Authors: Jerome Weidman
I considered what did not seem a very large problem until you tackled it. What, indeed, is like a Susskind?
“Susquehanna, maybe?” I said finally.
My mother nodded with approval. Her brilliant son, valedictorian of his class in Thomas Jefferson High School, had come through again.
“That’s it,” she said. “Susquehanna.”
Susquehanna is not an easy word to say in Yiddish. But my mother managed. Even though the way she managed it would probably have been confusing to the New York Telephone Company.
“Susquehanna what?” I said.
“What what?” my mother said.
“The numbers,” I said. “After the word Susquehanna there have to be numbers.”
My mother’s examination of the ceiling became more intense. When my mother examined a ceiling she brought to my mind, which was even then earnest but untidy, an image: Marie Antoinette studying the jewel case on a top shelf, trying to decide whether diamonds or rubies were more appropriate for a ride in a tumbril
“Well, then, all right, Susquehanna,” my mother said. “At least we have that settled.”
“Yes, but the numbers,” I said. “I can’t call Mr. Reibeisen back unless I have the numbers that go with the Susquehanna.”
“Don’t I know that?” my mother said. “What do you think I am? A stupid greenhorn?”
Stupid? My God, no. Given the proper education—or even any education—my mother could have guided Einstein to the only correct method for splitting the atom long before General Groves was appointed to the Manhattan Project. But my mother had been given no education. And pride had prevented her from seeking it at a time when she could have had it for the asking.
If you went to school at night, as most immigrants on East Fourth Street did, you were making a public confession that you were ignorant. My mother was not a confessor. My mother was a battler. She did not go to night school. She made it all up out of her head as she went along. And when I say all I mean all. Everything.
What God had in store for you. Why the price of potatoes on the Avenue C pushcarts was the result of a conspiracy among the “bosses.” How many ounces there should be in a pound. The longest distance between two points. Why you should add lemon to soap when you wash your hair. How to answer a telephone. Everything.
“Of course you’re not stupid,” I said. “And it’s a little late to discuss whether you’re a greenhorn. You’ve been in this country for twenty-five years.”
“Thirty,” my mother said. “The president was Tiddy Roosevelt.”
“Teddy,” I said.
“What’s the difference?” my mother said.
I didn’t bother to answer that. Many of my mother’s questions defied the polite q. and a. of simple logic.
“Never mind the difference,” I said. “Just give me the numbers after the Susquehanna.”
My mother resumed her contemplation of the ceiling. She was not, of course, seeking answers in the unevenly painted plaster. Hungarian girls, when they are no longer girls, tilt their eyes toward heaven quite frequently. It smooths the jowls.
“It begins with a two,” my mother said. “A two to begin.”
“Susquehanna two,” I said. “Okay. Susquehanna two. And then?”
“A seven,” my mother said. “Could it be this Mr. Reibeisen he has a Susquehanna, and a two, and then a seven?”
“Possibly,” I said. “Seven happens to a lot of people.”
“But after a two?” my mother said. “And first a Susquehanna?”
“No,” I said. “I must admit that’s more rare.”
“What’s with the rare?” my mother said.
“It’s like, say, unusual,” I said.
Getting a phone number out of my mother was not unlike reeling in a tarpon. If you wanted the fish it was foolish to make waspish remarks to the rod and reel. If you wanted the fish you played the game. Patience was not always rewarded, but it was the only highway to possible success.
“If we have the Susquehanna and the two and the seven,” I said, “okay. But we still have to get two more numbers.”
“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.”