Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

  At this moment the other girl could have flushed slightly, but I’m not sure. The Family Tricino was not as generous with electric bulbs as it was with tomato sauce.

  “Couldn’t we just get on with Seb’s explanation of why he came back to New York?” said the other girl.

  “Don’t you know?” said Lillian.

  Now there was no question about what happened to the face of the other girl. With more electric bulbs in the vicinity, it might have been accurate to say her cheekbones turned red. In the light provided by The Family Tricino, as I recall, it seemed to me the skin between her nostrils and her ear lobes seemed all at once to change slowly from the color of the plate on which my spaghetti was swimming in tomato sauce to the color of the maraschino cherry on the charlotte russe I used to hand out for a nickel to customers when I worked in Mr. Lebenbaum’s candy store on Avenue D.

  “Of course I know,” said the other girl.

  It occurred to me that while her friendship with Lillian Waldbaum was genuine, which was puzzling since they were obviously so different, it was also a source of irritation to her.

  “There’s nothing much to know,” Sebastian Roon said. “You may recall, Benjamin, that about a year ago I spent some time at your home on Tiffany Street”

  “In my bed,” I said.

  “Quite,” Seb said. “And while you used to go off to the gallery of Loew’s One Hundred and Eightieth Street with my brother’s present wife, I remained behind and helped your mother with her ‘turning.’”

  “‘Turning’?” the other girl said.

  “One of the preliminary steps in a cottage industry known as the manufacture of jazz bows,” Seb said.

  “You mean neckties?” the girl said.

  “Well,” Seb said, “I suppose they could be worn as sock suspenders, but in most instances they are worn around the neck. At any rate, toward the end of my stay with the Kramer family, Benny’s mother had moved beyond mere ‘turning’ to the manufacture of the completed jazz bow. One evening while I was helping Benjamin’s mother with her records, I told her that I would soon be returning to Blackpool. She asked why, and I told her about the demise of my uncle and his complex business ventures, and that it seemed sensible to go home, where I would at least have my own bed to sleep in until I got myself sorted out. Benjamin’s mother said going home was a waste of time because I would be back. She said it with so much certainty that I could not help asking how she knew something I did not know myself. Benjamin, do you know what she said?”

  I knew it as well as I knew most things my mother had said. She rarely said anything once. I had heard this particular observation many times. But this was Seb’s story. And I liked what the inadequate lighting did, as she listened, to the face of the girl across the table from me.

  “No,” I said. “What did my mother say to you?”

  “She said Europe was a rotten worn-out place,” Seb said. “A garbage pail was the expression she used. Everybody wants to leave it, she said. That’s why she had come here from Hungary, and that’s why, when I got another look at the garbage pail, I would come hurrying back to America. When I did, she said, I would always find a bed waiting for me on Tiffany Street.”

  I could see ahead of me a long siege of going back to sleeping on the floor of our front room. Sebastian Roon did not look prosperous. He was wearing the same tveet suit he had worn when I first met him. It looked frayed but, on closer examination, I saw that it was not. What gave the jacket a look of shabbiness was that it had obviously not been pressed for a long time. Perhaps not since it had come off the rack in the store where Seb had bought it. The wrinkles on the sleeves up near the shoulders had a permanent look, as though they could never really be pressed out of the cloth. And of those three buttons that had run so close together down the front like the keys of a cornet, only one remained.

  “You mean you just got back from Blackpool today?” I said.

  Going to the theater had made it a long day. Taking Lillian Waldbaum home would make it longer. Unless Sebastian Roon had called my mother on Tiffany Street to warn her that he was coming up to claim that offered bed, before I got home and hit the sack I would have to make up the sack myself on the living room floor.

  “No,” said the other girl. “Seb has been here for over a week. I found him the day he arrived.”

  Seb laughed and said to the other girl, “Look at his face!”

  She did, and mine for no apparent reason grew hotter.

  “Well, one can hardly blame him,” she said. “I did say I found you, which is an odd way to put it.”

