by Trevanian
“How much is this going for?” I asked.
“More than you got.”
“You don’t know that, mister. For all you know I could be a rich kid dressed up in old clothes so I can jew you down on the price of your stuff.” On the streets we used the verb ‘to jew’ for ‘to haggle’ without intending any hurt and, in those crusty, insensitive days, without the slightest realization that it could be offensive. But the shopkeeper didn’t rankle at my usage although, like all the shopkeepers in this part of town, his accent and idiom were purest first-generation shtetl, despite his evident facility with language and love of word-play.
“I suppose you could be a rich kid come slumming,” he said. “But then, I could be an eccentric Rothschild amusing myself with a little hobby.”
“Well then...between us rich guys, how much are these used plates and stuff?”
“As a special offer from one very rich person to another, I could let you have that set of one-hundred-percent fine oriental porcelain for...say...five ninety-nine. A steal at twice the price.”
A beautiful tea set for six bucks! I just knew that Mother would love the raised decorations of little flowers and birds that were, although I was not then equipped to recognize it, typical of shoddy/gaudy oriental export ware designed for the barbaric taste of westerners. Then too, my mother never drank tea. Only the Irish drank tea. But this set was so intricate, so colorful, so chock-full of things to look at. I could see Mother, Anne-Marie, Ben and me sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea in little sips so we didn’t empty the delicate cups too fast. Very hoi polloi indeed.
“Six bucks!” I exclaimed with staggered disbelief. “Six bucks for some old crockery? Do I look like I just jumped off a freight train from Hickville?”
“This set of original, one-of-a-kind, top-quality bone china was hand-made to sell at twelve dollars—”
“Twelve dollars?”
“—but a customer broke one of the saucers, and that’s why I’m willing to practically give it away.”
I hadn’t noticed that one of the saucers was missing. I counted and found it was true, and this greatly reduced the appeal of the set for me because Mother would immediately spot what I had not. She had a quick eye for imperfection. But as I started to walk away the shopkeeper told me that I could use one of the small plates as a saucer, which is what they customarily did in the Orient where this set had been made by a family of artisans who had been in the pottery line for five, maybe six hundred generations, some even longer. Who can tell with Orientals? “And look at it this way. With six cups, five saucers, six little plates and a two-piece teapot (including the lid, which you’ve got to have if you want to keep the tea hot), that makes nineteen pieces of genuine top-quality hand-wrought bone china for under six dollars...and what does that come to?
“About thirty cents a piece,” I said.
“A steal! In fact, there ought to be a law to protect me from myself.”
I told him I didn’t have six dollars to spend—
“That must be a big come-down for a rich kid like you.”
—but I would think about it and maybe come back.
“Okay, you think about it, kid. But don’t think too long. There was a man in here just this morning...a collector of rare top-quality bone china...and he was interested. Very, very interested.”
I walked to the door and opened it...then I turned back. “What about four-fifty?”
“You took the trouble to change into old clothes and come all the way down here from your mansion just to rob me?”
“Four-sixty. That’s all I’ve got.”
“That’s not all you got, kid. You also got plenty of chutzpah. But...tell you what. I’ll let it go for five-fifty. Who could ask better?”
“Four ninety-nine...oh, and throw in those stupid little books for good measure.”
“Never!”
“And that tray the dishes are on, too.”
“Are you crazy? That tray is worth fifteen maybe twenty bucks all by itself!”
“All right, forget the tray. Now you’re fifteen maybe twenty bucks ahead. Just put the china in one of those boxes with wood shavings and all, and wrap it in nice paper. It’s a present.”
“You know what you are? You’re a very nasty little kid, that’s what.”
I took off my shoe and unpeeled the five sweat-moist dollar bills from the insole, then I took the seven cents I had in my pocket and placed the tennis-shoe-smelling bills, the buffalo nickel, and the two Lincoln pennies on the top of the glass display case. “There. Five dollars and seven cents. That’s everything I’ve got. My last penny.”
“I couldn’t possibly do it, kid.”
I sighed and picked up the pennies...then the nickel...then one of the dollar bills, which I folded carefully and put back into my pocket...then the next...then the next...then the—
I walked down the street with two packages, the tea set tied up in elegant oriental wrapping paper and the cigar box with its eleven riffle books, my chest effervescent with anticipation of my mother’s delight on Christmas day, when she set eyes on that fancy tea service.
