was seeing that judge. His alive, concerned face. And hearing his totally unexpected words. Over and over again. Why?

I don’t know. I had gone to Philadelphia to save the life of my son. To do so I had been forced to involve myself in a fragment of a stupid legal brawl. The only justification for its existence was the wealth of the plaintiff. He could afford to snarl the dockets of the nation’s courts with a piece of idiotic vanity. He could afford to enlist my not inexpensive help in this shameful charade. As the train pulled into Penn Station, the core of what was troubling me surfaced in the form of a question. I wished it hadn’t. The question was: Is this a way for a man to spend his life? The question was addressed to Benny Kramer.

Before I could answer it, things started to happen. There were, of course, no taxis. There have been no taxis at Penn Station since Commodore Perry opened up Japan, though most New Yorkers are either unaware of this fact or refuse to believe it. They emerge from the railroad station into the street, seem astonished to discover that there are no cabs waiting, and do something I feel I have a right to call stupid because I have done it so often myself: they ask a redcap to get one for them.