Tiffany Street (41 page)

“Where is he?”

“In his bedroom. Go in and talk to him.”

It seemed an odd bit of instruction. Did Elizabeth Ann think I would
not
talk to him? Or that, on coming into his presence, I would do something else rather than talk to him? Like, for instance, kick him?

Actually, when I did come into his room, Jack was in a position to receive a good swift one. He was bent over, his back to me. He had one foot up on the chair near his bed. He was polishing his boots.

“If you wear shoes instead of boots,” I said, “it’s less work.”

He turned and grinned and said, “Hi, Pops,” and I had a moment of surprise.

Since I had seen Jack last, he had grown a full beard. The surprise was the color: a dull auburn, almost red. His hair on top had always been, and still was, as black as Parker’s Quink.

“Shoes are really not less work,” he said. “You see, with boots you don’t have to shine the high parts because they tuck in under your jeans.”

He demonstrated.

“Good,” I said. “Bring up the lights on them. We have guests for dinner.”

“Who?”

“Aunt Lillian and Uncle Seb.”

Jack’s brush stopped pushing back and forth across his boot.

“Why?” he said. “I mean why were they invited?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You mother said they invited themselves.”

“They must have given a reason?” Jack said.

“Aunt Lillian said they’d heard you were flying in tonight and they wanted to see you.”

A scowl takes on an extra dimension when it is surrounded by a full beard. In addition to the puzzlement there was suddenly a touch of worry on Jack’s face. Or the parts of it I could see.

“That’s funny,” he said.

“Not nearly so funny as the fact that Aunt Lillian and Uncle Seb should know you’re coming before your mother and I do.”

The brush resumed its back-and-forth march across the instep of Jack’s boot. More slowly now.

“I have something to tell you,” Jack said. “You and Mom. I didn’t want any arguments about it on the phone. I wanted to be face to face with you and Mom when I told you.” Pause. Scowl. “That’s why I kept it a secret that I was coming up.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s no longer a secret. Whatever it is, unless you want to be telling it to four people instead of just me and Mom, maybe you’d better tell me now, before Aunt Lillian and Uncle Seb arrive.”

Jack took his foot from the chair and straightened up. Around the beard the touch of puzzlement sank into an unmistakable look of total worry.

“Where’s Mom?” he said.

“In the shower,” I said.

“Jesus, God,” Jack said. “Since you built her that damned Radio City bathroom, she spends more time in it than she used to spend with the rest of the human race.”

“Shall I get her?”

“Would you, Pops?”

I went out and down the hall. The thudding of the water in the shower had stopped. Elizabeth Ann was in her terry cloth robe, doing something to her hair with a comb.

“You look worried,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Jack wants to see us before Lillian and Seb arrive,” I said. “Shall I bring him in here?”

“No,” Elizabeth Ann said. “I think his room would be better. It’s his turf.”

We went back down the hall. There was something unpleasant about this marching back and forth in our own home. I felt like the accused, being led back and forth under guard between his cell and the courtroom. When we came in, Jack had started on his second boot. He stopped polishing and straightened up.

“It’s like this,” he said promptly. “The last time we talked, Pops, you had just come back from that Dr. McCarran in Philadelphia. And you remember, of course, what happened.”

The way Leonidas probably remembered Thermopylae. Victories become hazily pleasant, boozy recollections. Defeats get burned into the mind and heart in details so sharply etched that they never stop hurting.

“Of course I remember,” I said.

Elizabeth Ann gave me a look. I remembered something else. The kiss Elizabeth Ann had given me that night for what she had called my stupidity.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t take you up on that,” Jack said. “I appreciated the effort, Pops, but you see I’m not a boy from East Fourth Street. I’m something you made me. A boy from Eighty-third and Fifth. I couldn’t pee my way out of this situation.”

Meaning that Benny Kramer could.

“I understand,” I said.

Only too clearly.

“Jack,” Elizabeth Ann said quietly. “Whether or not your father would have used Dr. McCarran’s list of answers at an army physical to stay out of the draft is beside the point. He never had to be put to that particular test.”

“True enough,” Jack said. “I’m sorry, Pops.”

