“What?” Hannah said.
“Churchill always puts in an alas!” I said. “Like a pinch of salt in a recipe.”
“He’s entitled,” Hannah said. “But back to the balcony of Loew’s Hundred and Eightieth Street on that night in nineteen thirty. You went off to get the knishes. Grace Krieger went off with Sebastian Roon somewhere on the right. I took a seat on the left and kept the one next to me empty for you. A minute or two later, Sebastian Roon came over and sat down in the empty seat next to me. I was surprised but there was no time to say anything because just then there was this noise. From the front of the theater. ‘Out of the shadow of the silent screen strides John Barrymore in, and as, GENERAL CRACK!’ Seb leaned over to me and said: ‘Are you much taken with this?’ Imagine. Are you much taken with this? Jesus! Guess what I said.”
“Some variation of huh?”
Hannah laughed. “Close, Benny, close,” she said. What I actually said was ‘Not particularly.’ And guess what he said.”
“He took your hand and he said let’s get out of here.”
Hannah registered an astonishment that I don’t think she felt. She was playing up to me.
“How did you know?” she said.
I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying I’ve been to a lot of movies without her.
“I’ve known Seb for a dozen years,” I said.
“Well,” Hannah said, “that’s exactly what he did say, and we walked out of Loew’s One Hundred and Eightieth Street, and he said is there any place we can sit and talk? So I took him into Bronx Park. You know that bench on the left side of the Small Mammals House?”
Oh, God, she shouldn’t have said that!
“Yes,” I said with the sort of restraint Dean Acheson used to employ when talking to Khrushchev.
“Well,” Hannah said, “we went over there, and we sat down, and he talked. Boy, did he talk. It turned out underneath that Oxford accent he was lonely, and scared, and not sure what the hell to do. You know, he was really Leslie Howard in those scenes by the hollyhocks where he tells the girl he’s not an elegant bounder from those clubs in St. James Street but just a frightened little schnook looking for affection. Did he have a load of tsuris! After his uncle died Seb said all he had in the world was nine hundred bucks. He showed it to me. Did you ever see nine hundred dollars in the flesh?”
“Yes,” I said. “About a month before you saw it, the day his uncle died, Seb showed it to me.”
“Well, he didn’t show it to you in the shadow of the Small Mammals House,” Hannah said. “It makes a difference. There was a sort of, I don’t know, a glow about it And that’s why I suppose it happened.”
“What happened?” I said.
“What he said,” Hannah said. “Seb. He said it’s terribly upsetting. I like it here, he said. This country. I want to stay here. But I’ve got to go back and see my mum. She’s not well. And she thinks her brother, that’s my uncle, she thinks he’s a big bug over here, and I’ve got to break it to her that he’s not a big bug but he’s dead and he died broke, and oh, well, it’s a mess, and I hate it, but I’ve got to go. And that’s when I said it,” Hannah said. “Right there. That minute. By the Small Mammals House in Bronx Park,” Hannah said. “That’s when I said it.”
“Said what?” I said.
“Take me along,” Hannah said.
She paused. I took a bite out of one of the things she had baked herself. The candied cherry on top did not help. I was indeed surprised that she had been able to pry it out of the baking pan. But I was glad she had managed it. It gave me something to do. While I did it, I tried not to think, but it is an effort at which I have never succeeded. I don’t mean that my thinking is good. Or constructive. Or even worth recording. But it is feverish.
“Why did you say take me along?” I said.
Hannah looked troubled. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said.
“It matters to me,” I said. “Why do you think I came here today? In the middle of a war? And an air raid?”
The troubled look on Hannah’s face didn’t exactly change. But it moved. As though she had shifted gears.
“Benny,” she said, “I think it would be better if I didn’t tell you.”
Better for whom?
“I want to know,” I said.
“No, Benny,” Hannah said. “You don’t. Really, you don’t.”
“I think I’m the one who knows the answer to that,” I said. “That night near the Small Mammals House, I want to know why you said to Seb take me along.”
“Okay,” Hannah said. She sounded sad. “I said it because I had two things in my head. I knew I loved Benny Kramer, but I also knew something else.”
