“That’s right,” Mr. Bern said slowly. Then, a bit more quickly. “Sure that’s right.” His expression shifted frantically from horror to nervously troubled scrambling for a rope ladder, so to speak, out of disaster. “It was just a mistake,” Ira Bern said. “I would never talk that way to Mr. Roon.”
I wouldn’t have thought so. Mr. Roon was the president of I.G. Roon, Ltd. The most important client on the Maurice Saltzman & Company list. Most important in those days meant, as I suppose in these days it still does, most lucrative. Mr. Roon, or his Ltd., was in the rabbit business.
Mr. Roon had been born in Adelaide, Australia. Of how he spent his life between 1865, when all my research indicates he surfaced, and 1930, when he came into my life, I am totally ignorant. All I know is that in 1930, while I was just beginning my tour of duty with Maurice Saltzman & Company, Mr. Roon was sixty-five years old, he was the central figure in a British corporation with offices on West 21st Street in New York City, and he or his corporation owned rabbit farms in Australia. These farms supplied a good deal of the raw material for the hat factories of Danbury, Connecticut.
I had never as a boy thought much about hats. The kids I grew up with on East Fourth Street never wore hats except when we went to cheder, or Hebrew school, and to the synagogue on Saturdays. On these occasions we wore what were then known as caps. I think they still are. I see them regularly in newspaper photographs, looking not much different, on the heads of world-famous golfers playing at the Royal and Ancient in St. Andrews. Loose round affairs, somewhat like flat cabbages on top, with peaks in front presumably to shield the player’s eyes from the sun. Nobody played golf on East Fourth Street, and there was very little sun, but that’s what we wore to cheder and synagogue.
Hats were different. Hats were homburgs and fedoras and snap brims. Things I saw only rarely. Grooms wore them to their weddings. Or relatives to funerals. But in my youth on East Fourth Street I had attended very few weddings, and fewer funerals. Life, as I lumbered through my first two decades of it, had not yet struck an elegiac note. I was surprised, therefore, to discover when I came to work for M.S. & Co. that many men wore hats regularly, that the material from which hats were made was rabbit fur, and that one of the leading suppliers of rabbit fur to the hat manufacturers of Danbury, Connecticut, was I.G. Roon, Ltd. Our client.
Indeed, our best client. With Mr. Roon it was never necessary for Ira Bern to play either of his two highly dramatic roles on the telephone. Mr. Roon always paid his auditing bills promptly.
“Sure it was a mistake,” Mr. Bern said desperately, as though he were pleading for forgiveness. “I would never talk like that to Mr. Roon. Would I, Miss Bienstock?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Then it’s got to be a mistake,” Ira Bern said. His expression changed. A look of accusation invaded his rubbery face. “Miss Bienstock,” Ira Bern said sternly, “how could I make such a mistake?”
If you stand still long enough, life catches up with you. If your face is fixed permanently in the same expression, moments will inevitably arrive when you could not have worn a more perfectly appropriate expression. This was such a moment. Miss Bienstock’s moment.
“I don’t know,” she said. Even her voice sounded perplexed. “The phone rang, and a man’s voice said he wanted to talk to you, and it sounded like Mr. Shimnitz, so I put him through.”
“You mean you didn’t ask him what his name was?” Mr. Bern said. The stern expression vanished. Disbelief, like the tides of Fundy, came racing in. “You mean without knowing who you were putting on my wire you told me it was Mr. Shimnitz calling?”
“I thought it was Mr. Shimnitz,” Miss Bienstock said. “I talk to him all the time. It certainly sounded like Mr. Shimnitz.”
“It sounded like Mr. Shimnitz?”
A new expression on Mr. Bern’s face. Not quite incredulity. Not quite astonishment. A shading of both.
“Miss Bienstock,” he said. “To you Mr. Roon sounded like Mr. Shimnitz?” He strode to the door, hauled it open, and bellowed: “Mr. Shimnitz, come on in here!”
Mr. Bern’s office door was perhaps four feet from the reception room. His roaring voice came bouncing back from the walls of that tiny chamber like a basketball snapped back into play. Mr. Shimnitz came hurtling with it. Mr. Bern stepped back. Mr. Shimnitz, looking somewhat confused, stood among us.
“Say a few words,” Mr. Bern ordered.
Like all chronic debtors, Mr. Shimnitz had only two speeds on his gearbox: the bluff and the cringe. He swung his head to look at everybody in the room, as though reading our faces could help him decide which switch to throw. Since I was as confused as he was, Mr. Shimnitz could see at once that I was a total loss to him, and Miss Bienstock’s expression of permanent perplexity was no road out of his dilemma. The only possible guide was Mr. Bern, and Mr. Bern was glaring. Mr. Shimnitz chose the cringe.
“A few words about what?” he said.
“What the hell do I care about what?” Mr. Bern thundered. “Just say a few words!”
Mr. Shimnitz scratched his head. It was bald. I could hear his fingernails rasping across the naked scalp.
“Good morning?” he said tentatively.
“Jesus Christ!” Mr. Bern shrieked. “Is that the best you can do?”
Mr. Shimnitz stepped back, as though he expected to be punished physically. I would not have been surprised if he had been.
“I don’t understand what you want,” he said.
“Who gives a damn what you understand or don’t understand?” Mr. Bern said. “I’m not asking you to pay your lousy past due bills. I’m asking you to do something it won’t cost you a nickel. Just say a few words.”
Miss Bienstock leaned over and whispered in Mr. Bern’s ear. He nodded and turned back to Mr. Shimnitz.
“Tell us why you came here today.”
Having opted for the cringe, Mr. Shimnitz could not reverse himself. He looked around the room the way, in silent movies, the innocent country girl who has been kidnapped by a white slave ring looks around at the captors who have just ordered her to disrobe.
“I would like to tell you that in private, Mr. Bern, please.”
“For a guy who is five months behind in his bills,” Ira Bern said, “this is as much privacy as you’re going to get. Speak up. Why did you come here today?”
“Well, uh, I’m afraid I won’t be able to pay this month’s bill either, Mr. Bern, but please don’t cut me off because I got this letter from the Internal Revenue on my nineteen twenty-nine return, and I need your help to deal with them, and I promise, I honest to God promise, next month, honest, I’ll clear up the whole bill, honest I will, if you’ll just—”
Mr. Bern cut into the flow of words that weren’t really words, but a sort of open faucet of tearless tears, with a sharp question directed at Miss Bienstock.
“This sounds to you like Mr. Roon?”
“I don’t know,” Miss Bienstock said. “I never heard Mr. Roon speak.”
Ira Bern blinked at her. “You never heard Mr. Roon speak?” he said.
“No, sir,” Miss Bienstock said. “He’s never been here in the office, and I never had occasion to speak to him on the phone.”
It was a perfectly sensible answer, I thought, but I felt there was something odd about it. If I had made it, the oddity would not have struck me. After all, I had been working for M.S.&Co. for only a few months. There were many of the firm’s clients I had never seen, and almost none to whom I had talked on the phone. But Miss Bienstock had been Ira Bern’s secretary for almost five years. In addition to her other duties, she took her turn at the switchboard when the regular operator went to lunch or to the washroom or was out sick. Was it really possible that she had never heard on the phone the voice of the firm’s most lucrative client?
“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—”
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?”
Last Respects Page 38