  “You’ve told me this part,” Lillian Waldbaum said. “So “I’ll just go to the little girls’ room.” She stood up.

  “Do be careful and knock first,” Seb said. “At The Family Tricino the little girls’ room is also the little boys’ room.”

  “While I’m out,” Lillian Waldbaum said, “try to think up a bit of advice that will be new to me. I learned to knock on bathroom doors when I was still in diapers.” She walked away.

  Seb watched her go. “Interesting girl, that,” he said.

  “Lillian?” The other girl smiled. “She’s probably the most wonderful person I know. We met in a sketching class at the Y.W.C.A.”

  “Lillian?” I said.

  The sound of my voice made Seb laugh again. “I know what you mean,” he said. “Miss Waldbaum does not look like a sketcher, does she?”

  “I don’t know what a sketcher should look like,” the other girl said. “But Lillian is a darned good one. Now, for how I found our actor friend here. About a week ago, was it?”

  “Nine days, actually,” Sebastian Roon said. “I came over from England on the cheap. A Norwegian freighter with a few cabins for passengers who don’t mind traveling slowly so long as the passage is low, and who have stomachs strong enough to sustain a steady diet of herring. The ship docked at a pier just north of Fourteenth Street, and I went trotting along with my bag down Fourteenth, hunting a phone booth. I wanted to alert your mother that her favorite nonpaying lodger was on his way up to Tiffany Street. Have you ever tried to make a phone call on West Fourteenth Street?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I urge you not to attempt it,” Seb said. “The paucity of phone booths in the area is astonishing. In fact, they don’t exist. I was becoming a bit irked when I saw one of those round blue and white enamel signs the telephone company nails outside structures that contain public phones. It was nailed to the brick wall of the Preshinivetz Playhouse. I went in and found myself in that small, dismal outer room which you and Miss Waldbaum crossed tonight to get into the theater proper. In one corner was a phone booth. I popped in and called your home. No answer.”

  “Was it a Monday?” I said.

  “Let me think,” Seb said. He did. Then: “Yes, I believe it was. Why?”

  “On Mondays my mother goes downtown to deliver the jazz bows that were completed the week before,” I said. “And my father can’t get to the phone because of the wheelchair.”

  “Quite,” Seb said. “I thought it was something like that. So I decided I’d wait a bit and try again. When I came out of the phone booth, I heard the damnedest racket from beyond the doors that separate that outer room from the theater proper. Furious voices shouting.”

  “And screaming,” said the girl who had played the part of Walda Wexler.

  “Indeed yes,” said Seb. “My God, what a brouhaha. I eased one of the doors open an inch or two and peered in. Well, the screams were nothing compared to the sight. A dozen or more people were sprawled on the benches. They were the actors you saw in the play tonight, although I didn’t know that at the time. I mean to say, I was unaware that I had stumbled into a theater during a rehearsal. Not that these actors were doing much rehearsing. They were watching and listening to the two people who were going at each other in the aisle. One was an ethereal type with marcelled hair who would have looked more properly dressed in a ball gown. He later proved to be the director. His
opponent in the battle of billingsgate was none other than our charming friend here, Elizabeth Ann.”

  Thank God, Seb had mentioned her name again. I had forgotten it, and I was tired of referring to her in my head as the girl with the clean look. What bothered me was that her name had not registered because I had not really looked at her until I noticed the Botticelli clipping on the wall over her head. Elizabeth Ann. Elizabeth Ann. Okay. I had it. Now back to what she was saying.

  “I didn’t really want to scream,” Elizabeth Ann said. “What I wanted to do was kill that goddamn director because of the way he was butchering my play.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You wrote the play?”

  “You mustn’t be surprised,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Many women have written plays.”

  That was not what had surprised me. What had surprised me was that just as Lillian Waldbaum did not look like a sketcher type, Elizabeth Ann did not look like a Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent! type.

