Tiffany Street (31 page)

“You see,” Elizabeth Ann said to me through her laughter, “I thought Seb was an actor who had been sent over by an agent to read for a part in the play.”

“She told me it was a very small part,” Seb said, “but a very important part.” He grinned. “Little did I know how small.”

“A good thing you didn’t,” Elizabeth Ann said. “All I could do was thank my stars. There he was. The actor I had been praying for. Willie!”

“Don’t I look the part?” Seb said.

“Well,” I said.

Seb beetled his brows into a tough-guy scowl, flexed his muscles, and growled like a bulldog. “Me!” he said. “Tough, masculine strike leader!”

“That’s what makes him so perfect,” Elizabeth Ann said. “The audience is expecting a crude dese-dem-and-doze oaf. And what do they get? This tall, elegant, blond thing with a British accent you can smear all over Balliol.”

“He certainly was effective in the part tonight,” I said.

“His best performance, however, was the day he was hired,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Before he even stepped on the stage.”

“Now, now,” Seb said. “We mustn’t make too much of that.”

“I am making just as much of it as it deserves,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Which is a lot” To me: “When I brought him into the theater, and I told the director I’d found my Willie, he said he may be your Willie but he’s not mine. My plays, he said, are not cast by amateur virgins from Sarah Lawrence. Whereupon Seb grabbed him by the necktie, lifted him a foot or more off the ground, and said you will apologize to this lady for that, you so-and-so.”

“Actually,” Seb said, “the words I used were ‘you mincing bugger.’ And I doubt that I had him more than two or three inches off the ground. After all, we can’t have swine talking like that to young ladies, can we? Not in this great and glorious country to which your mother and I have fled from the pogroms of Blackpool and the garbage pail of Europe.”

“Anyway,” Elizabeth Ann said, “I got the apology and Seb got the part.”

“And I got a small upstairs bedroom that used to belong to the sexton when the Preshinivetz Playhouse used to be a church,” Seb said.

“That means my mother doesn’t know you’re back in New York,” I said.

Seb grinned. “It also means you can continue sleeping in your own bed,” he said. “Miss Waldbaum seems to be signaling rather frantically, wouldn’t you say?”

Elizabeth Ann and I turned. Lillian was standing in the archway that led from the Family Tricino living room to the hall. She was scowling and waving her hand in a sweeping, impatient gesture toward herself. I stood up and pointed inquiringly to myself. Lillian shook her head irritably and waved me back into my chair.

“That leaves only you,” Seb said to Elizabeth Ann. “Miss Waldbaum would hardly be urging me to join her in the little girls’ room, would she?”

“Excuse me,” Elizabeth Ann said. She stood up and walked toward Lillian. I watched her go.

“Pretty,” Seb said. “Isn’t she?”

My face grew hot again. I turned back. “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not that. There’s a sort of quality about her. I don’t know what it is.”

“I do,” Sebastian Roon said. “She always looks as though she’s just taken a shower.”

F
ORTY YEARS LATER, WALKING
up Madison Avenue from my drink with Sebastian Roon at Will’s to my apartment at 83rd and Fifth, I was struck again by the funny little feeling in my heart that Seb’s remark about Elizabeth Ann had brought me across the spaghetti plates at that table in The Family Tricino.

“Are you in pain, Mr. Kramer?” Sean said.

I came back to 1971.

“Not any more,” I said. “Did you win?”

Sean is the day doorman of our apartment house. Noon to 8:00
P.M.
It is not a new apartment house. What real-estate brokers identify as “one of those real oldies with huge fireplaces that actually work and those great big high ceilings.”

One of the most pleasant things about our apartment house is what Elizabeth Ann calls the staff. Why shouldn’t she? She was born and raised in Wynwood on the Philadelphia Main Line. Servants were as normal a part of her existence as toilets in the hall were a part of mine. She knew things I didn’t know. It helped when we bought our apartment at 83rd and Fifth.

Elizabeth Ann discovered at once that all our elevator operators, handymen and doormen are Irish. Not Third Avenue Irish. The employees of our apartment house are Irish Irish. Sean O’Casey stuff. They are brought over from Dublin. Or County Galway. Or wherever William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory rapped the knuckles of John Millington Synge and ordered him to cut the malarkey and go to the Aran Islands where he would learn what life is all about.

