Last Respects (54 page)

“Four numbers?” my mother said.

“As a rule,” I said, “yes.”

This was 1930. Even zip codes had not yet surfaced. The flow of life was simpler.

“With a Susquehanna?” my mother said. “Four numbers also in addition on top of the Susquehanna?”

“It’s the system,” I said. “The telephone company. They have to work out something that will take care of the thousands of people who have telephones. Millions. The only way is numbers.”

“We didn’t have numbers in Hungary,” my mother said.

“We didn’t have them on East Fourth Street,” I said. “But here uptown in the Bronx it’s different. What comes after the seven, Ma?”

My mother’s chin went up to the ceiling. I saw the wisdom of the gesture. It took years off her profile.

“A nine, maybe?” she said.

“I don’t know, Ma,” I said. “You were the one took the message.”

“Message?” my mother said. “What message? The bell rings. I answer it. A man says this is Nachman Reibeisen. This is a message?”

“Nachman Reibeisen?” I said.

“What difference?” my mother said. “It’s a Reibeisen. He says could I talk to Mr. Benjamin Kramer, the accountant. That’s you, no?”

“Yes, and of course he couldn’t talk to me because I was not home,” I said. With rather ostentatious patience, I must add. The biblical character I have learned to dig the most is Job. So would you, if you had been my mother’s son. “So you asked for his number and said I would call him back. Right?”

“What else could I say?” my mother said. “Go ahead, tell me, what would you have said?”

I knew this ploy. Pickett had used it at the post-mortem after Gettysburg. Where would you have hurled your cavalry? Hmm?

“I would have said my son Benjamin is not at home now,” I said. “I would have said my son Benjamin Kramer usually comes home on Saturday about six o’clock. Because on Saturdays he has no classes at C.C.N.Y. Saturday is one of his two free nights every week. When he does come home, I will ask my son to call you back. May I have your number, please? That’s what I would have said.”

“So what did I say to him?” my mother said.

“I don’t know, Ma,” I said. “I wasn’t here when Mr. Reibeisen called. What did you say?”

“I said my son Benjamin Kramer is not at home,” my mother said. “My son Benjamin Kramer, I said, he comes home Saturday nights about six o’clock. Maybe a little later. When he comes home tonight I’ll tell him to call you back. You’ll give me please your number?”

“Which he did,” I said. “And it starts with a Susquehanna, goes on to a two, proceeds to a seven, and then seems to stop dead.”

“From a Susquehanna and a two and a seven,” my mother said, “you can’t call back a Nachman Reibeisen?”

“Not any kind of a Reibeisen,” I said.

“This is some country,” my mother said. “In Hungary we didn’t have telephones, but believe me, in Hungary, if you had a Susquehanna, and a two, and a seven, you could find not only Nachman Reibeisen, but Sam also, and his father and mother, too.”

“No doubt,” I said. “But this is not Hungary. This is Tiffany Street in the Bronx.”

Her eyes came down from the ceiling. They were blue. Or rather, they had been blue. In Hungary, which was a guess on my part, of course, and on East Fourth Street, which was no guess but a vivid recollection of my youth. Blue as the grapes from which my father used to make our Passover wine.

“There’s times here on Tiffany Street,” she said, “I wish it was Hungary.”

I don’t think my mother meant that. I did not learn about her life in Hungary until almost half a century later, when my Aunt Sarah from New Haven told me. My mother’s life in Hungary had not been pleasant.

The phone rang. My mother stared at it with distrust. She did not move. “If there’s two people in the house, always let the other person answer the telephone.” I picked it up.

“Hello?” I said.

“Is this Intervale one-six-two-three?”

The voice brought back with an almost physical thrust the sidewalk at Seventh Avenue and 34th Street the day before.

“Hot Cakes?” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Isn’t this Hot Cakes Rabinowitz?” I said.

“No, of course not.”

But it had to be. Hot Cakes was the only person who had ever asked how he could get in touch with me. Only yesterday, when I had jumped down from the Built-in Uplift Frocks truck at 21st and Seventh, I had yelled after him: “I’m in the phone book!” Who else would know such a thing?

“I say, are you there?”

Then I caught the British accent

“Oh,” I said. “It’s Mr. Roon.”

“No,” he said. “Sebastian.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He laughed. “Wrong again. Mister Roon and sir are hardly what one calls a chap with whom one’s been sozzled at high noon. Try Seb.”

“Seb?”

“Why not?” he said. “All my friends call me Seb.”

How many did he have? And if I called him Seb, would he now have one more?

“Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.”

“Seb,” I said.

