Authors: Jerome Weidman
“Mr. Bern, please listen. I’ll pay up next month, honest I will, but first will you handle this tax audit for me, my nineteen twenty-nine return, they say I owe them over—”
“Beat it!” Mr. Bern said. He shoved Mr. Shimnitz out the door. “And don’t come back without a check!” Mr. Bern shouted into the corridor.
He pulled the door shut, went to his desk, and fell into the leather chair with a small, weary sigh of defeat. Miss Bienstock watched him with her usual expression, but I sensed she was frightened. Perhaps I felt this because I was frightened. It was a time when large issues were settled by small things. I didn’t know how lucrative a client Mr. Roon was, but it was possible that if Maurice Saltzman & Company lost his monthly payment, the staff would have to be reduced. And who was more reducible than the newest and youngest employee?
I was reminded of the gas mantles we used for illumination down on East Fourth Street. They were small balls of white material more fragile than eggshells. If you touched them with nothing but flame they would ignite and glow serviceably for months, sometimes longer. But if your hand shook when you applied the match, so that the ball of white was tapped or even brushed, it disintegrated at once into a puff of fine powder. The ambience in Mr. Bern’s office at that moment was, I thought, not dissimilar.
“All right,” he said in a low voice. “Get Mr. Roon back on the phone, and I’ll see what I can do to apologize and maybe make him believe I thought I was talking to somebody else.”
Miss Bienstock seemed to hesitate. Then she stepped around the desk, bent down, and whispered something in Mr. Bern’s ear. My heart lurched. I thought I had heard my name. Mr. Bern’s glance came up. His eyes told me I had indeed heard my name. Mr. Bern’s eyes narrowed. He nodded.
“Good thinking,” he said to Miss Bienstock.
She straightened up. Now they both were staring at me. I might have been a gobbler in a pen of turkeys into which a husband and wife were staring, trying to decide which one to choose for their Thanksgiving table.
“Benny,” Mr. Bern said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I want you to do something.”
“Yes, sir?”
Mr. Bern was writing in longhand on one of the firm’s letterheads. I knew at once something unusual was in the wind. Mr. Bern enjoyed the process of dictating. I had the feeling he felt it was one of the appurtenances of success. There was, however, one office activity that Mr. Bern insisted on performing in longhand: sending out the monthly bills to the firm’s clients. It seemed odd, because the fees were fixed and the list of clients was neatly indexed in a loose-leaf notebook on Miss Bienstock’s desk. All she had to do was run the bills through her typewriter, and Mr. Bern would have been spared an onerous chore. Except that I don’t think he found it onerous. I think he found in it what I imagine I would have found: a small, repeated ritual, in the very discomfort of performing which was contained the repeated reminder that for him the world had changed.
East Fifth Street boys, like Fourth Street boys, spent their early lives on the receiving end of bills. Or rather their parents did. From the landlord, from the gas company, from the coal merchant. What a secret thrill it must have been to Ira Bern to be reminded that now he was on the sending end!
I think it was the pleasure he took in this reminder that had dictated the choice of the instrument he used. It was a memorable tool.
By 1930 the fountain pen had already become a fairly sophisticated implement available to almost everybody. Even I owned a slender salmon-colored Parker, my father’s bar mitzvah present, with at the top a plunger for filling. Mr. Bern, however, used what even in 1930 must have been a museum piece. A very old Waterman, as long and as thick around as a banana. To fill it he needed help, which it was one of my duties to provide.
While I held the pen upright on his desk, writing end toward ceiling, Mr. Bern would unscrew the section that contained the gold penpoint. What remained was an enormous black tube or barrel. Into this he would empty an entire bottle of Waterman’s blue-black, and screw the point back into place. When filled, this implement was not much lighter in weight than a sculptor’s chisel. Yet on the first of every month Mr. Bern, happily hunched over his desk, would shove this writing tool back and forth for three or four hours at a time without pausing for rest.
To see him pushing this huge pen now, in the middle of the month, across one of his letterheads was an event so unusual that it jolted me.
