Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

  “So sit down,” said I. G. Roon, and he pulled out a chair between himself and me. Until this moment I had not even noticed it was there. “Take a load off,” I. G. Roon said. “And have a snort. Seb?”

  Sebastian reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his silver flask. To my surprise, before he had unscrewed the cap George had materialized with another coffee cup. He set it down in front of Mr. O’Casey. For some reason, not very clearly thought out, I felt it would help in my confused condition if I counted the ice cubes in Mr. O’Casey’s cup. I made the attempt. I failed. The amber fluid splashed down out of Sebastian Roon’s silver flask on probably two, perhaps more, ice cubes. Mr. O’Casey raised his cup.

  “Here’s to business,” he said.

  I. G. Roon’s eyebrows ascended toward his widow’s peak, and almost made it. “Business?” he said. “What business?”

  “I thought I heard you and your nephew here discussing the rabbit’s fur business,” Mr. O’Casey said.

  I. G. Roon shook his head. His face looked sad. He might have been responding to a toast by George V in honor of the Kaiser’s skill as a woodcutter at Doom.

  “You and your thinking,” he said. “If you did less of it, Mr. O’Casey, you wouldn’t have to spend so much of your life chasing after me in restaurants where I’m having a pleasant little lunch with my nephew and his friend.”

  “Oh,” Mr. O’Casey said. “So this is just another one of your pleasant little lunches with your nephew?”

  “And with my nephew’s friend,” I. G. Roon said.

  “What is your nephew’s friend’s name, may I ask?” said Mr. O’Casey. In a tone of voice, I may add, that Edmund Lowe, who was a gentleman, would never have employed.

  “Seb,” Mr. Roon said. “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Franklin Kramer,” said Sebastian Roon.

  “No, not Franklin,” I said. “Benjamin.”

  And that was the last thing I did say. Or the last thing I remember. About Shane’s restaurant, anyway. The next thing I actually knew, I was lying on the couch in the file room of the Maurice Saltzman & Company offices on 34th Street. My head ached. All my insides bubbled. The taste in my mouth seemed to have been scraped from the rusted plates of the Leviathan in dry dock. I wanted to die. Mainly because, among the three people standing over me, was Sebastian Roon.

  “He’ll be all right,” Roon was saying to Mr. Bern and Miss Bienstock. “I’m afraid I miscalculated his capacity for spirits.”

  Miss Bienstock’s expression of perplexity deepened to pandemonium proportions. “Spirits?” she said. “What spirits?”

  “That chap from the insurance company,” Sebastian Roon said. “O’Casey. He stalked us to this restaurant. Shane’s on Twenty-third Street.”

  Ira Bern looked troubled. “Anything?” he said tensely.

  Sebastian Roon laughed. “Nothing at all,” he said. “My uncle and I had finished the York transaction before O’Casey arrived.” He laughed again. “Poor Mr. Kramer.”

  “Mr. Who?” Mr. Bern said.

  Sebastian Roon nodded toward me. “He is your Mr. Kramer, is he not?”

  Miss Bienstock, without losing the grip on her look of perplexity, said, “You mean Benny.”

  “I suppose I do,” said Sebastian Roon. “Yes, he did say his name is Benjamin. Well, he did nobly. He was most helpful to me and my uncle, and we’re both grateful, we really are, Mr. Bern.”

  “You are?” Mr. Bern said.

  “Indeed yes,” said Sebastian Roon.

  “But what should I do with him?” said Ira Bern, staring down at me.

  Sebastian Roon looked thoughtful. “Why don’t you simply let him sleep it off?” he said.

  3

  TAKE A FOOL’S ADVICE, my mother used to say. And then she would casually drop into your lap a ladleful of wisdom for which Benjamin Franklin would have fought to obtain the rights. For inclusion, that is, in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

  “If there’s two people in the house,” I remember my mother saying one day, “always let the other person answer the telephone.”

