[BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) goes to desk and picks up a slice of pickle]
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) It’s like a piece of pickle, Mr. Bern, with a hot pastrami sandwich. It adds fillip.
BERN (Seb) Next time, Benny, ask Philip he should add a little more mustard.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Mr. Bern, do you mind if I ask a personal question?
BERN (Seb) First give me back the pickle.
[BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) hands back the slice of pickle to BERN (Seb). He munches the pickle as BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) speaks]
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Mr. Bern, what do you think of me as a pastrami sandwich bringer from Lou G. Siegel?
BERN (Seb) Without hesitation or equivocation, with complete candor and beyond peradventure of a doubt, I can say Benny Kramer is the finest the most accomplished hot pastrami sandwich bringer from Lou G. Siegel now functioning in New York City, possibly all of America.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Thank you, Mr. Bern. That is indeed praise from Sir Hubert.
BERN (Seb) Who is he?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) I don’t know. But Miss Bongiorno, my elocution teacher in J.H.S. Sixty-Four, when you did something good, and she said so, she would always add: “And that, my dear Benjamin, is praise from Sir Hubert!”
BERN (Seb) Well, you mind we keep him out of it?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Not at all. Mr. Bern. Whatever you say, Mr. Bern. May I go on, Mr. Bern?
BERN (Seb) [Poking about among the paper napkins, the wax paper, and the bag in which his pastrami sandwich had been wrapped] Benny, next time ask them to put in two pieces of pickle. BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Two pieces of pickle. Correct. I have made a mental note of it, Mr. Bern. Now, then, sir, may I ask what you think of me as a carrier of vici kid shoes to the bootblack in the lobby for shining every morning?
BERN (Seb) Without hesitation or equivocation, Benny, with complete candor and beyond peradventure of a doubt, I can say Benny Kramer is the finest, the most accomplished carrier of vici kid shoes to the bootblack in the lobby for shining every morning now functioning in New York City, possibly in all America.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Thank you, Mr. Bern. That is indeed praise from Sir—oops, sorry. He’s out, isn’t he?
BERN (Seb) Unless he comes in with another piece of pickle. [He bursts into laughter] Pretty funny, huh?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) [Getting the hint, he also explodes in a roar of laughter] Funny? Mr. Bern, you could sell that to Jack Benny.
BERN (Seb) I doubt it. He’s gotten along for so many years with the same old jokes, why should he buy new ones?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Now that I know how you feel about me as a pastrami sandwich bringer and a vici kid carrier, Mr. Bern, may I ask what you think of my character?
BERN (Seb) I think you are as honest as the day is long. No matter if it’s Eastern Standard or Daylight Saving.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Thank you, Mr. Bern, but I don’t mean that.
BERN (Seb) What do you mean, Benny?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) When you look at me, Mr. Bern, what do you see?
BERN (Seb) Why, I see a nice, clean-cut, good-looking, one hundred percent Galitzianer American boy, a boy I am proud to have working for me.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Thank you, Mr. Bern, but is that all you see?
BERN (Seb) [Examines Mm closely] Well, Benny, I’ve been meaning to mention it to you, but I think you’re growing up faster than you think, and I feel you really should shave more often than twice a week.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) I will, Mr. Bern. I’m making a mental note of it. But all that is on the surface. I’m talking about what’s under the surface. The hidden Benny Kramer.
BERN (Seb) Benny, for God’s sake, you got something to hide?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Yes, Mr. Bern.
BERN (Seb) Benny, what? What?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) A seething caldron in my heart.
BERN (Seb) Benny, please talk English.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Mr. Bern, you are a boy from East Fifth Street. Would you want a son of yours to spend his life carrying hot pastrami sandwiches and taking down vici kid shoes to be shined? Even for a man who is the finest, the most successful, and some say the wealthiest certified public accountant now practicing in New York, and possibly in all of America?
BERN (Seb) [Thoughtful] I can’t really answer that, Benny. You see, my son is now in his second year at dental school.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) And where is Benny Kramer?
