“That explains it,” she said.
“Explains what?” I said.
“How I guessed who you were,” Annabelle Bern said, “This morning, when I checked myself out in the Daily News, it said, you know, it said keep your eyes open for an unusual meeting today with someone who has played an important role, you know an important role in your past.”
“An important role in your past?” I said. “Miss Bern, I have never seen you before.”
Laugh. Hair sway. Heart wallop. My God, these kids have more going for them than the Atomic Energy Commission.
“That’s true,” she said. “But you’ve been a part of my, you know, part of my life since I was a kid. Grandpa used to tell us stories about you.”
“Me?” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Annabelle Bern said with the sort of smile we would be wise to send to the bargaining tables of stalled treaty negotiators. “Grandpa used to tell, you know, he’d tell about what it was like during the Depression. I mean the office, you know, he’d tell about what it was like on Thirty-fourth Street. Grandpa was very funny about it. A lot of the stories dealt with, you know, with this office boy. Benny Kramer. That’s you, isn’t it?”
I was no longer certain.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s me.”
Or was.
“How you used to, you know, take his shoes down to be shined?”
“Vici kid,” I said.
Another giggle. “That’s right,” Annabelle said. “And he always gave you, you know, Grandpa always gave you a dime for a ruggle and coffee. And how you used to get his hot pastrami sandwiches from, you know, from that place?”
“Lou G. Siegel,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “And how Mr. Saltzman, he had this green piece of leather?”
“It was the hide of a stag,” I said.
“And how Mr. Saltzman made you, you know, he made you polish it every morning?”
“I brought up the lights,” I said.
Not without pride.
“You what?” the girl said.
“Never mind,” I said.
“But the thing that used to kill us,” Annabelle Bern said, “the thing that really broke us up was a story about, you know, the day Grandpa got mixed up about a phone call, and he sent you with a note to this client, and the client he took you to lunch in a, you know, a fancy place called Shane’s on Twenty-third Street and you got smashed.”
“That used to kill you, did it?” I said.
The hair swung. Her face surfaced. She looked upset.
“I’m sorry,” Annabelle said.
“Why?” I said.
“I guess people don’t like to be reminded of things like, you know, things like that,” she said.
I thought of Dean Swift. When he was very old a friend found a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels and brought it to the dean as a present. The old man thumbed the pages slowly. Then, in a voice heavy with sadness, he said: “What genius I had then!” Benny Kramer never had genius. But he did have fun. This girl had just made him realize that. I could not believe my luck. So I crowded it.
“Did your grandfather really make it sound funny?”
For a long time the memory of those early years had been troubling me. Getting Mr. Bern’s shoes shined. Running for his hot pastrami sandwiches. Bringing up the lights on Mr. Saltzman’s green stagskin. For months the memories had bothered me. I had wasted the green years. Now I was going into the brown, and I felt terrified by the memory of the waste. Until this moment. When I saw what those years looked like not to Benny Kramer, who had lived them, but to this child to whom those years were a scrap of history. The lens of her youth had, unexpectedly, done for Benny Kramer what I had once done for Maurice Saltzman’s green stagskin. She had brought up the lights. I suddenly saw myself carrying a hot pastrami sandwich from Lou G. Siegel’s delicatessen to Mr. Bern’s office. But I saw it through the eyes of this girl. She was looking back at a legend. All at once so was I. And what I saw was not demeaning. Or depressing. I saw it as she saw it: a piece of time that had been preserved by her grandfather’s recollections. It made me feel young again.
“Please,” I said. “Did your grandfather really make it sound funny?”
She hesitated. “Not with like what you’d call, you know, disrespect,” she said. “It’s just sort of—well, you know, he got a kick out of you. When you were a kid, I mean. Grandpa said you were so—well, you know, so earnest. The way you ran for those hot pastrami sandwiches. The way you polished that piece of green leather. He used to tell these stories about you and, you know, he’d laugh and he’d laugh, and he’d shake his head, and he’d say they don’t make kids like that any more.”
I hesitated for a few moments. Savoring my luck. Trying on once more the mantle of youth. My mother used to say never make your own medals. She was right, of course. So I knew that what I wanted to say was wrong. But I also knew it was true. And I wanted to say it. So I did.
“They don’t,” Benny Kramer said.
The yellow hair swung clear. The delightful face was pinched with puzzlement.
“You must have been—” she started to say.
I nodded.
“I think I was,” I said. “Anyway, I hope so. It was easy in nineteen thirty. There were lots of things to worry about, but there were even more things you didn’t have to worry about. I was lucky. I knew good people when I was a kid.”
Her laugh should have been bottled. Even an inept promoter could have cleaned up with it.
“Jeepers,” she said. “You’re cool. You know?”
Obviously she had not noticed the blood pouring through the capillaries and veins of my face.
“And you’re a very lucky girl,” I said. “If I were not an old crock of fifty-eight, and happily married, and the father of a son your age, I would ask you to marry me.”
“I’m lucky?” she said. “Man, you’re the one that’s lucky. If you asked me to marry you, you know, I’d accept.”