“What?” I said.
“I knew something about me that maybe Benny Kramer didn’t even know himself.”
“What was that?” I said.
“I knew Benny Kramer liked me upstairs in the dark,” Hannah said. “In the balcony of Loew’s One Hundred and Eightieth Street. Where nobody was looking. But downstairs. During the day. Where people could see us. You were ashamed of me.”
“Hannah,” I said. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s too late,” she said. “I have. I told you it was something you wouldn’t like. Still, why not? It’s the truth. You never asked me for a date on Sunday. When the sun was shining in the park.”
“How could I?” I said. “I had to work on Sunday. At Maurice Saltzman & Company it was a seven-day week.”
“Maybe that’s why I said take me along to Seymour,” Hannah said. “Not really because he looked like Leslie Howard, but because he didn’t work a seven-day week for Maurice Saltzman & Company. Our first date, right after John Barrymore came striding out of the shadow of the silent screen, Seymour and I we walked around and stayed up until daylight. He liked me, Benny. The way you did, but also he wasn’t ashamed of me, Benny. The way you were.”
“So when he said he was going home to England?”
“I said take me along,” Hannah said.
“And he did,” I said.
Hannah nodded. “The next thing I knew we were on the United States,” she said.
“Was that the only reason you said it?” I said. “Take me along?”
She gave me another of those over-the-glasses looks. “You mean did I say it because I was in love with him?”
Of course that’s what I meant. So I said, “No.”
“Well,” Hannah said, “I wasn’t. He was a very attractive boy, and if you go to see his movies, as I do, you know he’s grown more attractive, but that wasn’t it. The reason I heard myself saying take me along, I mean in addition to how you were ashamed of me, the reason was that all of a sudden I realized I was tired of waiting to get out of the Bronx. Bone-tired. Scared-tired. I suddenly felt, my God, it may never happen! Where the idea came from, I don’t know. But all at once the years of waiting for you to go to law school, and move your mother and father downtown, and get a job with Hartman, Sheridan, Tekulsky & Pecora—Jesus, Benny, all of a sudden I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to last it out. And here it was. Sitting beside me on the bench near the Small Mammals House. Instant Out! So I went.”
I picked at the sliver of candied cherry on top of the thing she had baked herself.
“But it didn’t work,” I said.
“It didn’t work the way I thought it was going to work,” she said. “But it worked better than I can see you think it worked.”
“Look,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“Of course not,” Hannah said. “You’re Major Kramer now, in a snappy uniform with a lot of fancy colored ribbons, and for all I know you’re probably winning the war, but to me you’re still a nice Jewish boy from Tiffany Street named Benny Kramer. So I’m not going to tell Major Kramer what happened. I’m going to tell Benny.”
I laughed and I bit into the candied cherry. A mistake. But no matter. I smacked my lips. It was not for her culinary talents that I had once been dead stuck on this girl. And now? Take it
easy, Benny. There’s a war on.
“Tell me,” I said. “I’m Benny.”
“Well, naturally I didn’t tell Ma and Pa I was traveling with Seb. I made it sound I was going alone. When they came down to the ship to see me off, I made sure Seb was out of sight. And well, anyway, Seb and I got here.”
“Here?” I said.
“Yeah,” Hannah said. This is where his mother and father and brother lived. This is the house Seb was born in. It’s nice, isn’t it?”
I took another look around. At the cramped but neat little living room. At the tiny fireplace. At the framed picture of Churchill and the sampler that warned you in black and yellow and blue wool to keep the poker on the hearth. At the tiny foyer, just outside the living room, on the wall of which a row of pegs was hung with stained mackintoshes—did you ever see an Englishman in a clean raincoat?—and Major Kramer’s dashing trench coat from the Officers’ Commissary on Oxford Street. What I saw gave me a funny little feeling in my chest. It was nice.
“It’s delightful,” I said.
Miss Marine? Were you listening? Benny did not say it was great. He did not say it was the cat’s pajamas, or the berries. Benny said it was delightful.
Tm glad you like it, Benny,” Hannah said. “We come from the same place, you and I. If you didn’t like it I’d feel rotten.”
