Tiffany Street (13 page)

“Look here, old chap,” Roon said, “as long as I’m in the neighborhood I wondered if I might pop in for a moment?”

Leaving aside Hannah and her sugar plums, the vocabulary was all wrong. On East Fourth Street people had never popped in. Nor had they done so during our few brief months on Tiffany Street

“Sure, but—”

I got no further. The phone went dead. I hung up slowly.

“Who was that?” my mother said.

I stared at her for a long moment, then realized why. “Mr. Reibeisen,” I said.

“Nachman?” my mother said.

“No,” I said. “Sebastian.”

“What?”

It was a “What?” from the heart, and who could blame her? Not someone who heard her pronouncing the two dissimilar names in Yiddish. It is a language in which Latin verbs can be made to rhyme with the names of Tel Aviv taxi drivers.

“The man whose number started with a Susquehanna, went on to a two, proceeded to a seven, and then seemed to stop dead.”

“See?” my mother said. “I told you. Nachman Reibeisen.”

“No,” I said. “Sebastian Roon.”

“That’s a name?” my mother said.

“He says it is,” I said.

“Who is he?” my mother said.

I explained the relationship of I. G. Roon, Ltd., to Maurice Saltzman & Company.

“And he’s coming here?” my mother said.

“He said he’s in the neighborhood,” I said. “Mr. Roon just said on the phone—”

There was a knock on the door. My mother and I stared at each other.

“Well,” she said, “it’s a small neighborhood.”

She was not joking. Geographically Tiffany Street was larger than East Fourth Street But emotionally, well—I had not figured it out yet. I went to the door and opened it.

“Hello, there,” Sebastian Roon said.

“Hello,” I said. “Come in.” He did, and I said, “This is my mother.”

“How very nice to meet you,” Roon said, bowing over her hand. I stared. Not because he looked like Lewis Stone bowing over the hand of Barbara LaMarr in
The Prisoner of Zenda,
but because my mother accepted the gesture with as much casual grace as it was offered.

“Likewise,” my mother said.

It was one of her few English words.

“That was rather quick, wasn’t it?” Roon said. He must have seen the look on my face. He laughed. “I actually rang you from a booth in the chemist’s round the corner.”

The chemist’s? All at once I could see the biology and chemistry lab in Thomas Jefferson High, complete with high stone-topped tables and Bunsen burners.

“Ask him he should sit down,” my mother said.

I wondered where. A visitor was an unusual experience. My mother and father and I spent most of our time at home in the kitchen. The kitchen table, however, was covered with my mother’s “turning.” My father, who lived in a wheelchair, was in the bedroom. Since the accident that had made him an invalid he did not like to be seen by strangers. He spent most of his time in the bedroom, reading “A Bintel Brief” and “Yenta Telabenda” by B. Kovner in the
Jewish Daily Forward.
He enjoyed the former because it made him ponder, and the latter because it made him laugh.

“I do seem to be interrupting,” Roon said. “I’m awfully sorry. I think I’d better be going. It was very nice to meet you, Mrs. Kramer.”

“What did he say?” my mother said.

“He said it was very nice to meet you,” I said.

“Twice he said it,” my mother said. “Bring him in the front room. I’ll get some honey cake.”

“No, no, Mrs. Kramer,” Roon said. “Please don’t bother.”

I gave him a quick look. My mother, as usual, had spoken in Yiddish.

“Bother?” my mother said. “Since when is honey cake a bother?”

And she left the hall. I nudged Roon’s elbow and we followed her into the kitchen. My mother went to the large blue plate covered with a damp dishtowel under which she kept her honey cake. I went with Sebastian Roon toward the door that led to the front room. He was, after all, a guest

I realized, in a moment of revelation, that since we had moved up to the Bronx we had not had any. The moment was unexpected, yes, and then unexpectedly unwelcome. I felt a stab of panic for what we had left behind. We had moved up in the world. Yes. But we had also moved out of it. Out of the part we had known. I was flooded by a sudden sense of loss. Then I heard Sebastian Roon’s voice.

“I think you’ll do better, Mrs. Kramer, if you snip the squares apart with a pair of scissors. It prevents the thread from clotting.”

My mother stopped lifting the damp dishcloth from the honey cake and waited. The way she always waited when anything but the simplest statements in English—Yes. No. Go. Why? Who? Where? How much?—were made in her presence. She waited for a translation.