For Sean Boyle what life is all about is soccer. What puzzles me about what life is all about for Sean Boyle is where he plays soccer. He tells me he lives on Fox Street. This is where Hot Cakes Rabinowitz used to live. Just around the corner from where Sebastian Roon helped my mother get started in the jazz bow business. Soccer? On Fox Street? Around the corner from Tiffany Street? Preposterous. Peter Stuyvesant and his bunch of Dutch chums playing bowls on Fox Street? Very well, that I will accept. It’s a piece of Americana. But Sean Boyle of County Galway playing soccer on Fox Street? Who does he think he’s kidding? Obviously, Benny Kramer.

“No, we lost,” Sean said.

I detected a note of bitterness. Not good. Bitterness does not sit well on Sean’s sunny, open, pleasant and, it distresses me to record, somewhat stupid face. I don’t know how other people feel, but when I like someone I like to feel he or she has brains. It hurts to state that Sean, who gives me great pleasure by his mere existence, is a horse’s ass.

“They brought in this man from Belfast,” he said. “They sprung him on us, Mr. Kramer. It was crooked, of course. The names of the members of the teams had been posted for a week. Every man named properly. And then they brought in this ringer from Belfast.”

“That’s bad,” I said.

It seemed the appropriate comment

“It was that Mr. Kramer,” Sean said. “Very dispiriting. One expects sportsmen to play fair, and then they bring in a man from Belfast”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Thank you, Mr. Kramer,” Sean said. “But don’t you worry, sir. Next Sunday we’ll get a bit of our own back.” He grinned wickedly. “My cousin Roderick just arrived. He’s going on the rear elevator. Midnight to eight
A.M.
Roderick is from Belfast too.”

“How’s the betting?” I said.

“Two to one in favor of Fox Street,” Sean said.

“Can I get in for a five-spot?”

“You certainly can, Mr. Kramer. I’ll take care of it personally.”

I gave him a five-dollar bill.

“If I lose,” I said, “don’t tell me. If I win, don’t tell Mrs. Kramer. She disapproves of gambling.”

“Good women always do, sir,” Sean Boyle said. “That’s what makes them good women.”

I was pleased to get this piece of advice from an Irish soccer player thirty years my junior who had thus far reached the altar only for his first communion.

“Your five will get you ten, Mr. Kramer,” Sean said. “Don’t you worry, sir.”

I wished I could stop worrying. But I couldn’t. Suddenly, today, the vague fears of months past had surfaced in a clear, unpalatable image. It was part of being punched in the head by a black man in front of Penn Station. Part of being told in a troubled voice by Sebastian Roon over a drink at Will’s that after forty years in this country he wanted to go home to die.

At least he had a home to go back to die in. What did Benny Kramer have to go back to? East Fourth Street? The part I remembered, the part where I had been fashioned, had vanished under the asphalt of the East River Drive. Tiffany Street? Like all the rest of the south Bronx it had become an all-black ghetto of junkies. Benny Kramer, a home-loving man, had been jolted into facing an unpleasant fact: he was homeless. “Is it raining yet?”

I came up out of my thoughts and saw that I had moved from Sean Boyle, our doorman, to Eamon Fleece, the elevator man on our bank. I looked at Eamon. There wasn’t much to see. A wisp of a man with frail shoulders. They seemed to sag under the weight of his blue and gold elevator operator’s uniform and the tremendous shock of snow-white hair that sat on his head like an enormous snowball.

Eamon had been running the elevator on the A-B bank since 1937. The date had been nailed down in the memory of every employee in the apartment house because Eamon had arrived in America and come to work in our building on the day the
Hindenburg
Zeppelin blew up at Lakehurst. Sean said his older brother, who worked the relief shift on the C-D bank, remembered it vividly. Sean felt this gruesome coincidence had soured Eamon’s disposition. Brian Treaner, our building superintendent, disagreed.

Brian once told me he felt what had turned Eamon Fleece into a misanthrope was his marriage. The marvelous thing about the Irish is that you get superintendents of apartment houses who use words like misanthrope. Eamon lived somewhere over in Yorkville with his wife, her spinster sister, and their ancient mother. The wife was maimed, the sister was halt, and the mother was blind.

“A man with a setup like that,” Brian had said to me, “he doesn’t go dancing among the shamrocks on the banks of the Liffy, now does he, Mr. Kramer?”

