Tiffany Street (8 page)

The floor was covered with very old green carpeting. It was dotted here and there with small islands of brown where the green nap had worn away and the cording showed through. On the walls hung what looked like steel engravings of rolling farm country. I counted eight. Somehow they all looked alike, perhaps because they were all framed by the same kind of narrow bands of black wood.

One picture, over the door at the far end of the room, I did recognize. I had seen it many times in my high school history textbook. It was a picture of Queen Victoria, full-face, arms folded across her plump little middle, looking exactly the way a few years later Helen Hayes would look. There was nothing unusual about most of the furnishings. Rows of very old dark green filing cabinets. I could tell they were old by the way the drawers sagged at the corners. A couple of long dark brown tables, stacked neatly with what looked like fat reference books, stood side by side against one wall. In one corner a wooden umbrella stand with a square brass pan in the bottom leaned over slightly because one of the knobbed legs was missing.

Two things, however, were so unusual that I felt, for a startled moment, they must have been purchased from the Cheeryble brothers when Dickens was shoehorned into the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Two things I had never seen before. A couple of stand-up desks. One on either side of the room.

Then I saw the two people in the room, and I forgot the desks.

At one of them, working busily over a fat ledger, stood a tall old lady. She wore a black alpaca dress buttoned up to her throat and held at the neck by a yellowing ivory cameo. At the other desk stood an old man working over two ledgers. He was bald, with tufts of white over the ears. He wore a gray alpaca jacket. What looked like a pair of black stockings without bottoms were pulled up on his arms from wrist to elbow, apparently to protect the sleeves of his coat. As he moved his head from side to side, glancing from one ledger to the other, I could see he had a pencil tucked over each ear.

Even more arresting than the appearance of these two people, and the desks at which they were working, was the way they were working: facing opposite walls, their backs to each other.

I had time to take all this in for a somewhat disconcerting reason. Or rather, I realized after a while I was disconcerted because I’d had time to take all this in. There was a small, black bell over the door. An old-fashioned bell with a clapper. It was fixed in such a way that, when somebody entered, the corner of the door punched the bell and set it tinkling. It was not until the tinkling stopped that I realized neither the old man nor the old woman had looked up. They went right on working away at their ledgers.

It was the sort of situation I had never before experienced. I don’t suppose my experience was unique, but it seems likely. How often would a young man have occasion to attract the attention of adults who are ignoring him? Clawing through my mind for examples of such occasions, I remembered a comic-strip character named Harold Teen who suffered endless misadventures every morning in the pages of the
Daily News.
Harold was constantly being ignored by his high school principal, to whose office Harold had been summoned for disciplinary action, or by the fathers of the girls on whom he called. After shifting uneasily from one foot to another for a long time, Harold Teen always broke the silence by saying, in a balloon over his head: “Ahem!”

I could not manage the balloon, but I had no trouble exploding a good, loud “Ahem!”

Without raising his head the old man said, “In a moment. In a moment.”

He said it to one of the two ledgers on which he was working. Then he moved his head, made an entry in the second ledger, and looked up. Naturally, he was wearing thick glasses made of small fat halfmoons that were held to his head by thin gold strands. What else would a man working in the office of the Cheeryble brothers be wearing?

“What is it?” he said.

Staring at me over the halfmoon glasses he looked so severe that I was taken aback by the softness of his voice. He sounded kind.

“I’d like to see Mr. Roon, please,” I said.

“About what?”

“I have a letter for him,” I said. I held up the envelope. “From Mr. Bern.”

“Maurice Saltzman & Company?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll take it,” the old man said.

He came across the room toward me. His gait was as surprising as his voice. He walked with long, crisp strides, as though he was trying to overtake someone without giving the appearance of hurrying.

“Are you Mr. Roon?” I said.

“No, but I’ll take the letter to him.” He held out his hand.

I put the envelope behind my back. “I’m sorry,” I said. “My instructions were to give this to Mr. Roon personally.”

“Don’t be silly, boy, I’ll take it in to him.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t.”

“What’s the matter with you, boy?”