  She said this at a time when Alexander Graham Bell’s invention was to her life not unlike what the Beagle was to Darwin. Every day was a revelation. I don’t think my mother had ever used a telephone until I paid to have one installed in the Bronx apartment on Tiffany Street.

  I thought my mother would be pleased by this electronic addition to our life. Not only because it provided a rather spectacularly new contact with the outside world, but also because it was a visible symbol to relatives and friends that the Kramer family had moved up the economic and social ladder. Visible symbols were important to my mother. I have felt for years that she practically invented conspicuous consumption single-handed. My mother had always been a snob. William Makepeace Thackeray, take note. My mother had been a snob even when we were very poor down on East Fourth Street. I see now that living with a telephone, while it may have pleased my mother, confused her. Perhaps it even frightened her. Yes, I think it probably did. I remember coming home late at night, after my long day in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company, after my classes at C.C.N.Y., and asking if anybody had called. My question was silly. I didn’t really expect anybody to call me. As I have indicated earlier, I had left all my friends behind on East Fourth Street. Without telephones, of course. And I had made no new friends during my months on Tiffany Street. There had been no time. I was always downtown. Just the same, the Kramers now had a telephone, and I had seen enough movies to know that when you came home you asked whoever was around if anybody had called you while you were out. Usually, it was a butler. But the Kramer family had not yet made it up to butlers. I had to lean on my mother.

  This was easy to do. She always waited up for me with “something to go in your stomach,” as she put it. And it was always something good. Food does not always depend on the shop it came from. The best depends on the feeling with which it is prepared.

  My mother prepared mine for me the way legendary French chefs, according to their memoirs, prepared his for Louis Napoleon: with love. That’s why my mother was always around. It took me some time to grasp that there was something wrong in this. On East Fourth Street she had rarely left our tenement flat. Aside from her daily shopping expedition to the Avenue C pushcart market for the ingredients of our evening meal, I don’t remember that she ever went out into the street except for an unusual reason. A visit to Dr. Gropple, for example. Yet there had seemed nothing wrong in this. I don’t really know why. My guess is that my mother was doing what most women on East Fourth Street did.

  It was a place where a good deal of life was lived outdoors. By children, who went to school. By men, who went to their jobs. But not by women. They stuck close to what it seems foolish to call the family hearth. Some hearth. A black cast-iron coal-burning stove in the kitchen. Nonetheless, I feel the image is accurate. Women stayed home because that was where women belonged. Up in the Bronx, on Tiffany Street, my mother stayed home for what struck me long after we moved there as a different reason. My mother on Tiffany Street in the Bronx was not unlike Pocahontas on Ebury Street in London.

  In the social sense she had moved upward. But in the emotional sense she had moved into terra incognita. On East Fourth Street my mother had known the boundaries of what she was afraid of. On Tiffany Street there were no boundaries. A large, sprawling, shapeless world poured itself away in all directions from the tight little block of yellow apartment houses to which we had moved from East Fourth Street. So she stayed home. And when I came home Saturday night after my lunch at Shane’s and asked my foolish question about whether anybody had called, there she was, with plates full of food, trying to pretend I had not asked a foolish question.

  “Yes,” she said casually. Her notion of casually was to look up at the ceiling as she spoke. “This afternoon, when I put this honey cake in the stove—eat the piece on this side first, it has a nice rindle—a man named Reibeisen called.”

  “Rei
beisen?” I said.

  What else could I say? In 1930 a reibeisen in Yiddish was a grater. I’m sure it still is. On it you could then, and probably still can now, reduce raw potatoes to the batterlike material from which latkes are made.

  “Yes, Reibeisen,” my mother said. “What’s the matter? You don’t know anybody named Reibeisen?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “So a telephone it’s a thing you pay for only to receive calls from people you know?”

  I thought about that for a moment. The answer was, of course, yes. Or so I had always believed. Why would strangers call you on the phone?

  “Not necessarily,” I said. In Yiddish. My mother did not speak English. When I feel that my light is not shining as brightly as I could wish in the auditorium of the world, I remind myself that I know how to say “not necessarily” in Yiddish.