I was usually equal to the occasion. The English spoken in my mother’s presence on Tiffany Street was not, as it had not been on East Fourth Street, very complicated. So far as I was concerned, however, Sebastian Roon might have just uttered a quotation from the Koran in the original Arabic.

He laughed at what I assumed was the expression on my face. Who could blame him? Not I. Slack-jawed, pop-eyed, open-mouthed confusion is not really an expression. It is a look. The look of a dim-witted fool, and that’s precisely how I felt at the moment. Roon laughed again.

“Here, note if you will,” he said. He stepped to the kitchen table. He picked up a strip of my mother’s “turning” and pulled a small pair of scissors from his jacket pocket. He made a few deft snips at the skein of thread. “You see?”

I did, and I’m sure my mother did, too, but I think an explanatory pause would not at this point be what Jane Austen identifies as amiss.

Our family had always been poor. Not desperately so, but the lack of desperation was due to my mother. She was a no-nonsense girl. Early in her marriage she had accepted without complaint the fact that my father was never going to earn enough to support us. She accepted it, and she did something about it. What she had done down on East Fourth Street was become a bootlegger. In a very small way, of course. Al Capone and Dutch Schultz were unknown to her. What my mother knew was a minor source of supply. She learned how to find an occasional bottle for a wedding or a bar mitzvah. Her share of the transaction now seems ludicrously small: twenty-five cents, or half a dollar. But it was a time when, and East Fourth Street was a place where, twenty-five cents or half a dollar was important.

On Tiffany Street things were different. Not because I was earning more than I had earned when we lived on East Fourth Street, although I was. Things were different on Tiffany Street because Tiffany Street was different. It was a quiet place. Too quiet. I missed the noises of East Fourth Street. The river traffic. The horse-drawn wagons carrying coal and lumber from the docks. Mothers yelling from their windows to their children in the street. I did not miss the noises as much as my mother did because I was almost never at home during the day.

On East Fourth Street my mother had been on intimate terms with all our neighbors. On Tiffany Street she did not know the names of our neighbors. Neither did I. The Tiffany Street tenements were smaller than the monstrous gray stone buildings in which I had been raised on East Fourth Street. The toilets were indoors. We even had a bathtub. The sidewalks were cleaner. But they were deserted. People did not sit out on the stoops in the evening eating Indian nuts and gossiping. In fact, there did not seem to be any people. It was my first experience with a neighborhood that was essentially a bedroom for people who worked in other parts of the city.

It was my mother’s first experience, too, but she felt it more intensely. After all, I was downtown all day. I came home late at night, as apparently almost everybody on Tiffany Street did, to go to bed. But my mother was there every hour of the day, every day of the week. I see now what I did not see then: my mother was not only frightened, she was also puzzled. Fear is tough to handle. But not as tough as puzzlement. What you don’t know can kill you.

All of her years in America my mother had dreamed of “improving” herself. Escaping from the slums. Moving her life uptown. Now she had done it. And what did she have? In her own Yiddish words: “A great big fat empty day with nothing to do except cook for Papa and stare out at the trees.”

But it was the trees that eased her fears and enabled her to turn her back on what I see now was a disappointment A street with trees on it was what America was all about, and she had finally made it to a street with trees. They were pretty terrible trees. Once, when I discovered that I was worrying about my mother and our new home, I made it a point to find out what these scruffy trees were called.

Ailanthus.

Can you imagine? I can’t. Not even now. But my mother could. I don’t think she saw them as they were. She saw those miserable trees the way Moses saw Canaan. And to make sure we were not swept back from them to treeless East Fourth Street she went to work for Mr. Lebenbaum.

Philip Lebenbaum was an entrepreneur who operated what my economics textbook in Thomas Jefferson High School called a cottage industry. Mr. Lebenbaum was a manufacturer of men’s neckwear. Not the sort of neckwear that requires knotting. Mr. Lebenbaum manufactured what we used to call on East Fourth Street “jazz bows.” Permanently knotted bow ties with elastic neckbands that snapped into place. He operated out of a store on Intervale Avenue, around the corner from our home on Tiffany Street. In this store Mr. and Mrs. Lebenbaum performed the groundwork functions, so to speak, that enabled the women of the neighborhood, my mother included, to produce the completed jazz bows.

