Tiffany Street (45 page)

After all, whether he liked it or not, Jack was the son of a boy from East Fourth Street.

Seb signaled to the white-haired woman in black bombazine behind the small bar. She came across the creaky floor of the dimly lighted room.

“The same, Mr. Roon?” she said.

“Please,” Seb said.

“Not the same for me,” I said. “May I please have not a martini but some Cutty Sark and water?”

The little old lady gave me a cold look and went back to the bar.

Seb laughed. “You never give up,” he said. “Do you?”

“I would if I knew how,” I said. “It’s one of the courses they left out of the curriculum on East Fourth Street.” I leaned across to my brief case and slid the zipper open. “Let’s get on with the TV deal,” I said. “I’ve got everything out of Mennen’s lawyers that they were able to give, and a few things they didn’t even know they had. If this TV series comes off, Seb, you and Lillian will be retiring to your native heath in style.”

“It’s not coming off,” Seb said.

The white-haired woman came to the table. She set down our drinks and left. I did not actually see her. I merely felt the sudden presence of her heavy body, and then the presence was gone. My glance was concentrated on Seb.

“What’s not coming off?” I said.

“The TV deal,” he said.

“Jim Mennen has changed his mind?” I said. “After all the work I’ve done with his legal department?”

“No,” Seb said. “Jim Mennen’s mind has been changed for him. The new Nielsen ratings were made public late last night. Every one of Mennen’s shows has nose-dived, and when the market closed this afternoon ABTV common was down eleven points. The jackals went to work at once. Mennen was fired at five o’clock as head of the ABTV network. Every one of his projects was canceled. Mine among them. This will be a big blow to the ambassador.”

“What ambassador?” I said.

“My dear Benjamin,” Seb said. “To an Englishman there is only one ambassador. Monday night last, Sir Nolan Branch came backstage after the play, introduced himself, and asked if I could take lunch with him next Thursday in Washington. That was yesterday. I flew down, we had lunch at the embassy, and guess what?”

“The Prince of Wales has defected to the Kremlin, and you have been asked to step into the vacant spot.”

“Not bad,” Seb said. “Sir Nolan, it seems, had heard about the TV series. Through Jim Mennen’s P.R. people, no doubt, and it had gone into one of his weekly reports to London. Last week he received a minute from one of the Queen’s secretaries saying that when the series was completed I would be placed on Her Majesty’s Honors list. None of your evasive Orders of Merit, either. A real honest-to-goodness solid-gold knighthood.”

“Sir Sebastian Roon?” I said.

“No less,” Seb said. “That means Lady Lillian,” I said. Seb smiled. “That is most certainly the Benjamin Kramer I first met forty years ago in the office of my uncle,” he said. “To think first of what it would mean to Lillian.”

“You surely must know by now that my feelings for the Roon family extend to all its members,” I said. “But...” I paused. A sound he had uttered caught at my mind. Like a bit of sweater catching at a paling as you pass a picket fence too closely. “What it
would
mean to Lillian?” I said. “What does that mean?”

“It means my poor devoted wife is not going to be known as Lady Lillian,” Seb said. “Any more than her poor devoted husband is going to be known as Sir Sebastian. Don’t look so bloody perplexed. I had to turn it down, Benjamin.”

I reached for my drink. It was not, of course, Cutty Sark on the rocks. It was what
she
wanted me to have. All at once the familiarity of the annoyance was comforting. So few things had not changed that even a recurring irritation had the welcome warmth of constancy.

“I’m sure you’ll find it in your heart to tell me why,” I said.

“Benjamin,” Seb said, “why are you so bitter about what is after all a simple piece of social intelligence?”

“Because I’m a boy from East Fourth Street and from the Bronx,” I said. “How often does a boy from East Fourth Street or Tiffany Street have a friend who is offered a knighthood by the Queen of England? So what does my friend do? He turns it down.”

“Benjamin,” Seb said, “you have my assurance that I did not turn down Her Majesty’s gracious offer merely to irk you.”

“Nevertheless you’ve succeeded,” I said. “Now stop being Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and just tell me why the hell you turned it down?”

“Because it would have been illegal to accept,” Seb said. “I am a naturalized American citizen.”