I’m sure he was. But that did not change what he had said. All my life I had seen the world through the lens of East Fourth Street. This was a fine time to learn from your own son that maybe the lens was distorted.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

One thing you learn on East Fourth Street is how to lie with the best of them. Without taking her eyes off Jack, Elizabeth Ann touched my arm.

“And you told us, Jack,” she said, “that you wanted to think it over, and when you came to a decision about your next move you would let us know.”

“That’s why I flew up today,” Jack said. “To let you know.”

“Okay,” I said, “We’re listening.”

Elizabeth Ann’s fingers dug into my arm. I knew the signal. She didn’t want me to reach the fuck off stage.

“Two weeks ago,” Jack said, “I wrote to the draft board here in New York, asking them to give me a C.O. classification.”

My insides jumped. “Conscientious objector?” I said.

“Yes,” Jack said. “They wrote back and said I would have to appear before their board for an oral examination, and they gave me a date.”

“Tonight?” Elizabeth Ann said.

Jack nodded. “Seven o’clock,” he said.

“Oh, God,” Elizabeth Ann said. “It’s almost five-thirty. I’d better step on it.” She gave my arm an extra hard squeeze. “You stay here, Benjamin, and talk to him.”

About what? Feelings about my own son that I did not want to examine?

“I assume you’ve gone beyond just making the decision to ask for C.O. status?” I said. “I assume you’ve examined the consequences?”

“There’s a draft counselor on campus, Pops. There’s one on every campus in the country. I had several long sessions with him before I made my decision.”

But not even one short one with his father from East Fourth Street.

“And you’re satisfied that his advice was sound?” I said.

“Pops, it’s his field,” Jack said. “He knows all there is to know about it, and he told it all to me.”

“Did he tell you that draft boards are very hostile to young men who ask for C.O. status? That they are suspicious of them? And that they grant very few of these requests?”

“At the very first session, Pops. He told me everything.”

I wondered about that draft counselor. Could he have told everything to his own son?

“Did he tell you what the odds are that you will not be granted C.O. status?”

“He did, Pops.”

“Did he tell you that if you don’t get C.O. status you are at the end of the line? There is no further recourse? You can’t go back and say, oops, sorry, I didn’t really mean to ask for C.O. status in the first place? I didn’t have to? You see I wet the bed at night?”

“He told me all that, Pops.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “you decided to take the risk?”

“I did, Pops.”

“Without consulting your mother or me.”

The scowl appeared again around the edge of the beard. “What good would that have done?” Jack said. “I’d already made my decision, Pops.”

It wouldn’t have done him any good. But it might have prevented Benny Kramer from learning at the age of fifty-eight that there were people who did not consider it such a wonderful thing to have been born and raised on East Fourth Street, and among those people was his own son.

“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “Many of my friends, many of my colleagues have sons your age. The draft comes in for a lot of discussion around me. I might have been able to tell you something helpful.”

Few things are more pompous than the language of a man trying to conceal a resentment he wishes he did not feel.

“I doubt it, Pops,” Jack said. “These campus draft counselors know more about it than any real-estate lawyer in the country.”

If you take fat fees from people like Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger, you have to be able to take a jolt now and then even from members of your own family.

“Suppose the board does not grant your request for C.O. status?” I said. “Have you thought about your next step?”

“Yes, I have, Pops.”

“Is it a secret?”

Another thing that is difficult for a man with a beard is adding to a troubled scowl the perplexed bite of the lower lip.

“Pops,” Jack said. “What are you sore about?”

The day my mother died, her doctor, who was an old friend of mine, had sensed I was in a bad way, and be had said to me: “Don’t worry, Benny. I’m here. We East Side boys always stick together.” Who was sticking by Benny Kramer today?

“I’ll tell you why I’m sore,” I said, and I laughed.

Laughs are the traditional beards that get hung on lies. I couldn’t tell Jack what I was sore about. What I was sore about could only have been understood by another boy from East Fourth Street. Jack was not a boy from East Fourth Street. He was a boy from 83rd and Fifth. He had just made that perfectly clear.

