Tiffany Street (30 page)

Sebastian Roon pushed the spaghetti around on his plate and shrugged. “I don’t really know,” he said.

“Then you’d better learn,” Lillian Waldbaum said. “She’s told me all about you. As much as you’ve told her, anyway. And I can tell you why you wanted to come back to New York.”

“Why?” Seb said.

“Because in Blackpool you’re a Jew boy,” Lillian said. “Here in New York you’re an Englishman.”

“Lillian,” said the other girl. “I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say.”

“Perhaps not,” Sebastian Roon said. “But I daresay it’s true. I never thought it out very clearly until this moment, thanks to Miss Waldbaum. But I do see now that the point about emigration, any kind of emigration, is that it enables the emigrant to shed his skin.” He laughed. “One gets a bit weary of being a Jew boy in Blackpool, you know.”

Lillian Waldbaum tapped my elbow. Now it was my ball of spaghetti that splashed back into the plate.

“Benny,” she said. “Are you weary of being a Jew boy in New York?”

I gave it the few moments of thought without which any reply would probably be a disaster. It was always wise, I had learned, when answering a Lillian Waldbaum question, to parse the sentences, so to speak, of your reply before uttering it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been a Jew boy in any place except New York.”

“And you never will be,” Lillian said. “Until you stop spending your life getting Ira Bern’s shoes shined.”

The bottom of my stomach did a small Immelmann turn. I’d thought we were having a small reunion. How had it swung in this direction? Why was Lillian suddenly jumping down my throat?

“Or running hot pastrami sandwiches for Mr. Bern from Lou G. Siegel,” she added.

Her remarks were totally unexpected. Maybe that’s why they hit so hard. I knew what was wrong. I had been jolted into facing a moment of truth.

In the years since that night I have been forced to face others. But they never hurt as much as they do when you’re young. Before the years have built for you the calluses that shield you from the full impact of the blows.

“Lillian,” said the other girl. “I think you would send your own mother to the gallows if it meant clearing the way for one of your wisecracks. I do not believe Mr. Kramer is spending his life getting Ira Bern’s shoes shined, whoever Ira Bern may be.”

“If you knew my mother,” Lillian said, “I think you’d be what you have always been, a good friend, and help me truss up the old bitch and carry her to the gallows. As for Ira Bern, naturally you wouldn’t know who he is. You’re a lifted-pinky WASP from the Philadelphia Main Line, and I’m a hard-working stenographer in an accountant’s office on Seventh Avenue. But I don’t mind educating the other half that does the real living, so make a note, dear. Ira Bern is my boss, as well as the boss of this good-looking innocent over here who prefers, I’m sure, to be called not Mr. Kramer but Benjamin, so why don’t you try?”

At this moment the other girl could have flushed slightly, but I’m not sure. The Family Tricino was not as generous with electric bulbs as it was with tomato sauce.

“Couldn’t we just get on with Seb’s explanation of why he came back to New York?” said the other girl.

“Don’t you know?” said Lillian.

Now there was no question about what happened to the face of the other girl. With more electric bulbs in the vicinity, it might have been accurate to say her cheekbones turned red. In the light provided by The Family Tricino, as I recall, it seemed to me the skin between her nostrils and her ear lobes seemed all at once to change slowly from the color of the plate on which my spaghetti was swimming in tomato sauce to the color of the maraschino cherry on the charlotte russe I used to hand out for a nickel to customers when I worked in Mr. Lebenbaum’s candy store on Avenue D.

“Of course I know,” said the other girl.

It occurred to me that while her friendship with Lillian Waldbaum was genuine, which was puzzling since they were obviously so different, it was also a source of irritation to her.

“There’s nothing much to know,” Sebastian Roon said. “You may recall, Benjamin, that about a year ago I spent some time at your home on Tiffany Street”

“In my bed,” I said.

“Quite,” Seb said. “And while you used to go off to the gallery of Loew’s One Hundred and Eightieth Street with my brother’s present wife, I remained behind and helped your mother with her ‘turning.’”

“‘Turning’?” the other girl said.

“One of the preliminary steps in a cottage industry known as the manufacture of jazz bows,” Seb said.

“You mean neckties?” the girl said.

