Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

  On that night in 1931 we made it to The Family Tricino comfortably under the line. The middle Tricino daughter, Carissima, admitted us at ten minutes to twelve. This was not an unusual hour for diners to show up. Especially diners like Benny Kramer who had not yet learned about dining. All Benny knew about was eating. The Tricinos managed to remain financially afloat by feeding illegally people who ate cheap. The Family Tricino was a speak-easy restaurant. No booze. Just spaghetti. But they served it without a restaurant license.

  There was one part of the operation that The Family Tricino seemed to feel was essential to keep the cops off their backs. For a few minutes after customers were seated, one of the Tricino daughters would plump herself down at the table as though she were depositing a dollop of whipped cream on a piece of apple pie. She would utter a few words, always accompanied by giggles, scream with laughter at what she clearly felt was a handful of good jokes, then race out to the kitchen for a coal scuttle full of Mrs. Tricino’s pasta.

  “It gives the place the camouflage the family feels safe with,” Sebastian Roon whispered to me as we were admitted to the brownstone by Mr. Tricino. “If the members of the family sit with the diners, then the diners are not customers but guests. That’s seventy cents, old boy.”

  Seb nodded toward Mr. Tricino’s hand, which was outstretched under my nose like a Salvation Army tambourine. “No, it isn’t,” Lillian Waldbaum said. “I happen to work in the same office with Benny, so I know how much he earns. This is dutch.”

  She dropped a quarter and a dime into Mr. Tricino’s hand. I fished from my pocket a quarter and two nickels, dropped them into Mr. Tricino’s hand, and took a step after Lillian. Sebastian Roon caught my elbow.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be in possession of another seventy cents, would you?” he said. “I seem to have been caught short.”

  I did happen to be in possession of another seventy cents. In fact, I happened to be in possession of another two dollars and ten cents, and I didn’t have to hunt through my pockets to check. It was a time when I always knew down to the penny exactly how much money I had on my person. It was never much, but it was always enough, and what made it enough was that I had no sense of desperation about it.

  The trick in handling money, I learned in 1931, is never to let other people know you are handling it. Seventy cents called for? No need to panic. Since I knew I had two ten on me. If I hadn’t kept a careful mental record of every coin concealed on my person, I would have had to start hunting through my pockets.

  “Sure,” I said to Sebastian Roon.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the handful of coins, each one of which had left a precise impression of its value on my right thigh by pressure through my pants pocket and underwear. I counted out into Mr. Tricino’s outstretched palm two quarters and two dimes. With my free, hand poised over the now dangerously diminished hoard, I took a stab at a role that life had thus far denied me: Haroun Al-Rashid in O’Henry’s “Baghdad on the Subway.”

  “If you’re strapped,” I said to Sebastian, “I can let you have something extra.”

  Sebastian laughed and winked. “Thanks, Benjamin, that’s very good of you, but I’m doing quite well, actually.” He winked again. “Elizabeth Ann is wallowing in the stuff.”

  “Who’s that?” I said.

  Seb nodded toward the girl who had played the female lead in the play. She was moving across the room with Lillian Waldbaum toward a table near the far wall.

  “The people in the cast call her Peggy,” Seb said. “But she doesn’t like that. She was christened Elizabeth Ann, and that’s what she insists on being called. So mind your manners, boy.” He took my arm and led me across toward the table.

  “If you’re both acting in the same play,” I said, “why should she be wallowing in the stuff while you have to borrow seventy cents from me?”

  “Very simple,” Sebastian Roon said. “She is a stage-struck sophomore from Sarah Lawrence College whose father owns most of the real estate on the Philadelphia Main Line, and I am the impecunious nephew of a deceased bankrupt Australian rabbit breeder named I. G. Roon.”

  We reached the table.

  “You sit there,” Lillian Waldbaum said to me. She pointed to a chair at the other side of the table. “You,” she said to Sebastian Roon. “You sit here.” She patted the chair next to her.

  “A pleasure,” he said.

  “We’ll see about that,” Lillian said. “You didn’t even notice me when you visited the Maurice Saltzman office.”