It sounded wrong. I had spent my life in a world where people were called Benny and Hot Cakes and Ira. Seb? It sounded like one of those games that came in cardboard boxes with decks of cards and small celluloid counters of various colors which you pushed around on a marked board.

Sebastian Roon laughed again. “There, you see? Not difficult, really, is it?”

Up through my confusion came a distressing thought. Was I dealing with a type that would almost certainly have been identified at Thomas Jefferson High School as a wise guy? I hoped not. I had liked young Mr. Roon. Roon? That, too, sounded odd.

“What can I do for you?” I said.

It didn’t sound very friendly, but I had noticed it was the way Mr. Bern started a great many of his telephone conversations.

“Nothing, really,” Mr. Roon said. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d give you a tinkle.”

The statement made just about as much sense as if he had said he was heading toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and it had occurred to him to check the directions with someone he knew who lived along the way. Happened to be in the neighborhood meant happening to be in the Bronx, and nobody “happened” to be in the Bronx. You got there the way Lewis and Clark got to Oregon. By setting out deliberately, as you would set out on an expedition, with a specific destination in mind. I couldn’t believe a young Englishman who was in a position to invite guests to lunch at Shane’s on West 23rd Street “just happened” to be in the neighborhood of our apartment house in the Bronx.

“Well, uh, hello,” I said.

“Are you all right?” Roon said.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Good,” he said. “Delighted to hear it. One couldn’t help wondering, you know. And feeling guilty. I mean to say, when I left you in Mr. Bern’s office yesterday, you did look a bit on the bleak side.”

He laughed. My face grew hot.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry about that. But I’m okay now. I really am.”

There was a pause. I had the feeling I had missed something.

“Look here,” Roon said “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

I looked across the narrow hall into the kitchen. Our telephone sat on a small table near the front half of the hall. It was tiny. A sort of cupboard just inside the front door. My mother was laying out her “turning” on the table near the stove. On Saturdays and Sundays I came home directly from my chores in the Maurice Saltzman & Company offices. On Saturdays I did not even expect a meal from my mother. I came home about six or six-thirty, gave my mother the salary envelope Mr. Bern had given me, and started cleaning up for my weekly meeting with Hannah Halpern.

This started at her home, which I reached by walking north across to 180th Street for perhaps half a mile, and then east for four blocks to Vyse Avenue. It was not much of a journey and, with the visions of sugarplums that danced in my head as I walked, it was scarcely noticeable.

In subsequent years, indeed even today, I have on occasion wondered if my mother had any notion of those sugarplums.

In 1930 the age of sexual permissiveness had not yet really surfaced. True, there was D. H. Lawrence. Every literate kid at Thomas Jefferson had waited his turn at George Weitz’s copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
And Chink Alberg had charged a nickel a shot at his older brother’s copy of Krafft-Ebing. But these were literary experiences. The real stuff was hearsay. For Benny Kramer, anyway. Until we moved up to the Bronx. Then my mother introduced me to the Halperns.

It was an eye-opener. They were an eye-opener? Well, one member of the family was. Hannah.

I have wondered many times since it happened if my mother had done something casually innocent, or sensibly and calculatedly sophisticated. On East Fourth Street she had never introduced me to anybody. The people I knew were the people I met on my own. In school. On the docks. At the Hannah H. Lichtenstein Settlement House. Here on Tiffany Street, one day my mother told me she thought I ought to meet the Halperns. Who were the Halperns? They were a nice family. Used to live around the corner from us on Lewis Street, a little to the right of the Fourth Street corner, between Mr. Raffti’s barbershop and Mr. Slutsky the glazier. Mr. Halpern was a pocket maker in the shop upstairs over Papa’s factory on Allen Street. They had moved to the Bronx shortly before we did.

On one of my mother’s Saturday night trips to Mr. Lebenbaum’s store for her weekly allotment of “turning,” she accompanied me as far as Vyse Avenue. She introduced me to the Halpern family, and then went off on her errand. Mrs. Halpern offered me an apple, which I politely refused, then a piece of honey cake, which I have never been able to refuse, and then she suggested that maybe Hannah and I might like to go out to Bronx Park for a walk. We did.

Wow!

It had been wow every Saturday night now for months, and it was wow to which I had been looking forward on this particular Saturday night, when I found myself at the other end of the phone from this character named Sebastian Roon.

“No, no, you’re not interrupting,” I said. “By the way, I never thanked you for lunch yesterday.”

“Why should you?” said Roon. “Since you never really had it.”

“Well, it was nice of you to invite me,” I said. Then, because Hannah’s sugarplums were beginning to move from a dance in my head to a rather uncontrolled mazurka, I said: “Well, it was nice talking to you.”

“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