“Well,” Seb said, “I suppose they could be worn as sock suspenders, but in most instances they are worn around the neck. At any rate, toward the end of my stay with the Kramer family, Benny’s mother had moved beyond mere ‘turning’ to the manufacture of the completed jazz bow. One evening while I was helping Benjamin’s mother with her records, I told her that I would soon be returning to Blackpool. She asked why, and I told her about the demise of my uncle and his complex business ventures, and that it seemed sensible to go home, where I would at least have my own bed to sleep in until I got myself sorted out. Benjamin’s mother said going home was a waste of time because I would be back. She said it with so much certainty that I could not help asking how she knew something I did not know myself. Benjamin, do you know what she said?”

I knew it as well as I knew most things my mother had said. She rarely said anything once. I had heard this particular observation many times. But this was Seb’s story. And I liked what the inadequate lighting did, as she listened, to the face of the girl across the table from me.

“No,” I said. “What did my mother say to you?”

“She said Europe was a rotten worn-out place,” Seb said. “A garbage pail was the expression she used. Everybody wants to leave it, she said. That’s why she had come here from Hungary, and that’s why, when I got another look at the garbage pail, I would come hurrying back to America. When I did, she said, I would always find a bed waiting for me on Tiffany Street.”

I could see ahead of me a long siege of going back to sleeping on the floor of our front room. Sebastian Roon did not look prosperous. He was wearing the same tveet suit he had worn when I first met him. It looked frayed but, on closer examination, I saw that it was not. What gave the jacket a look of shabbiness was that it had obviously not been pressed for a long time. Perhaps not since it had come off the rack in the store where Seb had bought it. The wrinkles on the sleeves up near the shoulders had a permanent look, as though they could never really be pressed out of the cloth. And of those three buttons that had run so close together down the front like the keys of a cornet, only one remained.

“You mean you just got back from Blackpool today?” I said.

Going to the theater had made it a long day. Taking Lillian Waldbaum home would make it longer. Unless Sebastian Roon had called my mother on Tiffany Street to warn her that he was coming up to claim that offered bed, before I got home and hit the sack I would have to make up the sack myself on the living room floor.

“No,” said the other girl. “Seb has been here for over a week. I found him the day he arrived.”

Seb laughed and said to the other girl, “Look at his face!”

She did, and mine for no apparent reason grew hotter.

“Well, one can hardly blame him,” she said. “I did say I found you, which is an odd way to put it.”

“You’ve told me this part,” Lillian Waldbaum said. “So “I’ll just go to the little girls’ room.” She stood up.

“Do be careful and knock first,” Seb said. “At The Family Tricino the little girls’ room is also the little boys’ room.”

“While I’m out,” Lillian Waldbaum said, “try to think up a bit of advice that will be new to me. I learned to knock on bathroom doors when I was still in diapers.” She walked away.

Seb watched her go. “Interesting girl, that,” he said.

“Lillian?” The other girl smiled. “She’s probably the most wonderful person I know. We met in a sketching class at the Y.W.C.A.”

“Lillian?” I said.

The sound of my voice made Seb laugh again. “I know what you mean,” he said. “Miss Waldbaum does not look like a sketcher, does she?”

“I don’t know what a sketcher should look like,” the other girl said. “But Lillian is a darned good one. Now, for how I found our actor friend here. About a week ago, was it?”

“Nine days, actually,” Sebastian Roon said. “I came over from England on the cheap. A Norwegian freighter with a few cabins for passengers who don’t mind traveling slowly so long as the passage is low, and who have stomachs strong enough to sustain a steady diet of herring. The ship docked at a pier just north of Fourteenth Street, and I went trotting along with my bag down Fourteenth, hunting a phone booth. I wanted to alert your mother that her favorite nonpaying lodger was on his way up to Tiffany Street. Have you ever tried to make a phone call on West Fourteenth Street?”

“No,” I said.

“I urge you not to attempt it,” Seb said. “The paucity of phone booths in the area is astonishing. In fact, they don’t exist. I was becoming a bit irked when I saw one of those round blue and white enamel signs the telephone company nails outside structures that contain public phones. It was nailed to the brick wall of the Preshinivetz Playhouse. I went in and found myself in that small, dismal outer room which you and Miss Waldbaum crossed tonight to get into the theater proper. In one corner was a phone booth. I popped in and called your home. No answer.”