  “Did this Mr. Reibeisen leave his number?” I said to my mother.

  “Would I let a man call here and not ask him to leave his number?” my mother said. “Of course he left his number.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s have it, and I’ll call him back.”

  “Not so fast,” my mother said. “Give a person a minute to think. I have it in my head.” She closed her eyes. “It begins with like a Susskind?”

  “Susskind?” I said. “Ma, I doubt it.”

  “I’m the one who answered the telephone,” my mother said. “So he doubts it.”

  “All I mean,” I said, “I don’t think there’s a New York telephone exchange named Susskind.”

  “What’s like it, then?” my mother said.

  I considered what did not seem a very large problem until you tackled it. What, indeed, is like a Susskind?

  “Susquehanna, maybe?” I said finally.

  My mother nodded with approval. Her brilliant son, valedictorian of his class in Thomas Jefferson High School, had come through again.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Susquehanna.”

  Susquehanna is not an easy word to say in Yiddish. But my mother managed. Even though the way she managed it would probably have been confusing to the New York Telephone Company.

  “Susquehanna what?” I said.

  “What what?” my mother said.

  “The numbers,” I said. “After the word Susquehanna there have to be numbers.”

  My mother’s examination of the ceiling became more intense. When my mother examined a ceiling she brought to my mind, which was even then earnest but untidy, an image: Marie Antoinette studying the jewel case on a top shelf, trying to decide whether diamonds or rubies were more appropriate for a ride in a tumbril

  “Well, then, all right, Susquehanna,” my mother said. “At least we have that settled.”

  “Yes, but the numbers,” I said. “I can’t call Mr. Reibeisen back unless I have the numbers that go with the Susquehanna.”

  “Don’t I know that?” my mother said. “What do you think I am? A stupid greenhorn?”

  Stupid? My God, no. Given the proper education—or even any education—my mother could have guided Einstein to the only correct method for splitting the atom long before General Groves was appointed to the Manhattan Project. But my mother had been given no education. And pride had prevented her from seeking it at a time when she could have had it for the asking.

  If you went to school at night, as most immigrants on East Fourth Street did, you were making a public confession that you were ignorant. My mother was not a confessor. My mother was a battler. She did not go to night school. She made it all up out of her head as she went along. And when I say all I mean all. Everything.

  What God had in store for you. Why the price of potatoes on the Avenue C pushcarts was the result of a conspiracy among the “bosses.” How many ounces there should be in a pound. The longest distance between two points. Why you should add lemon to soap when you wash your hair. How to answer a telephone. Everything.

  “Of course you’re not stupid,” I said. “And it’s a little late to discuss whether you’re a greenhorn. You’ve been in this country for twenty-five years.”

  “Thirty,” my mother said. “The president was Tiddy Roosevelt.”

  “Teddy,” I said.

  “What’s the difference?” my mother said.

  I didn’t bother to answer that. Many of my mother’s questions defied the polite q. and a. of simple logic.

  “Never mind the difference,” I said. “Just give me the numbers after the Susquehanna.”

  My mother resumed her contemplation of the ceiling. She was not, of course, seeking answers in the unevenly painted plaster. Hungarian girls, when they are no longer girls, tilt their eyes toward heaven quite frequently. It smooths the jowls.

  “It begins with a two,” my mother said. “A two to begin.”

  “Susquehanna two,” I said. “Okay. Susquehanna two. And then?”

  “A seven,” my mother said. “Could it be this Mr. Reibeisen he has a Susquehanna, and a two, and then a seven?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “Seven happens to a lot of people.”

  “But after a two?” my mother said. “And first a Susquehanna?”

  “No,” I said. “I must admit that’s more rare.”

  “What’s with the rare?” my mother said.

  “It’s like, say, unusual,” I said.

  Getting a phone number out of my mother was not unlike reeling in a tarpon. If you wanted the fish it was foolish to make waspish remarks to the rod and reel. If you wanted the fish you played the game. Patience was not always rewarded, but it was the only highway to possible success.

