Tiffany Street (27 page)

“This place Klein’s,” she said. “On Fourteenth Street. You know it?”

Did Martin Chuzzlewit know the Monument to the Great Fire in Pudding Lane?

“Sure,” I said.

“You could meet me there today?” my mother said. “Say like maybe half past twelve?”

“Sure,” I said again. “But there’s still that problem. An hour up here by subway to get you, an hour back downtown, maybe a half-hour for buying the coat, then I’d have to bring you back up here, and I’d have to go back downtown again. Five hours, Ma, at least. Maybe six.”

“Not if all you have to do is come from your office and meet me at Klein’s,” my mother said. “You help me buy the coat, then you go back to your office.”

“What about you?” I said. “How will you get to Klein’s?”

“Don’t worry about me.” my mother said. “Just tell me where it is. I’ll get there.”

I knew there was no point in protest or argument. She had made up her mind. So I told her and, as I told her, I drew a crude map on the back of a grocery bag. My mother studied it for a few moments.

“I’ll meet you here,” she said, pointing to the Union Square entrance. “Twelve-thirty.”

I had a bad morning. My mother had never before set foot in the subway. She was bound to get lost or worse. Fortunately, that day I was helping Mr. Breiner and two other members of the Maurice Saltzman & Company staff with a bankruptcy audit of a passementerie manufacturer on 23rd Street. When I got to Klein’s at twenty minutes past twelve, my mother was waiting in front of the Union Square entrance.

“Did you have any trouble?” I said.

“What kind of trouble?” she said. “There’s signs. All you need to know is how to read them.” Pause. “And also you must have a nickel.”

The ability to read signs was for her of course a tremendous achievement. So she wanted the credit, and she got it. In her own way. By making little of it. And giving the weight of her remark to something anybody could achieve. A nickel.

It was the touch that set her apart. It was what made her not just anybody’s mother. It was what for Benny Kramer made her his mother.

The next Sunday morning, when I came out of my bedroom for breakfast, she set before me a plate of piping hot potato
latkes.
My heart thumped. I knew what she was telling me. The wedge that her feelings for Sebastian Roon had driven between us, that was gone. From now on she had only one son.

She demonstrated this in many ways. For me the most significant was that she never mentioned Hannah Halpern. I don’t know how much my mother knew, but she always knew a lot that you did not suspect she knew. What she didn’t know, she knew how to find out. She and Mrs. Halpern were friends. My mother, by introducing me to the Halperns, had introduced me to Hannah.

I was fairly certain that my mother had talked to Mrs. Halpern on the phone during the day, when I was downtown. And I was equally certain that Mrs. Halpern had given my mother her joyous version of the good luck that had befallen Hannah. What Mrs. Halpern had no way of knowing was what my mother knew: a boy named Sebastian Roon, of whose existence Mrs. Halpern was unaware, had disappeared from Tiffany Street at the same time Hannah had sailed for England.

When I started coming home for supper on Saturday nights, and she set out my meal, I knew she knew that there was no longer any Hannah around for me to go to double features with.

Eight or nine months after she sailed, I had a letter from Hannah. It was friendly, but short. She invited me to come to her wedding in Blackpool. The fact that she knew I couldn’t possibly accept seemed to contain a concealed message. For a while I tried to figure it out, but I couldn’t. Then I became interested in another girl.

I forgot Hannah.

O
NE DAY, WITHOUT WARNING,
Lillian Waldbaum came out into the file room where I was working.

“What are you doing Tuesday night?” she said. This was about a year after Seb and Hannah had disappeared from the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street.

“Nothing much,” I said uneasily, feeling my face grow hot. In those days when girls came at me out of the blue, I went into the red. “I mean aside from my classes at C.C.N.Y.”

“What time are they?” Lillian said. “These classes?”

“Eco Two is six-thirty,” I said. “French One is seven-thirty. And Debentures Three is eight-thirty.”

“You crazy about Debentures?” Lillian said.

The answer was: of course not. I detested Debentures. I did not understand them. But I felt it was a proper course to take for a young man who worked for a firm of certified public accountants. I was trying to impress Mr. Bern. He felt about debentures the way Tom Mix felt about his horse Tony.

