Tiffany Street (10 page)

“Gesundheit,” said George.

“Thank you,” said Roon. He gave me a funny look, as though he wanted to say something but was not sure I would understand. Finally, he turned to George and said, “I think we might risk a couple of cups of coffee to start.”

“Very good,” said George.

He bowed and went away. I have never been in this sort of restaurant, so I assumed things were done not quite the way they were done in the Automat and in Stewart’s. Starting a meal with a cup of coffee seemed peculiar, but so did having El Greco’s St. Jerome bow to a kid from Thomas Jefferson High School who fetched hot pastrami sandwiches from Lou G. Siegel’s for Ira Bern.

“Do you know this city very well?” Sebastian Roon said.

It was like asking Ulysses if he knew the Aegean.

“Parts of it,” I said. “I know downtown pretty well. I was born on East Fourth Street.”

“What’s that?” Roon said.

The question jolted me. I had never heard one like it. I didn’t know how to put together the words of a sensible answer. What was East Fourth Street? It was my life, that’s what it was. Up to six months ago, anyway.

“Well, it’s sort of a poor section,” I said, and because I didn’t want him to think ill of me, I added: “We don’t live there anymore.”

“Who is we?” Roon said.

“My father and mother,” I said.

“They’re alive, then, are they?” Roon said, and then he laughed. “Sorry. That is a bit silly, isn’t it? I mean if they weren’t alive you wouldn’t be living with them, would you? What I meant was it must be very pleasant to have a family. Where do you live now?”

“A place called the Bronx,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of it,” Sebastian Roon said. “Do you like it?”

Again his question jolted me. Did I like the Bronx? I must have. We’d fought so hard to get there.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s okay.”

What I meant was do you like it better than East Fourth Street?” Roon said.

How could I not like it better? East Fourth Street was a slum. The Bronx was uptown.

“It’s a much nicer neighborhood,” I said.

George arrived with two coffee cups. He set down one in front of me and the other in front of Sebastian Roon.

“Thank you,” Roon said.

George bowed and went away. I stared into my cup. It contained two lumps of ice. No coffee. Just two lumps of ice. Since it is not necessary to say I was surprised, I will not say it. But I will say that I had a sudden glimpse of the fact that education is a long and endless process. In my six months as an employee of Maurice Saltzman & Company, I thought I had learned a good deal about the customs and practices of the businessmen in the midtown area. At least during the business day. I had no idea what they did at night or where they did it. Perhaps I thought I had learned it all. Now, staring at the two lumps of ice in what was supposed to be a cup of coffee, I realized I had a long way to go.

The obvious move was to stick to my resolve of a few minutes ago. I would do nothing until Sebastian Roon did it first. What he did now was pull from his breast pocket a silver flask. It was flat, about the size and shape of the
Othello
we had used in English class at Thomas Jefferson. I had never seen such a thing before except in movies about Flappers with John Held, Jr., faces and college boys in raccoon coats.

“This stuff is perfectly reliable,” Roon said. “My uncle gets it from one of the best merchants in town.”

He twisted off the silver cap, leaned across the table and poured a couple of inches of amber fluid into my cup. Then he did the same for his own cup. He recapped the flask, slid it back into his breast pocket, and from the cluster of salt cellars, pepper mills, and mustard pots in the center of the table he picked up a small pitcher of water.

“Or would you prefer soda?” Sebastian Roon said.

“Er,” I said.

I may not be spelling that correctly. But I didn’t really say “Uh.” I simply heard myself utter a sound that was popped out of me by my confusion. Not stupidity. Confusion. I knew about Prohibition and bootleggers and speakeasies and the fact that there were people who drank various forms of alcohol every day as regularly as they consumed food. I did not know this from personal experience. I knew it from reading newspapers and seeing Emil Jannings movies in which he played the boss bootlegger who is unaware until the second reel that his own syndicate has supplied the hooch for the wild party at which his son, a clean-cut college boy, drinks his father’s product and goes blind for the remaining three reels.

My personal experience with alcohol was not unlike that of pretty nearly every kid who was raised on East Fourth Street, and probably similar to that of most seventeen-year-olds who in 1930 lived in the Bronx.