Mr. Lebenbaum worked feverishly over a huge table. He sliced up endless bolts of gaudy silk into rectangles twelve inches long and three inches wide. These Mrs. Lebenbaum, bent over her sewing machine like a jockey flogging his mount into the stretch, stitched into endless belts of folded-over cloth that looked like tiny purses. These belts were bundled and tied with lengths of clothesline, then piled up on the floor, like sacks of laundry, for the women of the neighborhood who performed the next step in the manufacture of the Lebenbaum jazz bow. This step was known as “turning.” My mother did a great deal of it

Every day she would go over to Intervale Avenue. She would pick up a bundle of sewed silk belts and a stack of canvas rectangles that were to be stuffed into them. At home, working at our kitchen table, my mother would rip the silk belts into individual pieces. She would stuff each piece with a rectangle of canvas. And with a deft and curiously graceful movement flip the rectangle inside out. This process was known as “turning.”

When my mother finished her task, what had been a long ribbon of stitched-together rectangles of silk, and a bundle of canvas scraps, had become a neat pile of colorful rectangles about the size of bathroom tiles. These she fastened with fat rubber bands provided by Mr. Lebenbaum. The next day she carried them to his store, where his wife crimped and sewed the rectangles into finished jazz bows. While she did that, Mr. Lebenbaum counted the results of my mother’s labors and made an entry in her small notebook. At the end of the week he totted up the entries and paid my mother in the most ragged and crumpled dollar bills I have ever seen. They felt like lettuce leaves that should have been eaten a week ago.

My mother did not mind what those dollar bills looked or felt like. She enjoyed her capacity to earn money. It is a trait her son has inherited, but I don’t think Benny Kramer has ever quite approached the sheer physical relish my mother took in those decayed dollar bills she earned by working for Mr. Lebenbaum on Intervale Avenue. She was up to twelve a week on the night that Sebastian Roon came to visit us without warning on Tiffany Street.

“If you tear the bits apart, look,” he said, and he tore a couple of bits apart. “You see?”

My mother and I looked. The threads at the ends of the two bits had balled up. The word Sebastian Roon had used was “clotting.” I was surprised by the accuracy. The two tiny balls of sprung thread did look like bits of clotted blood at the ends of a shaving cut.

“One thinks one is saving time by tearing them apart,” Roon said. “But one isn’t, actually, because then one has to smooth away the clotted bits.” He smoothed away with his thumbnail the two bits of balled-up thread. “Whereas if you snip with a pair of scissors to start with.”

He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, sat down, and snipped away at the chain of my mother’s turning. With a dexterity that impressed me and clearly surprised my mother, Sebastian Roon flicked two scraps of canvas out from under the fastenings of one of Mr. Lebenbaum’s neatly prepared bundles and poked them into the two rectangles of silk. Then he pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and, with the blunt end, stabbed swiftly into the four corners of each rectangle. This smoothed the canvas inserts absolutely flat. And finally, with obvious delight in his own skill, he slapped the rectangles of silk flat on the table with an almost musical punctuation: tum-ta-ra-ra-ra, tum-tum!

He laughed, threw his hands up and out, and said, “
Voilà!
”

It was the gesture, the mood, the very word he had used the day before. In his office on 21st Street. When he had invited me to lunch and, seeing I was uneasy about taking the time, had called Mr. Bern to fix it. It was the same gesture, the same mood, and the same word, but this time it annoyed me.

This was Saturday night, remember. And Hannah Halpern was waiting for me under Goldkorn’s clock on 180th Street and Vyse Avenue. The visions of those sugarplums dancing in my head were interfering with my capacity to appreciate the dimensions of an encounter that, I see now, was at the very least a startling confrontation: the meeting of Georgian England with Herbert Hooverian Bronx in a tenement kitchen on a thoroughfare named Tiffany Street. By comparison, “Mr. Livingstone, I presume?” was not even in the running.

Until the day before I had never met an Englishman. Like most Jewish boys from the Lower East Side, I was from my very early years an Anglophile without knowing what the word meant or how the condition came about. Now I know.

The New York City public school curriculum, in my youth, at any rate, was built solidly around Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Burke, Swift, Coleridge, Thackeray, Addison, Steele, Lamb, and other prominent members of the Atheneum. I don’t know how they managed to pay their dues. There were no movie sales for Charles Lamb’s
Essays of Elia
or
Paradise Lost.