Authors: Jerome Weidman
“That’s my name,” I said. “Yes.”
“And you’re, you know, you’re a lawyer, Mr. Kramer?”
“Well,” I said. “I’ve been a member of the New York bar for thirty-two years.”
The yellow hair swung aside. The delightful face exploded in the kind of smile I had not seen since that terrible day in Islington Crescent when Benny Kramer had made it, but Hannah Halpern had not.
“Then you must be the real Benny Kramer!”
I couldn’t stand up. Because was on my feet. But I felt I should have done so.
“You’re making this sound like a TV show,” I said. “Do. we know each other?”
“No,” she said. “But I think you knew my grandfather. Ira Bern?”
I took one look at you, that’s all I meant to do, and then my heart stood still.
If Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart will pardon this sliver of piracy.
“Ira Bern,” I said when I recovered. “Of Maurice Saltzman & Company?”
That giggle again. And Benny Kramer’s heart went out the window again. Attention, Dr. Paul Dudley White. Up there in Boston. En garde, please. It’s only a pop fly. A little Texas leaguer. But do get under it, Doc. It’s the only heart Benny Kramer owns.
“Yes,” the girl said. “My name is Annabelle Bern, but my friends, you know, I mean everybody, in school and all over, they call me Nell, which is why I guess, you know, why you got me mixed up with that girl and the king.”
No, that was not the reason. But all at once I understood why kings get mixed up.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You are the granddaughter of the man for whom I used to work on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street in nineteen thirty?”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“But why would you know that?” I said. “I’m just a casual visitor to an office. You must have hundreds of visitors coming in and out to see your people here. And Kramer is not a very unique name. I mean, how did you connect me, Benjamin Kramer, lawyer, with the Benjamin Kramer who used to work for your grandfather forty years ago?”
She laughed again. And again swung away from her face the hawsers of yellow hair.
“Mr. Kramer,” she said. “Do you believe in, you know, in horoscopes?”
If I didn’t blush, the blood suddenly pouring through the veins and capillaries of my face was wasting its time. I felt fiery red.
“Don’t give me away to the top executives of the Anglo-British Television Corporation,” I said. “But I wouldn’t dream of leaving my house in the morning without checking myself out in the New York
Daily News
.”
“What are you?” she said.
A middle-aged, confused, somewhat-at-sea lawyer who was paid fat fees for acting unconfused and firmly-at-the-helm by people who should have known better. But that was a secret. I knew what Annabelle Bern meant
“I’m an Aries,” I said.
“That explains it,” she said.
“Explains what?” I said.
“How I guessed who you were,” Annabelle Bern said, “This morning, when I checked myself out in the
Daily News,
it said, you know, it said keep your eyes open for an unusual meeting today with someone who has played an important role, you know an important role in your past.”
“An important role in your past?” I said. “Miss Bern, I have never seen you before.”
Laugh. Hair sway. Heart wallop. My God, these kids have more going for them than the Atomic Energy Commission.
“That’s true,” she said. “But you’ve been a part of my, you know, part of my life since I was a kid. Grandpa used to tell us stories about you.”
“Me?” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Annabelle Bern said with the sort of smile we would be wise to send to the bargaining tables of stalled treaty negotiators. “Grandpa used to tell, you know, he’d tell about what it was like during the Depression. I mean the office, you know, he’d tell about what it was like on Thirty-fourth Street. Grandpa was very funny about it. A lot of the stories dealt with, you know, with this office boy. Benny Kramer. That’s you, isn’t it?”
I was no longer certain.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s me.”
Or was.
“How you used to, you know, take his shoes down to be shined?”
“Vici kid,” I said.
Another giggle. “That’s right,” Annabelle said. “And he always gave you, you know, Grandpa always gave you a dime for a ruggle and coffee. And how you used to get his hot pastrami sandwiches from, you know, from that place?”
“Lou G. Siegel,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “And how Mr. Saltzman, he had this green piece of leather?”
“It was the hide of a stag,” I said.
“And how Mr. Saltzman made you, you know, he made you polish it every morning?”
“I brought up the lights,” I said.
Not without pride.
“You what?” the girl said.
“Never mind,” I said.
