“We’re going across the street,” she said. “He’ll bring the tray right back.” To me: “You first.” She shoved me into the revolving door. “This time,” Miss Bienstock said, “I’ll follow.”
She did. So rapidly that, when we popped into Seventh Avenue, the sandwich she was carrying crunched damply against the back of my neck.
“Ooh!” I said.
“Never mind,” Miss Bienstock said. “I’ll clean it off later. Come on. We’ve got the light.”
We also had luck with the elevator at 224 West 34th. When we came racing in from the street, the elevator was sitting in the lobby. They were not very good elevators. It was a very old building. So were the operators. And on Sunday only one was on duty.
“Lennie,” Miss Bienstock said. “Take us up. Quick!”
Her voice had the ring of Paul Revere clattering through the Middlesex night.
“Yes, Miss Bienstock,” Lennie said.
Up we went. Out into the fifth-floor corridor. Around the brown marble bend to the double doors on which was lettered MAURICE SALTZMAN & COMPANY. Miss Bienstock clattered the doors open. I followed. And stopped so suddenly that I hit her in the left buttock with the Automat tray.
“Oh,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She didn’t answer. Who could blame her? She was doing what I was doing. Staring. At Mr. Bern, at Mr. Saltzman, at Mr. Roon, and at a fourth man. I had no trouble recognizing him. This was the man who on Friday had interrupted the lunch I was having in Shane’s restaurant on 23rd Street with Sebastian Roon and his uncle.
“Hi, kid,” Mr. O’Casey said. I didn’t realize he was addressing me until, through a sour grin that was really not a grin, he said, “How’s your head?”
The answer was: confused. I did not make it, however, because odd things began to happen.
One: Mr. Bern raced across the reception room, grabbed the Automat tray from me, raced back to the table near the water cooler, and slapped the tray down on the haunches of Mr. Saltzman’s green stagskin.
Two: Mr. O’Casey sauntered over to the tray, looked down at the sandwiches and cardboard containers, and said, “This is a Sunday morning breakfast?”
Three: I noticed that the face of Sebastian Roon’s uncle looked not unlike Mr. Saltzman’s stagskin—green.
Four: Mr. Saltzman came closer to the table and said, “Sure. We have breakfast here every Sunday morning. My partner here, Mr. Bern, and me, and our former client, Mr. Roon.”
Five: “Your former client?” Mr. O’Casey said.
Six: “What else,” Mr. Bern said. “A man he’s had a heart attack, he can’t work anymore, we like to remember the old days, so we invite him in every Sunday morning, because it’s not a business day, we invite him in for a little friendly breakfast No business, of course. Mr. Roon, he’s not allowed to conduct any business, as you know.”
Seven: “We sure do,” Mr. O’Casey said. “That’s why my company is paying him that big fat monthly check every single goddamn month in the year.”
Eight: Sebastian Roon’s uncle, his coloration changing slightly until he resembled the shamrock in the ads for the Irish Tourist Bureau, said: “I bought that policy fair and square. You bastards were glad enough to collect the premium all these goddamn years. Now, now I’m a sick man, now I can’t work, you bastards you’re trying to get out of paying me what you insured me for. Well, you bastards, you’re not getting out of it. I’ll fight you bastards in the courts if it takes my last penny, you bastard.” He moved toward the table, pulled up a chair, sat down, and said, “Come on, Ira. Come on, Maurice. Let’s eat.”
I will not omit the numbers. At this point things became too confused for numbers. I’m not sure I can sort out the confusion into separate acts. They all seemed to bleed into one another, like the paints in the watercolors Miss Kahn used to try to teach us how to do in P.S. 188 kindergarten class. The last sharply etched single act I remember is Mr. Roon picking up one of the sandwiches. Mr. O’Casey lunged forward and snatched the sandwich from Sebastian Roon’s uncle.
“Give me back my sandwich!” I. G. Roon shouted.
“And let you get kicked out of heaven?” Mr. O’Casey said. “My company gives its customers not only financial protection, but also spiritual. This is ham, Isaac. Ham. You want to go to hell?”