BERN (Seb) Why, Benny, you’re here, working for me.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Carrying hot pastrami sandwiches and vici kid shoes. Is that the proper work for a man?
BERN (Seb) But Benny, you’re not a man.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) I’m getting close. Already I have to shave more than twice a week.
BERN (Seb) [Incredulous] Benny, you want to improve yourself?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Didn’t you, Mr. Bern, when you started shaving more than twice a week? BERN (Seb) [Slow] My God. I forgot.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) I’m still young, Mr. Bern. I haven’t lived long enough yet to forget.
BERN (Seb) [His voice breaks] I—I remember when I—when I started shaving more—more than twice—twice a week.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Before you started eating dollar pastrami sandwiches.
BERN (Seb) [A sob] I ate—I ate ruggles.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Before you wore vici kid shoes.
BERN (Seb) [Choked] I wore Thorn McAn.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Mr. Bern, that’s what I eat now. Ruggles. That’s what I wear now. Thom McAn.
BERN (Seb) [The tears well up in his eyes] And you want to eat pastrami? You want to wear vici kid?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Why not? I’m a nice, clean-cut, one hundred percent Galitzianer American boy.
BERN (Seb) [Another sob] And I’ve been holding you back.
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Not intentionally, Mr. Bern.
BERN (Seb) [Beginning to fall apart] But I have! I have! What can I do, Benny, what can I do to make you forgive me?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) You can help me achieve my great ambition.
BERN (Seb) What’s that, Benny?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) I want to go to law school.
BERN (Seb) What’s the matter with dental school?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) When I hear a drill I come out in a rash.
BERN (Seb) All right, then, law school. How can I help, Benny?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) By giving me a raise.
BERN (Seb) [Sobbing stops. Voice sharp] A raise?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) Law school costs money. Mr. Bern, at N.Y.U. it’s ten dollars a point. Evening session.
BERN (Seb) [Sobbing resumes, but a touch of caution] How big a raise?
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) If I earned five dollars a week more, Mr. Bern, I could swing it.
BERN (Seb) [A cry of anguish] No!
BENNY (Elizabeth Ann) [Sags in despair. Voice piteous] Why not?
BERN (Seb) [Through the sobs, a roar of triumph] Because I’ll give you six!
BERN (Seb) [Throws his arms around BENNY (Elizabeth Ann). They cling together, both sobbing with happiness]
BERN (Seb) Curtain!
Silence clapped down on the Preshinivetz Playhouse like the lid on an ashcan. Then, from the first row, Ira Bern rose and turned. The harsh yellow rays from the work light struck the left side of his face. I was surprised, all the way back in the last row, to see that Mr. Bern’s face was wet with tears.
“Benny!” he cried. His voice shook with sobs. “Benny, where are you?”
“Here!” I called, standing up.
Mr. Bern stumbled out into the aisle. He came running up to the back of the theater and clasped me in his arms. By now he was weeping desperately.
“Miss Foster is a rotten playwright!” he sobbed. “She got it all wrong! Benny, I’m going to give you seven!”
“Thanks, Mr. Bern,” I said. “That’s very generous of you. I wish there
was something I could do to repay you.”
“There is, Benny!” he cried. “There is!”
“What?” I said.
In a choked voice Ira Bern said, “Come back to me a chief justice!”
16
I HAD NOT MADE IT, of course. And it did not help to tell myself I had never wanted to be a chief justice to begin with. Because if I had made it the way Ira Bern had wanted me to make it, I would not now be sitting in my study at one-thirty in the morning, staring out at the taxi headlights stabbing through the Central Park night, waiting for Jack to come home from his meeting with the draft board.
An Ira Bern-type chief justice would have been able to drop a hint to the right people. An Ira Bern chief justice would have been able to pull what for others were unpullable strings. The son of an Ira Bern chief justice would not have to pee his way out of the Mekong Delta by giving an army medical examiner the answers written for him by a Dr. McCarran in Philadelphia. The failure went beyond a line that never got into Who’s Who. The failure to achieve Ira Bern’s objective posed a tough question: If in half a century you have not piled up enough clout to be able to save your son’s life, what good can be said of your life?
