“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Thank you, Mr. Kramer,” Sean said. “But don’t you worry, sir. Next Sunday we’ll get a bit of our own back.” He grinned wickedly. “My cousin Roderick just arrived. He’s going on the rear elevator. Midnight to eight A.M. Roderick is from Belfast too.”
“How’s the betting?” I said.
“Two to one in favor of Fox Street,” Sean said.
“Can I get in for a five-spot?”
“You certainly can, Mr. Kramer. I’ll take care of it personally.”
I gave him a five-dollar bill.
“If I lose,” I said, “don’t tell me. If I win, don’t tell Mrs. Kramer. She disapproves of gambling.”
“Good women always do, sir,” Sean Boyle said. “That’s what makes them good women.”
I was pleased to get this piece of advice from an Irish soccer player thirty years my junior who had thus far reached the altar only for his first communion.
“Your five will get you ten, Mr. Kramer,” Sean said. “Don’t you worry, sir.”
I wished I could stop worrying. But I couldn’t. Suddenly, today, the vague fears of months past had surfaced in a clear, unpalatable image. It was part of being punched in the head by a black man in front of Penn Station. Part of being told in a troubled voice by Sebastian Roon over a drink at Will’s that after forty years in this country he wanted to go home to die.
At least he had a home to go back to die in. What did Benny Kramer have to go back to? East Fourth Street? The part I remembered, the part where I had been fashioned, had vanished under the asphalt of the East River Drive. Tiffany Street? Like all the rest of the south Bronx it had become an all-black ghetto of junkies. Benny Kramer, a home-loving man, had been jolted into facing an unpleasant fact: he was homeless. “Is it raining yet?”
I came up out of my thoughts and saw that I had moved from Sean Boyle, our doorman, to Eamon Fleece, the elevator man on our bank. I looked at Eamon. There wasn’t much to see. A wisp of a man with frail shoulders. They seemed to sag under the weight of his blue and gold elevator operator’s uniform and the tremendous shock of snow-white hair that sat on his head like an enormous snowball.
Eamon had been running the elevator on the A-B bank since 1937. The date had been nailed down in the memory of every employee in the apartment house because Eamon had arrived in America and come to work in our building on the day the Hindenburg Zeppelin blew up at Lakehurst. Sean said his older brother, who worked the relief shift on the C-D bank, remembered it vividly. Sean felt this gruesome coincidence had soured Eamon’s disposition. Brian Treaner, our building superintendent, disagreed.
Brian once told me he felt what had turned Eamon Fleece into a misanthrope was his marriage. The marvelous thing about the Irish is that you get superintendents of apartment houses who use words like misanthrope. Eamon lived somewhere over in Yorkville with his wife, her spinster sister, and their ancient mother. The wife was maimed, the sister was halt, and the mother was blind.
“A man with a setup like that,” Brian had said to me, “he doesn’t go dancing among the shamrocks on the banks of the Liffy, now does he, Mr. Kramer?”
I thought at the time it would have been a sensible way to obtain some relief. I remembered Mr. Pflug down on East Fourth Street, a street cleaner whose wife was dying of some unidentified but terrible wasting disease. On the day his only son, who happened to be in my class in P.S. 188, was killed while stealing a hitch on the back of an ice wagon on Avenue C, Mr. Pflug was found dancing on the Fourth Street dock in the middle of the night.
True, they took him away to Bellevue. I don’t doubt it was the only course available to the authorities. But I always felt the poor bastard had got some relief out of the strange performance. I will never know, of course. But I’m going to continue believing it. Hope is where you find it.
The trouble with Eamon Fleece, I felt, was that he did not believe there is any to find. So why try? It is, of course, the basic error. Life is hopeless. Everybody dies. What matters is maintaining the pretense that it is not hopeless. The belief that you are indeed going to live forever. So that when death comes you can with a sense of excitement throw up your arms and kick out your legs in a vaudevillian’s Four Wings And Scram, and exclaim: “Hey, what a surprise!”
But Eamon Fleece was not equal to the pretense. Inside his dark, brooding, bitter mind he saw only the inevitable horror at the end of the tunnel. And he understood that it could not be avoided. The horror had all the time in the world. It could and of course would outwait him. So he plodded along, day after day, moving closer to the inevitable. This black vision created a curious kind of inverted hope. A sort of gloomy illumination along the tunnel to defeat. So that even bright moments insisted on being turned into mocking shadows.
