Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

  “Why not?” Mrs. Halpern said. “She’s got something wrong with her tongue? But why aren’t you already here, Benny? It’s almost like nearly seven o’clock?”

  “That’s what I want to talk to Hannah about,” I said.

  “Benny, you’re sick, God forbid!”

  I had the feeling that at any moment I might be.

  “No, no, I’m just a little late. Could I talk to Hannah?”

  “I’m holding her back from the telephone? Of course you can talk to Hannah. This is a free country, Benny. Hannah, here, it’s Benny. He’s sick, but he says no. Find out, Hannah.”

  “Benny,” Hannah said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m here at home.”

  “On Tiffany Street?”

  “Hannah, for God’s sake, how many homes do I have?”

  “But how can you be home, Benny? It’s almost seven o’clock. In four minutes you’re supposed to be under Goldkorn’s clock?”

  “I’ve got sort of a problem.”

  “Then it’s true?”

  “What’s true?”

  “You’re sick, Benny?”

  “Don’t sound so eager,” I said. “No, I’m not sick. But I’ve got this friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “The Englishman.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Him. I’m sorry about this, Hannah. I’m not responsible. He’s been sort of living with us. I mean, I came home from work just a few minutes ago, and there he was, as usual.”

  “Where?”

  I began to regret that the Kramer family’s fortunes had risen to the point where we could afford a telephone.

  “Here, in our kitchen,” I said. “That’s where.”

  “What’s he doing in your kitchen?”

  I closed my eyes, prayed for help, and got it. I was certainly entitled to it. If you live a clean life, Mr. O’Hare, my old scoutmaster, used to say, you can always count on God to be in your corner.

  “He’s been helping my mother with her jazz bow business,” I said.

  Hannah’s voice, a seductive knish-larded murmur in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street, could on the phone split an eardrum.

  “You mean he’s an Englishman and he knows how to make jazz bows?”

  “Don’t scream at me,” I said. “I’ve had a rough week. Yes, he does know how to make jazz bows. Apparently it’s a very popular way to spend an evening in Blackpool.”

  “Boy,” Hannah said, “I would certainly like to meet this guy.”

  “It could be arranged,” I said. “In fact, that’s why I’m calling you. Hannah, do you have a friend who might want to go out with him tonight?”

  “A girl?”

  No, a musk ox.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s sort of lonely, I guess. He’d like to take in a double feature.”

  “We-ell.” Pause. “Benny?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I could call my friend Grace Krieger?”

  “Who is she?”

  “She works with me in the office at Gold-Mark-Zweig, Inc. Grace is very nice. Really, she is. She’s in charge of apartment rentals. All the files and everything. She’s very efficient.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Well, Alice Faye she’s not, but she’s really very nice. You’ll like her, Benny.”

  “Who cares if I like her?” I said irritably. “I’m trying to get a date for Sebastian Roon.”

  “That’s some name, Benny.”

  “It’s not much different from Kramer or Halpern,” I said. “It’s just a name. Could you call her and find out if she’s free tonight?”

  “Sure,” Hannah said, and then: “Benny?”

  “What?”

  “There’s just one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Grace Krieger is a very nice girl.”

  “Good,” I said. “I do not like un-nice girls.”

  You should live so, Benjamin Kramer.

  “No, now wait, Benny.” Hannah paused, then: “Grace—Krieger—is—a—very—nice—girl.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “You told me.”

  “But I want it clearly understood, Benny.”

  “What understood?”

  “Grace—Krieger—is—a—very—nice—girl.”

  Bong!

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes, oh,” Hannah said.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, I didn’t say—”

  “No, you didn’t. Because you are a gentleman, Benny.”

  “Me?”

  “Now look who’s screaming.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that all I asked is—”

  “I know what you asked,” Hannah said. “But this Englishman, he could be expecting more.”