  “I am willing to make amends,” Sebastian said.

  “Not for me,” Lillian said. “I don’t like nuts.”

  Seb gave her another of those startled looks. If he had spent as much time as I did with Lillian in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company, he would have known there was nothing startling about what she had just said. Lillian talked like that all the time.

  If George Burns had met Lillian when he was still uncommitted, the vaudeville team of Burns & Allen would have been known as Burns & Waldbaum. No, sorry. Waldbaum and Burns.

  “I beg your pardon?” Seb said.

  “You’re begging the wrong person,” Lillian said. “For pardons you call the governor.”

  The look on Seb’s face did not exactly change, but I could see that somewhere inside his head gears were shifting.

  “Everybody duck,” Lillian said. “Here come the groceries.”

  They came in the shaky clutches of one of the willowy Tricino daughters. With an expulsion of breath that whistled across my head she set down a bowl of spaghetti as big as a basketball. She did it as though she had brought the bowl on foot, at shoulder height, from Thermopylae: with a thump that shook the table. Some of the red sauce slopped over.

  “Ooh!” the Tricino daughter giggled. With a deft swipe of her hand she scooped up the spilled sauce and licked it out of her palm.

  “A touch of oregano perhaps?” Lillian said. “Or a pinch of cardamom seed?”

  The Tricino daughter giggled. “No,” she said. “It’s just right.”

  “You see?” Lillian said to us. “For thirty-five cents you get not only a plate of the best spaghetti this side of the Appian Way, but it’s garnished with jokes.”

  As though she were replacing manhole covers on a construction job, the Tricino daughter set plates in front of the four of us. Mine had clearly been washed in haste. Even more clearly, the spots had been left by the same sauce the Tricino daughter had just licked up from the table. My mother on Tiffany Street would have snatched the plate out from under my nose and rushed it to the sink for a thorough scouring with Fels-Naphtha. My mother had never heard of Louis Pasteur, but she had her own ideas about what brought on rabies.

  “Won’t you join us?” said the girl who had played Walda Wexler.

  It is not one of the more memorable arrangements of syllables in the English language. But somehow she made it sound pleasant. I looked at her more closely. Over her head, on the dirty wall, was pasted a page from the Daily News. It was an advertisement for tourist cruises to the Mediterranean. The advertisement was dominated by a head of Botticelli’s Venus.

  I knew all about Botticelli. Miss Bongiorno, my elocution teacher in J.H.S. 64, had also taught art appreciation. She had been crazy about Botticelli. I had never understood why, but now all at once I did. This girl, whose name I had not caught, and who had just played the part of Walda Wexler, did not resemble even remotely the foolish face of Botticelli’s Venus pasted on the wall over her head. But this girl had the same clean look.

  “I don’t eat,” said the Tricino daughter. “I just sit.”

  She did. Between me and the girl with the clean look. And the Tricino daughter started to ladle spaghetti into our plates. She did it the way W. C. Fields used to mix paint. She spilled some sauce near each plate, but it did not remain on the scarred table top very long. I could see why this girl did not eat but only sat. From the scooping up, and licking from her palm, of tomato sauce she was obv
iously before long going to have a weight problem.

  “While we’re digging in,” Lillian Waldbaum said, “I have a suggestion.”

  “Now, Lillian,” said the other girl. “Don’t start that.”

  “Relax,” said Lillian. “I’m not going to say anything that will upset your mother in Wynwood. It’s just perfectly obvious to me that these two jokers have not seen each other for a long time? Right?”

  “Who, me?” said the Tricino daughter.

  “You pipe down,” said Lillian. “You just sit.”

  The Tricino daughter giggled.

  “Then you must mean me,” Sebastian Roon said.

  “You and Benny,” Lillian said. “Why don’t you get it out of your systems? Both of you?”

  “Get what out?” Seb said.

  “Like the Dickens,” Lillian said. “When this schmo Martin Chuzzlewit comes back from America, and he and this creep Mr. Pecksniff have the And-What-Happened-To-You-In-The-Intervening-Time Scene.”