“Listen,” Mr. Saltzman said. “It’s Sunday. On Sunday we always have ham sandwiches.”
“Mr. Saltzman,” Mr. O’Casey said, his hard, angular face twisted in a spiky look of terrifying reproach. “What would your mother say if she heard you speak like that?”
Mr. Bern stepped in and picked up the second sandwich. “I knew Mr. Saltzman’s mother,” he said. “She was a wonderful woman. She’s now gone, God bless her, she should rest in peace, but I think I can speak for her without fear of contradiction or erroneous statement.”
“You trying to tell me,” Mr. O’Casey said, “Mr. Saltzman’s mother would approve of him eating ham?”
“Only on Sundays,” Mr. Bern, said.
“What the hell has Sunday got to do with it?” Mr. O’Casey said.
“On Sundays,” Mr. Bern said, “it doesn’t count. How about joining us, Mr. O’Casey?”
The detective for the insurance company glanced at the Automat tray sitting on the green stagskin. “Looks to me like you’ve run out of sandwiches,” he said.
After forty years I am still not certain that I now saw what it seems to me I must have seen. Miss Bienstock, looking as perplexed as ever, stepped forward.
“Here, Mr. O’Casey,” she said. “Have this one.”
What she was holding out, of course, was “Excelsior!” The banner with a strange device under which she had led me out of the Automat: the last of the three ham sandwiches. It had lost much of the sheen it had possessed when I drew it out of the small metal box on the Automat wall. After all, Miss Bienstock had dented it when she shoved it into the face of the busboy, and she had damaged it further when she splashed it against the back of my neck on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk. It looked a bit lopsided. Perhaps that is what caused Miss Bienstock to stumble.
She lost her grip on the battered sandwich. It flew up and out, missing Mr. O’Casey completely, and landed with a plop on the other end of Mr. Saltzman’s green stagskin. Just in time for Sebastian Roon’s uncle to fall face down into the sandwich.
I did not understand what was happening until I heard the hoarse, choking noises that came out of his mouth. They sounded like great rusted spikes being drawn with tremendous effort, out of a waterlogged plank. Then I saw Mr. Roon’s shoulders heaving. When I realized what he was doing, I turned away. The sight of a man vomiting is not entrancing. On that Sunday morning it was more than a sight. It was a bell tolling.
I learned later that Mr. Roon was having his last heart attack.
5
FORTY YEARS AFTER IT happened, sitting at the desk in my office on Madison Avenue, I could suddenly feel again the sense of dismay that had overwhelmed me on that strange Sunday morning in 1930. I stared at Miss Bienstock. She was holding the telephone out to me. For a moment I couldn’t remember why.
“It’s Mr. Roon,” she said patiently. “He wants to talk to you.”
I took the phone. “Seb?” I said.
“Benjamin, my boy.”
One of the nice things about our relationship is that for forty years I have called him Seb but he has never called me Ben.
“How are you, Seb?”
“I don’t really know,” he said.
The clipped British phrases made, as always, a pleasant noise in my ear. They gave me the feeling I was a citizen not only of Tiffany Street or even Madison Avenue, but of the world.
“I’m anxious to know how you made out with Dr. McCarran in Philadelphia,” Seb said.
It occurred to me that the charming voice had changed since those early days on Tiffany Street and in the Maurice Saltzman & Company office. There was in Seb’s voice now four decades of Scotch and
sodas and Chesterfield cigarettes. They had converted the boyish, slightly Cockney piping of 1930 to what my wife calls the sexiest baritone on the English-speaking stage.
“I don’t think I should discuss it on the phone,” I said.
“Then come have a drink with me at the club,” Seb said. “I can’t wait to hear, even though you must be absolutely flat out after a full day in Philadelphia testifying for the squid Shtinkenpopfer.”
“Schlisselberger,” I said. “And how did you know that? All I told you was that I was going to see Dr. McCarran.”
“My dear chap, how did Walter Winchell know when Agamemnon set out for Troy to retrieve Helen from the arms of Priam? By the bye, have you seen him lately?”
“Who?” I said.
