“I was born on East Fourth Street,” I said. “I’d rather die on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-third.”
“Why?” Seb said.
“I don’t have to climb down five flights of tenement stairs to the backyard to get to the toilet.”
“There’s more to life than ready accessibility to a bathroom,” Seb said.
“But not to death,” I said. “And to die is why you say you want to go back to Islington Crescent.”
“Don’t you want to go hack to East Fourth Street?” Seb said.
“It’s gone,” I said. “Buried under the cement of the East River Drive.”
“Islington Crescent is still there,’ Seb said. “I want to go home to die.”
I thought of suggesting that he read Thomas Wolfe. But he was a friend. I couldn’t do that to a friend.
“How will this Jim Mennen series help you do that?” I said.
“Mennen said he wants the series desperately.”
“Desperately?” I said.
“Yes,” Seb said. “That’s the word he used.”
So I saw the point. “And he’s willing to pay to get it?”
Seb nodded again. “He said he would work out any deal I wanted. All I had to do was get my lawyer together with his.”
“You’re sure about that word desperately?” I said.
“Absolutely,” Seb said.
“Okay,” I said. “Give me the name of his lawyer. I’ll get you enough to retire on.”
6
IT WAS NOT AN arrogant statement. Basically, every business deal is a fire sale. The man who wants to sell, will. At the buyer’s price. I learned that early. From Ira Bern. On that Sunday morning in 1930 when Seb’s uncle I. G. Roon died of a heart attack on Maurice Saltzman’s green stagskin.
It was Miss Bienstock who phoned for the ambulance. While we were waiting, Mr. Saltzman removed from the table the three ham sandwiches Miss Bienstock and I had brought up from the Automat. He gave one to Ira Bern, took another for himself, and handed the third to me.
“You might as well eat it, Benny,” Mr. Saltzman said. “In times like these a ham sandwich is not to be sneezed at.”
“Thanks, Mr. Saltzman,” I said. I turned to his partner. “Mr. Bern,” I said, “while we’re waiting, would you like me to take your shoes down to be shined?”
“It’s Sunday,” Mr. Bern said. “They’re not open.”
I had forgotten that. But I have never forgotten what happened next. After the ambulance arrived and the body of I. G. Roon was carried off to Bellevue, Mr. Saltzman pointed to the green stagskin.
“Benny,” he said. “Take this away.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll take it out to the men’s room and wash it.”
“No,” Mr. Saltzman said. “Get rid of it.”
“You mean throw it away?”
“Yes,” Mr. Saltzman said. He sounded sad but firm. “Get rid of it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I rolled up the green stagskin on which I had so recently brought up the lights. I carried it out to the men’s room, and did a stupid thing. I stuffed it down one of the toilets, and flushed. What happened was not unlike what happened at Johnstown in Pennsylvania when the dam broke.
I retreated slowly, then ran for the door and slammed it shut. Outside I waited. Soon the roaring of the mechanism stopped and the seepage from under the door diminished. I went back down the corridor into the Maurice Saltzman & Company offices.
Ira Bern and Maurice Saltzman and Miss Bienstock were standing in a group around the desk in Mr. Bern’s office. Miss Bienstock looked normal. That is to say, she looked perplexed. Mr. Saltzman and Mr. Bern looked as though they had just come out into the street from a subway wreck. Miss Bienstock, as usual, cut through to reality.
“Maybe Benny knows,” she said.
Mr. Bern and Mr. Saltzman turned to look at me as though Miss Bienstock had suggested that maybe I knew the whereabouts of Justice Joseph Force Crater.
“Why should Benny know?” Mr. Bern said.
“He had lunch with him on Friday,” Miss Bienstock said. “Only two days ago. You remember what happened, Mr. Bern.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Bern said. “That’s right. But what has that got to do with—?”
“He in-vi-ted Benny,” Miss Bienstock said, giving to her pronunciation of the verb a significance that she obviously wanted Mr. Bern to grasp. “Mr. Roon invited Benny to lunch, didn’t he, Benny? Mr. Sebastian Roon?”