“I’m sore because I don’t think you’re giving yourself a chance with that draft board tonight,” I said. “Is that how you’re going to appear before that C.O. committee? In boots and blue jeans?”

“Plus the beard,” Jack said, and he laughed.

His laugh made me feel better. It showed that a boy from East Fourth Street could still put one over on a boy from 83rd and Fifth.

“Come on, Pops, relax. I know you think I’ve got a better chance with these jokers if I wear my Brooks Brothers blue blazer and take a quick, clean shave.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think that’s what I think.”

Anyway, that wasn’t all of what I was thinking. The rest of what I was thinking was too difficult for me to state on such short notice even to myself, much less to a boy from 83rd and Fifth. Benny Kramer feels deeply, but he thinks slowly. What had happened to Benny Kramer had just happened, in this room, a few minutes ago. It would take me a few days and a couple of sleepless nights to figure it out. When I did, it might prove to be worse than it seemed now, while the wound was still raw, but it wouldn’t hurt so much. Benny Kramer can handle anything, so long as he sees where the blow came from, how much damage it has done, and why it sought him out. Then he can tuck it away in one of his mental boxes, seal it, and hide the box on the back shelf in the dead file of his memory. Benny is finished with it. He is ready for the next blow.

“Look at it this way, Pops,” Jack said. “People in every war wear different clothes when they visit their draft boards. Think of the guys they rounded up to help Caesar divide up Gaul. Think of what those clowns were wearing. Think of the clothes you wore when you visited your draft board in your war. Now, what’s funny about that?”

“I wasn’t laughing at what you said,” I said. “I was laughing at the picture it gave me of the draft boards in my war. In my war it didn’t matter what you wore to the draft board. By the time the examination came around you looked like everybody else. Stark naked.”

“I know that,” I said. “Which is why I thought you might be interested in something Uncle Seb told me recently. This play he’s in now, there’s a kid in it who has the juvenile lead, and his draft board classified him One-A. So he applied for C.O., and when he went to his hearing he was surprised to find the members of the board were a different kettle of fish from the clerks he’d met who handled the papers. These men were all dignified, respectable, well-to-do members of the community who had volunteered their services and held these meetings at night after their day’s work was done. You know,” I said. “Doctors, corporation executives, stockbrokers, lawyers, a well-known priest.”

“Sure I know,” Jack said. “People like you, Pops.”

I walked to the triple mirror over his dresser and made an elaborate business of examining my reflection, as though a salesman in a clothing store had just hung a jacket on me. I turned left, then right, cocking my head and squinting judiciously.

“Yes,” I said. “People like me.”

Quite a few of whom had come from the East Fourth Streets of the world.

“Well, now, Pops, let me hand you a tough one,” Jack said. “Suppose you were in there with your buddies tonight as a member of his C.O. board. Now, forget it’s me. I’m just a guy named Irving B. Toklas, say.”

“Alice B. Toklas.”

“I know that, Pops. We had Gertrude Stein in freshman English at Harvard. I’m just trying to stop you from thinking of this kid as your son. Yes?”

Koyach,
Benny,
koyach.

“I’ll try,” I said.

“Okay, this kid comes in before you and the board,” Jack said. “He’s wearing blue jeans and boots and his face is all hung over with a lot of fuzz. Hold that image. Now focus on the next one. The kid comes in wearing a Brooks navy blue blazer, a white button down Oxford shirt, and a Hasty Pudding tie. Let’s throw in a pair of Peal’s wing-tip brogans. Now, Pops, you’ve got the images fixed in your mind?”

I nodded. I knew where this interrogation was taking me. I had heard hundreds like it in a score of courtrooms. I had even conducted dozens like it myself. Years of practice had given me the skill with which to avoid the trap of the inevitable final question. Even as Jack had been talking, I had already worked out the answer that would not be inevitable, the answer that would spring the trap on my honorable opponent, Your Honor, and cause him to fall flat on his prematurely triumphant face. But Benny Kramer knew he would not make that skillfully fabricated and totally unexpected answer. What a boy from East Fourth Street could do for a client, he could not do to a son. Even if the son did come from 83rd and Fifth.

“I have both images fixed in my mind,” I said.