What was the matter with me was that my feeling of virtue and my feeling of cleverness about the way I had handled getting to Mr. Roon’s office were going out the window in the face of a new threat.

“Mr. Bern told me if I did not deliver this letter to Mr. Roon in person he would fire me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the old man said. “I’ve known Ira Bern for years. Before Mr. Saltzman took him in as a partner. He used to come over here in person every month to do our audit. Ira Bern would never do such a thing.”

There was a sound behind us. The old man and I both turned. The old lady was holding open the door at the far side of the room.

“Okay, kid,” she said, and she jerked her thumb across her shoulder. “I told Mr. Roon you’re here. Go on in.”

Her voice was even more astonishing than the voice of the old man. She sounded like an enraged traffic cop with a bad bronchial ailment. I hurried across the room. Behind me the old man said petulantly, “Now, why did you want to do that?”

“Because I’m trying to get my work done,” the old woman said. “How the hell can I do that with you braying away like a jackass?”

I walked through the door. She closed it behind me. A young man was standing behind a desk at the far side of the room, and when I say young I mean young. He could have graduated with me from Thomas Jefferson High School, until he opened his mouth.

“You have a letter for me?” he said.

Out of his mouth had come an English accent. Nobody with an English accent had graduated with me from Thomas Jefferson High School. If I didn’t know every kid in the class any better than I knew Hot Cakes Rabinowitz, I had at one time or another during my four years at Thomas Jefferson heard every one of their voices. None of them had ever sounded like this kid behind the desk.

“Are you Mr. Roon?” I said.

I’m sure I sounded uneasy. I think I probably also sounded as though I didn’t believe him.

He grinned. “I am,” he said. “Truly I am.” He held out his hand. I hesitated. He said, “Were you asked to get a receipt for the thing?”

“No,” I said. “Mr. Bern just said I was to deliver it to Mr. Roon in person.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m Mr. Roon in person.” He snapped his fingers. “Let’s have it, shall we?”

I handed over the envelope. He tore it open, pulled out the M.S.&Co. letterhead, and read Mr. Bern’s scrawled words, moving his lips as he did so. This gave me a chance to sneak a swift survey of the room. It was just about the same size as the outer room, and with a few exceptions much the same in atmosphere and furnishings. The same black-framed line drawings of rolling farmland. The same worn green carpet. The same brown furniture. Fewer but still the same kind of sagging green filing cabinets. There were no stand-up desks, however, and there was no picture of Queen Victoria. Oddly, I missed her. Where she should have been, behind the young man, there was a window that looked out on 21st Street, and his desk was an ordinary office flat top. I was paying so much attention to my surroundings because I sensed something was wrong with what was happening. This feeling was underscored when the young man started to laugh.

“Well,” he said, “that explains it.”

The fact that he was laughing did not sound as though he intended to fire Maurice Saltzman & Company as his auditors, which meant my job was safe. As safe, at any rate, as it had been half an hour ago, before Mr. Bern had started screaming on the telephone. This knowledge encouraged me to take a stab at erasing my feeling that something was wrong.

“Explains what?” I said.

I had almost added “sir.” But I couldn’t. Not to a kid who looked, even if he did not sound, as though he could have been in my graduating class at Thomas Jefferson High.

“Why, what happened on the phone just a bit ago,” Mr. Roon said. Then he looked at me with suddenly aroused curiosity. “I take it you work for Mr. Bern?”

“That’s right.”

“Then it’s possible you were there when it happened,” Mr. Roon said. “Were you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean I don’t know to what you’re referring.”

This was a lie, of course, but it was the only way I felt I could inch my way to the core of this puzzling experience. Besides, Mr. Roon seemed surprisingly amiable and chatty.

“Well, it was damned funny,” Mr. Roon said. He plopped down into his chair behind his desk and pointed to another chair beside the desk. “Do sit,” he said. “I want—”

The laughter overtook him again. While it had him tied up I noticed several things: his hair was blond; he needed a haircut; his teeth, at least the ones I was able to see, could have done with some attention from a dentist; and he was wearing a suit made of a material my father admired. My father, being in the pants business, although not very far in, actually, after twenty-five years of making pockets had picked up some knowledge of fabrics. The shaggy herringbone out of which Mr. Roon’s suit had been cut, while identified by the rest of the world as tweed, was known to my father as tveet. This piece of tveet had been cut in an odd way. The lapels of Mr. Roon’s single-breasted suit peaked upward, like the ears of a rabbit, and the three buttons down the front were set close together, like the keys of a cornet. He stopped laughing and waved Mr. Bern’s letter in front of his face as though the laughter had made him feel warm and he was fanning himself.