A key scraping in the lock saved me from continuing to paw about for an answer to this question. After the scratch of the key came the sound of Jack whistling “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier.” I met him at the door. From the look on his face I knew I didn’t have to ask the question, so I asked another one.
“Will you have that drink now?”
“I sure will, Pops,” he said. “Where’s Mom?”
“She’s asleep.”
“No, I’m not,” Elizabeth Ann said, coming into the room. “It worked?”
“It worked,” Jack said.
Elizabeth Ann held him for a few moments, then said, “Don’t tell me any more. This is enough pleasure for one night. I’ll pick up the details in the morning.”
“Are there any details to pick up?” I said after she was gone.
“Thanks, Pops,” Jack said, taking the drink. He skimmed off a sip, smacked his lips, and said, “No.”
So I knew there were details he didn’t want me to know.
“I’m glad I was wrong about the boots and the beard,” I said.
Jack looked at his drink as though he expected a message in a bottle to come floating to the surface.
“I don’t know that you were wrong,” he said finally.
“You got it without your Brooks blazer,” I said. “Or your Hasty Pudding tie.”
“I got it because a guy on the board said are you the son of Benjamin Kramer the lawyer,” Jack said.
“You’re kidding the old man,” I said.
“No,” Jack said, I’m not. The guy who said it, by the way, was wearing a Brooks blazer.”
“Why not?” I said. “It’s a sensible garment, sold at a sensible price.”
“Not always to men who work for ABTV,” Jack said.
It was like the moment in the crossword puzzle when 37 Down locks into 147 Across: “A moment of comprehension in five letters.”
Boing!
“Some guy on the draft board C.O. Committee works for the network that’s going to do Uncle Seb’s TV show?” I said.
“He’s in the legal department,” Jack said. “He asked me if I was the son of a lawyer named Benjamin Kramer who represented Sebastian Roon in this ABTV negotiation.”
“I hope you didn’t deny it,” I said.
“Only because he didn’t make it sound like an accusation,” Jack said.
“Did you get his name?” I said.
“No,” Jack said, “but I got the impression that he’d been impressed with you. He asked if I planned to become a lawyer, and when I said I didn’t know yet, he said well we can’t have such potentially-first-rate legal talent killed in places like the Mekong Delta, so he reached for his quill, and he signed his name, and here I am.”
Well, it wasn’t exactly the same as coming back to my old boss as a chief justice. For the practical purpose of saving his son’s life, however, Benny Kramer had come through.
“You mind if I propose a toast?” I said.
“To whom?” Jack said.
“Ira Bern,” I said.
“Tonight, Pops, I’ll drink to anybody,” Jack said. “But why this Ira Bern?”
“He made us both what we are today,” I said. “I hope you’re as satisfied as I am.”
17
“THAT’S GOOD NEWS,” SEB said two days later across a drink at Will’s. “Not only for Jack’s sake, but also for Elizabeth Ann.”
“Yes, Jack’s okay,” I said. “The army is allowing him to work out his two-year C.O. stint doing something constructive rather than destructive. Instead of murdering innocent peasants in the Mekong Delta he’ll be jockeying bedpans as an orderly up at Harlem Hospital.”
“He’ll be mugged a few times,” Seb said. “But he’ll last it out.”
During the war, in Blackpool, Hannah had said it was the only way. She had not known, of course, that all she had left to last out was a quarter of an hour.
“Yes,” I said. “He’ll last it out.”
After all, whether he liked it or not, Jack was the son of a boy from East Fourth Street.
Seb signaled to the white-haired woman in black bombazine behind the small bar. She came across the creaky floor of the dimly lighted room.
“The same, Mr. Roon?” she said.
“Please,” Seb said.
“Not the same for me,” I said. “May I please have not a martini but some Cutty Sark and water?”
The little old lady gave me a cold look and went back to the bar.
Seb laughed. “You never give up,” he said. “Do you?”