I thought at the time it would have been a sensible way to obtain some relief. I remembered Mr. Pflug down on East Fourth Street, a street cleaner whose wife was dying of some unidentified but terrible wasting disease. On the day his only son, who happened to be in my class in P.S. 188, was killed while stealing a hitch on the back of an ice wagon on Avenue C, Mr. Pflug was found dancing on the Fourth Street dock in the middle of the night.

True, they took him away to Bellevue. I don’t doubt it was the only course available to the authorities. But I always felt the poor bastard had got some relief out of the strange performance. I will never know, of course. But I’m going to continue believing it. Hope is where you find it.

The trouble with Eamon Fleece, I felt, was that he did not believe there is any to find. So why try? It is, of course, the basic error. Life is hopeless. Everybody dies. What matters is maintaining the pretense that it is not hopeless. The belief that you are indeed going to live forever. So that when death comes you can with a sense of excitement throw up your arms and kick out your legs in a vaudevillian’s Four Wings And Scram, and exclaim: “Hey, what a surprise!”

But Eamon Fleece was not equal to the pretense. Inside his dark, brooding, bitter mind he saw only the inevitable horror at the end of the tunnel. And he understood that it could not be avoided. The horror had all the time in the world. It could and of course would outwait him. So he plodded along, day after day, moving closer to the inevitable. This black vision created a curious kind of inverted hope. A sort of gloomy illumination along the tunnel to defeat. So that even bright moments insisted on being turned into mocking shadows.

“No,” I said as we rode up in the elevator to the twelfth floor. “It’s not raining. The sun is out.”

“Never trust the sun,” said Eamon Fleece.

I did not answer. Could it be that Eamon Fleece was right? Was it possible that he had touched the root of the trouble? Benny Kramer had always trusted the sun. It had been the only thing on East Fourth Street that was free. I let myself into 12-B with my key.

“Benjamin?” Elizabeth Ann called from the kitchen. “Is that you?”

My heart turned over. No, it soared. By God, there were some things that held. In spite of Mr. Yeats’ contention that the center had collapsed. Generalizations are misleading. Everybody has his own center. Part of mine was Elizabeth Ann’s attitude toward my given name. She is a WASP. They make the best Jews.

They may be born with restricted vision. But the vision sits solidly on character. If when weary you are ever in doubt about where to place your bottom, take Benny Kramer’s advice: eschew the cushions; choose character. It makes for a solid seat.

When George Washington died, Napoleon wept. Not because George was a great general, but because his will was made of granite. Napoleon admired that. So does Benny Kramer.

Once Elizabeth Ann of Wynwood decided to marry Benny Kramer of East Fourth Street, she did the sort of research job on Jews that to Sarah Lawrence girls is what the cadets of St. Cyr do on Clausewitz. Soon Elizabeth Ann was asking me, with a touch of severity in her voice, why we did not fast on Yom Kippur. Was it right for us to be eating Pepperidge Farm Thin Sliced instead of matzos on the First Days of Passover? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate, now that Jack was almost six years old, for Daddy to spend his Saturday mornings with the boy at the Park Avenue Synagogue, which was just around the corner from our apartment, rather than trail along behind Sebastian Roon on the Century Club golf course, which was an hour’s drive up into Westchester?

As for circumcision. Well! Not that it would ever have occurred to me to object. How could I? After all—oh well, we can skip that part of the argument. Elizabeth Ann saw to it that Jack was circumcised. I stayed out of it. Not for the obvious reason, of course. Circumcision is like adolescence. Once you’ve gone through it, you don’t have to do it again. But Elizabeth Ann got into it up to her armpits.

Before she would allow Rabbi Altshuler, the moël, into the operating room at Doctors Hospital, she had several conferences with Artie Steinberg. Artie is our doctor. He was one of the best reader-jotters we ever had in Troop 244 at the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House on Avenue B and Ninth Street in the days when I was the troop’s champion one-flag Morse code signaler. I had the feeling, when it was all over, that Elizabeth Ann had performed the operation herself.

I suppose Freud would say she had. I remember what my mother said when I introduced her and my father to Elizabeth Ann.

First, the moment of shock. Benny marrying a
shiksa?
It can’t be! Ah well, like so many other things in life that can’t be, it is. The shock waves recede. My mother and father look at Elizabeth Ann. The way my father used to look at the cloth of a suit he was buying for me on Stanton Street. Frowns of doubt. About what? Benny marrying a
shiksa?
So it seemed to Benny. Then, slowly, I learned I’d been wrong.