“Was it a Monday?” I said.

“Let me think,” Seb said. He did. Then: “Yes, I believe it was. Why?”

“On Mondays my mother goes downtown to deliver the jazz bows that were completed the week before,” I said. “And my father can’t get to the phone because of the wheelchair.”

“Quite,” Seb said. “I thought it was something like that. So I decided I’d wait a bit and try again. When I came out of the phone booth, I heard the damnedest racket from beyond the doors that separate that outer room from the theater proper. Furious voices shouting.”

“And screaming,” said the girl who had played the part of Walda Wexler.

“Indeed yes,” said Seb. “My God, what a brouhaha. I eased one of the doors open an inch or two and peered in. Well, the screams were nothing compared to the sight. A dozen or more people were sprawled on the benches. They were the actors you saw in the play tonight, although I didn’t know that at the time. I mean to say, I was unaware that I had stumbled into a theater during a rehearsal. Not that these actors were doing much rehearsing. They were watching and listening to the two people who were going at each other in the aisle. One was an ethereal type with marcelled hair who would have looked more properly dressed in a ball gown. He later proved to be the director. His opponent in the battle of billingsgate was none other than our charming friend here, Elizabeth Ann.”

Thank God, Seb had mentioned her name again. I had forgotten it, and I was tired of referring to her in my head as the girl with the clean look. What bothered me was that her name had not registered because I had not really looked at her until I noticed the Botticelli clipping on the wall over her head. Elizabeth Ann. Elizabeth Ann. Okay. I had it. Now back to what she was saying.

“I didn’t really want to scream,” Elizabeth Ann said. “What I wanted to do was kill that goddamn director because of the way he was butchering my play.”

“Oh,” I said. “You wrote the play?”

“You mustn’t be surprised,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Many women have written plays.”

That was not what had surprised me. What had surprised me was that just as Lillian Waldbaum did not look like a sketcher type, Elizabeth Ann did not look like a
Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent!
type.

“I’m glad I said I liked it before I found out you wrote it,” I said.

“Bravo!” Sebastian Roon said. “We’ll make a gallant of you yet, that we shall.”

Benny, like Barkis, was willing.

“I don’t know what on earth you could have seen on that stage tonight that was worth looking at, much less liking,” Elizabeth Ann said. “It certainly is not the play as I conceived it. What I wrote originally has been cut to ribbons and tossed into the wastebasket. That’s why I was determined not to give in on this last piece of casting. The savage illiterate had filled all the parts with his dear little epicene friends, not one of whom can act, certainly not on a stage. All that was left was the part of Willie, the man they are all waiting for. It’s a small role, just one word in the last moments of the play, but it’s absolutely crucial. On it the play stands or falls. If Willie isn’t absolutely right, the play we have seen up to that climactic moment will be not right. The play will simply vanish. And that day I saw this son of a bitch warming up another one of his simpering friends for the part. Think of it. The part demands a tough, masculine strike leader, and he was going to give it to one of his boys with marcelled hair! Over my dead body, I said, and that’s how the battle started.”

“It ended with Elizabeth Ann storming up the aisle toward the doors through which I was eavesdropping,” Sebastian Roon said. “I ducked backward as fast as I could, but not fast enough.” He laughed. “Elizabeth Ann caught me.”

She laughed. “No, not caught,” Elizabeth Ann said. “I had no idea Seb had been eavesdropping, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I had known. I was so damn mad, I couldn’t see straight.”

“You were actually shaking with fury,” Seb said. “A rather frightening sight, I must say. You were trying to get a lighted match up to your cigarette, and missing by at least two inches.”

Elizabeth Ann laughed again. “So Seb took the match from me,” she said. “And he held it to my cigarette. I filled my lungs with smoke and I blew the smoke in his face. I didn’t mean to. It was simply that, in my rage, I hadn’t even seen him.”

“When she did,” Seb said, “she gave me a look that I suppose can only be described as penetrating. Then she walked slowly around me, as though she were a tourist and I was a statue in some public square, and she wanted to remember it when she got home.”