“No,” I said as we rode up in the elevator to the twelfth floor. “It’s not raining. The sun is out.”
“Never trust the sun,” said Eamon Fleece.
I did not answer. Could it be that Eamon Fleece was right? Was it possible that he had touched the root of the trouble? Benny Kramer had always trusted the sun. It had been the only thing on East Fourth Street that was free. I let myself into 12-B with my key.
“Benjamin?” Elizabeth Ann called from the kitchen. “Is that you?”
My heart turned over. No, it soared. By God, there were some things that held. In spite of Mr. Yeats’ contention that the center had collapsed. Generalizations are misleading. Everybody has his own center. Part of mine was Elizabeth Ann’s attitude toward my given name. She is a WASP. They make the best Jews.
They may be born with restricted vision. But the vision sits solidly on character. If when weary you are ever in doubt about where to place your bottom, take Benny Kramer’s advice: eschew the cushions; choose character. It makes for a solid seat.
When George Washington died, Napoleon wept. Not because George was a great general, but because his will was made of granite. Napoleon admired that. So does Benny Kramer.
Once Elizabeth Ann of Wynwood decided to marry Benny Kramer of East Fourth Street, she did the sort of research job on Jews that to Sarah Lawrence girls is what the cadets of St. Cyr do on Clausewitz. Soon Elizabeth Ann was asking me, with a touch of severity in her voice, why we did not fast on Yom Kippur. Was it right for us to be eating Pepperidge Farm Thin Sliced instead of matzos on the First Days of Passover? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate, now that Jack was almost six years old, for Daddy to spend his Saturday mornings with the boy at the Park Avenue Synagogue, which was just around the corner from our apartment, rather than trail along behind Sebastian Roon on the Century Club golf course, which was an hour’s drive up into Westchester?
As for circumcision. Well! Not that it would ever have occurred to me to object. How could I? After all—oh well, we can skip that part of the argument. Elizabeth Ann saw to it that Jack was circumcised. I stayed out of it. Not for the obvious reason, of course. Circumcision is like adolescence. Once you’ve gone through it, you don’t have to do it again. But Elizabeth Ann got into it up to her armpits.
Before she would allow Rabbi Altshuler, the moël, into the operating room at Doctors Hospital, she had several conferences with Artie Steinberg. Artie is our doctor. He was one of the best reader-jotters we ever had in Troop 244 at the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House on Avenue B and Ninth Street in the days when I was the troop’s champion one-flag Morse code signaler. I had the feeling, when it was all over, that Elizabeth Ann had performed the operation herself.
I suppose Freud would say she had. I remember what my mother said when I introduced her and my father to Elizabeth Ann.
First, the moment of shock. Benny marrying a shiksa? It can’t be! Ah well, like so many other things in life that can’t be, it is. The shock waves recede. My mother and father look at Elizabeth Ann. The way my father used to look at the cloth of a suit he was buying for me on Stanton Street. Frowns of doubt. About what? Benny marrying a shiksa? So it seemed to Benny. Then, slowly, I learned I’d b
een wrong.
My mother and father took to this shiksa. The way their darling Benny had taken to her. And they had the same reaction. They fell in love with her. And for thirty years they never thought of her as a shiksa.
She became to them a nice Jewish girl. The sort of girl it was proper, even inevitable, for their Benny to marry. Whenever the subject of Elizabeth Ann’s background came up, if there was some reference to the fact that she was not, as Rabbi Altshuler put it, “of the faith,” my mother and father would rock with laughter. Benny and his jokes!
For thirty years Elizabeth Ann was to them the perfect Jewish girl who had been born to marry the perfect Jewish boy. Their son Benny. And after thirty years their son Benny found he shared that belief firmly. Especially when Elizabeth Ann spoke his name.
He might be Benny to his parents. And Ben to his colleagues. But to Elizabeth Ann he was Benjamin. As, oddly enough, he was to Sebastian Roon. Benjamin. What a name. Even leaving aside the glorious idiocy of flying kites in dangerous electrical storms, it was the sort of name that gave a man a sense of dignity. Especially on a day when he’d had his head pummeled in front of Penn Station.