“But the thing that used to kill us,” Annabelle Bern said, “the thing that really broke us up was a story about, you know, the day Grandpa got mixed up about a phone call, and he sent you with a note to this client, and the client he took you to lunch in a, you know, a fancy place called Shane’s on Twenty-third Street and you got smashed.”
“That used to kill you, did it?” I said.
The hair swung. Her face surfaced. She looked upset.
“I’m sorry,” Annabelle said.
“Why?” I said.
“I guess people don’t like to be reminded of things like, you know, things like that,” she said.
I thought of Dean Swift. When he was very old a friend found a first edition of
Gulliver’s Travels
and brought it to the dean as a present. The old man thumbed the pages slowly. Then, in a voice heavy with sadness, he said: “What genius I had then!” Benny Kramer never had genius. But he did have fun. This girl had just made him realize that. I could not believe my luck. So I crowded it.
“Did your grandfather really make it sound funny?”
For a long time the memory of those early years had been troubling me. Getting Mr. Bern’s shoes shined. Running for his hot pastrami sandwiches. Bringing up the lights on Mr. Saltzman’s green stagskin. For months the memories had bothered me. I had wasted the green years. Now I was going into the brown, and I felt terrified by the memory of the waste. Until this moment. When I saw what those years looked like not to Benny Kramer, who had lived them, but to this child to whom those years were a scrap of history. The lens of her youth had, unexpectedly, done for Benny Kramer what I had once done for Maurice Saltzman’s green stagskin. She had brought up the lights. I suddenly saw myself carrying a hot pastrami sandwich from Lou G. Siegel’s delicatessen to Mr. Bern’s office. But I saw it through the eyes of this girl. She was looking back at a legend. All at once so was I. And what I saw was not demeaning. Or depressing. I saw it as she saw it: a piece of time that had been preserved by her grandfather’s recollections. It made me feel young again.
“Please,” I said. “Did your grandfather really make it sound funny?”
She hesitated. “Not with like what you’d call, you know, disrespect,” she said. “It’s just sort of—well, you know, he got a kick out of you. When you were a kid, I mean. Grandpa said you were so—well, you know, so earnest. The way you ran for those hot pastrami sandwiches. The way you polished that piece of green leather. He used to tell these stories about you and, you know, he’d laugh and he’d laugh, and he’d shake his head, and he’d say they don’t make kids like that any more.”
I hesitated for a few moments. Savoring my luck. Trying on once more the mantle of youth. My mother used to say never make your own medals. She was right, of course. So I knew that what I wanted to say was wrong. But I also knew it was true. And I wanted to say it. So I did.
“They don’t,” Benny Kramer said.
The yellow hair swung clear. The delightful face was pinched with puzzlement.
“You must have been—” she started to say.
I nodded.
“I think I was,” I said. “Anyway, I hope so. It was easy in nineteen thirty. There were lots of things to worry about, but there were even more things you didn’t have to worry about. I was lucky. I knew good people when I was a kid.”
Her laugh should have been bottled. Even an inept promoter could have cleaned up with it.
“Jeepers,” she said. “You’re cool. You know?”
Obviously she had not noticed the blood pouring through the capillaries and veins of my face.
“And you’re a very lucky girl,” I said. “If I were not an old crock of fifty-eight, and happily married, and the father of a son your age, I would ask you to marry me.”
“I’m lucky?” she said. “Man, you’re the one that’s lucky. If you asked me to marry you, you know, I’d accept.”
Well, Benny, it’s been quite a day.
Jenny kissed me when we met, jumping from the chair she sat in. Jenny kissed me when we met. Time, you thief, put that in.
He won’t, of course. But all at once it was fun to remind the old bastard that he should.
“You know why I’d do it?” Annabelle Bern said.
“Why?” I said.
Yellow hair swung all the way to the right. Face in the clear. Big impish grin.
“In memory of, you know, Grandpa,” she said.
My gut jumped.
“Memory?” I said.
“He died four years ago,” she said.
As always, when I get this piece of news, I felt stupid. How could I not be prepared? What could be more expected in life than the news of death? How many times have I heard it? And yet—a line from a poem out of my youth, by a girl named Selma Robinson, tunneled through my mind:
I know, and I know, and I keep forgetting.
