Tiffany Street (39 page)

Mennen’s voice had been rising. His eyes had grown brighter. His words were coming faster. I noticed his hands. They sat on his thighs. There was no other place to put them. He had the only straight-backed chair in the room. I suddenly wished he hadn’t. There was something upsetting about Mennen’s hands. He kept clenching and unclenching them. As though he were working an invisible generator that pumped into him the energies that kept him going but at the moment was irritably impatient with the amount of energy the generator was providing.

In my time I have seen only one person who has been certified insane by the courts. A woman in a private asylum. The judge in a trust case had ordered me to visit her in the company of a psychiatrist assigned by the court to see if she could recall any of the circumstances surrounding the signing of a disputed will. It occurred to me now, as I watched Mennen, that I might very well have met my second certifiable case.

“I have determined that the American public has had enough of that crap,” he said. “I want every American kid and every American adult to see what has happened in this great country during the past half-century, yes. But I also want every American kid and every American adult to go beyond seeing.”

I was impressed. Joseph Conrad, in stating his credo in the famous introduction to
The Nigger of the Narcissus,
had been content with: “Above all, I want you to see!”

“I want them to understand,” Mennen said. “And I want them to remember. Gary Cooper and Jane Fonda were not able to do it. I think Sebastian Roon can.”

“Why,” I said.

Mennen nodded once more. He did it to the rhythm of his clenching hands. I was reminded of something I had once read about T. S. Eliot. The rhythms of the born poet were so strongly embedded in his nature that even when he carved a roast the knife descended and ascended to the beat of iambic pentameter. Or, if it was a tough piece of meat, terza rima. Was the certifiable lunatic on the same wave length as the dedicated poet?

Steady, Benny. Don’t ask any more questions. Keep working on the ones to which you’re still scratching for answers.

“You are a persistent man, Mr. Kramer,” Mennen said.

Not to mention a confused one.

“I am what you just called merely a lawyer,” I said. “Being merely a lawyer may not be enough for me to do a job I was asked to handle only because I happen to be an old friend of the man you want to hire. Before you turn me over to your legal department, I’d like to pick up as much information as I can.”

Mennen laughed. Not good. Those hands were still clenching and unclenching.

“What you really mean, Mr. Kramer, is that if you know more about how much I want Roon for this series, you will know more about how much money you can squeeze out of my network for his services.”

“Not squeeze out of,” I said. “Bludgeon out of.”

Why not? He had set up the scene. And I had been raised on Clifford Odets.

“I am glad, Mr. Kramer, that I obeyed my instinct to meet with you in person before I turned you over to my legal beagles,” Mennen said. “You are a man of parts, sir.”

And he had obviously been raised on Dion Boucicault.

“Without parts,” I said, “we all end up on the junk heap back of the used-car lot.”

Benny Kramer, attorney at law and gallus-snapping philosopher.

“You won’t, Mr. Kramer,” Mennen said.

“I’m here to see that Sebastian Roon doesn’t,” I said.

This time Mennen’s laugh was strictly Sydney Green-street telling Humphrey Bogart: “By Gad, sir, you are a character, sir, that you are!”

“Mr. Kramer,” Mennen said, “I can assure you that if Seb agrees to do this series, none of us will end up on the junk heap.” The eyes, the eyes. Oy! “Not even these characters on our left and right,” Mennen said. He turned back to me. “The reason I think Sebastian Roon can do the job that Gary Cooper and Jane Fonda couldn’t is that he is unique. What you members of the legal fraternity describe as
sui generis,
if I am using the phrase correctly.”

If he wasn’t, I had a feeling his legal department would before this day was done rush to his desk a discreet memo straightening him out.

“How is Sebastian Roon
sui generis?
” I said.

Mennen must have felt the concealed power generator was finally coming through. He stopped clenching and unclenching his hands. He raised them from his thighs and started ticking off points on his fingers.

“One, Sebastian Roon has lived in this country for forty years. Ever since he was a boy. He has had an opportunity to observe the American scene as no native American could observe it. With the eye of an outsider. Two, he has demonstrated over and over again as a guest on talk shows that he is an observer with an acute intelligence, fresh insights, and a wit for expressing those insights as sharp as his eye for seeing them. Three, he is a superb popular performer, especially with women. And four, Sebastian Roon for this assignment is precisely the right age.”

