Fifteen bumps later there was still no sign of her. So I knew for certain what I had suspected from the beginning: she was not coming. I remember that night, only a month ago, the night Sebastian Roon showed up on Tiffany Street for the first time. I had arrived under the clock five minutes after seven. Hannah had bawled me out for being late.
The clock overhead bumped again. Sixteen minutes after seven. Time to go home. Nobody was going to bawl out anybody under Goldkorn’s clock tonight. Still I lingered.
Another bump. Another. And another. Nineteen minutes. Just one more bump, I decided, and then—
And then a curious thing happened.
A taxi came out of Vyse Avenue, turned into 180th Street, eased up to the curb at my feet, and stopped in front of Goldkorn’s clock. I couldn’t make out who was inside, but I could see hands moving forward, across the back of the front seat, and the driver turning toward them, and I realized the fare was being paid. A moment later the door opened and a fat woman, in a series of panting jerks, as though she were saddled with a heavy knapsack, started to heave her way out. There was something familiar about the movements, but I did not recognize Mrs. Halpern until she stood up on the sidewalk and the cab pulled away.
Then I realized why I had not recognized her. Mrs. Halpern, like my mother, was not a taxi rider, and I had never seen her except in her own kitchen where, like my mother in our kitchen, she always wore a housedress covered by an apron. Here, on the sidewalk under Goldkorn’s clock, Mrs. Halpern was wearing a blue silk dress with white flowers embroidered at the neckline, and an Empress Eugénie hat.
“Benny!” she cried. “Thank God you waited! Hannah said you’re always here by seven o’clock, so she gave me money to take a taxi from the ship, but it was traffic from downtown there by the dock, Benny, such traffic I never saw, and I got scared you wouldn’t be here, and even though I knew I could call you up at home and tell you what Hannah said, I knew it would be nicer if I told you straight from the ship, like Hannah wanted.”
“The ship?” I said.
Mrs. Halpern nodded and smiled happily and poured out a stream of hopelessly disorganized facts that clearly were not disorganized to her. So I thought I’d better listen and place them in some sort of order that would make them comprehensible. It took a bit of doing, but I managed it I was so pleased with my achievement that I did not immediately grasp the extraordinary nature of the story.
More or less coherently, it went like this:
Seven days ago, the night John Barrymore came striding out of the shadow of the silent screen in, and as, General Crack, Hannah had been offered a job in England. The story, which Mrs. Halpern had heard only late this afternoon, when Hannah asked her mother to come to the ship to say farewell, was that my firm, Maurice Saltzman & Company, had a client over there who manufactured hats made from rabbit hairs raised in Australia by another client of Maurice Saltzman & Company. The English firm was in trouble, and had appealed to Maurice Saltzman & Company for an American bookkeeper to come over and straighten out its records. Only an hour ago, on board the ship that was taking her to England, Hannah had told her mother that I had recommended her for the job, and the reason her movements had been so erratic in recent days was that all week she had been busy with passports, steamship tickets, buying clothes, and packing. Indeed, Hannah had been so busy, she told her mother, that she had forgotten to tell me the hour her ship was sailing. She was kissing her mother goodbye out on deck when Hannah remembered.
“She felt so terrible,” Mrs. Halpern said, “honest, Benny, she started to cry, and she gave me money for a taxi because she said she wanted me to say goodbye for her, not on the telephone, but real people talking face to face, and Hannah said I should hurry, because she knew you’d be waiting under Goldkorn’s clock. So I hurried, and Benny, look, here I am.”
She threw her arms around me and gave me a fierce kiss.
“That’s from Hannah,” Mrs. Halpern said. “She said I should do it, and I should tell you why I was doing it, and you would understand.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Halpern,” I managed to say. “I understand.”
Mrs. Halpern kissed me again, not so fiercely this time.
“That one is from me alone,” she said. “Because you did such a wonderful thing for my Hannah.”
“It was nothing,” I said.
