Authors: Jerome Weidman
“But you want to know,” Hannah said through her extraordinary smile. “Don’t you?”
“Yes, very much,” I said. “You see, I’m jealous.”
The squeal of laughter that came pouring out of her across the tea tray might have made Rudolf Bing wince. But one man’s wince is another man’s music. For me Hannah’s squeal could, as Ring Lardner once put it, have been poured on a waffle.
“Oh, Benny,” she said. “Benny, Benny, Benny, you nice son of a bitch. Maybe...”
Hannah paused. Then she shook her head. The late afternoon light that was making a horror of Mrs. Rampole’s gorilla across the narrow driveway suddenly caught Hannah’s eyes. For the first time, and to my considerable astonishment, I noticed that they were violet. I had never before seen violet eyes. How could I not have noticed that years ago?
True, it was dark up in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street, but—
Yes? But? But what, Benny?
You know what, Benny. Stop pretending you don’t. Hannah was a girl you liked but were scared to love. Now that she had made her life with somebody else, you wanted to know what your life would have been like if you had made it with her. That’s why you had come to Islington Crescent in the middle of a war. Not a bad objective. If you are going to discover at thirty that you were a louse at seventeen, the best place in which to make the discovery is Islington Crescent, in Blackpool, in 1942, while the air raid sirens are screaming.
“No,” Hannah said firmly. “You live, and you move on, and if you have any brains you know that what you lived yesterday is finished. It’s today that counts. I like my today, Benny. Do you understand that?” I looked around the small, neat, compact room. I looked at the picture of a scowling, fiercely determined Winston Churchill over the fireplace. I looked at the embroidered sampler on the wall over Hannah’s head that said:
KEEP THE POKER ON THE HEARTH!
I looked at the photograph cut from
The Daily Sketch
that showed Paddy Finucane in his RAF outfit smiling out gallantly over the message he had radioed a moment after his Spitfire was hit and went down over the Channel: “This is it, chaps!” And then I saw something I had not seen since Miss Bongiorno’s Elocution Class in J.H.S. 64: a framed quote from the “a mighty charge” speech in
Henry V:
“
And on this charge cry God for Harry, England, and St. George!
” Benny Kramer of Tiffany Street turned back to Hannah Halpern from Vyse Avenue, both of the Bronx.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I understand.”
Hannah smiled again. “Then I can tell you,” she said. “The way I felt about you, all that was fine. I was happy to coast along and wait. You see, I felt sure of you. So someday you would be a chief justice and I would be Hannah Kramer, the Mrs. Chief Justice.”
“My God,” I said. “I never knew that.”
“Of course not,” Hannah said. “Men never know anything.”
For a stunned moment I wondered if she was right. If that was the answer to the secret of the whole insane mess known as life. But in the battle of the sexes, you do not deliver neatly packaged ammunition to the other side.
“Now, wait a minute,” I said.
“Not in the middle of a war,” Hannah said. “You don’t wait minutes. You live them.” She paused and cocked her head toward the window. The sirens were still wailing. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re coming in across Bootle north of Liverpool. The RAF will stop them before they get anywhere near here.”
My gut had started to twitch. The raids scared me.
“You don’t seem worried,” I said.
Hannah shrugged. “Actually, I am,” she said. “I don’t like it much. But you’d be surprised how easy it is not to be too scared. You have to learn one thing.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“To learn to survive,” Hannah said, “you have to learn to last it out.”
A quarter of a century later it still seems to me the sagest piece of off-the-rack philosophy I have ever heard.
“I’m trying,” I said.
Hannah smiled. “Don’t hunch over the handlebars,” she said. “You’ll make it. Boys from Tiffany Street are built to last.”
“I didn’t last with you,” I said.
“Because one night you made the mistake of bringing around a boy named Sebastian Roon.”
If something requires rubbing in, you can always count on a woman to do the best job.
“I know it was a mistake,” I said. “The facts prove that. But what I’ve never understood is
how
it was a mistake.”
“Seb didn’t do anything wrong,” Hannah said.
“Somebody did,” I said.
“Me,” Hannah said.
“That’s hard for me to believe,” I said.
And leave it to a man to make the more fatuous let’s-rub-it-out remark.
“I don’t mean dirty wrong,” Hannah said. “I mean rotten wrong.”