If I hadn’t liked it how did she think I would feel?
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I do like it.”
I not only liked it I suddenly realized I was jealous of her for having it Hannah had achieved something I was still seeking. Sanctuary.
“Seb didn’t,” she said.
“What?” I said.
Hannah shook her head as though she was trying to shake off a persistently buzzing fly.
“The moment we got here,” she said, “I could see he hated it. You know what it was like?”
“What?” I said.
“It was like suppose what I’d told my mother and father was true,” Hannah said. “Suppose I’d really come over here from the Bronx on a job for Maurice Saltzman & Company, and then I had to go home and it was Seb, not me, who said take me along, and I did, and we arrived in that crummy apartment we used to live in on Vyse Avenue. Jesus, Benny, think of it.”
I did.
“You would have hated it,” I said.
“You bet I would,” Hannah said. “And that’s how it was with Seb. I was coming to a new country. Dickens. Shakespeare. Thackeray. All that stuff they taught us at school. Remember ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’?”
“Sure,” I said. “And how about Gammer Gurton’s Needle?”
“And Patient Griselda?” Hannah said. “All those things. All of a sudden it wasn’t stuff in books that they taught you in school. All of a sudden it was real. It was here. Islington Crescent. I was so excited there were times I couldn’t breathe. No kidding. I just couldn’t catch my breath, it was so wonderful. But to Seb? Benny, poor Seb, he was coming back to the Bronx. That’s what this place meant to him. His Bronx. He felt awful. All he wanted was to get back.”
“To our Bronx,” I said.
Hannah scowled at the teapot. “Now, isn’t that funny?” she said. “I never thought of it that way, but of course that was it. To you and me the Bronx was the Bronx, but to Seb it was, I don’t know, like in school, America was to those explorers, John Cabot and that Frenchman La Salle and oh, you know.”
I did. I knew. Boy, did Benny Kramer know.
“A new world,” I said.
Hannah nodded. “And that’s what Blackpool has been to me,” she said. “A new world.” Then she did something that it still hurts to remember. She put her hand to her heart and said, “I love it, Benny. I love it so much I could die for it.”
What I said next was not particularly brilliant, but it took me a couple of moments to get the words arranged in proper sequence.
“You don’t have to do that, Hannah,” I said.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I’m like Winston. I mean I know what he means. To save this little hunk of Islington Crescent I will fight on the beaches, I will fight on the landing fields, I will never surrender—!”
“Hannah,” I said, “take it easy.”
“You’re right, Benny,” she said. “I am making a horse’s ass out of myself.”
“You couldn’t do that,” I said, “if you were entered in a contest”
Think of that one. In fact, you may have it. Courtesy of Major Benjamin Kramer, U.S. Army, formerly of Tiffany Street
“Jesus,” Hannah said, and she turned on me the sort of look that you get only from the top of the Washington Monument. “Jesus,” Hannah said again. “Why didn’t I wait for you?”
“Because Seb came along,” I said.
Hannah shook her head. “Not really,” she said. “He came along, and he brought me over here, but then he couldn’t stand it. And one day he just took off.”
“Leaving you here alone?” I said.
Hannah laughed. “Not exactly,” she said. “There was his mum and his dad, nice people both. And there was—”
A noise out in the foyer drew her attention. I turned to follow her glance. A key was scraping in the lock of the front door. It opened. Sebastian Roon came in. Except that it was not Sebastian Roon. It was a man who looked exactly like him. Hannah leaped up.
“Eustace!” she said. “We’ve got a visitor from the Stytes!”
I wondered if my ear was playing tricks. Had Hannah said Stytes?
“Evening, love,” said Eustace.
He came limping into the room, and that explained why he was not really Sebastian Roon, even though he looked exactly like Seb. Eustace wore a shoe with a seven-inch heel.
“This is Benny Kramer,” Hannah said. “You’ve heard me talk of him. We were kids in the Bronx together.”
It was not until Eustace snapped a salute at me that I realized he was wearing the rough woolen khaki and the broad slashing V-stripe of a corporal in the British Army.