Through the rolling mass of my emotions, which reminded me of angleworms squirming in a bottle, came a brightly lighted sliver of cynicism: perhaps I had spoken the truth; perhaps it was nothing.
“Nothing he says,” Mrs. Halpern said to Goldkorn’s clock. “Benny,” she said, “you should have seen Hannah’s face on that ship. Like she was born again. It would have done your heart good, Benny.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. I walked Mrs. Halpern down Vyse Avenue to the stoop of her house, where she kissed me again.
“Oh, Benny, Benny,” she said with a joyous smile. “What a wonderful boy you are!”
It was not much, but it was something, to know that at least one member of the Halpern family thought so.
“Good night,” I said, and walked slowly in the dusk to Tiffany Street
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table working on her account book.
“I saved you soup and kiggle and a nice piece chicken,” she said, getting up. “I’ll warm it good so you’ll enjoy.”
So I knew she knew. My mother never fed me on Saturday nights.
“Thanks, Ma,” I said.
“Take off the jacket and the tie,” she said. “A good piece chicken you must eat it in comfort.”
She made no attempt to stop me when I went into my room. I took off my jacket and tie and came back out into the kitchen. My mother had set out enough food to carry my old East Fourth Street boy scout troop through a Labor Day weekend camping trip to the Palisades. I suddenly felt famished. I cleaned the plates.
My mother never mentioned Sebastian Roon. It was as though the young Englishman had never been with us. Or had never existed. But he had left his mark. He had given my mother her basic grounding in English, and she moved ahead steadily. Occasionally she would ask me to explain a difficult word. There was no deference in her request. It was not Benny Kramer asking Miss Bongiorno a question in class. My mother asked as an equal. That pleased me.
Also, my mother’s jazz bow business prospered. Soon she allowed me to keep not three but five dollars a week out of my Maurice Saltzman & Company pay envelope. And, of course, I owed that to Sebastian Roon. But I managed to restrain my gratitude. I kept it to myself.
One day, as she was cooking my breakfast, my mother asked how much time Mr. Bern allowed me for lunch every day.
“I don’t have a regular lunch hour,” I said. “If I’m working away from the office, I usually do what the other men on the staff do. I go out, have a sandwich, walk around for a while, and then come back to work. A half-hour. An hour. Like that. If Mr. Bern keeps me in the office for the day, I grab a bite when I’m out on an errand for him or Miss Bienstock. Why do you ask?”
“I’d like to buy a spring coat,” my mother said. “I’d like you to come with me.”
She had long ago lost the capacity to surprise me. Now it came hurtling back. My mother had never owned a spring coat. Her few clothes were functional, almost primitive. She made most of them herself. They had no style. She was not a good seamstress. But she was good enough for her purpose, which was protection from the elements. In the winter heavy she used to say, in the summer light.
“Why do you want to buy a spring coat?” I said.
“It’s coming soon spring,” my mother said. “In America, it comes spring, you buy a spring coat.”
It had taken an Englishman to lead her, after a quarter of a century of immigrant darkness, onto the bright road of Americanization.
“Why do you ask about my lunch hour?” I said.
“I want you to come help me,” she said.
“On my lunch hour,” I said, “I d
on’t think I could get up to the Bronx and then back to work. It’s an hour on the subway each way.”
“Who said the Bronx?” my mother said.
I got it. “You mean downtown?” I said.
“What else?” she said. “You want something good, you have to go downtown. Everybody goes to buy downtown.”
It was clear that she meant everybody who was in America.
“Is there any particular store you have in mind?” I said.
I was absolutely certain she had. Until she knew, my mother would never have asked me to accompany her. She did not mind unanswered questions, so long as it was somebody else who did not know the answer. My mother did not like to be tagged off base.
“This place Klein’s,” she said. “On Fourteenth Street. You know it?”
Did Martin Chuzzlewit know the Monument to the Great Fire in Pudding Lane?
“Sure,” I said.
“You could meet me there today?” my mother said. “Say like maybe half past twelve?”