  “Oh,” I said again. Then: “I don’t see what it has to do with me and you. You’re my date. She’s his date. Let them work it out for themselves.”

  “One of the reasons I know Grace will be home tonight,” Hannah said, “is she doesn’t like boys who want to work things out for themselves. Grace—Krieger—is—a—very—nice—girl.”

  That, I figured, was Sebastian Roon’s tough luck.

  “Good,” I said. “All this Englishman wants is a double feature.”

  “Okay,” Hannah said. “As long as that’s understood, you two meet me and Grace under Goldkorn’s clock in half an hour.”

  “Don’t you want to call her first and find out if she’s free?” I said.

  “Grace is free,” Hannah said. “Don’t you guys be late.”

  We weren’t, and as soon as I clapped eyes on Grace Krieger I knew why she was free. It isn’t that she was homely. Having said that, need I say more? Yes. As some of our more hectoring playwrights keep telling us: attention must be paid. Sebastian Roon, I noticed, was paying attention.

  “Now,” I said after the introductions were over. “This is what Hannah and I usually do. We get a couple of knishes in the Hebrew National and we go up into the balcony. You two, you can do anything you like.”

  “Why, that sounds like an ideal program,” Sebastian Roon said, smiling with obvious delight at Grace Krieger. “Is the purchase of knishes, I think you called them, is that a difficult operation?”

  Hannah nudged me. “Benny, you get them,” she hissed.

  “Oh, yes, well,” I said. “Why don’t we do it this way? We’ll get the tickets, then you three go up to the balcony, and I’ll go next door and get the knishes and bring them up.”

  “Jolly good,” Sebastian Roon said. “Are you sure you’re up to it, old boy?”

  “Ask Hannah,” I said.

  Benny Kramer, the rooster.

  “Benny is the best knish-getter in the East Bronx,” Hannah said.

  Everybody laughed except Grace Krieger.

  “Very well, then,” Sebastian Roon said. “On with the show.”

  In the lobby of Loew’s 180th Street he bought two tickets and I bought two. I gave one of mine to Hannah and whispered in her ear.

  “Get rid of these two clucks,” I said.

  “How?” she said.

  “Take them all the way over to the right,” I said. “By the exit sign. Then you go where you and I always sit, all the way on the left. I’ll bring up the knishes, give them two, and then they’re on their own.”

  Hannah giggled. “Benny Kramer,” she whispered. “You are a terrible person.”

  I went off to the Hebrew National feeling like a Jewish Errol Flynn. What a girl! My feelings dampened somewhat in the delicatessen store. In those days a knish was served on a small square of glazed paper. It was perfectly adequate for one knish. Even two had never been a serious inconvenience. But four were a new experience. It means two in each hand, and the knish of 1930 on 180th Street in the Bronx was not a gumdrop. Each one was about the size of a catcher’s mitt. The girl behind the counter saw my problem.

  “Here, wait.” She came up with an empty hot dog roll carton and set the four knishes into it.
“How’s that?”

  “Great,” I said, “except for one thing. Would you put this between my teeth?”

  I indicated the theater ticket tucked into my breast pocket. She laughed, pulled it out, and set it between my teeth.

  “Don’t say thanks,” the girl said. “You’ll spit out the ticket.”

  I almost did, in the theater lobby, but the ticket-chopper caught it in time. I climbed the stairs to the balcony and stood in the back until my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. When I felt safe, I moved over to the far left, where Hannah and I always sat. No Hannah. This confused me. I felt my confusion would clear up if I unloaded my two excess knishes. I worked my way across to the far right. Grace Krieger was sitting on the aisle. The seat beside her was empty.

  “Where’s Seb?” I said.

  “Why don’t you ask Hannah?”

  Even at that early age I disliked people who answer a question by asking another one.

  “Where is Hannah?” I said.

  “Why don’t you ask your British friend,” Grace Krieger said icily.