“I wish—” I started to say.
And then, golden hair hanging in hawsers, probably one third my age, she demonstrated she was smarter than Benny Kramer.
“Don’t wish,” she said. “That kind of wishing, you know, you just pile up trouble. He had a good life, Grandpa did. You were, you know, you were part of it. It’s okay, Mr. Kramer. Honest. It’s okay.”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.”
The hell it was. But she was one third my age. She had plenty of time to learn what Benny Kramer now knew. I shut up.
“You know what’s the matter with you?” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You think you’re like older than you are,” she said.
What she did not know was that Benny Kramer had always thought he was older than he was. At my bar mitzvah I remember feeling I was fourteen.
“And that’s not a good thing,” I said.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “You ought to, you know, you ought to cut it out.”
“Okay,” I said. “For you I’ll do it.”
M
Y FIRST ATTEMPT WAS
a failure.
I was doing my damnedest to feel younger when I came into our apartment late that afternoon. But the first thing I heard was the water thudding down in Elizabeth Ann’s bathroom. At once my mind was hurled back forty years. To the night in the Family Tricino restaurant when I had first met her.
“She always looks as though she’s just taken a shower,” Sebastian Roon had said in 1931.
I suppose it was appropriate to discover that she was taking another one on this day in 1971 when Ira Bern’s granddaughter had, in effect, urged me to forget those intervening forty years.
As I pulled my key from the lock, I paused to listen to the sounds of the shower from Elizabeth Ann’s brand-new bathroom. When it had been an old bathroom I could not hear the water thudding down. All I could hear was a running tap, and I could not hear that until I reached the door of Elizabeth Ann’s bathroom. The old bathroom had been like the rest of the old apartment house: a sight to inspire confidence in a New Yorker, the way St. Paul’s inspires confidence in a Londoner. It had tonnage.
A bathtub the dimensions of which compared favorably with the lake in Central Park. White marble tiling up the walls to the height of a tall man’s eyebrows. Every tile as long and as wide as a building brick. Every tile veined by a network of cracks as delicate as a spider’s web. Every web caused by the same thing that had brought the once white tile to a soft, glowing ivory: age.
Like many old things, however, Elizabeth Ann’s bathroom slowly ground down. The movable parts creaked. The fixtures rolled slowly. The water came forth in chugging rivulets rather than roaring torrents. For Christmas the year before I had given Elizabeth Ann a new bathroom. I had not realized it was a process not unlike giving the navy a new aircraft carrier.
The entire apartment had been reduced to a pocket shipyard. Including a dry dock in which small, dark men who did not speak English mixed the cement they then tramped vigorously into the hall carpets. After the months of hammering were over, and the scaffolding was cleared away, and a split of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge had been smashed across the toilet seat, Elizabeth Ann owned a nest of chromium and glass, with fluorescent lighting and, when the shower was running, a thrumming drumbeat of sound to which the guard at Buckingham Palace could with ease have been changed.
“What did you say?” I yelled as I came into her bedroom.
“I said hurry up and change,” Elizabeth Aim shouted. “Lillian and Seb are coming to dinner.”
“How did that happen?” I bellowed. “You didn’t say anything about it when I left for the office this morning.”
“I didn’t know about it when you left for the office this morning,” Elizabeth Ann roared. “Lillian called about ten for a chat, mainly about how your negotiations are going for Seb’s series. I didn’t know, of course, but like any wife Lillian is understandably interested in how much loot her husband will carry away from ABTV for the project they hope to retire on. So I made reassuring noises, but Lillian said she was not interested in that. She just wanted me to know she and Seb were coming to dinner.”
Even for a close friend as forthright as Lillian, this seemed a little high-handed.
“Well,” I said, “they’re always welcome, of course, but what’s the big push?”
Through the thudding of her shower, Elizabeth Ann said something that sounded completely improbable.
“What did you say?” I shouted.
Elizabeth Ann roared, “Lillian said she and Seb had heard that Jack was flying in tonight from Indiana.”
“He is?” I bellowed.
“He has,” Elizabeth Ann yelled back.