Last Respects (55 page)

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.

“Excuse me,” I said. “It’s very nice to see you again, Mr. Roon, but it’s sort of, well, sort of unexpected.”

“You mean you have an appointment?” he said.

“Frankly, yes,” I said. “But if there’s anything important, anything I can do for you, I’ll be glad to—”

“No, no,” he said. “It’s not that important I merely thought I’d pop in and explain that strange lunch we had yesterday.”

He laughed. It occurred to me he did an awful lot of laughing. I had drawn the inference from my reading that, aside from some wine-bibbing types in
The Pickwick Papers,
most Englishmen were dour.

“By the time I was in a position to explain it,” he said, “you were in no condition to hear it.”

“Thanks to you,” I said.

I was careful to add a laugh. An apologetic little titter, anyway. This was 1930, you must remember. Benny Kramer never allowed himself to forget.

“Believe me,” Roon said, “it was unintentional. The situation is a bit ridiculous. I’m surprised Mr. Bern didn’t explain it to you. He helped arrange it, you see. My uncle, the I. G. Roon who
is
I. G. Roon, Ltd., as it were, is a very shrewed man, as I think you will probably have suspected from your brief meeting. A number of years ago he contracted for an insurance policy that says if he is physically incapacitated, and can no longer go to his office, he is to receive a monthly indemnity from the insurance company. Well, a few months ago my uncle did in fact suffer a heart attack. I don’t know how severe it was, but he decided it was severe enough to keep him from going to the office, and he filed his claim. The insurance company was understandably annoyed because the monthly indemnity payments they had contracted to pay are rather large. My uncle sent for me to come over from England. My father is his brother. He installed me in his office in which he no longer sets foot, but I do meet him for lunch every day in some restaurant like Shane’s. The insurance company suspects that my uncle and I do more than consume a few potables and some comestibles at these lunches. In fact, they strongly suspect my uncle is continuing to conduct his business affairs through me.”

He laughed again.

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised, you know, but the insurance company has to prove it, and so they’ve got my uncle under constant surveillance. We had a near thing the day before you accompanied me to Shane’s. I made the mistake of pulling a bill of lading from my pocket at the lunch table, and the detective saw it. So the next day, yesterday, I thought I’d ask you along as a sort of cover, you might say. I hope you didn’t mind too much?”

I thought of the gutted venison hanging outside the restaurant door. Well, perhaps some other time. I was still working on ham sandwiches and bacon and eggs.

“That man who came over to the table?” I said. “Mr. O’Casey? He was a detective?”

“One of several my uncle and I have come to know.”

“Well,” I said.

It did not seem an adequate reply, but I could think of nothing else.

“If you have a date,” Roon said, “why don’t you just buzz along?”

“But what about you?” I said.

He pulled over the bundle of “turning” and started snipping at the rectangles of silk with his scissors.

“Oh, you mustn’t mind me,” he said cheerfully. “If you’ll just explain to your mother that I’d enjoy staying here for a bit and helping her, I’ll be very happy.”

“You sure?” I said.

“Oh yes, quite,” Sebastian Roon said.

While I explained this odd development to my mother, I noticed the way she was looking at Roon. With suspicion, of course. She never really trusted anybody. But also with something I had noticed on other occasions: interest. My mother had always had an eye for a good-looking man. I looked back at Roon. Ramon Novarro? No. But not Louis Wolheim, either. He was attractive.