  Her voice had an odd effect on what I was carrying. The knishes in the hot dog roll box seemed to get hotter in my hands.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “How should I know?” Grace Krieger said. “They left together.”

  The theater’s sound system exploded into action.

  “Out of the shadow of the silent screen,” the sound track bellowed, “strides John Barrymore in, and as, GENERAL CRACK!”

  I stood there in the dark theater, holding my four knishes, and watched stupidly as John Barrymore came striding out of the shadow of the silent screen.

  8

  I AM NOT CLEAR about what John Barrymore did after he stopped striding. I am very clear about what Benny Kramer did.

  I sat down beside Grace Krieger and, in silence, offered her one of the four hot knishes. With an angry shake of her head, she refused. I had to get rid of them somehow. So I ate them. All four.

  When John Barrymore won the last battle, and wrapped up the last countess, the screaming sound track went silent. The screen flashed a familiar, flickering announcement:

  REMAIN IN YOUR SEATS!

  DOUBLE FEATURE TONIGHT

  I turned to Grace Krieger. “Do you want to see the second picture?”

  From the sound of my voice the answer I hoped to get was apparent even to me. Nevertheless, I don’t think the way I asked the question dictated Grace Krieger’s reply. It was obvious that she’d had that worked out before John Barrymore stopped striding. She stood up before she made the reply.

  “No,” Grace Krieger said curtly.

  And she embarked on some striding of her own. Up the aisle, across the back of the balcony, down the stairs, and out into 180th Street. Keeping up with her was not easy. Four Gabilla’s knishes were, and I suspect still are, quite a load to carry. I caught up with her under the marquee. Grace Krieger stared up at me as though she were posing for a Salem woodcarver hacking out with an adz the figurehead of Medusa for a whaling ship.

  “Where do you live?” I said, and belched. “Sorry.”

  “Why do you ask?” Grace Krieger said.

  She snapped the words at me as though I were a masher who had accosted her in the park. In those days in the pages of the Daily News the masher was the equivalent of today’s mugger.

  “I thought I’d take you home,” I said. Another burp. A new experience. With Hannah I had never eaten more than two knishes at one balcony sitting.

  “Why?”

  I stared at this coiled spring of a girl. Chin up. Lips pursed in a tight little circle. Eyes hurling almost visible darts of savage light, like tracer bullets in a movie about the Lafayette Escadrille.

  “I don’t know why,” I said, ducking my head to one side to avoid getting hit by a spent shell. “I always take Hannah home after the movies.” The remark struck me as being somewhat deficient in chivalry content, so I added hastily, “I mean, it’s late at night.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  I had to restrain an impulse to smash my fist into her face. In spite of what the four knishes were doing to my gut, however, my brain told me it was not Grace Krieger I was sore at.

  “Look,” I said irritably, “I’m just trying to be polite.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” she said, shaving the words from an invisible block of ice.

  I blinked at her. It had never occurred to me that she had expected more. After all, who the hell did she think she was? Hannah Halpern?

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said, “everybody knows when a guy takes out a girl, especially it’s late at night, he escorts her home.”

  “I don’t know about the intelligence of the girls you are accustomed to taking out,” Grace Krieger said as though she were spitting out grape seeds. “But I am quite capable of finding my own home. I suggest when you find yours, you take a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in a glass of warm water. Good night, Mr. Kramer.”

  And she was gone. I saluted her departure with a belch of relief and turned toward my own home. When I reached it my mother was at the kitchen table, working with her pencil at the large notebook in which Sebastian Roon had taught her to record, every Saturday night, all the wages she had paid earlier in the evening to her turners. I had not realized, until I saw the alarm clock on the refrigerator, that, for a Saturday night, it was still early in the evening.

  “No double feature?” my mother said.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “Hannah had a headache.”

  Even as I uttered the unimaginative, spineless little lie, I was aware of a small, pulsing, hopeless flicker of hope that it might be true.

  “Where’s Seymour?” my mother said.