“Now, Benny,” Mr. Bern said. “Here’s what I want you to do.” He signed his name with a flourish, pulled an envelope from his drawer, and carefully lettered a name and address on the envelope. “I want you to take this over to Mr. Roon’s office right away and give it to him personally. Personally, you hear?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Mr. Bern lifted the envelope flap and licked it wet. Then he sealed it down with broad, totally unnecessary sweeps of both palms across his desk blotter. It was as though the more energy he poured into sealing his handwritten letter the more confidence he gained in what the contents could do for him.
“You know where Mr. Roon’s office is?” Mr. Bern asked.
I didn’t. I had never been there. But I knew how to read an address, and Mr. Bern had inscribed this one on the envelope in letters half an inch high.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Mr. Bern handed me the envelope. “Remember what I told you,” he said. “To Mr. Roon in person. Anybody in the office, a bookkeeper or somebody, they say give it to me, I’ll see he gets it, nothing doing. You want to deliver this to Mr. Roon personally. He’s out? You’ll wait. He’s in a meeting? You’ll wait until the meeting is over. To Mr. Roon in person only. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Then Mr. Bern did a surprising thing. He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket, slid out a dollar bill, and placed it on top of the envelope in my hand.
“Take a taxi,” he said.
A man who was capable of giving his office boy a dime every morning so the boy could enjoy a cuppa cawfee and a ruggle while he watched his boss’s shoes being shined, obviously possessed at least some generous instincts. But I was fairly certain none of these instincts was involved in Mr. Bern’s astonishing gesture on that morning of the Shimnitz-Roon confusion. In 1930 generosity to office boys stopped at a dime.
The address was on West 21st Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues. A mere fifteen blocks. On nights when I could get out of the office early enough to save the nickel fare, I walked almost twice that distance to my classes in the 23rd Street branch of C.C.N.Y. I knew I could almost certainly walk from the offices of M.S.&Co. to the Roon office in a quarter of an hour. But I knew something else: the contents of the letter Mr. Bern had entrusted to my care.
Though I had not read the words, I knew the emotion out of which they had come. It was evident from the whispering Miss Bienstock had done in Mr. Bern’s ear immediately following his request that she get Mr. Roon on the phone. The letter was obviously a substitute for the spoken apology Mr. Bern had planned. Perhaps Miss Bienstock always looked perplexed because she was constantly struggling inside her head to invent improvements on Mr. Bern’s moves.
They were, on the whole, good moves. Good enough, at any rate, to keep M.S.&Co. afloat in a time of many sinkings. But Mr. Bern was erratic. From a man like Mr. Bern a personal note was bound to be more effective than a phone call. Not only would it indicate an honest regret for a boorish mistake without the distraction of a boorish voice. It would also keep Mr. Bern off the phone, where he sometimes forgot whether he was cajoling or threatening.
Unlike Mr. Bern’s morning dime, however, which represented an attempt to bring a few moments of pleasure into the bleak life of an underling, his dollar represented a dilemma of distressing dimensions for that same underling.
If I took a taxi and got to Mr. Roon with Mr. Bern’s letter in the next few minutes, the Roon account might be saved for M.S.&Co. If I walked, and pocketed the dollar, the letter might come into Mr. Roon’s hands too late. His anger might be building up right now to explosive proportions. Written apologies would be too late. Maurice Saltzman & Company would lose the Roon account. And I, of course, as the firm’s newest and youngest employee, would be the first to be fired. My first lesson in irony.
At that time I don’t remember getting many. Which is why I remember this one.
That dollar was killing me.
Before it did, I was saved. By something out of my past. At that time I didn’t have much past. But for this moral dilemma I had just enough.
“Hey, Benny!”
I looked up. Struggling with my moral dilemma, I had not realized I had come down from the M.S.&Co. office into the street. I saw now that the flow of Seventh Avenue traffic had stopped for a red light at the 34th Street corner. Most of the traffic on Seventh Avenue, then as now, consisted of huge garment-center trucks. They were hearselike affairs, not unlike the vans in which horses are transported from race track to race track. On the front seat of the truck that had stopped practically at my feet sat Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. He had been in my scout troop down on East Fourth Street. Troop 244, of which I had been senior patrol leader. I had not seen him since the graduation exercises at Thomas Jefferson High.
“How you been?” he said.
“Pretty good,” I said. “You?”
“Fine. How’s your mother?”
The driver leaned across Hot Cakes. “You two mind stopping this class reunion? That light’s gonna change.”
“Where you going?” Hot Cakes said.
