Authors: Jerome Weidman
“Tell me,” I said. “I’m Benny.”
“Well, naturally I didn’t tell Ma and Pa I was traveling with Seb. I made it sound I was going alone. When they came down to the ship to see me off, I made sure Seb was out of sight. And well, anyway, Seb and I got here.”
“Here?” I said.
“Yeah,” Hannah said. This is where his mother and father and brother lived. This is the house Seb was born in. It’s nice, isn’t it?”
I took another look around. At the cramped but neat little living room. At the tiny fireplace. At the framed picture of Churchill and the sampler that warned you in black and yellow and blue wool to keep the poker on the hearth. At the tiny foyer, just outside the living room, on the wall of which a row of pegs was hung with stained mackintoshes—did you ever see an Englishman in a clean raincoat?—and Major Kramer’s dashing trench coat from the Officers’ Commissary on Oxford Street. What I saw gave me a funny little feeling in my chest. It
was
nice.
“It’s delightful,” I said.
Miss Marine? Were you listening? Benny did not say it was great. He did not say it was the cat’s pajamas, or the berries. Benny said it was delightful.
Tm glad you like it, Benny,” Hannah said. “We come from the same place, you and I. If you didn’t like it I’d feel rotten.”
If I hadn’t liked it how did she think I would feel?
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I do like it.”
I not only liked it I suddenly realized I was jealous of her for having it Hannah had achieved something I was still seeking. Sanctuary.
“Seb didn’t,” she said.
“What?” I said.
Hannah shook her head as though she was trying to shake off a persistently buzzing fly.
“The moment we got here,” she said, “I could see he hated it. You know what it was like?”
“What?” I said.
“It was like suppose what I’d told my mother and father was true,” Hannah said. “Suppose I’d really come over here from the Bronx on a job for Maurice Saltzman & Company, and then I had to go home and it was Seb, not me, who said take me along, and I did, and we arrived in that crummy apartment we used to live in on Vyse Avenue. Jesus, Benny, think of it.”
I did.
“You would have hated it,” I said.
“You bet I would,” Hannah said. “And that’s how it was with Seb. I was coming to a new country. Dickens. Shakespeare. Thackeray. All that stuff they taught us at school. Remember ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’?”
“Sure,” I said. “And how about
Gammer Gurton’s Needle?
”
“And
Patient Griselda?
” Hannah said. “All those things. All of a sudden it wasn’t stuff in books that they taught you in school. All of a sudden it was real. It was here. Islington Crescent. I was so excited there were times I couldn’t breathe. No kidding. I just couldn’t catch my breath, it was so wonderful. But to Seb? Benny, poor Seb, he was coming back to the Bronx. That’s what this place meant to him. His Bronx. He felt awful. All he wanted was to get back.”
“To our Bronx,” I said.
Hannah scowled at the teapot. “Now, isn’t that funny?” she said. “I never thought of it that way, but of course that was it. To you and me the Bronx was the Bronx, but to Seb it was, I don’t know, like in school, America was to those explorers, John Cabot and that Frenchman La Salle and oh, you know.”
I did. I knew. Boy, did Benny Kramer know.
“A new world,” I said.
Hannah nodded. “And that’s what Blackpool has been to me,” she said. “A new world.” Then she did something that it still hurts to remember. She put her hand to her heart and said, “I love it, Benny. I love it so much I could die for it.”
What I said next was not particularly brilliant, but it took me a couple of moments to get the words arranged in proper sequence.
“You don’t have to do that, Hannah,” I said.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I’m like Winston. I mean I know what he means. To save this little hunk of Islington Crescent I will fight on the beaches, I will fight on the landing fields, I will never surrender—!”
“Hannah,” I said, “take it easy.”
“You’re right, Benny,” she said. “I am making a horse’s ass out of myself.”
“You couldn’t do that,” I said, “if you were entered in a contest”
Think of that one. In fact, you may have it. Courtesy of Major Benjamin Kramer, U.S. Army, formerly of Tiffany Street
“Jesus,” Hannah said, and she turned on me the sort of look that you get only from the top of the Washington Monument. “Jesus,” Hannah said again. “Why didn’t I wait for you?”
“Because Seb came along,” I said.
Hannah shook her head. “Not really,” she said. “He came along, and he brought me over here, but then he couldn’t stand it. And one day he just took off.”
“Leaving you here alone?” I said.
