Tiffany Street (32 page)

My mother and father took to this
shiksa.
The way their darling Benny had taken to her. And they had the same reaction. They fell in love with her. And for thirty years they never thought of her as a
shiksa.

She became to them a nice Jewish girl. The sort of girl it was proper, even inevitable, for their Benny to marry. Whenever the subject of Elizabeth Ann’s background came up, if there was some reference to the fact that she was not, as Rabbi Altshuler put it, “of the faith,” my mother and father would rock with laughter. Benny and his jokes!

For thirty years Elizabeth Ann was to them the perfect Jewish girl who had been born to marry the perfect Jewish boy. Their son Benny. And after thirty years their son Benny found he shared that belief firmly. Especially when Elizabeth Ann spoke his name.

He might be Benny to his parents. And Ben to his colleagues. But to Elizabeth Ann he was Benjamin. As, oddly enough, he was to Sebastian Roon. Benjamin. What a name. Even leaving aside the glorious idiocy of flying kites in dangerous electrical storms, it was the sort of name that gave a man a sense of dignity. Especially on a day when he’d had his head pummeled in front of Penn Station.

“Yeah,” I called down the corridor from the front door to the kitchen. “It’s me. You okay?”

“Probably,” Elizabeth Ann called back. “But I won’t know for another four minutes. I’ve made you a crème brûlée and I’m tapping the crust in the casserole. Don’t you dare come into the kitchen.”

“And don’t you dare serve it for dinner,” I said. “I was up two and a half pounds this morning.”

On Tiffany Street I’d never even heard of calories. On 83rd and Fifth they ruled my life the way insulin rules the life of the diabetic.

“You’ll be three and a half over in the morning,” Elizabeth Ann said. “But it will be in a good cause. If this damn thing comes out. Brown sugar gets stiffer and stiffer. I don’t know why. It never seems to happen to Julia Child. Get comfortable. I’ll join you in four minutes. No, three and a half. I have something to tell you.”

Elizabeth Ann always has something to tell me. She lives the most satisfying life of any person I know. Not because her husband is remarkably noteworthy for being a good provider. Although in that respect Benny Kramer doesn’t think he falls too far behind the average. Nor because she is cherished more spectacularly than most women. Although Benny Kramer must confess with as little embarrassment as these statements can be made that on all counts he finds her eminently satisfactory. No. What makes Elizabeth Ann’s life good is that she lives it.

Nothing passes her by. I think I should put that more firmly. She
allows
nothing to pass her by. Everything is examined. And squeezed. Like a melon in the supermarket. If it is ripe, Elizabeth Ann is pleased and buys it. If it is not, she leaves it in the bin, but she pushes her cart on with the satisfaction of knowing she’s had an experience.

The thought is refreshing. How often do people walk away from a honeydew or a Cranshaw with a feeling Leif the Red had when he first sighted the coast of Labrador? The feeling that his time had not been wasted? The feeling that he had learned something about life worth passing on to his fellow man?

Not often, I bet. That’s why I admire the effort. Mainly, I suppose, because I have yearned for it and tried for it, but have never achieved it I have never been able to extract from the day-to-day pulsations of life the satisfaction Elizabeth Ann gets as effortlessly as she gets rich yellow foaming orange juice out of the halved fruit she slaps onto our electric Green Stamps machine. Eleven books. “There’s ice in the bucket!” Elizabeth Ann called. “God, this brown sugar is a pain. Make yourself a drink. I’ll be another moment. Make one for me, too.”

I did, and I sat down in my favorite room. It wasn’t anything the directors of the Met would have fought to buy. It was just a nice room, with two big windows that looked out on the Central Park reservoir. A room full of furniture and bric-a-brac Elizabeth Ann had brought back from the various places around the world where we had spent fragments of our thirty years together. But it was not those things that made it my favorite room. I can take furniture or leave it alone. It can please me. It can displease me. But it never sends me. And what pleases me rarely pleases Elizabeth Ann.

I like, for instance, green metal filing cabinets. The kind we had when I was a kid at Maurice Saltzman & Company on West 34th Street. They drive Elizabeth Ann up the wall. No.
Into
the wall. She is always burying my green metal filing cabinets behind expensive cabinetwork. Anyway, what makes me like places is not how they are furnished but what I do in them.