“Well,” I said nervously, “not about Three.”

“I hear One and Two also stink,” Lillian said.

She was not a subtle girl. All you had to do was see her lean across the wash basin in the file room.

“Anyway,” I said, “I got through them.”

“You got Debentures Three on Tuesday night?” Lillian said.

The way she said it made me look at her more closely. God knows, when Lillian Waldbaum leaned over the wash basin in the file room, I looked at her closely enough. But that’s all the attention I had thus far paid to her. Now I realized I had probably overlooked something.

I was a one-woman man. As long as Hannah Halpern had been up there on Vyse Avenue, waiting for me every Saturday night, I’d had eyes for no other girl. But now Benny was older. And Hannah had vanished.

Looking at Lillian Waldbaum, I was suddenly wondering about the problems of fidelity. It seemed to me I was making a very big and very important discovery. It was a time in my life when I was more excited about making discoveries than I was about—. Steady, Benny.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got Debentures Three on Tuesday night, but I’ve got Debentures Three five nights a week, and it gets to be sort of, you know, a pain. I could use a little relief, and I’ve got a few cuts coming to me. What did you have in mind?”

“Here,” Lillian Waldbaum said. “Take a look at this. This ad for The New Theatre.”

She held out a copy of
The Nation.
Or it could have been
The New Republic.
Or maybe it was some other magazine. I don’t really remember.

In 1931 there were a lot of publications around that were very thin and printed on what Westbrook Pegler used to call butcher’s paper. They were full of calmly ferocious articles by people named George Soule that made shattering attacks in good, clean prose on Big Business, the merchants of death, cartels, primogeniture, Washington lobbies, child labor, the judges in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, amphictyonies, and allodial tenure. These articles were printed in between small ads for the Martha Graham Dance Studio, manuscript typing services, and something called The New Theatre.

All these publications cost fifteen cents. Each, that is. I never bought any of them. Fifteen cents was half a dinner in Stewart’s cafeteria.

I took the magazine from Lillian. The ad for The New Theatre pleaded with the reader to come to one of eight previews of a new play by a new playwright in a new theater on a new part of Fourteenth Street. I remember an inward creasing of the brow. Fourteenth Street was a very crowded thoroughfare. How had they managed to slip in a new part?

“What about it?” I said.

“I’ve got a friend playing in this thing,” Lillian said. “She tells me it’s very good. She gave me a couple of passes, and I’d like to go, but I don’t want to go alone.”

“Gee whiz,” I said.

I wince now when I think of the gee-whizzing I did at that time of my life. I wince, but I also shrug. Gee-whizzing is a part of the time of innocence. The young David, entering for the first time the tent of King Saul, was a gee-whizzer. Why not Benny Kramer?

“You mean,” I said to Lillian Waldbaum, “if I cut Debentures Three we could go to this thing next Tuesday?”.

“Yop,” Lillian said. She was a very pretty girl. And she had something Benny Kramer was just beginning to appreciate: style. But she talked most of the time like a truck driver. “How about it?”

“Thanks very much,” I said. “I’d like that”

I am not sure now what I was actually saying then. I didn’t, to be truthful, care very much about The New Theatre. I had not yet sunk my teeth into the Old. But I missed Hannah Halpern. And stirring in the back of my mind was the thought that maybe, by just sort of tagging along, I might find a substitute in this tough little beauty, Miss Lillian Waldbaum. She reminded me of a movie actress named Evelyn Brent. Tense. Pulled in. On the verge of exploding. Like a drawn bow before the twang when the arrow is released. She opened vistas. Memories of Gabilla’s knishes had been disturbing my sleep.

“And listen,” Lillian said. “You don’t have to worry about buying my evening groceries.”

“I wasn’t thinking of a meal,” I said. “What I had in mind, all I was thinking, I thought maybe we could have a couple of knishes, that’s all I had in mind.”

“Yop,” Lillian Waldbaum said coolly, “I know what you had in mind.”

She certainly did. Which proved to be a big surprise to Benny Kramer.