Hannah laughed. “Not exactly,” she said. “There was his mum and his dad, nice people both. And there was—”
A noise out in the foyer drew her attention. I turned to follow her glance. A key was scraping in the lock of the front door. It opened. Sebastian Roon came in. Except that it was not Sebastian Roon. It was a man who looked exactly like him. Hannah leaped up.
“Eustace!” she said. “We’ve got a visitor from the Stytes!”
I wondered if my ear was playing tricks. Had Hannah said Stytes?
“Evening, love,” said Eustace.
He came limping into the room, and that explained why he was not really Sebastian Roon, even though he looked exactly like Seb. Eustace wore a shoe with a seven-inch heel.
“This is Benny Kramer,” Hannah said. “You’ve heard me talk of him. We were kids in the Bronx together.”
It was not until Eustace snapped a salute at me that I realized he was wearing the rough woolen khaki and the broad slashing V-stripe of a corporal in the British Army.
“Glad to meet you, sir,” he said. “Hannah has indeed talked a grite deal about you. A pleasure, sir.”
We shook hands.
“Eustace, love,” Hannah said, “will you ave a cup of tay?”
“That’s why oy came ome, love.”
He limped to a chair facing me while Hannah fussed with the teapot. His resemblance to Seb was so startling that I could not stop myself from making the obvious remark.
“You look like Seb’s twin,” I said.
Eustace laughed. The same, easy, engaging laugh that had helped make his brother one of the most famous actors on the English-speaking stage. But there was a hard core at the bottom of the laugh. A sort of grating metallic sound. It surfaced again when Eustace spoke.
“Why not?” he said. “Since that’s what oyam? His bloody twin brother oyam. The only difference between us is that oym the one who got the polio.”
“Ere, love,” Hannah said. He took the teacup. “It’s on account of is leg that Eustace is in the typists’ pool up at the arsenal. Ee runs the mimeograph machine.”
“It eyn’t like piloting a Spitfire,” Eustace said. “But Oy daresay it’s as much against Itler as playing a eero in the cinema.”
So that’s the way it is, I remember thinking. And that’s the last thought I do remember. No. Not quite. I remember that the sound of the planes had taken on a new note. Nothing loud or disturbing. Except that it reminded me of something very odd. The way Mr. Lebenbaum, in whose candy store I used to work after school on East Fourth Street when I was a boy, used to get the trash ready for the garbage wagon.
Most of the stuff was cardboard boxes. Cracker Jack cartons. Tootsie Roll containers. Mary Jane boxes. Dry stuff. Not sloppy, but it took up space. And Abe Lebenbaum was a neat man. So the day before the garbage man came, he would go out into the room back of the candy store and crush these boxes and cartons into manageable shape. He seemed to enjoy the process. I can still see him jumping up and down on a big fat Tootsie Roll carton, reducing it gleefully to a thin pack of cardboard. And I can still hear the curious crunch crunch crunch the cardboard made as Abe Lebenbaum jumped on the boxes.
It was this sound, this curiously satisfying crunch crunch crunch, that I had been hearing, without knowing I was hearing it, all during my brief meeting with Eustace Rubin in the tiny living room of his house in Islington Crescent. I learned later that this is the sound made by sticks of bombs as they are laid down by aircraft. I had never heard this sound during the raids I had lived through in London.
“Now, now, Eustace.” Hannah said. “No woman ever had a better husband, and Oym appy to be your wife. The truth is Oy never was appy until Oy met you, and it’s—”
She probably said more. I don’t remember. I don’t even remember which one of us screamed. It could have been me. All I remember is the clarity with which I was hearing the noise Abe Lebenbaum made when he used to jump up and down on those Cracker Jack cartons, and then that stopped, too.
I
T SOUNDED FUNNY, MORE
than a quarter of a century later, to be hearing that crunching sound again. In the thickly carpeted corridors of the ABTV Building on Madison Avenue. On my way to the meeting I had arranged with Jim Mennen’s legal department to work out the terms of Sebastian Roon’s TV deal.
It seemed funny to hear that sound again, but it was even funnier to realize the meaningless noise was reassuring. I suddenly felt like the hero of one of those old Warner Bros. movies that were supposed to be the biographical accounts of the lives of noted composers. The plot always turned on the composer’s endless quest for the true meaning of his work. I had spent half a century, the script said, combing the world desperately for the magic note that would unify my oeuvre. And suddenly I had stumbled into it in the Dry Cereals aisle at the A&P.