In this room I work. And read
Bleak House.
And take off my shoes. And do something I have not been happy about doing all my life but in this room I somehow manage to do it with less pain than I do it elsewhere. In this room I think.

Which is what the human race hates to do but, as Rabbi Goldfarb used to say over and over again down on East Fourth Street, must do to survive. If there is one thing Benny Kramer wants to do it is survive. I don’t know why. There are moments in this room furnished by Elizabeth Ann when I think: What in God’s name for?

A nice juicy heart attack? For juicy, read massive. A good clean stroke? For clean, read decisive. That’s the way to live, isn’t it? Die clean and swift and without pain. What more can a man want? Answer: to live. Why? I don’t know. But in this room, which contains all the bits and pieces of the life I’ve lived for three decades with Elizabeth Ann, in this room I am able to think. And what do I think? I think an unthinkable scream. A cry of irrational outrage.

Not yet! Not yet! Hold that heart attack! Forget that stroke! Put a different address on that embolism. Send that melanoma down to some poor bastard in Chile. River Styx, stay away from this door. The author of these irrational notes is not yet ready to die. The poor slob hasn’t even learned how to live.

I made the drink a stiff one. Coming on top of the shot I’d had at Will’s with Seb, it did the trick. The trick of making life seem not really impossible. Merely loathsome. When Elizabeth Ann came in from the kitchen, she looked beautiful.

I’ve said it wrong again. I don’t mean Elizabeth Ann looked beautiful because I’d had two stiff drinks. Plus one sock on the medulla oblongata in front of Penn Station by a fellow citizen who, I must remember, meant nothing personal by the outrage. He was merely fighting back against the people who had oppressed his race for two centuries. Elizabeth Ann, as I said, came into the room where I was doing my thinking.

“How was Philadelphia?” Elizabeth Ann said.

“I am not going to answer that,” I said. “You know how Philadelphia was. You were born there.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “But I keep hoping it will get better. Seb has been trying to get you.”

“I know,” I said. “I stopped in at the office when I got back. Miss Bienstock told me.”

“Anything important?”

I hesitated. Elizabeth Ann loves Seb. So does my son Jack. Seb is the best kind of friend. A family favorite.

“Yes, very,” I said.

Elizabeth Ann was reaching for the glass I was holding out to her. Her hand stopped moving.

“Is Seb in trouble?” she said.

I hesitated again. Trouble had not crossed my mind as the way to describe the curious mood of our talk at Will’s, yet now it seemed surprisingly accurate.

“Yes, I said. “I think Seb is in very bad trouble.”

“Oh, God,” Elizabeth Ann said. Her hand moved on, she took the glass I was holding out, and she plumped herself down on the couch facing me. “Some woman, I suppose?”

I thought of Dr. McCarran’s wife in Philadelphia, whom I had not met.

“Yes,” I said.

“Anyone we know?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s her name?”

“Britannia,” I said.

“What?” Elizabeth Ann said.

I explained as much as I knew. The TV deal Jim Mennen had proposed. The rather surprising financial potential for Seb. Mennen’s eagerness to have Seb at any cost. And why the money was important to Seb.

“He wants to retire,” I said. “He wants to go home.”

I left out why.

“To England?” Elizabeth Ann said.

The surprise in her voice took me by surprise. It occurred to me that to Elizabeth Ann our friend Sebastian Roon had always been an American.

“He seems to have remembered at the age of fifty-eight,” I said, “that England is his home.”

Elizabeth Ann took a sip from her glass and looked out at the sun coming in fiery red from Central Park West across the green glass roof of the Met.

“Maybe we could go with him,” she said.

“I don’t think what Seb has in mind is a holiday,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Elizabeth Ann said.

I sat up straighter in the chair where I do my thinking. I was reminded of a moment during the war in an Edinburgh pub when my CO, a man of almost terrifying intelligence named Buchanan, shed light for me on a puzzling corner of the complex fabric of the British character.

We had been discussing a project that had brought us up from London, the drafting of surrender leaflets to be dropped by the RAF on Dusseldorf, and suddenly a fight broke out at the other side of the saloon. It was settled in a few minutes, but I did not understand what had happened, and I asked.