Well, Benny, it’s been quite a day. Jenny kissed me when we met, jumping from the chair she sat in. Jenny kissed me when we met. Time, you thief, put that in. He won’t, of course. But all at once it was fun to remind the old bastard that he should.
“You know why I’d do it?” Annabelle Bern said.
“Why?” I said.
Yellow hair swung all the way to the right. Face in the clear. Big impish grin.
“In memory of, you know, Grandpa,” she said.
My gut jumped.
“Memory?” I said.
“He died four years ago,” she said.
As always, when I get this piece of news, I felt stupid. How could I not be prepared? What could be more expected in life than the news of death? How many times have I heard it? And yet—a line from a poem out of my youth, by a girl named Selma Robinson, tunneled through my mind: I know, and I know, and I keep forgetting.
“I wish—” I started to say.
And then, golden hair hanging in hawsers, probably one third my age, she demonstrated she was smarter than Benny Kramer.
“Don’t wish,” she said. “That kind of wishing, you know, you just pile up trouble. He had a good life, Grandpa did. You were, you know, you were part of it. It’s okay, Mr. Kramer. Honest. It’s okay.”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.”
The hell it was. But she was one third my age. She had plenty of time to learn what Benny Kramer now knew. I shut up.
“You know what’s the matter with you?” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You think you’re like older than you are,” she said.
What she did not know was that Benny Kramer had always thought he was older than he was. At my bar mitzvah I remember feeling I was fourteen.
“And that’s not a good thing,” I said.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “You ought to, you know, you ought to cut it out.”
“Okay,” I said. “For you I�
��ll do it.”
14
MY FIRST ATTEMPT WAS a failure.
I was doing my damnedest to feel younger when I came into our apartment late that afternoon. But the first thing I heard was the water thudding down in Elizabeth Ann’s bathroom. At once my mind was hurled back forty years. To the night in the Family Tricino restaurant when I had first met her.
“She always looks as though she’s just taken a shower,” Sebastian Roon had said in 1931.
I suppose it was appropriate to discover that she was taking another one on this day in 1971 when Ira Bern’s granddaughter had, in effect, urged me to forget those intervening forty years.
As I pulled my key from the lock, I paused to listen to the sounds of the shower from Elizabeth Ann’s brand-new bathroom. When it had been an old bathroom I could not hear the water thudding down. All I could hear was a running tap, and I could not hear that until I reached the door of Elizabeth Ann’s bathroom. The old bathroom had been like the rest of the old apartment house: a sight to inspire confidence in a New Yorker, the way St. Paul’s inspires confidence in a Londoner. It had tonnage.
A bathtub the dimensions of which compared favorably with the lake in Central Park. White marble tiling up the walls to the height of a tall man’s eyebrows. Every tile as long and as wide as a building brick. Every tile veined by a network of cracks as delicate as a spider’s web. Every web caused by the same thing that had brought the once white tile to a soft, glowing ivory: age.
Like many old things, however, Elizabeth Ann’s bathroom slowly ground down. The movable parts creaked. The fixtures rolled slowly. The water came forth in chugging rivulets rather than roaring torrents. For Christmas the year before I had given Elizabeth Ann a new bathroom. I had not realized it was a process not unlike giving the navy a new aircraft carrier.
The entire apartment had been reduced to a pocket shipyard. Including a dry dock in which small, dark men who did not speak English mixed the cement they then tramped vigorously into the hall carpets. After the months of hammering were over, and the scaffolding was cleared away, and a split of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge had been smashed across the toilet seat, Elizabeth Ann owned a nest of chromium and glass, with fluorescent lighting and, when the shower was running, a thrumming drumbeat of sound to which the guard at Buckingham Palace could with ease have been changed.
“What did you say?” I yelled as I came into her bedroom.
“I said hurry up and change,” Elizabeth Aim shouted. “Lillian and Seb are coming to dinner.”
“How did that happen?” I bellowed. “You didn’t say anything about it when I left for the office this morning.”
“I didn’t know about it when you left for the office this morning,” Elizabeth Ann roared. “Lillian called about ten for a chat, mainly about how your negotiations are going for Seb’s series. I didn’t know, of course, but like any wife Lillian is understandably interested in how much loot her husband will carry away from ABTV for the project they hope to retire on. So I made reassuring noises, but Lillian said she was not interested in that. She just wanted me to know she and Seb were coming to dinner.”
Even for a close friend as forthright as Lillian, this seemed a little high-handed.
“Well,” I said, “they’re always welcome, of course, but what’s the big push?”
Through the thudding of her shower, Elizabeth Ann said something that sounded completely improbable.
“What did you say?” I shouted.
Elizabeth Ann roared, “Lillian said she and Seb had heard that Jack was flying in tonight from Indiana.”
“He is?” I bellowed.
“He has,” Elizabeth Ann yelled back.
“Where is he?”
“In his bedroom. Go in and talk to him.”
It seemed an odd bit of instruction. Did Elizabeth Ann think I would not talk to him? Or that, on coming into his presence, I would do something else rather than talk to him? Like, for instance, kick him?
Actually, when I did come into his room, Jack was in a position to receive a good swift one. He was bent over, his back to me. He had one foot up on the chair near his bed. He was polishing his boots.
