Tiffany Street (36 page)

I thought about Elizabeth Ann. Who had been raised in Wynwood. And whom I had just married. The answer to Hannah’s question was: You know absolutely nothing about being a girl on the Main Line of Philadelphia. But I did not make that reply. My mother, a peasant from Hungary, had brought with her to the Golden Land not only two feather beds and a blue and white porcelain soup tureen, but also the basic rules of decent behavior. She had taught her son the elementary guidelines of human conduct.

“It’s like this,” Hannah said. “For a Bronx girl in nineteen thirty, I was sitting pretty. I had this cockamamy job at Gold-Mark-Zweig, Inc., on Mosholu Parkway. A living. I had a steady boyfriend. A delight. I could read the future more clearly than that dame in the
Daily News
with the horoscope. All I had to do was wait. You would graduate from law school. You would get a job with some good solid Rock of Gibraltar firm with one of those names. You know. White & Case. Sullivan & Cromwell. Weil, Gottschal & Manges. You know what I mean. The lads who sail in the summer on Martha’s Vineyard and hire boys from East Fourth Street and Tiffany Street to win the cases that pay for the mizzenmasts. The One Twenty Broadway gang. And pretty soon you’d be earning enough to move your father and mother from Tiffany Street in the Bronx to like say Central Park West or West End Avenue. Then you’d get the old
noodge
from your mother: Benny, it’s time you should think about a wife. Well, for God’s sake, who was there to think about? Who but Hannah Halpern, from the balcony in Loew’s One Hundred and Eightieth Street with the Gabilla’s knishes? The wedding? Concourse Plaza. What else? Our first home? Walton Avenue, natch. Sure, it’s the Bronx. But the classy Bronx. On Saturdays and Sundays you could go up on the roof with the other young lawyers and their wives and eat Eskimo pies while you looked down into the Yankee Stadium for free and watched Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig belt Waite Hoyt out of the park. This is bad? Think about it, Benny. Think!”

I did. And in 1942, in a neat little semidetached villa on Islington Crescent in Blackpool, in the middle of a war and an increasingly nervous-making air raid, my thoughts were astonishingly simple. The answer to Hannah’s question was: No, it is not bad. But the answer was upsetting. If it was not bad, how come Hannah and I had not achieved it?

“I guess something went wrong,” I said.

“Yes, and no,” Hannah said. “Now, don’t get sore. What I mean is it may have gone wrong for you, but it went right for me. Are you with me?”

I listened to the drone of the planes coming in across Bootle in Liverpool, and I tried to remember I was scared, the way I was always scared in London during a raid, but it wasn’t quite the same. To my surprise, this time I was not scared. There was something about sitting with Hannah that settled the stomach. She had substance.

“I’m with you in one way,” I said. “And I’m not sore. Honest. But I’m confused.”

“I don’t blame you,” Hannah said. “Look at it this way. You had no way of knowing what, was going on in my head. My ambitions, you might say. My dream of the future for you and me. Did you, Benny?”

I thought about it, and I could feel my face grow hot. The truth was brutal. All I had ever thought about Hannah Halpern in those days were getting her up into the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street with a couple of hot knishes. What a paltry ambition for a major in the U.S. Army to recall. What a crude desire for a member of the New York bar. Here was Churchill saving the world with the sort of rhetoric that would have foundered if he had lacked the wit to insert in his sentences at regular intervals the word
alas!
instead of commas, and all I could think of was that goddamned set of three snaps at the back of Hannah Halpern’s brassiere. Major Kramer wondered if he might not best display his patriotism by resigning his commission.

“Hannah,” I said, “this is nineteen forty-two and I’m almost thirty years old. I no longer remember what I thought about when I was seventeen in nineteen thirty.” Hannah gave me one of those over-the-glasses looks, although she did not wear glasses.

“I could refresh your recollection,” she said. “But the point is all the Bronx girls I knew were like me. They wanted to get out of the Bronx. And most of them had a sort of rough plan. Like me. Then one night you went and loused it all up by introducing me to an English boy named Sebastian Roon. Never mind that it later turned out to be Seymour Rubin. That night he was Sebastian Roon, and boy did he look it. That marvelous profile. That tweed suit with those three jazzy buttons down the front. That beautiful dark brown hair. Those manners. And my God, Benny, that accent! Can you imagine what it’s like to a girl from the Bronx who has secret dreams of becoming Greer Garson to meet Leslie Howard in the flesh? On Vyse Avenue yet?”

“No, I can’t” I said. “Because my friends in the theater tell me Leslie Howard was also Jewish.”

“Who cares?” Hannah said. “If you look like Leslie Howard, and you talk like Leslie Howard, and you have that slinky smile, and you turn it on a girl from the Bronx, you’ve got her, boy, you’ve got her. Now add to that something unbelievable. Are you ready?”

“Until those Nazi bombers dump their payloads on Islington Crescent,” I said, “yes.”

“Relax,” Hannah said. “They’ll never get this far. Not a chance. There’s an RAF base just north of Hidsup.”

“I know,” I said.

Hannah looked surprised. “You do?” she said.

“That’s where I had lunch before I came on here.”

Hannah shook her head. “Major Kramer,” she said, you shouldn’t have told me that. The operation at Hidsup is classified.”

“Hannah,” I said, “there are a lot of things I shouldn’t have told you. But I did. And I now think I should have told you more. And if I’ve violated security, to hell with security.”

Again her smile was like the sunrise coming in over the East River on East Fourth Street.

“I was your first girl,” she said. “Wasn’t I?”

Maybe my only one. But I was a married man. I couldn’t say that.

“Yes,” I said.

Her smile changed slightly.

“You always made me feel good,” she said. “I feel good now. So don’t worry about the raid. We get them every day at teatime. You’re as safe as houses here. Never before has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

“You left out the
alas!
” I said.

“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.