  I was afraid to imagine. Once you left Loew’s 180th Street, there were not many places in that neighborhood of the Bronx where you could take a girl late at night. I had taken Hannah to all of them.

  “His girl didn’t have a headache,” I said. “So they stayed for the double feature. Good night, Ma.”

  I started down the hall.

  “Where are you going?” my mother said.

  “To sleep,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “In my room,” I said.

  “So where will Seymour sleep?” my mother said.

  I stared at my mother without seeing her. It came to me at this moment that at the back of my mind there had been a small frightening hint about the meaning of the disappearance of Hannah with Sebastian Roon that I did not want to face.

  “Sorry, Ma,” I said, coming back into the kitchen.

  “I put two extra blankets for you under the mattress on the floor,” she said. “Now it’s nice and soft.”

  It was one of those rare moments when it occurred to me that perhaps she liked me. The moments came, of course, when she was free from her preoccupations with other things, when she remembered me. But that didn’t bother me. I was grateful for those moments, even if they were afterthoughts. They always made me feel good. This one helped now.

  “Thanks, Ma.” I said. “Listen, do we have any bicarbonate in the house?”

  “What did you eat?” she demanded, pushing herself away from the table.

  “Just a knish,” I said, and belched.

  “From one knish,” my mother said, disappearing into the bathroom, “you don’t get a thunderstorm like that.”

  I emitted a few more thunderstorms before she came back with a glass of water in which she was rattling a teaspoon.

  “Here,” she said. “Drink.”

  I drank. “Thanks, Ma,” I said, handing back the glass. “I’ll go to sleep now.”

  I went into the front room, got out of my clothes, and slipped into my makeshift bed on the floor between the cutting table and the Singer. The extra blankets under the mattress helped. My bed was much softer tonight than it had been since Sebastian Roon had come to live with us. But the extra, blankets did not help enough. I could not sleep.

  I
lay awake all night, thinking myself into and out of a maze of feverish guesses about what had happened, and frantic plans for what to do. None of these made much sense. In fact, I couldn’t retain any of them in my head for more than a moment or two before my mind went galloping off after a new possibility or a new plan.

  It is customary, in an account of such a sleepless night, to put an end to the nightmare by stating that at long last, with the dawn, came blessed sleep. Not for Benny Kramer. With the dawn came the conviction that, before I went crazy, it would be a good idea to get out of the house.

  All night, through the whirling fragments that had been chasing each other in my head, I had been listening for the sound of the front door opening and closing. I heard nothing.

  I dressed quietly, went out into the kitchen, and stood motionless, listening. From behind the closed door of my parent’s bedroom down the hall came the sound of my father’s musical snore. Around it, as though his sounds were a sapling to which a vine had taken a fancy wound the less decorative noises made by my sleeping mother. I tiptoed to my room and put my ear to the closed door. Not a sound. I worked the knob slowly and eased the door open. The bed was empty. I closed the door and tiptoed out of the house.

  My mind was still circling in and out and around the puzzling but ominous blow of the night before. My movements, however, were automatic. Seven days a week, at this hour of the morning, I walked to the subway. I did so now.

  Without knowing I was doing them, I did all the other things I did every morning. It was only after I had distributed the emptied and rinsed ashtrays around the office, and realized all my morning chores in the Maurice Saltzman & Company office were completed, that I looked at my watch. Ten minutes short of eight o’clock. The staff never started drifting into the office before nine. The realization that I had over an hour of absolute privacy, seventy minutes of guaranteed freedom from eavesdropping, seemed a gift that had to be used. I forced myself not to think or hesitate. I went out to the switchboard, sank one of the brass-tipped red rubber plugs into an outside wire, pulled the corresponding black key, and gave the operator the number I never had to look up.

  “Hello?” It was Mrs. Halpern’s voice.

  “Hello, Mrs. Halpern.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Benny.”

  “Benny Kramer?”