“If you wear shoes instead of boots,” I said, “it’s less work.”
He turned and grinned and said, “Hi, Pops,” and I had a moment of surprise.
Since I had seen Jack last, he had grown a full beard. The surprise was the color: a dull auburn, almost red. His hair on top had always been, and still was, as black as Parker’s Quink.
“Shoes are really not less work,” he said. “You see, with boots you don’t have to shine the high parts because they tuck in under your jeans.”
He demonstrated.
“Good,” I said. “Bring up the lights on them. We have guests for dinner.”
“Who?”
“Aunt Lillian and Uncle Seb.”
Jack’s brush stopped pushing back and forth across his boot.
“Why?” he said. “I mean why were they invited?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You mother said they invited themselves.”
“They must have given a reason?” Jack said.
“Aunt Lillian said they’d heard you were flying in tonight and they wanted to see you.”
A scowl takes on an extra dimension when it is surrounded by a full beard. In addition to the puzzlement there was suddenly a touch of worry on Jack’s face. Or the parts of it I could see.
“That’s funny,” he said.
“Not nearly so funny as the fact that Aunt Lillian and Uncle Seb should know you’re coming before your mother and I do.”
The brush resumed its back-and-forth march across the instep of Jack’s boot. More slowly now.
“I have something to tell you,” Jack said. “You and Mom. I didn’t want any arguments about it on the phone. I wanted to be face to face with you and Mom when I told you.” Pause. Scowl. “That’s why I kept it a secret that I was coming up.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s no longer a secret. Whatever it is, unless you want to be telling it to four people instead of just me and Mom, maybe you’d better tell me now, before Aunt Lillian and Uncle Seb arrive.”
Jack took his foot from the chair and straightened up. Around the beard the touch of puzzlement sank into an unmistakable look of total worry.
“Where’s Mom?” he said.
“In the shower,” I said.
“Jesus, God,” Jack said. “Since you built her that damned Radio City bathroom, she spends more time in it than she used to spend with the rest of the human race.”
“Shall I get her?”
“Would you, Pops?”
I went out and down the hall. The thudding of the water in the shower had stopped. Elizabeth Ann was in her terry cloth robe, doing something to her hair with a comb.
“You look worried,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Jack wants to see us before Lillian and Seb arrive,” I said. “Shall I bring him in here?”
“No,” Elizabeth Ann said. “I think his room would be better. It’s his turf.”
We went back down the hall. There was something unpleasant about this marching back and forth in our own home. I felt like the accused, being led back and forth under guard between his cell and the courtroom. When we came in, Jack had started on his second boot. He stopped polishing and straightened up.
“It’s like this,” he said promptly. “The last time we talked, Pops, you had just come back from that Dr. McCarran in Philadelphia. And you remember, of course, what happened.”
The way Leonidas probably remembered Thermopylae. Victories become hazily pleasant, boozy recollections. Defeats get burned into the mind and heart in details so sharply etched that they never stop hurting.
“Of course I remember,” I said.
Elizabeth Ann gave me a look. I remembered something else. The kiss Elizabeth Ann had given me that night for what she had called my stupidity.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t take you up on that,” J
ack said. “I appreciated the effort, Pops, but you see I’m not a boy from East Fourth Street. I’m something you made me. A boy from Eighty-third and Fifth. I couldn’t pee my way out of this situation.”
Meaning that Benny Kramer could.
“I understand,” I said.
Only too clearly.
“Jack,” Elizabeth Ann said quietly. “Whether or not your father would have used Dr. McCarran’s list of answers at an army physical to stay out of the draft is beside the point. He never had to be put to that particular test.”
“True enough,” Jack said. “I’m sorry, Pops.”
I’m sure he was. But that did not change what he had said. All my life I had seen the world through the lens of East Fourth Street. This was a fine time to learn from your own son that maybe the lens was distorted.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
One thing you learn on East Fourth Street is how to lie with the best of them. Without taking her eyes off Jack, Elizabeth Ann touched my arm.
“And you told us, Jack,” she said, “that you wanted to think it over, and when you came to a decision about your next move you would let us know.”
“That’s why I flew up today,” Jack said. “To let you know.”
“Okay,” I said, “We’re listening.”
Elizabeth Ann’s fingers dug into my arm. I knew the signal. She didn’t want me to reach the fuck off stage.
“Two weeks ago,” Jack said, “I wrote to the draft board here in New York, asking them to give me a C.O. classification.”
My insides jumped. “Conscientious objector?” I said.
“Yes,” Jack said. “They wrote back and said I would have to appear before their board for an oral examination, and they gave me a date.”
“Tonight?” Elizabeth Ann said.
Jack nodded. “Seven o’clock,” he said.
“Oh, God,” Elizabeth Ann said. “It’s almost five-thirty. I’d better step on it.” She gave my arm an extra hard squeeze. “You stay here, Benjamin, and talk to him.”
About what? Feelings about my own son that I did not want to examine?
“I assume you’ve gone beyond just making the decision to ask for C.O. status?” I said. “I assume you’ve examined the consequences?”
Tiffany Street Page 32