I was too flabbergasted to summon the energy needed to hunt for a less shopworn word. I seized the first one that surfaced. Flabbergasted covered the terrain.

“When did that happen?” I said.

“Right after Pearl Harbor,” Seb said.

I gave it a couple of moments, then said, “I think I can understand that.”

“Sorry, Benjamin,” Seb said. “I don’t think you can.”

“Why not?” I said. “You had lived in this country for almost a dozen years. You had married an American girl. Now, suddenly, America was at war. You felt the urge to legalize your status in your adopted home. The way we learned in English class Henry James did soon after the First World War broke out. He became a naturalized Englishman.”

Seb shook his head and took a sip of his drink. It was, of course, a martini. It occurred to me in another moment of irritated irrelevance that the character he played in his current play was probably a martini drinker.

“Henry James would never have become a naturalized Englishman if he’d been married to Lillian Waldbaum,” Sebastian Roon said. “She probably would have flogged poor Henry into coming back to Washington Square and writing propaganda leaflets for the U.S. war effort.”

“It was not a question of your loyalty to America?”

“Not a bit,” Seb said. “It was a question of Lillian’s loyalty to America. She dictated the course of action to me in no uncertain terms. You’ve had many years of experience with Lillian’s terms, uncertain and otherwise, beginning with your days together in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company. I’m sure you can imagine the decibels of sound on which these terms issued forth. She told me that while her country was at war she was not going to remain married to a foreigner.”

“And you agreed with her?” I said.

“Have you ever tried disagreeing with Lillian?” Seb said.

“No,” I said, “but she’s never tried to get me to change my citizenship. It makes a difference.”

“Not if you love someone,” Seb said.

That, I thought, is what comes to trying to argue with an actor. The words mean nothing. The day is carried by the sounds with which they surround the words. Who but an actor could utter a banality so impoverished as the remark Seb had just given to the world, and make it ring in the ears as though you were hearing Jefferson read his first draft of the Declaration of Independence from manuscript?

“That was thirty years ago,” I said. “It’s a hell of a long time to keep something like that from a friend.”

“I’m sorry, Benjamin,” Seb said. “Truly I am. But I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I was ashamed of what I had done,” Sebastian Roon said.

I wondered suddenly, if, deep down, Henry James had been ashamed.

“Don’t let that get around on the floor of the next D.A.R. convention,” I said. “They’ll pass a resolution urging American women to find themselves a new British acting idol.”

“It was because I became an American citizen that they found me in the first place,” Seb said. “I don’t have to tell you, Benjamin. You were there. For the first years of my career in this country I was a bust. Lillian had to continue working so we could pay, or rather she could pay, the rent. Then came the war, and British actors working in America went scuttling back to England. I don’t believe many of them wanted to go. Certainly not the ones I knew. For British performers the pickings have always been more lush over here in Hollywood and on Broadway than they are in the West End. Most of them felt, however, that their careers would be ruined if they continued on here, living like dukes and tapping the money pots instead of going home to defend King and Country. So they went. Sebastian Roon stayed. I didn’t have to defend King and Country. I was an American citizen. And because I stayed, my stock went up. I’m not Beerbohm Tree, you know. But I soon began to look like him and some of those other blokes. It was a case of what Karl Marx is reputed to have said after he dismissed all British economists as incompetents, and some irritated chauvinist said what about John Stuart Mill? Marx replied with a sneer. I can reproduce but won’t.
The eminence of John Stuart Mill,
old Karl is alleged to have replied,
is due to the flatness of the surrounding terrain
.”

Seb laughed. Bitterly? I tried to think not.

“Yes,” he said. “Sebastian Roon remained here, and now look.” He tapped the briefcase in front of me. “Look at the bundle I almost had thrust into my pocket.”

“That’s what annoys me about the cancellation of the show,” I said. “You’ve earned the right to this bundle.”

“Would I have earned it if I had gone home in nineteen thirty-nine to pilot a Spitfire?” Seb said. “After all, I was only twenty-six years old.”

So was Benny Kramer. It didn’t seem possible. How had I come from twenty-six, only yesterday, to fifty-eight today?”