Then so was Benny Kramer.

“What has age got to do with it?” I said.

“Maturity,” Mennen said. “A man of fifty-eight knows the score.”

Benny Kramer was fifty-eight, and for months he’d been living with the uneasy conviction that he didn’t even know where the ball park was located.

“A sexy juvenile type would be wrong for this,” Mennen said. “What it needs is a man who can bring to the screen the feel of the men who created our great country. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Hamilton. Men who remind us of what Franklin Roosevelt said about Winston Churchill.”

He paused. By now, I was well into the scene. I snapped up my cue.

“What was that?” I said.

“Roosevelt said of Churchill that he was half American and all British.”

It seemed to me that with Seb it was just the other way around.

“Have I convinced you?” Mennen said.

“Except for one point,” I said.

“What’s that, Mr. Kramer?”

“I know now why you want Seb for this assignment,” I said. “And I agree with you that he is perfect for it. What I don’t yet know is to what extent the ABTV legal department will share your enthusiasm.”

The eyes whipped right. “Sewell,” Mennen snapped.

A man near the end of the right wing of the V stood up. “Jim,” he said.

It was the snappiest salute I had seen since Eisenhower toured our staging area in Cornwall a week before D-day.

“That’s Sewell Fortescue,” Mennen said to me. “He is the ABTV legal department.” Mennen sounded like the cicerone on a bus tour, pointing out the sights for the visiting firemen. “The ABTV legal department is my legal department,” Mennen said. “They share all my enthusiasms. They do what I tell them to do. Right, Sewell?”

“Yes, Jim,” Sewell Fortescue said, or quavered, or perhaps whimpered. The voice had no shape. There was no metal underpinning in the sounds.

No matter. If I didn’t know how to describe the sound, I knew something more important: the funds needed to underwrite Seb’s declining years in England were in the bag.

“Mr. Kramer,” Mennen said, “I turn you over to my legal department.”

I suddenly felt like the baton in a relay race.

“May I ask one final question?” I said.

“Anything,” Mennen said.

“When Seb told me about his lunch with you,” I said, “he repeated that in telling him how much you wanted him for this series you had used a certain word.”

“What is that word?” Mennen said.

“Desperately,” I said.

“My feelings about Sebastian Roon as a reporter are confirmed,” Mennen said. “That is indeed the word I used.” He stood up. “Mr. Kramer,” Mennen said, “I want desperately to have Sebastian Roon do this series for ABTV.”

I stood up. “I will do my best to arrange it,” I said.

“So will Sewell,” Mennen said. “Won’t you, Sewell?”

“I certainly will, Jim,” said Sewell.

Mennen made a gesture with his finger. The gesture a waiter deep in a restaurant makes to the headwaiter at the door. The table was ready. Sewell Fortescue came briskly up to the top of the V.

“Sewell,” said Mennen, “meet Mr. Kramer.”

We shook hands. There is no difficulty about describing the sounds with which we accompanied the meaningless clutch. Sewell Fortescue and Benny Kramer murmured.

“Thank you for coming in, Mr. Kramer,” Mennen said. “This is an historic moment in the history of ABTV.”

I nodded.

“This way, Mr. Kramer,” Sewell Fortescue said.

He took my elbow. As we left the room, I noticed that all the men in both wings of the V had risen and were watching. I half expected them to draw swords and cross them over my head as I moved down the line with Sewell Fortescue, the way they did at military weddings in the newsreels. There was, however, something off about the image. All those executives were not watching me and Sewell Fortescue. They were watching Jim Mennen.

He was a tall man. An inch or more over six feet. He stood very straight. Shoulders squared. Head up. I had the feeling that he was a conductor with baton raised. Every eye in the orchestra was riveted on him. Every performer was waiting for the downward sweep of the stick that would signal the crash of instruments into the opening chord of the performance.

“Do you mind if we walk down?” Fortescue said.