The only alcoholic beverage even a practiced revenooer could ever have found in our house was sacramental wine. My father made it himself from blue Concord grapes that were peddled from pushcarts in our neighborhood every summer. Once a year, at the Passover Seder, I was given a timbleful of this aromatic sweet brew. The timbleful was part of the ceremony. It was also part of a rather primitive but effective method of child control. The ceremonies at a Passover Seder are lengthy; once the excitement of the first stages wears off, children at the table tend to become restless. With a small dose of sacramental wine coursing through their very young veins, however, they are inclined to become sleepy. At this point they are carried off to bed and the adults continue the complicated ceremony without the sort of interruptions that are more appropriate to a park playground.

My only other contact with alcohol occurred once a year in the synagogue during Rosh Hashanah. Boys were called up at regular intervals to chant a short section from the Torah. When my turn came I never knew what I was chanting, but I knew how to chant it. Rabbi Goldfarb had seen to that. When I had satisfactorily uttered the appropriate decibels of sound, the cantor tweaked my cheek—the gesture was known as a
knip
—to display his approval, and the
gobbe,
or sexton, led me to a table in a corner of the synagogue for my reward: a sliver of golden yellow sponge cake dipped into a small glass of booze known as
brohmfin.

Half a century of more complicated living has placed me, and my palate, in contact with many beverages, but I’ve never encountered anything quite like the
brohmfin
doled out by the
gobbe
of my father’s synagogue. I have a feeling it was some form of whiskey, homemade of course, but I seem to recall my father on one occasion saying disapprovingly that they—whoever “they” were—had made this batch, of which he disapproved, with an inferior type of prune. So perhaps it was not whiskey.

Whatever it was, it tasted like what I suppose Victorian novelists had in mind when they wrote of a character who had suffered the tragedy of pride-shattering humiliation that he had been forced to drink a draught of bitter aloes. Those characters should have had a crack at the
brohmfin
that was the house drink in my father’s synagogue. They would have run back to bitter aloes as though they were heading for a chocolate malted. I never complained, however, about the taste of what I was offered in my father’s synagogue. Gulping that piece of alcohol-soaked sponge cake was a sign of manhood.

(Footnote for Arab statesmen: in the virility sweepstakes Jewish boys win their spurs early.)

I certainly felt I had won mine long before that day in Shane’s when I found myself staring at the two ice cubes in my coffee cup. The problem was, however, the place in which I was doing my staring: a restaurant on West 23rd Street, dimly lighted, hushed, with red and white checked tablecloths, waiters in red mess jackets held together by silver buttons, and gutted deer—or bouquets of head-down grouse—hung at the door.

There was nothing about this place even remotely reminiscent of the other places in which I had previously consumed alcohol. I did not know what to do. What Sebastian Roon did was not helpful. He lifted his cup.

“Skoal,” he said.

I wondered why. The only ones I knew were P.S. 188, J.H.S. 64, Thomas Jefferson High, and the 23rd Street branch of C.C.N.Y. None of these seemed at this moment the proper subject for a toast. However, I did not want young Mr. Roon to think I was as backward as I felt I lifted my cup.

“School,” I said.

He drank. I drank. And I had the immediate feeling that death had come to carry me away.

The moment the amber fluid slid past my epiglottis I was seized by the sort of coughing fit out of which Fatty Arbuckle used to squeeze a six-minute sequence.

Whatever I had swallowed came right back up in a fine spray. My forehead went down like the cutting section of a guillotine and banged against the red and white checks. My eyes blurred with a sudden cloudburst of tears. And my knees, hurtling upward to ease the sudden stiffening of my esophagus, hit some sort of metal fastenings on the underside of the table. With two results: the table rocked, and I screamed.

When I had smeared away the tears, the pain in my knees was receding, my coughing fit was simmering down to a series of rasping, unpleasant gasps, and I saw that a third person was sitting at our table.

“You must sip,” Sebastian Roon said, “not gulp. This is my uncle.” He waved toward the man who had joined us during my seizure.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, still bubbling with gasps and tears as I put out my hand. “I’m sorry.”