“My mother says his name is Seymour,” I said.
“Your mother?” Mr. Bern said. “She knows Mr. Roon?”
“She knows him about the way I know him,” I said.
“How come?” Mr. Bern said.
I hesitated.
“Benny is a good boy,” Mr. Saltzman said. “He’ll tell us. Won’t you, Benny?”
I did. I left Hannah Halpern out of it, of course, but on the whole I related the events of the previous night with accuracy. The information was received in troubled silence. Miss Bienstock broke it.
“You mean, then, Benny,” she said, “that the young Mr. Roon is right this minute up there on Tiffany Street? Sleeping in your bedroom?”
“I don’t know if Mr. Roon is still sleeping,” I said nervously. “But he’s probably still up there. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry last night to go any place else. By now, my mother is probably making something for him to eat.”
“Benny,” Mr. Bern said. “Could you call him for us?” I must have looked undecided, because Mr. Bern said, “You have a telephone, no?”
“Oh, yes,” I said proudly.
“Would you give him a buzz then?” Mr. Bern said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Here,” Mr. Bern said. “Use my phone.”
Since it was the only phone in the room, I assumed he was paying me a compliment by allowing me a rare privilege. So I used his phone. My mother answered.
“Hello?” she screamed.
She did not, of course, understand electronics. She thought it made her sound more clear at the other end if she hurled her voice as loudly as she could into the mouthpiece at her end.
“Ma,” I said. “Please bring Seymour to the phone. It’s very important.”
“What’s very important?” my mother said.
“Seymour’s uncle just died,” I said.
My mother was very good about death. To my mother it did not mean fainting spells and screams of despair. To my mother death meant rolling up your sleeves. Funerals were as important as marriages. Perhaps more so. Who had time to weep? There was work to be done.
“He’s coming!” my mother yelled. “He’s finishing a potato latke.”
That settled it. Nobody and nothing could provide greater proof of something I already knew or at least suspected. She had fallen in love with him. The potato latke is not a breakfast dish.
It is one of the great inventions of Western Civilization, but it is not a breakfast dish. It is a pancake made from ground raw potato to which are added a half a dozen ingredients. Or perhaps a dozen. Who knows except Brillat-Savarin and my mother, and they are now both gone. These ingredients zing the ground potato up to the point where people fight for the end product. Your genuine potato latke never gets served at a table. It is snatched out of the pan when ready, and gulped standing up at the stove, and it is not, repeat not, a breakfast dish.
“Hello, Benjamin?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s me, Seb.”
“What’s the sweat, old boy?”
I told him. In that hushed tone I was beginning to learn was the uptown way of conveying the news of death. On East Fourth Street, except in the case of my no-nonsense mother, the melancholy event was always heralded with a long, loud scream.
“The silly ass,” the voice of Sebastian Roon crackled in my ear. “He always chose the most inconvenient times to do the damnedest things.”
“What?” I said.
“Where are you calling from?” Sebastian Roon asked.
I told him. Pause. “Look,” Seb said, and I wondered why people say that. Look at what? “Benjamin,” Seb said. “Do you think you can keep them there? Mr. Bern and Mr. Saltzman? Until I get down? There are some things I must talk to them about at once.”
“Hold it a second,” I said. I turned to the three people in Mr. Bern’s office. “He wants to know would you wait here for him? He’ll come right down.”
“Of course we will, Benny,” Miss Bienstock said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
I told this to Sebastian Roon, and he said he would see us in about an hour.
“He’s coming downtown right away,” I said.
“Benny,” Mr. Bern said. “The water cooler.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I had forgotten about the water cooler. Mr. Bern and Mr. Saltzman retreated behind the closed door of Mr. Bern’s office. Miss Bienstock went out into the stenographers’ typing room. And I tackled the water cooler. My preoccupation was not total: the water cooler, the ashtrays, the wastebaskets all helped, but people don’t die of heart attacks in front of you on green stagskins every day in the week. I was still somewhat dazed by the performance. I was still somewhat dazed when Sebastian Roon came into the reception room.