“Sure,” I said again. “But there’s still that problem. An hour up here by subway to get you, an hour back downtown, maybe a half-hour for buying the coat, then I’d have to bring you back up here, and I’d have to go back downtown again. Five hours, Ma, at least. Maybe six.”
“Not if all you have to do is come from your office and meet me at Klein’s,” my mother said. “You help me buy the coat, then you go back to your office.”
“What about you?” I said. “How will you get to Klein’s?”
“Don’t worry about me.” my mother said. “Just tell me where it is. I’ll get there.”
I knew there was no point in protest or argument. She had made up her mind. So I told her and, as I told her, I drew a crude map on the back of a grocery bag. My mother studied it for a few moments.
“I’ll meet you here,” she said, pointing to the Union Square entrance. “Twelve-thirty.”
I had a bad morning. My mother had never before set foot in the subway. She was bound to get lost or worse. Fortunately, that day I was helping Mr. Breiner and two other members of the Maurice Saltzman & Company staff with a bankruptcy audit of a passementerie manufacturer on 23rd Street. When I got to Klein’s at twenty minutes past twelve, my mother was waiting in front of the Union Square entrance.
“Did you have any trouble?” I said.
“What kind of trouble?” she said. “There’s signs. All you need to know is how to read them.” Pause. “And also you must have a nickel.”
The ability to read signs was for her of course a tremendous achievement. So she wanted the credit, and she got it. In her own way. By making little of it. And giving the weight of her remark to something anybody could achieve. A nickel.
It was the touch that set her apart. It was what made her not just anybody’s mother. It was what for Benny Kramer made her his mother.
The next Sunday morning, when I came out of my bedroom for breakfast, she set before me a plate of piping hot potato latkes. My heart thumped. I knew what she was telling me. The wedge that her feelings for Sebastian Roon had driven between us, that was gone. From now on she had only one son.
She demonstrated this in many ways. For me the most significant was that she never mentioned Hannah Halpern. I don’t know how much my mother knew, but she always knew a lot that you did not suspect she knew. What she didn’t know, she knew how to find out. She and Mrs. Halpern were friends. My mother, by introducing me to the Halperns, had introduced me to Hannah.
I was fairly certain that my mother had talked to Mrs. Halpern on the phone during the day, when I was downtown. And I was equally certain that Mrs. Halpern had given my mother her joyous version of the good luck that had befallen Hannah. What Mrs. Halpern had no way of knowing was what my mother knew: a boy named Sebastian Roon, of whose existence Mrs. Halpern was unaware, had disappeared from Tiffany Street at the same time Hannah had sailed for England.
When I started coming home for supper on Saturday nights, and she set out my meal, I knew she knew that there was no longer any Hannah around for me to go to double features with.
Eight or nine months after she sailed, I had a letter from Hannah. It was friendly, but short. She invited me to come to her wedding in Blackpool. The fact that she knew I couldn’t possibly accept seemed to contain a concealed message. For a while I tried to figure it out, but I couldn’t. Then I became interested in another girl.
I forgot Hannah.
9
ONE DAY, WITHOUT WARNING, Lillian Waldbaum came out into the file room where I was working.
“What are you doing Tuesday night?” she said. This was about a year after Seb and Hannah had disappeared from the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street.
“Nothing much,” I said uneasily, feeling my face grow hot. In those days when girls came at me out of the blue, I went into the red. “I mean aside from my classes at C.C.N.Y.”
“What time are they?” Lillian said. “These classes?”
“Eco Two is six-thirty,” I said. “French One is seven-thirty. And Debentures Three is eight-thirty.”
“You crazy about Debentures?” Lillian said.
The answer was: of course not. I detested Debentures. I did not understand them. But I felt it was a proper course to take for a young man who worked for a firm of certified public accountants. I was trying to impress Mr. Bern. He felt about debentures the way Tom Mix felt about his horse Tony.
“Well,” I said nervously, “not about Three.”