Until Benny encountered Lillian Waldbaum, I had always assumed girls didn’t know what you were after. Every Saturday night, when I went into the Hebrew National for the hot Gabilla’s knishes that I was about to carry up into the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street, I always felt like the first kid on the block who had latched onto Casanova in the Hamilton Fish Park branch of the New York Public Library.

My God, the stuff that goes on in books. I suppose that’s why they are the plinth on which all education stands. When I think of the things I first learned about what really goes on in life, just by using my library card, my mind responds as it did in the days of innocence: it boggles.

It was from books that Benny Kramer learned how to feel when he was up in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street with his hot Gabilla’s knishes. Shrewd. Clever. A canny conspirator. Setting the trap in which I would catch that lovely, seductive, sexy butterball waiting for me so innocently in the balcony seat near the red exit sign. And why shouldn’t Benny Kramer have thought so? After all, I always did catch her. But there are women and women. And Lillian Waldbaum taught me the difference.

They both know the score. But the sweet ones, the Hannah Halperns, allow you to think they never even suspected there was a scoreboard, and so what happens is a delicious surprise. You think so, anyway. The others, the non-sweet ones, they let you know right away that while they know the score they are not particularly impressed with the knowledge. Okay, buster, they say, I know what you want, let’s see if you can get it. You usually do, and it is not bad, but there is no sweetness in it. As the oddballs who climb mountains are reputed to say, you do it because it is there.

Benny Kramer, on his first date with Lillian Waldbaum, knew it was there. And precisely where it was located. Staking out the terrain, it was in the fourth row, on the left, of the Preshinivetz Playhouse on West Fourteenth Street. The Preshinivetz Playhouse was a fascinating place for Benny Kramer.

West Fourteenth Street is a shallow thoroughfare. It was anyway, in 1931. It had the feel of a neighborhood that knew it was being exploited. And it gave you the sense of being watched that is common to all ghettos. You felt that people were peering out at you. Not necessarily with hostility. But not with open-hearted warmth, either.

The Preshinivetz Playhouse was located in the Hoboe Kioboe Catholic Church of St. Francis the True. The church had been started by a small, passionate sect of—the confused owner of the building believed—Poles from Woloshonowa. They never got very far beyond starting. They faded away, leaving behind them a small mountain of unpaid bills, and a large room that looked like a grocery store without shelves into which had been dragged three aisles of primitively constructed benches. These had been intended to serve as pews.

I liked the place at once. This was the sort of dump in which Benny Kramer had spent the recreational hours of his youth. I was very young, but already I thought of part of my life as my youth. It seems odd to me now. But not in 1931. The young tend to confuse themselves with the world, which is old.

When Lillian Waldbaum and I came into the Preshinivetz Playhouse it was almost full. But the passes provided by Lillian’s friend had effectively held our seats in the fourth row on the left. Lillian and I settled down and looked around. Now that I was off my feet, I liked the place even better. All the people who were jamming the benches looked like me and Lillian.

I don’t mean that all the girls were as pretty as Lillian and all the men were as interesting looking as Benny Kramer who, as we all know, never claimed to be the model for the Arrow Collar ad.

I mean they all looked and smelled like young people who had dashed, without time out for showers, naturally, from their jobs on 34th Street or their courses in the evening session at C.C.N.Y. Hurtling themselves across the city to reach this redolent theater on West Fourteenth Street because they believed it was important to see a group of amateur actors perform a play called
Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent!
In 1931 they knew how to put together titles.

Yet, even for 1931,
Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent!
was unique. I did not realize it at the time. At the time it seemed perfectly normal. Especially if you went to see such a thing with an intense girl like Lillian Waldbaum. She had deep, dark, tragic, erotic circles under her eyes.

Two or three years ago, however, in 1969 I think it was,
Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad; Urgent!
resurfaced in the life of Benny Kramer in a rather odd way.

I have a client named Kermit Klinger. His family is loaded. Kermit’s father, Gershon Klinger, invented the underarm dress shield at a time when my father was bending over a sewing machine in an Allen Street sweatshop. Gershon Klinger is almost ninety and, as we say in the trade, I do his work. I like the old man because he reminds me of my father. If my father had been solvent, that is. Gershon Klinger has worked out and keeps enunciating a rule of life with which I do not know how to quarrel.