“Where is the silly ass?” he said.
I had a startled moment or two before I realized he was referring to his dead uncle.
“At Bellevue,” I said. “The ambulance came and carried it, him, I mean the body, they took it away.”
“Good riddance,” Sebastian Roon said.
The remark upset me. On East Fourth Street there had been firm conventions of conduct about such things. None were more firm than the conventions about death. It was an event about which you were expected to be sad. I had not thought it would be different on Tiffany Street. Or, more accurately, on West 34th Street. A man had died. You were expected to look sad, appear distraught, and sound as though you were about to hurl yourself on the bier.
“It was terrible,” I said in a confused voice.
“I don’t doubt it,” Sebastian Roon said. “Most events to which my uncle lent his talents were at least that, frequently worse than terrible. Where is Mr. Bern?”
“In his office,” I said. “Over this way.”
I led him to Mr. Bern’s office door, knocked on it, and shoved it open. Sebastian Roon went in. I pulled the door shut and walked out to the stenographers’ typing room.
“Miss Bienstock,” I said, “does this mean we’re in trouble?”
“Yes, Benny,” she said, “I think we are in trouble, but I don’t know how much trouble.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I know Mr. Roon was a client, but after all he was only one client. We have dozens of clients. I know it’s bad for us to lose any client, but why does losing just one make so much difference to Mr. Saltzman and Mr. Bern?”
“Well, you see, Benny, Mr. Roon was not just one client.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No,” Miss Bienstock said. “You know Grantham Estates?”
Of course I knew Grantham Estates. I knew it the way a Fifth Avenue bus driver knows Saks Fifth Avenue. Something he passes regularly on his way downtown to Washington Square. One of my duties in the M.S.&Co. offices was to keep the files tidy. Twice a day I collected the file folders from the various “out” boxes on different desks, and replaced them in the green metal cabinets that lined the walls of the file room. “Grantham Estates” was a thick folder just behind “Gogen-Heimowitz High Styled Kitchen Smocks, Inc.”
“What about Grantham Estates?” I said.
“It’s one of Mr. Roon’s companies,” Miss Bienstock said. “He’s got about twenty.”
I got the message. It took the form of a hot, terrifying wind of revelation: interlocking directorates; holding companies; conglomerates; cartels; write-offs; amortization; tax shelters; the whole complex, slippery apparatus that leads from tenement flats on East Fourth Street with toilets in the hall to huge villas at Montreux with doxies in every eiderdown.
“You mean Mr. Roon was more than just one client?” I said to Miss Bienstock.
“Like I said, he was about twenty,” she said. “From each one we drew about a hundred and a quarter a month. So you see, Benny...”
Benny saw. The Kramer family had just barely made it to Tiffany Street. We had been living there for what? Six months? Seven? And already we were being threatened with the Bronx equivalent of a moof tzettle, an order from the court to vacate for nonpayment of rent. At that particular moment, valiant was not the word for Benny. Then Sebastian Roon came into the file room.
“I’ve got to go over to our office and sort things out,” he said. “Why don’t you come along and help?”
I hesitated.
“Don’t worry about Messrs. Bern and Saltzman,” Sebastian Roon said. “I’ve asked them to release you in my custody, and they’ve agreed. Shall we go?”’
We went out to the elevator and then out into the street. It was like coming out onto one of those moors to which Shakespeare always brings his main characters for their big soliloquies. I winced away from the sunlight.
“Are you equal to a brisk stroll?” Sebastian Roon said. “Thirty-fourth to Twenty-first. Thirteen squares. Not insurmountable, really. After all, Benjamin, we are young, aren’t we?”
To my astonishment, I found myself laughing. There was something funny about this British kid from Blackpool, in his funny three-button tveet suit, and needing a shave, making jokes about our both being young. It doesn’t sound like the raw material from which great comic masterpieces like “Casey at the Bat” are fashioned, but it did sort of part the clouds.