Could my old Hannah of Vyse Avenue have become a devotee of the new war movies? She sounded like Rita Hayworth playing Rosie the Riveter.
“I know I sound like Walter Pidgeon in the big scene with Greer Garson,” I said, “but I’m going to say it, anyway. Quote. I don’t understand you, darling. Unquote.”
Hannah laughed. “Funny you should mention Greer Garson,” she said. “First time I saw her, in
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
with Robert Donat, I knew who I wanted to be.”
“Who?” I said.
“Greer Garson, you idiot,” Hannah said.
“I never thought of you as the Greer Garson type,” I said.
“That’s what went wrong,” Hannah said. “Get that look off your face and have another one of these. I know you think they’re terrible, and they probably are, but I did bake them myself, and the stuff you get to bake with these days, honestly, it’s a miracle the finished product can be pried out of the pan. Take the middle one. The candied cherry on top helps a little. What went wrong, Benny, is that nobody ever thinks of Bronx girls as the Greer Garson type, except Bronx girls themselves. Consider it for a second. If you were a Bronx girl, would you want to continue being a Bronx girl?”
I considered it. Why not? She was an old friend. You could say we had together taken our first groping steps toward finding out what the hell it is all about
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been a Bronx girl.”
“Count your blessings,” Hannah said. “Count your blessings, Benny. But you’ve been a Bronx boy.”
It did not seem the sort of statement from which a man could gain much by a denial.
“Of course,” I said.
“When you were a Bronx boy,” Hannah said, “do you remember what you used to dream about?”
It seemed wrong to say Jean Harlow, which was the truth. So I made an effort and tried to think of the second thing I used to dream about when I was a boy in the Bronx. It didn’t require much thinking. Two words surfaced at once.
“Getting ahead,” I said.
Hannah nodded and said, “Ahead where?”
“I don’t know,” I said, although of course I did. On East Fourth Street it meant getting up to the Bronx. On Tiffany Street it meant getting down to the good parts of Manhattan. It’s a desire, however, about which not many people like to talk. I mean the people engaged in the process. People like Benny Kramer. We have an uncomfortable feeling that there is something dirty about such an ambition. It’s not Christiaan Barnard and heart transplants. It’s just real estate. I said to Hannah, “I guess it meant earning more money so you wouldn’t have to stay in the Bronx.”
She nodded. “Because nobody wants to stay in the Bronx,” Hannah said. “So getting out is the trick. For a boy like you, for instance, it means studying, going to law school, that sort of thing, and if you have any brains that sort of thing is bound to work, the way it worked for you. But for a girl, she has to wait for a boy to marry her and take her out of the Bronx. Meantime, while she’s waiting, she types letters for Gold-Mark-Zweig, Inc., on Mosholu Parkway and she dreams of being Greer Garson. In my case, me and you, I never had any doubt it would happen. You had that look.”
“What look?” I said it with fear in my heart. If she said I’d had the look of eagles, I would have to strangle her, and I didn’t want to do that. I liked her.
“Remember Lindbergh?” Hannah said.
“Lindbergh?”
“Way back when everybody was flying the Atlantic,” Hannah said. “Harry Richman and that guy with one eye. Wiley Post? In this plane, a three-engined Fokker it was called, with the wings full of ping-pong balls? And Admiral Byrd with that Swede? Or maybe he was a Norwegian? Bernt Balchen? And that little bald-headed guy, Levine, with that blonde in the gold-mesh sweater? I mean real gold? Fourteen-karat? Mabel Boll?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sort of vaguely. What about them?”
“Well,” Hannah said, “this kid came along. Out of the West. My God, he looked like maybe eleven years old. And all he had was that cockamamy little airplane and that really but from Dixie five-dollar windbreaker jacket, and that look in his eyes. You could see it in the
Daily News.
You knew he was going to make it.”
“What’s Lindbergh got to do with Benny Kramer?” I said.
“You had the same look,” Hannah said. “I knew you were going to make it. And I think I figured as long as I waited patiently, it would happen to me, too, because you’d take me along.”
What a thought to be hit with at almost thirty. In the middle of an air raid.
“I might have,” I said. “But by the time I was in a position to do anything about it, you’d flown the coop.”
Hannah nodded again. “That’s what I meant when I said I didn’t do anything dirty wrong, but something rotten wrong.”
“By taking off with Seb?” I said.