Crunch, crunch, crunch: Abe Lebenbaum on Avenue D in 1927 stamping the candy-store empties into manageable shape for the garbage truck. Crunch, crunch, crunch: a Stuka coming in over the North Sea in 1942, laying a stick of bombs to the front door in Blackpool of a girl with whom I had once eaten Gabilla’s knishes in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street. Crunch, crunch, crunch: something making the same noise in the corridors of the ABTV Building in 1971 as I made my way to the room in which I planned to work out the financial arrangements that would ensure the end of Sebastian Roon’s forty-year exile.
“May I help you, sir?”
“Yes, you may,” I said to the girl at the reception desk. “What is the noise I’ve been hearing ever since I got out of the elevator?”
She cocked her head to one side. This caused her long, yellow, unfastened hair, parted in the middle, to sway all the way over. Like a couple of frayed hawsers whiplashing across the deck of a tug in response to a sudden thrust at the rudder from the wheelhouse. I realized all at once why this hair style was so popular. It had mystery.
Until the girl moved her head she was just a body encased in yellow fringe through which she squinted myopically to see if the traffic light had changed. Then the hair swung aside, and you saw she had breasts, and you saw she was pretty, and you saw... Maybe at fifty-eight you shouldn’t, but you do.
“Oh, that,” the girl said. “That’s the Coca-Cola man filling the Coke machine. Out back, behind that door.”
She nodded again. Her hair swayed again. She reminded me of Hannah, swinging her head away from the Islington Crescent tea tray in 1942 to listen for the throb of the bombers coming in across Liverpool.
“Why does filling a Coke machine cause that kind of sound?” I said.
“Well, you see, sir,” the girl said, “they bring the cans up in cartons, and after they fill the machine they jump up and down on the empty cartons to crush them so they’ll take less room in the freight elevator going down. It’s only a few minutes, but while it lasts it does sound unpleasant.”
Not if you had been introduced to the sound by Abe Lebenbaum in 1927.
“It also sounds as though everybody is going to get their Coke ration today,” I said. “My name is Kramer. Benjamin Kramer. I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Mr. Mennen.”
It was as though I had announced that this visit was not to be confused with my First Coming. She snapped up her phone, punched a button, and parted her hair to stare out at me. She did it the way I had always been led to believe Keats had stared at the printed page when he first looked into Chapman’s
Homer.
I was flattered but not fooled. I do not look like Lou Telegan. But neither am I a dead ringer for Lon Chaney. I look the way my experience as a trial lawyer has taught me it is advisable for a successful bank robber to look. A face that does not register on those tricky movie cameras that turn on overhead in the bank at the moment when the gun is pointed at the teller. The kind of face, if seen in a passing crowd, nobody will remember. So it was obvious that this pretty girl was staring at me with awe not because of what she was seeing but because of the man I had come to see.
In forty years I have been in and out of enough offices to have encountered almost every degree of employee deference for executives. This was the first time I had ever encountered what looked like reverence. It occurred to me that perhaps I had made a mistake to base my opinion of TV solely on what I saw on my set.
“Mrs. Hawtrey?” the yellow-haired beauty said into her phone. “This is Nell.”
Miss Gwyn, no doubt.
“It’s a visitor, Mrs. Hawtrey. He says he has an eleven o’clock appointment with Mr. Mennen. A Mr. Kramer? Benjamin Kramer?” She looked at me as though for confirmation. I nodded. “Yes, that’s right, Mrs. Hawtrey. Mr. Benjamin Kramer. He—” Pause. A look of perplexity. “Yes, of course, Mrs. Hawtrey.” She hung up slowly. “Mrs. Hawtrey is coming right out, sir.”
She arrived so quickly that my mind jumped to what Sebastian Roon had said to me when he asked me to represent
him
with ABTV on the day we were having a drink in Will’s an hour after I had been mugged in front of Penn Station: “Jim Mennen says he wants this series desperately.”
Except for the speed with which she had come out to fetch me, you would never have known from her face that Mrs. Hawtrey shared this desperation. It was the sort of face that seemed to belong between a bowler and a riding habit on the cover of the London
Illustrated News.
Those faces did not register desperation. Or even age. Mrs. Hawtrey could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. If you have a thing for ice, you would have liked her.