  Sebastian Roon and I looked at each other. I knew he knew what I was thinking, and I could tell he knew I knew what he was thinking. His face turned not exactly red but sort of pink. He stabbed his fork into his mound of spaghetti, rolled up a ball, stuck a spoon under it, started to lift both to his mouth, then stopped and put the fork back into the middle of his plate.

  “I trust your mother’s jazz bow business is prospering,” he said.

  “Booming along,” I said. “She now lets me keep five dollars a week out of my Maurice Saltzman & Company salary.”

  “Extraordinary woman,” Seb said. “Extraordinary.”

  He tightened the now slack ball of spaghetti around his fork and again started to lift it to his mouth.

  “How’s Hannah?” I said.

  For the second time the spaghetti didn’t make it. Seb put the loaded fork back on his plate.

  “Very well,” he said. “Very well indeed. She sends you every best wish.”

  If that was true he must have told Hannah before he left England that he planned to see me. I did not believe it. “Thanks,” I said.

  On the third try he managed to get the ball of spaghetti to its destination. He chewed for a few moments and swallowed. Getting the forkful of spaghetti down seemed to give him confidence.

  “It didn’t work out, you know.” he said. He paused, clearly waiting for me to say something, but I could find no words that seemed eager to step up to the plate. “So she married my brother,” he said.

  The “so” made it clear that Seb considered his brother a poor second choice. I didn’t know what to consider. I was stunned. I didn’t know until this moment that Sebastian Roon had a brother. But I was stunned in a totally impersonal way. The way I had been stunned, upon reading Vanity Fair for the first time, when Becky Sharp responds to the marriage proposal of Sir Pitt Crawley by revealing she is already married to his son Rawdon. Hannah and the passions of a year ago now seemed remote, as though I was hearing a scrap of personal history about a stranger. What was happening to me at this table, the girl with the clean look, was much more interesting. But I didn’t want Sebastian Roon to know I had been stunned, even in a remote way. So I said, “Yes, I know.”

  Another ball of spaghetti failed to reach its destination. I was pleased to see that I was not the only one who was stunned.

  “You do?” Sebastian Roon said.

  I was pleased, yes, but it seemed all at once such a tiny victory that I felt ashamed of myself.

  “I don’t mean I know that it was your brother she married,” I said. “I merely know she got married. She wrote me, about a month ago, I think it was, she wrote me and invited me to the wedding.”

  “Seriously?” Seb said.

  It was a tiny victory, but it made him vulnerable, so I felt I could abandon the formality of calling him Sebastian Roon.

  “It sounded serious enough,” I said. “But I’m sure Hannah knew I could not afford to go to Blackpool. Just the same, I thought it was very nice of her.”

  I wondered if I knew what I was saying. What the hell had been nice about it?

  “Yes,” Seb said.

  The ball of spaghetti resumed its aborted journey and made it. He chewed vigorously.

  “That’s the point about Hannah,” Seb said finally. “She is very nice.” He thrust the fork back into the mound on his plate and started work on another ball. “She seemed to like my brother more than she liked me.”

  “Or me,” I said.

  Seb stopped twirling his fork and scowled at the plate in a troubled way.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said quietly.

  Perhaps he was.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  I had a feeling he already had.

  “I did act badly,” he said.

  As Jack the Ripper said when he was booked at Bow Street.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. “You were very young. Like me.”

  He gave me a sharp look. As though he suspected I was mocking him. I guess I was.

  “That’s true,” he said finally. “But I did act badly.” He said no more. Perhaps he had more to say but didn’t want to say it in front of Lillian and the other girl. I had nothing more to say. Lillian seemed to sense that.

  “Terminé?” she said to Seb.

  “Terminé,” he said.

  Lillian turned to me. “Your turn,” she said.

  I had a moment of panic. What could I tell him about the time that had passed? How could I fill in a space in my life that I had obviously lived but about which I could remember almost nothing worth describing? All at once I realized a full year had been added to the count of my life, and I didn’t know what had happened in those twelve months. I had a sense of standing still. Of precious time running out. I could see the number of my next birthday like a winking warning light up ahead. My God, I thought, I’m middle-aged!