“We are,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We went down Seventh Avenue at a good clip. I noticed the way he walked. As though it was not just a form of locomotion but an activity to which one devoted the sort of attention that a golf nut devotes to his follow-through. Sebastian Roon walked as though he were entered in a competition in which points were awarded for the form you displayed while doing it. He rocked back and forth from heel to toe. I just panted.
When we reached 21st Street I thought of Hot Cakes Rabinowitz and the lift he had given me on Friday in the Built-in Uplift Frocks, Inc., truck. Could it really have happened on Friday? Only two days ago?
“Did they know you were coming?” I said to Seb when we came into the offices of I. G. Roon, Ltd.
I referred to the tall old lady in the alpaca dress buttoned up to her throat, and the old man with the tufts of white hair over his ears who wore long black stockings on his arms from wrists to elbows. They were working away at their stand-up desks, their backs turned to each other, exactly as they had been on Friday. I wondered when they slept. Or went to the bathroom. They did not look up when Sebastian and I came into the outer office.
“Do they know what’s happened?” I whispered.
“Without any doubt,” Seb said, his voice low. “They’ve been with my uncle for donkey’s years. They know everything that’s been going on, and they’ve been expecting what’s happened to happen for longer than you and I have lived. That’s why they’re here on Sunday. They haven’t taken a day off in years. When things toppled, they wanted to be in at the death, you might say. And from the fact that I’ve come into the office on Sunday, accompanied by you, you can be sure they know things have finally toppled. Come in here, Benjamin, if you will, please.”
We went into the private office with the windows that looked out on 21st Street.
“Now, Benjamin.”
“Yes?” I said.
“I want you to be a witness to this,” Sebastian Roon said.
He had pulled out a drawer in one of the wooden filing cabinets that lined the wall to the right of his desk. From the drawer he brought a green metal cashbox and set it on his desk. It was the sort of box in which Miss Bienstock kept the petty cash that paid for shining Mr. Bern’s shoes every morning and underwrote his Lou G. Siegel hot pastrami sandwiches. Sebastian pulled from his poc
ket a key ring, selected from it a small key, and opened the green box. There were no coins in the small compartments up front, but the long rectangular compartment at the back was stuffed with paper money. Sebastian pulled out the bills and slowly counted them out onto the desk, muttering as he did so.
“Nine twenty,” he said finally, “Nine hundred and twenty dollars. Correct?”
A moment went by before I realized he had asked me for corroboration.
“Is that correct?” Seb said sharply. “Nine hundred and twenty dollars?”
“Yes,” I said hastily. “I guess so.”
“You guess so?” Seb said. “You saw me count it, didn’t you?”
I had, and I hadn’t. Yes, I had seen the physical act of counting. And yes, I had heard Seb muttering as the total mounted. But I had not been aware of what I was seeing. I was not quite sure of what I now saw. Nine hundred dollars in real, live American money had about as much reality for me as the headwaters of the Amazon. I was still pleasantly dazed by the fact that every Saturday afternoon Mr. Bern handed me an envelope containing two fives and three singles.
“Yes,” I said. “I saw you count it.”
“Good,” Seb said. “Now come with me, please.”
Carrying the batch of bills, he walked into the outer office. I followed. Seb went to the old lady. In front of her, on the stand-up desk, he counted out some bills.
“Twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two,” he said.
So now I knew how much an old employee of I. G. Roon, Ltd., had earned each week.
“Thanks,” the old lady said.
She picked up the bills, rolled them into a tight sausage, and did something my mother always did with paper money. She lifted her skirt and stuck the roll of bills into the top of her stocking. Seb moved across to the old man and repeated the performance.
“Thirty-six,” he said at the end.
So I knew which of the two old people had seniority.
“This is the last?” the old man said.
“I’m afraid so,” Seb said.
“Then he’s gone, is he?” the old man said.
“This morning,” Seb said. “Heart attack.”
The old man nodded as he gathered the money and jogged the bills into a neat packet.
Tiffany Street Page 15