“I think there’s at least a good chance you might have,” I said. “Wars end. Ours did. You would have picked up your career. I wish you would pick up this knighthood.”

“I can’t,” Seb said. “It’s conditional on my completing this TV series, and as of this morning there’s no longer a TV series.”

“That’s not your fault,” I said. “Besides, there’s your long career. Nobody can cancel that. I’m sure with a little prodding Sir Nolan Branch can be induced to recommend that they give you the knighthood for what you’ve already done rather than for something you were about to do. As your lawyer, I’ll be happy to do the prodding.”

“It won’t work, Benjamin,” Seb said. “I’ve just explained to you why I cannot except Her Majesty’s offer.”

“Forty years ago you got me into N.Y.U. Law School,” I said. “Now I’m going to get you into Burke’s
Peerage.
I happen to know something about England that some of her expatriate native sons obviously don’t know because they’re too damn lazy to find out. Lawyers, however, cannot afford to be lazy. So they pick up the information for a fee that their clients could have picked up with a phone call to any British consulate in the country. Especially if they have clients with numbered bank accounts in Switzerland and the desire to get the hell out of this country and settle somewhere beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service.”

“Scoundrels,” Seb said.

“Not legally,” I said. “Quite a few native-born sons of bitches are now living regally in the stately homes of Surrey and Kent because they paid Benny Kramer, formerly of East Fourth Street and Tiffany Street, to look into the British naturalization laws.”

“You mean—?”

“Don’t give me that damn you-mean-question-mark dialogue out of
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
,” I said. “I know exactly what I mean. The British naturalization laws are childishly simple and they apply to everybody, including former British subjects who for a long time have been subjects of some other country. Sir Nolan Branch could have told you, if you’d had the brains to ask, or if you were really interested, in the honor Her Majesty was offering you. I suspect you were not interested, although I can’t imagine why. Unless after all these years you’ve suddenly had a bad attack of stupidity. All you have to do is go back to England, which you told me you’ve already decided to do anyway, then declare your intention to become a British subject, exactly as though you were in fact a native-born American. Then, in five years, I am sure you won’t have much difficulty passing those simple-minded citizenship tests. Even Pakistani busboys in Soho are now passing those tests every day to become loyal and better paid subjects of Her Gracious Majesty. Sir Nolan Branch will be happy to see to it that Her Gracious Majesty keeps your knighthood warming on the back of the stove until you have the legal right to pick it up and convert Lillian into Lady Roon.”

Seb looked at me for several moments. I could tell from his small frown that he liked the picture I had sketched but was troubled by the fact that I had left something out. I knew what that something was.

“Are you sure it will work?” he said.

“I’ve made it work for scoundrels,” I said. “How can I miss with an incipient knight of the British Empire?”

“There’s just one thing,” Seb said.

There always was.

“I know,” I said.

“You can’t possibly know,” Seb said.

“After forty years?” I said. “Cut it out. What’s missing in the plan, the one thing that troubles you, is that it won’t be happening out on a stage.”

Seb looked startled, worked up a baleful glare, then laughed.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You’re quite right, Benjamin. I will miss the applause.”

“Lillian won’t,” I said.

“No,” Seb said, “I daresay she won’t.” He laughed again. “What an extraordinary thing. For a Bronx girl, I mean. Lady Roon. Why, it’s as though a girl from Blackpool were to become Mrs. President.” The laughter drained away. Quietly, Seb said, “Lillian and I have been fortunate in our friendships.”

Benny Kramer had always thought the same about himself. But what good was friendship? If the friends went out of your life?

“I think I’d better clear up one point,” I said. Benny Kramer had learned another thing from Miss Bongiorno. Never take credit you have not earned. “I’m delighted that Lillian will have this,” I said. “But she’s not the only one involved.”

“Do please clarify that,” Seb said.

I hesitated. But not for long. He was more than Benny Kramer’s friend. Seb had been part of the beginning.

“You remember Hannah Halpern,” I said.

“Couldn’t we get through this day without raking up old unpleasantnesses?” Seb said.

“I don’t consider Hannah an unpleasantness,” I said. “You remember how she died.”