“I would if I knew how,” I said. “It’s one of the courses they left out of the curriculum on East Fourth Street.” I leaned across to my brief case and slid the zipper open. “Let’s get on with the TV deal,” I said. “I’ve got everything out of Mennen’s lawyers that they were able to give, and a few things they didn’t even know they had. If this TV series comes off, Seb, you and Lillian will be retiring to your native heath in style.”
“It’s not coming off,” Seb said.
The white-haired woman came to the table. She set down our drinks and left. I did not actually see her. I merely felt the sudden presence of her heavy body, and then the presence was gone. My glance was concentrated on Seb.
“What’s not coming off?” I said.
“The TV deal,” he said.
“Jim Mennen has changed his mind?” I said. “After all the work I’ve done with his legal department?”
“No,” Seb said. “Jim Mennen’s mind has been changed for him. The new Nielsen ratings were made public late last night. Every one of Mennen’s shows has nose-dived, and when the market closed this afternoon ABTV common was down eleven points. The jackals went to work at once. Mennen was fired at five o’clock as head of the ABTV network. Every one of his projects was canceled. Mine among them. This will be a big blow to the ambassador.”
“What ambassador?” I said.
“My dear Benjamin,” Seb said. “To an Englishman there is only one ambassador. Monday night last, Sir Nolan Branch came backstage after the play, introduced himself, and asked if I could take lunch with him next Thursday in Washington. That was yesterday. I flew down, we had lunch at the embassy, and guess what?”
“The Prince of Wales has defected to the Kremlin, and you have been asked to step into the vacant spot.”
“Not bad,” Seb said. “Sir Nolan, it seems, had heard about the TV series. Through Jim Mennen’s P.R. people, no doubt, and it had gone into one of his weekly reports to London. Last week he received a minute from one of the Queen’s secretaries saying that when the series was completed I would be placed on Her Majesty’s Honors list. None of your evasive Orders of Merit, either. A real honest-to-goodness solid-gold knighthood.”
“Sir Sebastian Roon?” I said.
“No less,” Seb said. “That means Lady Lillian,” I said. Seb smiled. “That is most certainly the Benjamin Kramer I first met forty years ago in the office of my uncle,” he said. “To think first of what it would mean to Lillian.”
“You surely must know by now that my feelings for the Roon family extend to all its members,” I said. “But...” I paused. A sound he had uttered caught at my mind. Like a bit of sweater catching at a paling as you pass a picket fence too closely. “What it would mean to Lillian?” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It means my poor devoted wife is not going to be known as Lady Lillian,” Seb said. “Any more than her poor devoted husband is going to be known as Sir Sebastian. Don’t look so bloody perplexed. I had to turn it down, Benjamin.”
I reached for my drink. It was not, of course, Cutty Sark on the rocks. It was what she wanted me to have. All at once the familiarity of the annoyance was comforting. So few things had not changed that even a recurring irritation had the welcome warmth of constancy.
“I’m sure you’ll find it in your heart to tell me why,” I said.
“Benjamin,” Seb said, “why are you so bitter about what is after all a simple piece of social intelligence?”
“Because I’m a boy from East Fourth Street and from the Bronx,” I said. “How often does a boy from East Fourth Street or Tiffany Street have a friend who is offered a knighthood by the Queen of England? So what does my friend do? He turns it down.”
“Benjamin,” Seb said, “you have my assurance that I did not turn down Her Majesty’s gracious offer merely to irk you.”
“Nevertheless you’ve succeeded,” I said. “Now stop being Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and just tell me why the hell you turned it down?”
“Because it would have been illegal to accept,” Seb said. “I am a naturalized American citizen.”
I was too flabbergasted to summon the energy needed to hunt for a less shopworn word. I seized the first one that surfaced. Flabbergasted covered the terrain.
“When did that happen?” I said.
“Right after Pearl Harbor,” Seb said.
I gave it a couple of moments, then said, “I think I can understand that.”
“Sorry, Benjamin,” Seb said. “I don’t think you can.”
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