Hannah giggled. I don’t understand it. What’s a giggle? A stunted laugh? An explosion of hilarity that gets headed off at the pass? Why should it make you feel twenty years younger? Why should it make you feel you’re being lifted out of a war, and a major’s uniform, and an encircling air raid, and put you back in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street? When nothing had mattered except the moment? And the moment was Botticelli’s Venus coming out of that foolish sea shell? And it had not yet occurred to you that you were not going to live forever?
Hannah sighed and said, “Have another cup of tea?”
Moments of truth arrive at odd moments. Without warning.
“Hannah,” I said. “I hate tea.”
“Of course,” she said. “To you tea is that stuff your mother made you drink when you were stopped up on East Fourth Street.”
“And Tiffany Street,” I said.
“Yes, yich,” Hannah said. “My mother made me drink it, too.”
“It was pretty bad stuff,” I said.
“Awful,” Hannah said.
So at least we had that in common. I thought about it. For the first time in my life I wondered how my mother, an immigrant from Hungary, had decided that the cure for her son’s constipation was a detestable herb tea that came from Ceylon.
“Worse than awful,” I said. “And this stuff you’re pouring now is not like that at all. In fact, this tea is delicious. But it’s still tea, if you know what I mean,”
“Of course I do,” Hannah said. “That’s what I thought back in nineteen thirty when Seb and I first got here.”
“I’m still waiting to hear how that happened,” I said.
“When we double-dated that night in nineteen thirty,” Hannah said, “I brought along this girl who worked with me at Gold-Mark-Zweig?”
“Grace Krieger,” I said.
Hannah giggled again. “That’s the one. She obviously made quite an impression on you.”
“She was a very nice girl,” I said.
Primly, I’m afraid. And with a blush, I suspect. A sense of inadequacy had sneaked up on me. Byron, at thirty, was banging the wife of his landlord in Venice. Burton, at thirty, was field-testing buggery on the spot in Al-Medinah and Mecca. Benny Kramer, almost thirty, was blushing in Blackpool because he had suddenly been reminded of how he once felt about the contours of a girl named Grace Krieger whom he had met exactly once. It is discomfiting to realize that no matter what other goodies life may have in store for you, it has not cast you in the role of One of the World’s Great Lovers.
“I know Grace was a very nice girl,” Hannah said. “Which is what surprised me about what happened. You remember how after we bought the tickets you went next door to the Hebrew National to get the knishes, and Seb and I and Grace Krieger went up into the balcony to wait for you?”
“Two of you didn’t,” I said.
Hannah gave me a quick look. “I detect a note of bitterness,” she said.
She said it not, I saw, with displeasure. “Well,” I said, and I hesitated. How did Byron say these things? Or Burton? I suppose it helps if you speak Italian or Arabic. In old-fashioned Tiffany Street English I said, “Hannah, I obviously failed you in some way in nineteen thirty. But I think you must have known that, even if I was a jerk, I was very fond of you.”
She smiled and reached across the tea tray. She touched my hand. It was like a gentle electric shock. I tingled. So Benny Kramer was not One of the World’s Great Lovers. So what? Goddamn it, though, there were women who liked him. You can always tell. You wait for the tingle. In Blackpool in 1942 I tingled. As I think I have indicated earlier, it was quite a war.
“Of course I knew it,” Hannah said. “And it made me proud. Not to mention my mother and father. Boy, were they proud of you!”
“Me?” I said.
“Oh, shut up,” Hannah said. “They adored you, and you know it. To them you were the nice Jewish boy to end all nice Jewish boys. And you were going with their darling Hannah! My God, on Saturday nights, when you came to pick me up, it was like Ferdinand and Isabella standing on the dock waiting for the
Nina,
the
Pinta,
and the
Santa Maria
to come into port. That’s why I think it’s only fair for me to set the record straight Benny, in nineteen thirty it wasn’t you who were the jerk. It was me.”
There are times when a man—a woman too, I suppose—simply does not know what to say. I have learned that in such a situation the most sensible course is to keep your trap shut. I did.
“I see I’ve taken you by surprise,” Hannah said.
“Well,” I said, “I have never before known a girl to confess that she’s a jerk.”
Hannah shrugged. “Maybe it’s because most of the time they’re not,” she said. “The thing about being a girl, especially in the Bronx, which is really what you might call my frame of reference, because after all what do I know about being a girl on, let’s say, the Main Line of Philadelphia?”