“Glad to meet you, sir,” he said. “Hannah has indeed talked a grite deal about you. A pleasure, sir.”
We shook hands.
“Eustace, love,” Hannah said, “will you ave a cup of tay?”
“That’s why oy came ome, love.”
He limped to a chair facing me while Hannah fussed with the teapot. His resemblance to Seb was so startling that I could not stop myself from making the obvious remark.
“You look like Seb’s twin,” I said.
Eustace laughed. The same, easy, engaging laugh that had helped make his brother one of the most famous actors on the English-speaking stage. But there was a hard core at the bottom of the laugh. A sort of grating metallic sound. It surfaced again when Eustace spoke.
“Why not?” he said. “Since that’s what oyam? His bloody twin brother oyam. The only difference between us is that oym the one who got the polio.”
“Ere, love,” Hannah said. He took the teacup. “It’s on account of is leg that Eustace is in the typists’ pool up at the arsenal. Ee runs the mimeograph machine.”
“It eyn’t like piloting a Spitfire,” Eustace said. “But Oy daresay it’s as much against Itler as playing a eero in the cinema.”
So that’s the way it is, I remember thinking. And that’s the last thought I do remember. No. Not quite. I remember that the sound of the planes had taken on a new note. Nothing loud or disturbing. Except that it reminded me of something very odd. The way Mr. Lebenbaum, in whose candy store I used to work after school on East Fourth Street when I was a boy, used to get the trash ready for the garbage wagon.
Most of the stuff was cardboard boxes. Cracker Jack cartons. Tootsie Roll containers. Mary Jane boxes. Dry stuff. Not sloppy, but it took up space. And Abe Lebenbaum was a neat man. So the day before the garbage man came, he would go out into the room back of the candy store and crush these boxes and cartons into manageable shape. He seemed to enjoy the process. I can still see him jumping up and down on a big fat Tootsie R
oll carton, reducing it gleefully to a thin pack of cardboard. And I can still hear the curious crunch crunch crunch the cardboard made as Abe Lebenbaum jumped on the boxes.
It was this sound, this curiously satisfying crunch crunch crunch, that I had been hearing, without knowing I was hearing it, all during my brief meeting with Eustace Rubin in the tiny living room of his house in Islington Crescent. I learned later that this is the sound made by sticks of bombs as they are laid down by aircraft. I had never heard this sound during the raids I had lived through in London.
“Now, now, Eustace.” Hannah said. “No woman ever had a better husband, and Oym appy to be your wife. The truth is Oy never was appy until Oy met you, and it’s—”
She probably said more. I don’t remember. I don’t even remember which one of us screamed. It could have been me. All I remember is the clarity with which I was hearing the noise Abe Lebenbaum made when he used to jump up and down on those Cracker Jack cartons, and then that stopped, too.
13
IT SOUNDED FUNNY, MORE than a quarter of a century later, to be hearing that crunching sound again. In the thickly carpeted corridors of the ABTV Building on Madison Avenue. On my way to the meeting I had arranged with Jim Mennen’s legal department to work out the terms of Sebastian Roon’s TV deal.
It seemed funny to hear that sound again, but it was even funnier to realize the meaningless noise was reassuring. I suddenly felt like the hero of one of those old Warner Bros. movies that were supposed to be the biographical accounts of the lives of noted composers. The plot always turned on the composer’s endless quest for the true meaning of his work. I had spent half a century, the script said, combing the world desperately for the magic note that would unify my oeuvre. And suddenly I had stumbled into it in the Dry Cereals aisle at the A&P.
Crunch, crunch, crunch: Abe Lebenbaum on Avenue D in 1927 stamping the candy-store empties into manageable shape for the garbage truck. Crunch, crunch, crunch: a Stuka coming in over the North Sea in 1942, laying a stick of bombs to the front door in Blackpool of a girl with whom I had once eaten Gabilla’s knishes in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street. Crunch, crunch, crunch: something making the same noise in the corridors of the ABTV Building in 1971 as I made my way to the room in which I planned to work out the financial arrangements that would ensure the end of Sebastian Roon’s forty-year exile.
Tiffany Street Page 29