Sebastian Roon’s uncle took my hand. He shook it, laughed, and said to his nephew, “He’s pleased to meet me, but he’s also sorry.”

So I knew the head of I. G, Roon, Ltd., was a wise guy.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said through a nervous giggle. “I meant I’m sorry about, you know, all the, well, the coughing and the noise. I guess I swallowed the wrong way.”

I. G. Roon laughed again and said, “Or the wrong stuff.”

So I knew something else. I hated this man.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

I found myself embarking on another nervous giggle, and shifted to a stab at a laugh. It came out all right, I think, but it also made me hate myself. Brown-nosing is never a pleasant activity. There are times, however, when it has to be done. The year 1930 was one of those times, and I did my share. But I was able to put a poultice on my pride by choosing the areas where I could tell myself this detestable activity was necessary.

Ira Bern, for example. Getting his shoes shined. Fetching his hot pastrami sandwiches. Damn it, I had been valedictorian of my class at Thomas Jefferson. I had won a bronze medal from
The New York Times
in an oratorical contest about the Constitution of the United States. Dean Foote had said I could have a scholarship to Long Island University, to N.Y.U., or to Harvard if I was able to pony up the living expenses.

Well, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even accept the scholarships on condition that I would take one of those waiting-on-table jobs with which the flower of American manhood, from Frank Merriwell to Justice Brandeis, seems to have worked its way through college. What the Kramer family needed in 1930 was not a scholarship to Harvard but a nice steady flow of Yankee bean soup coming in over the window sill every week, and so I had to get a job.

Fair enough. When my father had needed a job to support his family, he had gone out and got one. So I went out and got mine. It was a good enough job to have enabled the Kramer family to move from East Fourth Street to the Bronx, and I was not complaining.

I really wasn’t. I enjoyed the sense of achievement it gave me. Besides, I was moving ahead scholastically at C.C.N.Y., and I had the satisfaction of detesting the rich kids in my Thomas Jefferson graduating class who had gone on to college. They gave me something I had never had when we were all young: a goal. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to show the bastards.

I had no doubt I could. And if the process of showing them meant brown-nosing a man like Ira Bern, okay, I could do that, too. But I. G. Roon? Where did he fit into the contract?

I never really got a chance to find out. By the time my jumping gut, and my carefully concealed fury, were under control, I noticed that Sebastian Roon and his uncle had apparently forgotten completely that I was sitting at the same table with them.

They were leaning forward, foreheads almost touching, talking in a way that reminded me of one of those Conrad Veidt spy movies. They seemed to be exchanging information of a confidential nature in a manner they felt or hoped would not arouse attention from people nearby. They were talking. They were uttering sounds. But it was as though they were studying to be ventriloquists. Their lips did not move. Not much, anyway.

“No, Danbury Hat is out,” Sebastian said. “I talked with Maltz twice. They can’t meet the eight-fifty price.”

“Can’t or won’t?” I. G. Roon said sharply.

“I think they can’t,” Sebastian said. He seemed to be talking to his own cuticle. “I told them we wouldn’t come down, and they had until this morning to come up. I told them if they didn’t accept before I met you for lunch, we’d go to York.”

“Did they?” I. G. Roon said.

“No,” Sebastian Roon said. “Not a word.”

“So?” I. G. Roon said.

“Bugger it, I thought,” Sebastian Roon said. “Why wait for lunch? At ten-thirty I called York.”

“Which one?” I. G. Roon said.

“Irving, I think,” Sebastian said. “Yes, Irving. He’s the one with the lisp, isn’t he?”

“Actually, it’s a cleft palate,” I. G. Roon said. “But go on. What happened?”

“He’d take the whole New South Wales shipment, he said.”

I. G. Roon’s voice rose slightly. “The whole shipment?”

Small scream on first syllable:
ship.

“Yes,” Sebastian said. “On condition that we let them have all of North Adelaide in the spring at the same rate.”

I. G. Roon scowled. I. G. Roon’s scowl was not pleasant.

“The son of a bitch,” he said.

“Yes, quite,” Sebastian said. “That’s how I reacted. But I suppose being a son of a bitch is part of his game.”

“It sure is,” I.G. Roon said. I wondered how he came to have a nephew with a British accent