Authors: Jerome Weidman
“Nickels, please,” I said.
“A dollar?” the cashier-said. “Two?”
I took a chance. There was something about those three men up in Mr. Bern’s office at eight-thirty in the morning that sounded a note I was to catch years later, over and over again, as my work caused me to examine the expense accounts of other men, and the tax structure forced me to compose my own: if it’s a deduction, always choose the higher figure.
“Two dollars, please,” I said.
The girl spilled out the nickels. I swept the coins across the marble into my left hand, shoved into my pants pocket the paper money she had given in change, and realized I was in trouble. At Lou G. Siegel’s, when you bellied up to the “to go” counter, whatever you bought was wrapped in wax paper and placed in brown bags so you could go with it. In the Automat the food that came popping out of the small boxes in the wall sat on plates, ready to be eaten on the spot. The “Take-out” Automat had not yet been invented.
I stood there, in that huge white, white, blindingly white chamber, weighing my future. As avoirdupois, I must confess it didn’t seem to come to much. The tension when I was hustled out of Mr. Bern’s office had been unmistakable. What the tension was about I did not know. But the sight of those three men, Mr. Bern, Mr. Saltzman, and I. G. Roon, crowded around a desk in an office at eight-thirty on a Sunday morning was not something a boy from East Fourth Street could accept as normal. I felt like a seismograph recording the distant tremors of a disaster, the nature of which was still unclear. The food I had been ordered to bring, and bring fast, was obviously part of an attempt to keep the disaster from reaching the door of Maurice Saltzman & Company. My fate depended on doing my part. Whatever my part was.
“Benny.”
I turned. Miss Bienstock had appeared beside me. She was carrying a tray.
“Good morning,” I said.
She received this greeting in the Automat as she received it every morning in the Maurice Saltzman & Company office: with that perplexed scowl which somehow added rather than detracted from her basic comeliness.
“Benny,” she said. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you downstairs in the building lobby getting Mr. Bern’s shoes shined?”
“Because he sent me to get three sandwiches,” I said.
“Three?” Miss Bienstock said. “Eight-thirty in the morning?”
“Plus coffee for one,” I said. “And two teas, one with lemon and one with cream.”
“Oh, my God,” Miss Bienstock said.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“You’re sure one of those teas is with cream?” Miss Bienstock said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“That means Mr. I. G. Roon is in the office,” she said.
“He is,” I said. “With Mr. Bern and Mr. Saltzman.”
“Mr. Saltzman, too?” Miss Bienstock said. “At eight-thirty in the morning?”
“Yes,” I said. “They were all sitting around Mr. Bern’s desk. He wants with lemon. Mr. Saltzman.”
“Oh, my God,” Miss Bienstock said again.
There was in her voice the feel of lights burning late in embassy offices, the smell of midnight fires hurriedly burning secret papers in chancellery compounds.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Me?” Miss Bienstock said. “It’s not me.”
She turned and set down her tray on the nearest table. It rocked back and forth because of the bumps in the aluminum. The coffee splashed out of her cup. So did the orange juice out of the glass beside the cup. Both slopped onto the plate of toast. Miss Bienstock had obviously been about to have breakfast.
“You get the sandwiches,” she said. “I’ll get the coffee and tea.”
She raced away toward the wall of beverage spigots.
“The other tea is with lemon!” I called after her. “One with cream! One with lemon!”
She came back as I was working my stack of sandwiches onto an empty tray.
“You carry,” Miss Bienstock said.
I picked up the tray. The top sandwich, unsupported, fell off the stack.
“Never mind,” Miss Bienstock said. She grabbed the sandwich. “Follow me.”
Holding the ham sandwich aloft—a banner with a device strange indeed—as though under it she was leading her troops into battle, Miss Bienstock charged the revolving door. Before I could follow, a busboy grabbed my arm.
“Where you going with that tray?”
Fortunately, the hard shove with which Miss Bienstock had entered the revolving door kept it spinning. A fast backward glance gave her the picture. She did not allow the door to spill her out into Seventh Avenue. Miss Bienstock remained in transit. Completing the circle, she erupted back into the Automat with considerable thrust. It taught me an important lesson. Always trust centrifugal force. It carried Miss Bienstock up to the busboy and, without pause, she shoved the ham sandwich into his face.
“We’re going across the street,” she said. “He’ll bring the tray right back.” To me: “You first.” She shoved me into the revolving door. “This time,” Miss Bienstock said, “I’ll follow.”