“There are three moments in a pub that are crucial,” Colonel Buchanan said. “If you and I are having a talk over a glass of bitter, and a third chap starts pushing his way in, you observe in a friendly voice: buzz off, lad. A sensible chap understands you want privacy, takes no offense, and buzzes off. If he’s not sensible, perhaps because he’s sozzled, and he continues to push his way into the conversation, you put the screws on a bit in your voice and you say: piss off, lad. The chap has to be awfully stupid or awfully drunk not to twig to that. Usually, he does. But if he doesn’t, and he persists in being a pest, you come to phase three. Hard, now. Voice tough. You say: Fuck off, buster. That means if you don’t, buster, you are in for a fight. That’s what just happened over at the other side of the saloon bar a few minutes ago. The chap they just carried out, the poor sod apparently didn’t realize those other two chaps had told him they’d reached the fuck off stage. I had once explained this to Elizabeth Ann. She thought it funny. And every now and then, when a conversation or a discussion would get out of hand, she would say to me: “Let’s not reach the fuck off stage.” We rarely did.

But now, all at once, without a discussion or even a conversation, certainly without an argument, I sensed that her quickly and quietly spoken words—“Neither do I”—were in the fuck off stage.

I gave myself a moment, then remembered what she had called to me from the kitchen when I came into the apartment.

“You said you have something to tell me,” I said. “Yes,” Elizabeth Ann said. “I have something to tell you. Jack called from Bloomington this afternoon.”

“Anything wrong?” I said.

“He seems to have suffered an attack of intelligence,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Four of his Harvard friends have been killed in the Mekong Delta in the last three weeks. It occurred to Jack to wonder why. They were very close, you know.”

I did know. I even knew their names. And I could in my head see their faces. I am a City College boy. Evening session. I am jealous of kids who went to Harvard. Including my son Jack. He made it. Benny Kramer never did. I wished I didn’t have enough brains to understand how I felt. More and more, as the years go by, I find myself confronted by the heretical conviction that it is better to be stupid.

“Yes,” I said. “I do know.”

“And what have you done with your knowledge?” Elizabeth Ann said.

The trouble with being a lawyer is that you detect at once, even in the voices of people who love you, the metallic rasp of the attorney for the prosecution.

“I went to Philadelphia today,” I said. “That’s what I’ve done.”

“To help a real-estate crook,” Elizabeth Ann said. “For a fat fee.”

Among the more distressing horrors of life are the little terminal crevices into which people hurl their way in order to win a minor verbal battle. You have to strike back.

“That fat fee is paying our rent on this apartment in which you and I are now battling while you can enjoy the luxury of trembling about whether or not the crust of your crème brûlée will work.”

Elizabeth Ann scowled. The scowl is rarely thought of as an increment to beauty. Next time you get scowled at, by a woman I mean, pay attention. And count yourself a nice little blessing.

“You did not go to Philadelphia to help that real-estate crook,” Elizabeth Ann said. “You had another reason.”

No wonder Scotland Yard has had to reorganize from the ground up. The methods of Inspector Lestrade are outmoded. Women have taken over.

“That real-estate crook paid my fare and provided my cover story,” I said. “He didn’t know it, but I went to Philadelphia to have a secret meeting with a Dr. McCarran.”

Elizabeth Ann looked troubled. She sent the look down into her glass. It made her look—well, I’ll skip it. I’m too old to take on an imitation of Booth Tarkington describing Gentle Julia. That Hoosier could write.

“And it was about Jack,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Wasn’t it?”

And that Hoosier could also call the turn. Gentle Julia would have put it exactly the same way.

“Yes,” I said. “Jack is obviously going to be summoned any minute now for his physical. And since you are his mother who has known him from the womb out, you know that that kid is going to pass his draft board physical with depressingly flying colors.”

“So you went to Philadelphia to organize a way for him to flunk,” Elizabeth Ann said. “And you kept it a secret because you knew I would disapprove.”

“That,” I said, “as my old boss Ira Bern would have put it, that is one hundred and ten percent correct.”

Elizabeth Ann gave her drink another scowling examination.

“Okay,” she said finally. “I guess you better tell me.”

I did.

“In other words,” she said when I finished. “The life of our son depends on his ability to convince a draft board doctor that he wets his bed at night.”