  “If we have the Susquehanna and the two and the seven,” I said, “okay. But we still have to get two more numbers.”

  “Four numbers?” my mother said.

  “As a rule,” I said, “yes.”

  This was 1930. Even zip codes had not yet surfaced. The flow of life was simpler.

  “With a Susquehanna?” my mother said. “Four numbers also in addition on top of the Susquehanna?”

  “It’s the system,” I said. “The telephone company. They have to work out something that will take care of the thousands of people who have telephones. Millions. The only way is numbers.”

  “We didn’t have numbers in Hungary,” my mother said.

  “We didn’t have them on East Fourth Street,” I said. “But here uptown in the Bronx it’s different. What comes after the seven, Ma?”

  My mother’s chin went up to the ceiling. I saw the wisdom of the gesture. It took years off her profile.

  “A nine, maybe?” she said.

  “I don’t know, Ma,” I said. “You were the one took the message.”

  “Message?” my mother said. “What message? The bell rings. I answer it. A man says this is Nachman Reibeisen. This is a message?”

  “Nachman Reibeisen?” I said.

  “What difference?” my mother said. “It’s a Reibeisen. He says could I talk to Mr. Benjamin Kramer, the accountant. That’s you, no?”

  “Yes, and of course he couldn’t talk to me because I was not home,” I said. With rather ostentatious patience, I must add. The biblical character I have learned to dig the most is Job. So would you, if you had been my mother’s son. “So you asked for his number and said I would call him back. Right?”

  “What else could I say?” my mother said. “Go ahead, tell me, what would you have said?”

  I knew this ploy. Pickett had used it at the post-mortem after Gettysburg. Where would you have hurled your cavalry? Hmm?

  “I would have said my son Benjamin is not at home now,” I said. “I would have said my son Benjamin Kramer usually comes home on Saturday about six o’clock. Because on Saturdays he has no classes at C.C.N.Y. Saturday is one of his two free nights every week. When he does come home, I will ask my son to call you back. May I have your number, please? That’s what I would have said.”

  “So what did I say to him?” my mother said.

  “I don’t know, Ma,” I said. “I w
asn’t here when Mr. Reibeisen called. What did you say?”

  “I said my son Benjamin Kramer is not at home,” my mother said. “My son Benjamin Kramer, I said, he comes home Saturday nights about six o’clock. Maybe a little later. When he comes home tonight I’ll tell him to call you back. You’ll give me please your number?”

  “Which he did,” I said. “And it starts with a Susquehanna, goes on to a two, proceeds to a seven, and then seems to stop dead.”

  “From a Susquehanna and a two and a seven,” my mother said, “you can’t call back a Nachman Reibeisen?”

  “Not any kind of a Reibeisen,” I said.

  “This is some country,” my mother said. “In Hungary we didn’t have telephones, but believe me, in Hungary, if you had a Susquehanna, and a two, and a seven, you could find not only Nachman Reibeisen, but Sam also, and his father and mother, too.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “But this is not Hungary. This is Tiffany Street in the Bronx.”

  Her eyes came down from the ceiling. They were blue. Or rather, they had been blue. In Hungary, which was a guess on my part, of course, and on East Fourth Street, which was no guess but a vivid recollection of my youth. Blue as the grapes from which my father used to make our Passover wine.

  “There’s times here on Tiffany Street,” she said, “I wish it was Hungary.”

  I don’t think my mother meant that. I did not learn about her life in Hungary until almost half a century later, when my Aunt Sarah from New Haven told me. My mother’s life in Hungary had not been pleasant.

  The phone rang. My mother stared at it with distrust. She did not move. “If there’s two people in the house, always let the other person answer the telephone.” I picked it up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Is this Intervale one-six-two-three?”

  The voice brought back with an almost physical thrust the sidewalk at Seventh Avenue and 34th Street the day before.

  “Hot Cakes?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Isn’t this Hot Cakes Rabinowitz?” I said.

  “No, of course not.”