“Yeah,” I called down the corridor from the front door to the kitchen. “It’s me. You okay?”
“Probably,” Elizabeth Ann called back. “But I won’t know for another four minutes. I’ve made you a crème brûlée and I’m tapping the crust in the casserole. Don’t you dare come into the kitchen.”
“And don’t you dare serve it for dinner,” I said. “I was up two and a half pounds this morning.”
On Tiffany Street I’d never even heard of calories. On 83rd and Fifth they ruled my life the way insulin rules the life of the diabetic.
“You’ll be three and a half over in the morning,” Elizabeth Ann said. “But it will be in a good cause. If this damn thing comes out. Brown sugar gets stiffer and stiffer. I don’t know why. It never seems to happen to Julia Child. Get comfortable. I’ll join you in four minutes. No, three and a half. I have something to tell you.”
Elizabeth Ann always has something to tell me. She lives the most satisfying life of any person I know. Not because her husband is remarkably noteworthy for being a good provider. Although in that respect Benny Kramer doesn’t think he falls too far behind the average. Nor because she is cherished more spectacularly than most women. Although Benny Kramer must confess with as little embarrassment as these statements can be made that on all counts he finds her eminently satisfactory. No. What makes Elizabeth Ann’s life good is that she lives it.
Nothing passes her by. I think I should put that more firmly. She allows nothing to pass her by. Everything is examined. And squeezed. Like a melon in the supermarket. If it is ripe, Elizabeth Ann is pleased and buys it. If it is not, she leaves it in the bin, but she pushes her cart on with the satisfaction of knowing she’s had an experience.
The thought is refreshing. How often do people walk away from a honeydew or a Cranshaw with a feeling Leif the Red had when he first sighted the coast of Labrador? The feeling that his time had not been wasted? The feeling that he had learned something about life worth passing on to his fellow man?
Not often, I bet. That’s why I admire the effort. Mainly, I suppose, because I have yearned for it and tried for it, but have never achieved it I have never been able to extract from the day-to-day pulsations of life the satisfaction Elizabeth Ann gets as effortlessly as she gets rich yellow foaming orange juice out of the halved fruit she slaps onto our electric Green Stamps machine. Eleven books. “There’s ice in the bucket!” Elizabeth Ann called. “God, this brown sugar is a pain. Make yourself a drink. I’ll be another moment. Make one for me, too.”
I did, and I sat down in my favorite room. It wasn’t anything the directors of the Met would have fought to buy. It was just a nice room, with two big windows that looked out on the Central Park reservoir. A room full of furniture and bric-a-brac Elizabeth Ann had brought back from the various places around the world where we had spent fragments of our thirty years together. But it was not those things that made it my favorite room. I can take furniture or leave it alone. It can please me. It can displease me. But it never sends me. And what pleases me rarely pleases Elizabeth Ann.
I like, for instance, green metal filing cabinets. The kind we had when I was a kid at Maurice Saltzman & Company on West 34th Street. They drive Elizabeth Ann up the wall. No. Into the wall. She is always burying my green metal filing cabinets behind expensive cabinetwork. Anyway, what makes me like places is not how they are furnished but what I do in them.
In this room I work. And read Bleak House. And take off my shoes. And do something I have not been happy about doing all my life but in this room I somehow manage to do it with less pain than I do it elsewhere. In this room I think.
Which is what the human race hates to do but, as Rabbi Goldfarb used to say over and over again down on East Fourth Street, must do to survive. If there is one thing Benny Kramer wants to do it is survive. I don’t know why. There are moments in this room furnished by Elizabeth Ann when I think: What in God’s name for?
A nice juicy heart attack? For juicy, read massive. A good clean stroke? For clean, read decisive. That’s the way to live, isn’t it? Die clean and swift and without pain. What more can a man want? Answer: to live. Why? I don’t know. But in this room, which contains all the bits and pieces of the life I’ve lived for three decades with Elizabeth Ann, in this room I am able to think. And what do I think? I think an unthinkable scream. A cry of irrational outrage.
Not yet! Not yet! Hold that heart attack! Forget that stroke! Put a different address on that embolism. Send that melanoma down to some poor bastard in Chile. River Styx, stay away from this door. The author of these irrational notes is not yet ready to die. The poor slob hasn’t even learned how to live.