We were in the muted drawing room. Fortescue opened a door beside the fireplace and held it for me. We went down a narrow iron staircase. It was clearly private. The arrangement reminded me of secret passages in the castles of Walter Scott novels. I felt like Darnley—or maybe it was Bothwell?—creeping down in the dead of night to the bedchamber of Mary Queen of Scots. What Sewell Fortescue and I emerged into did not resemble even remotely the room in which Mary had knocked the bottom out of English history. Sewell Fortescue’s office was just an office. It was comfortable, spacious, and neat. There were no flourishes. It could have been furnished off the rack, so to speak, by the Itkin Brothers.

“Would you like to wash your hands?” Fortescue said.

So there was a flourish after all. The private washroom is, of course, the great symbol of status in American business, and Sewell Fortescue wanted me to know about his.

In these matters of protocol Benny Kramer had learned not to be chintzy. Like so many other things on which he leaned, Benny had learned it from his mother. She had never been inside an office, but she had told Benny before he was inside his own: “To be nice when it doesn’t cost anything could save you money later when it starts costing.”

“Why, thank you very much,” I said.

He gestured toward the door. I went through it. The washroom was like Sewell Fortescue’s office. Functional. Better than East Fourth Street. Infinitely superior to Tiffany Street. But Radio City? No.

I did not have to use what Colonel Buchanan used to call the conveniences, but neither did I want to hurt Sewell Fortescue’s feelings. So I stared out at Madison Avenue for what seemed the proper interval, then flushed the bowl. It did not make a Lexington Avenue roar. It emitted a discreet Madison Avenue circular purr.

When I came back out into Fortescue’s office, it was empty. Before I could do more than realize I was surprised, the front door opened. In came Nell Gwyn.

“Excuse me,” she said. She shook the long golden yellow hair away from her face, and once again she was lovely. “Mr. Fortescue has gone upstairs for a few moments to, you know, to get some papers, and he asked me to pop down and, you know, tell you he hasn’t run out on you.”

“I’m glad he did,” I said. “Doesn’t he have a secretary?”

“Yes, but she went to get her flu shot,” the girl said. “It’s, you know, it’s flu shot time. I mean for everybody on the staff, so we’re all sort of covering for each other.”

Benny the hypochondriac was suddenly trying to remember if he’d had
his
flu shot.

“Tell me,” I said. “Your name isn’t really Nell Gwyn, is it?”

She looked at me as though I had made an improper advance. In my day an improper advance was—well, I see now that it wasn’t really very much. But boy, it was... Okay, Benny, that will do. Think about your flu shot. I tried, but I couldn’t. Besides, it was one of those things that Miss Bienstock thought about for me. What I found myself thinking was what a kid as young and pretty as this one, in what all those
Reader’s Digest
articles called Our Age of New Sexual Permissiveness, would consider an improper advance. It was a line of thought, I found almost at once, on which I should not have embarked.

“Nell Gwyn?” she said. “Who dat?”

“A girl who was loved by a king,” I said.

Her eyebrows went up. I was lucky enough to see this happen because as she did it she swung the yellow hawsers of hair away from her eyes to look at me more closely.

“Ah, come on,” she said with a giggle. “You’re putting me on.”

At my age?

“No,” I said. “It’s true. One of those boys in England named Charles. I can never remember his number. Charles the One or Charles the Two. But I’ve never forgotten what he said just before he died. Or, if it was the boy with the other number, just before they chopped off his head.”

“What did he say?”

“
Don’t let poor Nellie starve
.”

The yellow hair swung aside again. “Gee,” the girl said wistfully. “Kings must have been, you know, they must have been cool in those days.”

It was a startling thought. For a boy from Tiffany Street. So I gave it a moment of attention. The result was surprising.

“I guess maybe it’s because in those days there were more of them,” I said. “They had to compete with one another. They were bucking for public favor, you might say.”

The enchanting yellow-haired creature giggled again. All my life I have been annoyed by gigglers. Suddenly they seemed one of the delights of life.

“Now what did I say that’s funny?” I said.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Benny. Yes. But don’t shovel them in.

“Are you really Benjamin Kramer?” the girl said.

To have answered with swearing-on-the-Bible courtroom honesty, I probably should have said there were times when I was not sure. But I sensed the girl was circling toward something.