She did. So rapidly that, when we popped into Seventh Avenue, the sandwich she was carrying crunched damply against the back of my neck.
“Ooh!” I said.
“Never mind,” Miss Bienstock said. “I’ll clean it off later. Come on. We’ve got the light.”
We also had luck with the elevator at 224 West 34th. When we came racing in from the street, the elevator was sitting in the lobby. They were not very good elevators. It was a very old building. So were the operators. And on Sunday only one was on duty.
“Lennie,” Miss Bienstock said. “Take us up. Quick!”
Her voice had the ring of Paul Revere clattering through the Middlesex night.
“Yes, Miss Bienstock,” Lennie said.
Up we went. Out into the fifth-floor corridor. Around the brown marble bend to the double doors on which was lettered
MAURICE SALTZMAN & COMPANY.
Miss Bienstock clattered the doors open. I followed. And stopped so suddenly that I hit her in the left buttock with the Automat tray.
“Oh,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She didn’t answer. Who could blame her? She was doing what I was doing. Staring. At Mr. Bern, at Mr. Saltzman, at Mr. Roon, and at a fourth man. I had no trouble recognizing him. This was the man who on Friday had interrupted the lunch I was having in Shane’s restaurant on 23rd Street with Sebastian Roon and his uncle.
“Hi, kid,” Mr. O’Casey said. I didn’t realize he was addressing me until, through a sour grin that was really not a grin, he said, “How’s your head?”
The answer was: confused. I did not make it, however, because odd things began to happen.
One: Mr. Bern raced across the reception room, grabbed the Automat tray from me, raced back to the table near the water cooler, and slapped the tray down on the haunches of Mr. Saltzman’s green stagskin.
Two: Mr. O’Casey sauntered over to the tray, looked down at the sandwiches and cardboard containers, and said, “This is a Sunday morning breakfast?”
Three: I noticed that the face of Sebastian Roon’s uncle looked not unlike Mr. Saltzman’s stagskin—green.
Four: Mr. Saltzman came closer to the table and said, “Sure. We have breakfast here every Sunday morning. My partner here, Mr. Bern, and me, and our former client, Mr. Roon.”
Five: “Your former client?” Mr. O’Casey said.
Six: “What else,” Mr. Bern said. “A man he’s had a heart attack, he can’t work anymore, we like to remember the old days, so we invite him in every Sunday morning, because it’s not a business day, we invite him in for a little friendly breakfast No business, of course. Mr. Roon, he’s not allowed to conduct any business, as you know.”
Seven: “We sure do,” Mr. O’Casey said. “That’s why my company is paying him that big fat monthly check every single goddamn month in the year.”
Eight: Sebastian Roon’s uncle, his coloration changing slightly until he resembled the shamrock in the ads for the Irish Tourist Bureau, said: “I bought that policy fair and square. You bastards were glad enough to collect the premium all these goddamn years. Now, now I’m a sick man, now I can’t work, you bastards you’re trying to get out of paying me what you insured me for. Well, you bastards, you’re not getting out of it. I’ll fight you bastards in the courts if it takes my last penny, you bastard.” He moved toward the table, pulled up a chair, sat down, and said, “Come on, Ira. Come on, Maurice. Let’s eat.”
I will not omit the numbers. At this point things became too confused for numbers. I’m not sure I can sort out the confusion into separate acts. They all seemed to bleed into one another, like the paints in the watercolors Miss Kahn used to try to teach us how to do in P.S. 188 kindergarten class. The last sharply etched single act I remember is Mr. Roon picking up one of the sandwiches. Mr. O’Casey lunged forward and snatched the sandwich from Sebastian Roon’s uncle.
“Give me back my sandwich!” I. G. Roon shouted.
“And let you get kicked out of heaven?” Mr. O’Casey said. “My company gives its customers not only financial protection, but also spiritual. This is ham, Isaac. Ham. You want to go to hell?”
“Listen,” Mr. Saltzman said. “It’s Sunday. On Sunday we always have ham sandwiches.”
“Mr. Saltzman,” Mr. O’Casey said, his hard, angular face twisted in a spiky look of terrifying reproach. “What would your mother say if she heard you speak like that?”
Mr. Bern stepped in and picked up the second sandwich. “I knew Mr. Saltzman’s mother,” he said. “She was a wonderful woman. She’s now gone, God bless her, she should rest in peace, but I think I can speak for her without fear of contradiction or erroneous statement.”