  “I’m glad I said I liked it before I found out you wrote it,” I said.

  “Bravo!” Sebastian Roon said. “We’ll make a gallant of you yet, that we shall.”

  Benny, like Barkis, was willing.

  “I don’t know what on earth you could have seen on that stage tonight that was worth looking at, much less liking,” Elizabeth Ann said. “It certainly is not the play as I conceived it. What I wrote originally has been cut to ribbons and tossed into the wastebasket. That’s why I was determined not to give in on this last piece of casting. The savage illiterate had filled all the parts with his dear little epicene friends, not one of whom can act, certainly not on a stage. All that was left was the part of Willie, the man they are all waiting for. It’s a small role, just one word in the last moments of the play, but it’s absolutely crucial. On it the play stands or falls. If Willie isn’t absolutely right, the play we have seen up to that climactic moment will be not right. The play will simply vanish. And that day I saw this son of a bitch warming up another one of his simpering friends for the part. Think of it. The part demands a tough, masculine strike leader, and he was going to give it to one of his boys with marcelled hair! Over my dead body, I said, and that’s how the battle started.”

  “It ended with Elizabeth Ann storming up the aisle toward the doors through which I was eavesdropping,” Sebastian Roon said. “I ducked backward as fast as I could, but not fast enough.” He laughed. “Elizabeth Ann caught me.”

  She laughed. “No, not caught,” Elizabeth Ann said. “I had no idea Seb had been eavesdropping, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I had known. I was so damn mad, I couldn’t see straight.”

  “You were actually shaking with fury,” Seb said. “A rather frightening sight, I must say. You were trying to get a lighted match up to your cigarette, and missing by at least two inches.”

  Elizabeth Ann laughed again. “So Seb took the match from me,” she said. “And he held it to my cigarette. I filled my lungs with smoke and I blew the smoke in his face. I didn’t mean to. It was simply that, in my rage, I hadn’t even seen him.”

  “When she did,” Seb said, “she gave me a look that I suppose can only be described as penetrating. Then she walked slowly around me, as though she were a tourist and I was a statue in some public square, and she wanted to remember it when she got home.”

  “You see,” Elizabeth Ann said to me through her laughter, “I thought Seb was an actor who had been sent over by an agent to read for a part in the play.”

  “She told me it was a very small part,” Seb said, “but a very important part.” He grinned. “Little did I know how small.”

  “A good thing you didn’t,” Elizabeth Ann said. “All I could do was thank my stars. There he was. The actor I had been praying for. Willie!”

  “Don’t I look the part?” Seb said.

  “Well,” I said.

  Seb beetled his brows into a tough-guy scowl, flexed his muscles, and growled like a bulldog. “Me!” he said. “Tough, masculine strike leader!”

  “That’s what makes him so perfect,” Elizabeth Ann said. “The audience is expecting a crude dese-dem-and-doze oaf. And what do they get? This tall, elegant, blond thing with a British accent you can smear all over Balliol.”

  “He certainly was effective in the part tonight,” I said.

  “His best performance, however, was the day he was hired,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Before he even stepped on the stage.”

  “Now, now,” Seb said. “We mustn’t make too much of that.”

  “I am making just as much of it as it deserves,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Which is a lot” To me: “When I brought him into the theater, and I told the director I’d found my Willie, he said he may be your Willie but he’s not mine. My plays, he said, are not cast by amateur virgins from Sarah Lawrence. Whereupon Seb grabbed him by the necktie, lifted him a foot or more off the ground, and said you will apologize to this lady for that, you so-and-so.”

  “Actually,” Seb said, “the words I used were ‘you mincing bugger.’ And I doubt that I had him more than two or three inches off the ground. After all, we can’t have swine talking like that to young ladies, can we? Not in this great and glorious country to which your mother and I have fled from the pogroms of Blackpool and the garbage pail of Europe.”

  “Anyway,” Elizabeth Ann said, “I got the apology and Seb got the part.”