“Winchell,” Seb said.
“Lately?” I said. “Seb, I have never seen him.”
“Very much into the sere and yellow he is these days,” Seb said. “Pity. He was always nice to me.”
“Everybody has always been nice to you,” I said.
True enough. There are charmers, and there are charmers. Seb was both.
“Including you,” Sebastian Roon said. “I hope it hasn’t been a matter of regret to you?”
There are questions that stop you cold. Even in a kidding conversation. Where nobody means anything more with his words than the pitcher in the bull pen means with those fancy warm-up throws. They look good, but will they do any good when he gets out on the mound?
Longevity, however, does more than please the life insurance statisticians. It adds shadows. Things you never before thought about suddenly stand out in clear outline. Sebastian Roon had asked a kidding question. But all at once it didn’t sound kidding. Maybe it was because my head still ached from what the black boy had done to it at Penn Station. But I don’t think so.
I think it suddenly seemed more than a dart of innocent fun, even though Seb may have intended it to be no more than that, because it came out of experience. Or rather, I’d had the experience with which to check it out. Forty years of it I hope, Seb had said, being nice to me hasn’t been a matter of regret to you?
“No, it hasn’t,” I said. “There are times when you are irritating, and maybe there have been more of those times than I would have liked, but on the whole, no. You have not been a matter of regret to me.”
“Good,” Seb said. “Will’s in ten minutes?”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
It had been Will’s in ten minutes for many years. Seb had put me up for membership soon after I was admitted to the bar. I walked around to 48th Street and climbed the linoleum-covered stairs that sagged. Those stairs always brought to mind that moment during the war when, in a practice exercise at that staging area in Kent before D-day, I had been forced for the first time in my life to climb a rope ladder.
Seb was sitting at the large round table up near the windows that look out on 48th. His forefinger and thumb twirled the stem of his martini glass as he smiled at Dr. Claude Pfeiffer. The N.Y.U. professor, who had lost most of his hair since I had first joined Will’s, was telling the group around the table the story about Willie Maugham and the Internal Revenue Service. Coming down the long room toward the performance, I suddenly had a revelation about the core of Sebastian Roon’s charm.
Seb must have heard that story, over the years, dozens of times. Even I, who came to the club far less often than he, had heard it more times than I could with any sense of accuracy count. And yet Seb was listening with a smile of eager anticipation.
He had the true actor’s gift. Making it seem, night after night, performance after performance, that this was the first time he had ever uttered the lines. Or heard the other actor utter his.
Seb saw me, changed the smile, and waved me toward one of the smaller tables at the back of the room, under the Howard Chandler Christy painting of Robert Benchley. Walking toward it, I saw Seb rise. On his way to join me, he paused at the bar and said something in a low voice to the stern-face, white-haired old lady in black bombazine. She nodded severely and started to mix my drink. I knew it would be a martini, even though I disliked martinis. The first day I came to Will’s I ordered Cutty Sark on the rocks and the Madame Defarge at the bar had made me a martini. After all these years I still did not want a martini, but if I wanted a drink at Will’s that was what I was going to get.
“I say,” Sebastian Roon said as he plopped down into the chair facing me. “What sort of horrors have you been involved in?”
The remark annoyed me. He sounded exactly like Miss Bienstock saying she could always tell when something troublesome was going through my mind.
“I’ve just been mugged,” I said.
Sebastian Roon’s glass, on its way to his mouth, did not falter. He took his sip. He is a Stanislavsky man.
“You mean mugged as in all those stories on page two of the New York Daily News?” he said.
“Page three,” I said. “Page two is fading Hollywood stars who take overdoses of sleeping pills.”
I gave him the details.
“Bad show, Benjamin,” Sebastian Roon said. “Bad show indeed. Have you been to see a man?”
“It’s too late in the day,” I said. “I’ll call Artie Steinberg in the morning.”
“Any pain now?” Seb said.
“Nothing a drink won’t fix.” How I wished it was not a martini.
“Well, here it is, old boy.”
The grim-faced old lady in bombazine set the drink in front of me.
“Take a good long pull,” Seb said. I did. “Better?”