“You trying to tell me,” Mr. O’Casey said, “Mr. Saltzman’s mother would approve of him eating ham?”
“Only on Sundays,” Mr. Bern, said.
“What the hell has Sunday got to do with it?” Mr. O’Casey said.
“On Sundays,” Mr. Bern said, “it doesn’t count. How about joining us, Mr. O’Casey?”
The detective for the insurance company glanced at the Automat tray sitting on the green stagskin. “Looks to me like you’ve run out of sandwiches,” he said.
After forty years I am still not certain that I now saw what it seems to me I must have seen. Miss Bienstock, looking as perplexed as ever, stepped forward.
“Here, Mr. O’Casey,” she said. “Have this one.”
What she was holding out, of course, was “Excelsior!” The banner with a strange device under which she had led me out of the Automat: the last of the three ham sandwiches. It had lost much of the sheen it had possessed when I drew it out of the small metal box on the Automat wall. After all, Miss Bienstock had dented it when she shoved it into the face of the busboy, and she had damaged it further when she splashed it against the back of my neck on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk. It looked a bit lopsided. Perhaps that is what caused Miss Bienstock to stumble.
She lost her grip on the battered sandwich. It flew up and out, missing Mr. O’Casey completely, and landed with a plop on the other end of Mr. Saltzman’s green stagskin. Just in time for Sebastian Roon’s uncle to fall face down into the sandwich.
I did not understand what was happening until I heard the hoarse, choking noises that came out of his mouth. They sounded like great rusted spikes being drawn with tremendous effort, out of a waterlogged plank. Then I saw Mr. Roon’s shoulders heaving. When I realized what he was doing, I turned away. The sight of a man vomiting is not entrancing. On that Sunday morning it was more than a sight. It was a bell tolling.
I learned later that Mr. Roon was having his last heart attack.
F
ORTY YEARS AFTER IT
happened, sitting at the desk in my office on Madison Avenue, I could suddenly feel again the sense of dismay that had overwhelmed me on that strange Sunday morning in 1930. I stared at Miss Bienstock. She was holding the telephone out to me. For a moment I couldn’t remember why.
“It’s Mr. Roon,” she said patiently. “He wants to talk to you.”
I took the phone. “Seb?” I said.
“Benjamin, my boy.”
One of the nice things about our relationship is that for forty years I have called him Seb but he has never called me Ben.
“How are you, Seb?”
“I don’t really know,” he said.
The clipped British phrases made, as always, a pleasant noise in my ear. They gave me the feeling I was a citizen not only of Tiffany Street or even Madison Avenue, but of the world.
“I’m anxious to know how you made out with Dr. McCarran in Philadelphia,” Seb said.
It occurred to me that the charming voice had changed since those early days on Tiffany Street and in the Maurice Saltzman & Company office. There was in Seb’s voice now four decades of Scotch and sodas and Chesterfield cigarettes. They had converted the boyish, slightly Cockney piping of 1930 to what my wife calls the sexiest baritone on the English-speaking stage.
“I don’t think I should discuss it on the phone,” I said.
“Then come have a drink with me at the club,” Seb said. “I can’t wait to hear, even though you must be absolutely flat out after a full day in Philadelphia testifying for the squid Shtinkenpopfer.”
“Schlisselberger,” I said. “And how did you know that? All I told you was that I was going to see Dr. McCarran.”
“My dear chap, how did Walter Winchell know when Agamemnon set out for Troy to retrieve Helen from the arms of Priam? By the bye, have you seen him lately?”
“Who?” I said.
“Winchell,” Seb said.
“Lately?” I said. “Seb, I have never seen him.”
“Very much into the sere and yellow he is these days,” Seb said. “Pity. He was always nice to me.”
“Everybody has always been nice to you,” I said.
True enough. There are charmers, and there are charmers. Seb was both.
“Including you,” Sebastian Roon said. “I hope it hasn’t been a matter of regret to you?”
There are questions that stop you cold. Even in a kidding conversation. Where nobody means anything more with his words than the pitcher in the bull pen means with those fancy warm-up throws. They look good, but will they do any good when he gets out on the mound?
Longevity, however, does more than please the life insurance statisticians. It adds shadows. Things you never before thought about suddenly stand out in clear outline. Sebastian Roon had asked a kidding question. But all at once it didn’t sound kidding. Maybe it was because my head still ached from what the black boy had done to it at Penn Station. But I don’t think so.