  “And I got a small upstairs bedroom that used to belong to the sexton when the Preshinivetz Playhouse used to be a church,” Seb said.

  “That means my mother doesn’t know you’re back in New York,” I said.

  Seb grinned. “It also means you can continue sleeping in your own bed,” he said. “Miss Waldbaum seems to be signaling rather frantically, wouldn’t you say?”

  Elizabeth Ann and I turned. Lillian was standing in the archway that led from the Family Tricino living room to the hall. She was scowling and waving her hand in a sweeping, impatient gesture toward herself. I stood up and pointed inquiringly to myself. Lillian shook her head irritably and waved me back into my chair.

  “That leaves only you,” Seb said to Elizabeth Ann. “Miss Waldbaum would hardly be urging me to join her in the little girls’ room, would she?”

  “Excuse me,” Elizabeth Ann said. She stood up and walked toward Lillian. I watched her go.

  “Pretty,” Seb said. “Isn’t she?”

  My face grew hot again. I turned back. “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not that. There’s a sort of quality about her. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I do,” Sebastian Roon said. “She always looks as though she’s just taken a shower.”

  11

  FORTY YEARS LATER, WALKING up Madison Avenue from my drink with Sebastian Roon at Will’s to my apartment at 83rd and Fifth, I was struck again by the funny little feeling in my heart that Seb’s remark about Elizabeth Ann had brought me across the spaghetti plates at that table in The Family Tricino.

  “Are you in pain, Mr. Kramer?” Sean said.

  I came back to 1971.

  “Not any more,” I said. “Did you win?”

  Sean is the day doorman of our apartment house. Noon to 8:00 P.M. It is not a new apartment house. What real-estate brokers identify as “one of those real oldies with huge fireplaces that actually work and those great big high ceilings.”

  One of the most pleasant things about our apartment house is what Elizabeth Ann calls the staff. Why shouldn’t she? She was born and raised in Wynwood on the Philadelphia Main Line. Servants were as normal a part of her existence as toilets in the hall were a part of mine. She knew things I didn’t know. It helped when we bought our apartment at 83rd and Fifth.

  Elizabeth Ann discovered at once that all our elevator operators, handymen and doormen are Irish. Not Third Avenue Irish. The employees of our apartment house are Irish Irish. Sean O’Casey stuff. They are brought over from Dublin. Or County Galway. Or wherever William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory rapped the knuckles of John Millington Synge and ordered him
to cut the malarkey and go to the Aran Islands where he would learn what life is all about.

  For Sean Boyle what life is all about is soccer. What puzzles me about what life is all about for Sean Boyle is where he plays soccer. He tells me he lives on Fox Street. This is where Hot Cakes Rabinowitz used to live. Just around the corner from where Sebastian Roon helped my mother get started in the jazz bow business. Soccer? On Fox Street? Around the corner from Tiffany Street? Preposterous. Peter Stuyvesant and his bunch of Dutch chums playing bowls on Fox Street? Very well, that I will accept. It’s a piece of Americana. But Sean Boyle of County Galway playing soccer on Fox Street? Who does he think he’s kidding? Obviously, Benny Kramer.

  “No, we lost,” Sean said.

  I detected a note of bitterness. Not good. Bitterness does not sit well on Sean’s sunny, open, pleasant and, it distresses me to record, somewhat stupid face. I don’t know how other people feel, but when I like someone I like to feel he or she has brains. It hurts to state that Sean, who gives me great pleasure by his mere existence, is a horse’s ass.

  “They brought in this man from Belfast,” he said. “They sprung him on us, Mr. Kramer. It was crooked, of course. The names of the members of the teams had been posted for a week. Every man named properly. And then they brought in this ringer from Belfast.”

  “That’s bad,” I said.

  It seemed the appropriate comment

  “It was that Mr. Kramer,” Sean said. “Very dispiriting. One expects sportsmen to play fair, and then they bring in a man from Belfast”