  “Nothing much,” I said. “I’m still going to C.C.N.Y. at night. I’m still working for Maurice Saltzman & Company. And—” I paused. I couldn’t tell him I was still taking down Ira Bern’s vici kids to be shined every morning. For the first time in my life I had a sense of the importance of human indignity. I said, “That’s all, I guess.”

  “Except for one thing,” Lillian said.

  “What’s that?” Seb said.

  “In a minute,” Lillian said. “First he wants to know what I want to know. How you got involved in this crap at the Preshinivetz Playhouse.”

  “Now you stop that,” said the other girl. “It is not crap. It is a very important and meaningful piece of theater.”

  I suddenly realized that I agreed with her. I wondered why.

  “Florenz Ziegfeld it’s not going to put out of business,” Lillian Waldbaum said. She reached across the table and tapped the elbow of the Tricino daughter. “You’ve done your bit here,” Lillian said. “Go giggle somewhere else, honey.”

  The Tricino daughter covered us with a final spray of giggles, rose, and departed. I hoped none of us would spill any tomato sauce. It was pretty peppy stuff. Without somebody to scoop promptly and lick it up, I could see Mrs. Tricino’s creation eating its way down through the scarred wooden table top and attacking my Thom McAns.

  “It’s simple and tedious,” Seb said. “After Hannah married Eustace, I counted my money. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get me back to New York.”

  The other girl said, “Why did you want to come back to New York?”

  Sebastian Roon pushed the spaghetti around on his plate and shrugged. “I don’t really know,” he said.

  “Then you’d better learn,” Lillian Waldbaum said. “She’s told me all about you. As much as you’ve told her, anyway. And I can tell you why you wanted to come back to New York.”

  “Why?” Seb said.

  “Because in Blackpool you’re a Jew boy,” Lillian said. “Here in New York you’re an Englishman.”

  “Lillian,” said the other girl. “I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say.”

/>   “Perhaps not,” Sebastian Roon said. “But I daresay it’s true. I never thought it out very clearly until this moment, thanks to Miss Waldbaum. But I do see now that the point about emigration, any kind of emigration, is that it enables the emigrant to shed his skin.” He laughed. “One gets a bit weary of being a Jew boy in Blackpool, you know.”

  Lillian Waldbaum tapped my elbow. Now it was my ball of spaghetti that splashed back into the plate.

  “Benny,” she said. “Are you weary of being a Jew boy in New York?”

  I gave it the few moments of thought without which any reply would probably be a disaster. It was always wise, I had learned, when answering a Lillian Waldbaum question, to parse the sentences, so to speak, of your reply before uttering it.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been a Jew boy in any place except New York.”

  “And you never will be,” Lillian said. “Until you stop spending your life getting Ira Bern’s shoes shined.”

  The bottom of my stomach did a small Immelmann turn. I’d thought we were having a small reunion. How had it swung in this direction? Why was Lillian suddenly jumping down my throat?

  “Or running hot pastrami sandwiches for Mr. Bern from Lou G. Siegel,” she added.

  Her remarks were totally unexpected. Maybe that’s why they hit so hard. I knew what was wrong. I had been jolted into facing a moment of truth.

  In the years since that night I have been forced to face others. But they never hurt as much as they do when you’re young. Before the years have built for you the calluses that shield you from the full impact of the blows.

  “Lillian,” said the other girl. “I think you would send your own mother to the gallows if it meant clearing the way for one of your wisecracks. I do not believe Mr. Kramer is spending his life getting Ira Bern’s shoes shined, whoever Ira Bern may be.”

  “If you knew my mother,” Lillian said, “I think you’d be what you have always been, a good friend, and help me truss up the old bitch and carry her to the gallows. As for Ira Bern, naturally you wouldn’t know who he is. You’re a lifted-pinky WASP from the Philadelphia Main Line, and I’m a hard-working stenographer in an accountant’s office on Seventh Avenue. But I don’t mind educating the other half that does the real living, so make a note, dear. Ira Bern is my boss, as well as the boss of this good-looking innocent over here who prefers, I’m sure, to be called not Mr. Kramer but Benjamin, so why don’t you try?”