“I rang up your office and asked for him,” Mr. Roon said. “The girl who answered put me through at once, without asking my name, and before I had a chance to explain why I was calling, Mr. Bern—Mr. Bern—he—he—”

Mr. Roon dropped the letter on the desk and covered his face with both hands, as though he was ashamed of the new attack of laughter that was shaking him. When he came out of it his eyes were actually wet at the corners.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He wiped away the tears with his knuckles, though he continued to heave gently up and down in his chair. “But it was the damndest bloody thing. As I said, I didn’t even get a chance to say who I was, when he hurled himself at me.”

Now a surprising thing happened. Mr. Roon drew himself up in his chair. He took the body of an imaginary telephone in his left hand. He lifted an imaginary receiver from its hook and placed it against his ear. Then, in spite of his unmistakable British accent, he launched into an unmistakable imitation of Mr. Bern.

“I am running a business, Mr. Shmootz, not an eleemosynary institution. Do you realize what it means, Mr. Shmootz, when you are callous enough not to pay one of my bills promptly? Let me tell you, Mr. Shmootz, let me tell you what it means. You are striking a blow at the faith of the average citizen in the country’s movers and shakers. We are in the depths of a depression, Mr. Shmootz. Are you aware of that? Are you—?”

This time it was my laughter that stopped him. Mr. Roon was clearly pleased by my response. He cleared his throat, not unlike an actor acknowledging the applause of an audience.

“By the way,” he said, “who is Mr. Shmootz?”

“No, not Shmootz,” I said. “Shimnitz.”

“Shimnitz?” Mr. Roon said.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s one of our clients. He’s always way behind in his bills, and Mr. Bern is always yelling at him. I don’t know what he wrote to you in that letter, but I guess he wanted to explain he didn’t mean to talk to you like that. Mr. Bern thought he was talking to Mr. Shimnitz.”

Mr. Roon scowled up at the ceiling.

“Shimnitz?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“What does Shimnitz mean?”

It had never occurred to me that names had to mean something. Then it occurred to me that Shmootz meant something to Mr. Roon.

“I don’t know what Shimnitz means,” I said.

But I did know that
shmootz
in Yiddish meant dirt. How did Mr. Roon know what it meant? A boy with an accent like that? Named Roon?

“Well,” I said, standing up, “I guess I’d better get back to the office.”

Mr. Roon said, “Hahf a mo.” He pulled a watch from his outer breast pocket. It hung from a thin gold chain that ended in a gold medallion stuck through the buttonhole of Mr. Roon’s jacket. “Getting on for noon,” he said, and dropped the watch back into his pocket. “Do you have a lunch date?”

He might just as well have asked where I housed my stable of polo ponies. In order to get through the week on my basic three dollars, lunch did not exist for me as a part of the day’s program. This was no hardship. Between the staying-power breakfast my mother fed me before I left home, and the cuppa cawfee and ruggle to which Mr. Bern treated me while I was having his shoes shined, I had no trouble or discomfort in getting through to my Stewart’s hot meal before classes at night. But it wasn’t really a question of money. It was simply that lunch dates were outside my social experience.

In high school, to which I used to bring my lunch in a paper bag, I always ate the midday meal with a group of my friends on one of the benches in the yard. At night, in Stewart’s, after my tray was loaded, I would look around the cafeteria and, if I saw a classmate, I would cross to his table and eat with him. But to make a date with someone in advance? A date to meet in a restaurant for the purpose of eating lunch? That happened only in novels.

“No,” I said, “but Mr. Bern—”

“Why not come along with me?” Mr. Roon said, and then he seemed to grasp something. “I meant to say, come as my guest.”