“Much,” I said.
It wasn’t. But I didn’t mind that. If you can’t lie to a friend, what’s friendship all about?
“Now tell me about Dr. McCarran,” Seb said.
I did.
“Do you think it will work?” Seb said.
“You ought to know,” I said. “McCarran said you got him to do it for several of your actor friends during the war.”
“Quite,” Seb said. “And it did work for them, but this is a different war.”
“I know,” I said. “But the chemistry of the human body that leads to bed-wetting can’t have changed much since the Persian wars and earlier. I’m not too worried about that. McCarran struck me as a man who knows his stuff.”
“But you’re worried about something,” Seb said. “I can tell.”
“How would you like to have facing you the job of breaking this to Elizabeth Ann?” I said.
Seb twirled the stem of his glass for a few moments. “Yes,” he said finally. “I see your point.”
I thought he would. He had known Elizabeth Ann before I met her. In fact, Seb had introduced us.
“Anyway,” I said, “don’t you worry about it.”
“It’s not Jack and the draft board I’m worrying about,” Seb said. “I’m sure McCarran has wrapped that up okay. And it’s not your breaking it to Elizabeth Ann that worries me, either. You’ve been breaking things to her for thirty years. You’ll pull this one off, too.”
“So it must be something involving you,” I said.
Sebastian Roon did quite a bit of worrying about things involving himself.
“Yes,” he said, “and even raising the subject with you at a time like this makes me feel a bit of a stinker.”
Sebastian Roon had been deploring for forty years that he felt a bit of a stinker. But the feeling had never even slowed him down in the process of asking his friends to immerse themselves up to their navels in his affairs. My experience with them was that Seb’s affairs were never silly. Preposterous? Possibly. Outlandish? On occasion. But silly? Never. Was it silly for Columbus to tell Isabella he could reach India by sailing west?
The average citizen, when he comes to see a lawyer, wants a will written. Or a real-estate deal closed. Or a divorce arranged.
Not Seb. He had at war within him the instincts of a high spirited but thoroughly inept adventurer and the innocence of an enthusiastic schoolboy. He could drive you crazy, b
ut he could never bore you. Not Benny Kramer, anyway. I felt about him the way my mother had felt about him. I loved the irritating son of a gun.
“Let’s skip the clipped ‘Oh, dear’ malarkey,” I said. “You’re not at the Lyceum in a revival of The Last of Mrs. Cheney. You’re at Will’s with your dopey old friend Benny Kramer from Tiffany Street. And actually, now that Benny is here, he’s glad he is here. My head hurts, but you soothe me. Tell me slowly all about your current problem.”
Seb stared down into his glass. He seemed troubled. As with all actors pushing sixty, especially good actors, when Sebastian Roon seems troubled your heart leaps. Being troubled seems right. It makes you both bigger men. Seb looked like Abraham Lincoln staring down from that marble armchair in the memorial on the Potomac.
“My problem,” Seb said quietly. “My problem,” he repeated. He sighed. “My problem, Benjamin, is that I’m suffering from an incurable disease.”
My gut jumped. During the past eight months two friends had gone. My barber, and the man who had sat beside me in Bills & Notes at N.Y.U. Law School. The big C. I knew people who hated this euphemism for cancer. I just hated cancer.
“That’s rough,” I said as calmly as I could manage to enunciate the words. “Are you sure it’s incurable?”
Seb’s glance came slowly away from his glass. What was he doing in Will’s? That profile belonged on Mt. Rushmore.
“Absolutely certain,” Seb said.
The place where my head had hit the cab door was suddenly throbbing.
“What have you got?” I said. “Or don’t you want to talk about it?”
“Of course I want to talk about it,” Seb said. “If I didn’t would I have raised the subject?”
Probably not I thought. But not very clearly. My head was going like a metronome.
“All right” I said. “Once on Tiffany Street we were small boys. Comparatively speaking. Now we’re big boys. Undeniably. If you can face telling me, I can face hearing it. Seb, for God’s sake, what damned incurable disease have you got?”
Tiffany Street Page 13