I made the drink a stiff one. Coming on top of the shot I’d had at Will’s with Seb, it did the trick. The trick of making life seem not really impossible. Merely loathsome. When Elizabeth Ann came in from the kitchen, she looked beautiful.
I’ve said it wrong again. I don’t mean Elizabeth Ann looked beautiful because I’d had two stiff drinks. Plus one sock on the medulla oblongata in front of Penn Station by a fellow citizen who, I must remember, meant nothing personal by the outrage. He was merely fighting back against the people who had oppressed his race for two centuries. Elizabeth Ann, as I said, came into the room where I was doing my thinking.
“How was Philadelphia?” Elizabeth Ann said.
“I am not going to answer that,” I said. “You know how Philadelphia was. You were born there.”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “But I keep hoping it will get better. Seb has been trying to get you.”
“I know,” I said. “I stopped in at the office when I got back. Miss Bienstock told me.”
“Anything important?”
I hesitated. Elizabeth Ann loves Seb. So does my son Jack. Seb is the best kind of friend. A family favorite.
“Yes, very,” I said.
Elizabeth Ann was reaching for the glass I was holding out to her. Her hand stopped moving.
“Is Seb in trouble?” she said.
I hesitated again. Trouble had not crossed my mind as the way to describe the curious mood of our talk at Will’s, yet now it seemed surprisingly accurate.
“Yes, I said. “I think Seb is in very bad trouble.”
“Oh, God,” Elizabeth Ann said. Her hand moved on, she took the glass I was holding out, and she plumped herself down on the couch facing me. “Some woman, I suppose?”
I thought of Dr. McCarran’s wife in Philadelphia, whom I had not met.
“Yes,” I said.
“Anyone we know?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What’s her name?”
“Britannia,” I said.
“What?” Elizabeth Ann said.
I explained as much as I knew. The TV deal Jim Mennen had proposed. The rather surprising financial potential for Seb. M
ennen’s eagerness to have Seb at any cost. And why the money was important to Seb.
“He wants to retire,” I said. “He wants to go home.”
I left out why.
“To England?” Elizabeth Ann said.
The surprise in her voice took me by surprise. It occurred to me that to Elizabeth Ann our friend Sebastian Roon had always been an American.
“He seems to have remembered at the age of fifty-eight,” I said, “that England is his home.”
Elizabeth Ann took a sip from her glass and looked out at the sun coming in fiery red from Central Park West across the green glass roof of the Met.
“Maybe we could go with him,” she said.
“I don’t think what Seb has in mind is a holiday,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Elizabeth Ann said.
I sat up straighter in the chair where I do my thinking. I was reminded of a moment during the war in an Edinburgh pub when my CO, a man of almost terrifying intelligence named Buchanan, shed light for me on a puzzling corner of the complex fabric of the British character.
We had been discussing a project that had brought us up from London, the drafting of surrender leaflets to be dropped by the RAF on Dusseldorf, and suddenly a fight broke out at the other side of the saloon. It was settled in a few minutes, but I did not understand what had happened, and I asked.
“There are three moments in a pub that are crucial,” Colonel Buchanan said. “If you and I are having a talk over a glass of bitter, and a third chap starts pushing his way in, you observe in a friendly voice: buzz off, lad. A sensible chap understands you want privacy, takes no offense, and buzzes off. If he’s not sensible, perhaps because he’s sozzled, and he continues to push his way into the conversation, you put the screws on a bit in your voice and you say: piss off, lad. The chap has to be awfully stupid or awfully drunk not to twig to that. Usually, he does. But if he doesn’t, and he persists in being a pest, you come to phase three. Hard, now. Voice tough. You say: Fuck off, buster. That means if you don’t, buster, you are in for a fight. That’s what just happened over at the other side of the saloon bar a few minutes ago. The chap they just carried out, the poor sod apparently didn’t realize those other two chaps had told him they’d reached the fuck off stage. I had once explained this to Elizabeth Ann. She thought it funny. And every now and then, when a conversation or a discussion would get out of hand, she would say to me: “Let’s not reach the fuck off stage.” We rarely did.
Tiffany Street Page 25