“I hear One and Two also stink,” Lillian said.
She was not a subtle girl. All you had to do was see her lean across the wash basin in the file room.
“Anyway,” I said, “I got through them.”
“You got Debentures Three on Tuesday night?” Lillian said.
The way she said it made me look at her more closely. God knows, when Lillian Waldbaum leaned over the wash basin in the file room, I looked at her closely enough. But that’s all the attention I had thus far paid to her. Now I realized I had probably overlooked something.
I was a one-woman man. As long as Hannah Halpern had been up there on Vyse Avenue, waiting for me every Saturday night, I’d had eyes for no other girl. But now Benny was older. And Hannah had vanished.
Looking at Lillian Waldbaum, I was suddenly wondering about the problems of fidelity. It seemed to me I was making a very big and very important discovery. It was a time in my life when I was more excited about making discoveries than I was about—. Steady, Benny.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got Debentures Three on Tuesday night, but I’ve got Debentures Three five nights a week, and it gets to be sort of, you know, a pain. I could use a little relief, and I’ve got a few cuts coming to me. What did you have in mind?”
“Here,” Lillian Waldbaum said. “Take a look at this. This ad for The New Theatre.”
She held out a copy of The Nation. Or it could have been The New Republic. Or maybe it was some other magazine. I don’t really remember.
In 1931 there were a lot of publications around that were very thin and printed on what Westbrook Pegler used to call butcher’s paper. They were full of calmly ferocious articles by people named George Soule that made shattering attacks in good, clean prose on Big Business, the merchants of death, cartels, primogeniture, Washington lobbies, child labor, the judges in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, amphictyonies, and allodial tenure. These articles were printed in between small ads for the Martha Graham Dance Studio, manuscript typing services, and something called The New Theatre.
All these publications cost fifteen cents. Each, that is. I never bought any of them. Fifteen cents was half a dinner in Stewart’s cafeteria.
I took the magazine from Lillian. The ad for The New Theatre pleaded with the reader to come to one of eight previews of a new play by a new playwright in a new theater on a new part of Fourteenth Street. I remember an inward creasing of the brow. Fourteenth Street was a very crowded thoroughfare. How had they managed to slip in a new part?
&nbs
p; “What about it?” I said.
“I’ve got a friend playing in this thing,” Lillian said. “She tells me it’s very good. She gave me a couple of passes, and I’d like to go, but I don’t want to go alone.”
“Gee whiz,” I said.
I wince now when I think of the gee-whizzing I did at that time of my life. I wince, but I also shrug. Gee-whizzing is a part of the time of innocence. The young David, entering for the first time the tent of King Saul, was a gee-whizzer. Why not Benny Kramer?
“You mean,” I said to Lillian Waldbaum, “if I cut Debentures Three we could go to this thing next Tuesday?”.
“Yop,” Lillian said. She was a very pretty girl. And she had something Benny Kramer was just beginning to appreciate: style. But she talked most of the time like a truck driver. “How about it?”
“Thanks very much,” I said. “I’d like that”
I am not sure now what I was actually saying then. I didn’t, to be truthful, care very much about The New Theatre. I had not yet sunk my teeth into the Old. But I missed Hannah Halpern. And stirring in the back of my mind was the thought that maybe, by just sort of tagging along, I might find a substitute in this tough little beauty, Miss Lillian Waldbaum. She reminded me of a movie actress named Evelyn Brent. Tense. Pulled in. On the verge of exploding. Like a drawn bow before the twang when the arrow is released. She opened vistas. Memories of Gabilla’s knishes had been disturbing my sleep.
“And listen,” Lillian said. “You don’t have to worry about buying my evening groceries.”
“I wasn’t thinking of a meal,” I said. “What I had in mind, all I was thinking, I thought maybe we could have a couple of knishes, that’s all I had in mind.”
“Yop,” Lillian Waldbaum said coolly, “I know what you had in mind.”
She certainly did. Which proved to be a big surprise to Benny Kramer.
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