“Downtown,” I said.
He opened the door of the truck and slid his rear end over toward the driver. “Hop in,” he said.
I hopped in and pulled the door shut. The light changed. The driver put the truck into gear and we rolled off down Seventh Avenue.
“Whereabouts downtown?”
“Twenty-first and Seventh,” I said.
“This is your lucky day, kid,” the driver said. “We’re taking this load to Ohrbach’s on Fourteenth. Okay if we drop you at the corner of Twenty-first and Seventh?”
“That will be fine,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
Then Hot Cakes and I seemed to become aware of each other. He was wearing a pair of battered khaki pants, a torn and sweaty T-shirt, a pair of scuffed sneakers, and he smelled like the locker room in Thomas Jefferson High after a basketball game. I was wearing my graduation suit and shoes, my mother’s beautifully laundered shirt, a tie that had been given to me for my bar mitzvah by my Aunt Sarah from New Haven, and I was certain I smelled better than Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. It would have been difficult to smell worse.
“You look like you’re doing pretty good,” Hot Cakes said.
“Not bad,” I said. “It looks better than it is only because it’s clean. A firm of certified public accountants. How about you?”
“I’m with Built-in Uplift Frocks, Inc.,” Hot Cakes said. “It’s actually not as bad as it looks because it looks so dirty. Right, Al?”
Al was dressed exactly as Hot Cakes was dressed, but Al was older, in his forties, I guessed, and he had not shaved for several days.
“It stinks,” he said. “But these days what doesn’t?”
“You still down on Fourth?” Hot Cakes said.
“No,” I said. “We moved to the Bronx three months ago.”
“Us, too,” Hot Cakes said. “Just a coupla weeks ago. Where you?”
“Tiffany Street,” I said.
“Jesus,” Hot Cakes said with a grin. “We’re just around the corner. Fox Street.”
“Okay, Tiffany,” the driver said as he pulled the truck up to the curb at 21st Street. “Here’s your stop.”
“Maybe we could get together?” Hot Cakes said.
We had never been close friends. In fact, I knew very little about him except that he had been very good at wigwagging one-flag Morse code. But we had come from the same country, so to speak, and now we had rediscovered each other in an alien land. Previous friendship was unnecessary. From now on only death could us part.
“I’d like that,” I said.
I opened the truck door and jumped down to the sidewalk. Hot Cakes moved over to the window and pulled the door shut. Al started the truck.
“Where can I reach you?” Hot Cakes called.
I replied with a phrase I’d learned from listening to Mr. Bern. It packed weight.
“I’m in the phone book,” I called back.
The track disappeared into the flow of downtown traffic. I turned west. Walking up 21st Street toward Mr. Roon’s address, I was in the grip of two emotions. I felt virtuous, and I felt clever. I felt virtuous because I had arrived at Mr. Roon’s address as rapidly as a taxi could have carried me. I felt clever because I had made a dollar on the deal. In the lobby I forgot my feelings.
It did not look much different from the lobbies of the other loft buildings in which Maurice Saltzman & Company clients functioned, and yet it seemed totally different. The difference puzzled me. I looked around the brown marble walls, but learned nothing. I walked over to the directory, found on the black felt the little white metal letters that spelled out
I. G. ROON, LTD.
1201, and pushed the elevator button. As the car came rumbling down the shaft, I found myself sniffing. For what? The car arrived. As soon as I stepped in, and the operator slammed the door, I knew what was different about this building. It was the smell.
All the other loft buildings I knew, most of them on Seventh Avenue, had very distinctive odors. Not necessarily unpleasant. In fact, as you moved up the avenue from 34th Street (dresses) to 37th (frocks) toward Times Square (gowns), in the buildings around 39th Street, where the more expensive gowns were manufactured, the smell was not unlike that of the perfume shop in Macy’s. The models were higher priced. The things with which they sprayed themselves came from distant countries. The Roon building was totally different. This building smelled clean.
“Twelve, please,” I said.
The door marked
I. G. ROON, LTD.
1201 was at the end of a long brown marble corridor. Except for being obviously very old, the door looked like any other office door. What I found behind it did not. The room into which I stepped could have served as the model for the Phiz drawing of the office in which the brothers Cheeryble functioned in
Nicholas Nickleby.