• • • • • • • • •
It was evening of a crisp Sunday in early December, and I was alone in the apartment because Mother, Ben and Anne-Marie had gone downtown to see the display of Christmas decorations in the store windows. I was standing in front of the Emerson, staring at the floor with defocused eyes, totally engrossed in one of my favorite radio programs, The Great Gildersleeve, which was a spin-off from Fibber McGee and Molly. In this episode Gildersleeve and his niece and nephew were in the train station to meet Gildersleeve’s aunt, a stern, overbearing woman. When the nephew, LeRoy, wondered what the aunt was like, Gildersleeve said, “Have you ever seen the battleship Idaho in a bad storm?” “No.” “Well, just wait until she gets off.” The studio audience laughed dutifully. This moment only came back to me later, when the irony of the reference to a battleship became apparent. The punchline of a joke was about to be delivered when an announcer broke in to say:
We interrupt this program for a special bulletin: Tokyo, Monday, December 8.44 Japan went to war against the United States and Great Britain today with air and sea attacks against Hawaii, followed by a formal declaration of hostilities. Japanese Imperial headquarters announced at 6 a.m.—that’s 4 p.m. Sunday, eastern standard time—that a state of war existed among these nations in the western Pacific as of dawn. Shortly afterwards it was announced that naval operations are progressing off Hawaii and that at least one Japanese aircraft carrier is in action against Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in the islands.
We return you now to The Great Gildersleeve.
We rejoined the interrupted program just as the studio audience let out a burst of laughter following a joke that we of the radio audience had missed. I remember thinking there was something ominous in the coincidence of Pearl Harbor and Pearl Street, but while I was considering the baleful implications of this, the announcer broke in again with his urgent, amateurish voice:
We interrupt the program to bring reports on the Panama radio. According to the Panama radio, a Jap aircraft carrier was sunk off Honolulu. I repeat, a Jap aircraft carrier has been sunk off Honolulu according to Panama radio.
We return you now to Hollywood.
This turned out to be untrue. The Japanese suffered no losses in the attack that sunk or damaged most of the major ships of our Pacific fleet, save for the three active aircraft carriers which, by sheer luck, happened to be out on manœuvers. The Great Gildersleeve continued in an eerie, maniacal way because the program had been recorded with a live audience, and broadcast at better listening times for the various time zones; therefore neither the wise-cracking cast nor the laughing audience was aware that reports of cataclysm and catastrophe were being interjected into their innocent exuberance.
During the final a
dvertising pitch from The Great Gildersleeve’s sponsor, Kraft Parkay margarine, it occurred to me that the outbreak of war was sure to produce a big ‘extra!’ edition for newsboys to hawk in the streets.
I grabbed my jacket and ran out of the house and all the way up to the squalid little basement office of my newspaper broker, where half a dozen newsies had already gathered, awaiting the arrival of the ‘extra!’ edition, which in fact was only the regular middle section of the Sunday paper encased in a one-sheet wrapper carrying a bold banner headline—WAR!—and such meager details of the Pearl Harbor attack as were available, together with archival pictures of Hawaii, soldiers, airplanes, and anything else that might be useful filler. The winter evening was closing in when the extras arrived on a truck, and we newsies grabbed as many as we could carry and ran down the Clinton Avenue hill towards the commercial downtown, shouting: Extra! Extra! Japanese Attack Hawaiian Islands! Reeeed aaal-abahdit!
In search of a hot corner to hawk my papers, I headed for downtown where people would be gawking at the Christmas lights and doing some window-shopping, the only kind of shopping you could do on Sunday in those days. Unfortunately, other newsies had the same idea, so there were four of us at the intersection of State and Pearl, one on each corner, stamping our feet to keep out the cold and bawling out: Extra! Extra! Sneak Attack on Hawaiian Islands! Ships Sunk! Reeeed aaal-abahdit! I was in mid-aaal-abahdit when I looked up to see Anne-Marie standing in front of me, her face lit by flashing red and green Christmas lights. She was grinning at my histrionic efforts, and Mother and Ben were in the crowd behind her, he in his new mud-colored suit and without either the Stetson or the fancy cowboy boots, for Mother was ‘civilizing’ him. I gave them a free paper and turned away to continue hawking, trying to out-shout the competition.45
When I got home that night with my sack still half full of unsold extras, I found Mother and Ben sitting before our Emerson, hoping to learn something about the extent of damage and loss of life at Pearl Harbor. Soon running out of fresh information because the government was concealing from the enemy the shocking extent of our losses, and from America their criminal lack of preparation in the face of frequent and clear indications of Japanese intent; the networks repeated the terse scraps they were fed by the Department of the Navy. These were interspersed by patriotic songs and Sousa marches. Ordinary programming was suspended, and this more than anything made the world seem very strange indeed. Ben told me that he had heard on the street that all of Japan’s aircraft carriers had been torpedoed and sent to the bottom while they were trying to enter the Panama Canal on their way to attack New York City. Over the following week, embroidered variants of the wishful-thinking ‘Panama bulletin’ I had first heard during The Great Gildersleeve would percolate through the rumor mill, slowly metamorphosing from hot news of total victory to dire reports of absolute defeat before they finally dried up and blew away, the forgotten ashes of folk hokum.
Anne-Marie was in the back bedroom, muttering to her paper dolls, assuring them there was nothing to worry about, this war wouldn’t last long. Mother forgot all about supper until after ten that night, when she heated up some tomato soup and made grilled cheese sandwiches...not real cheese but Velveeta, that vaguely cheese-like substance that we inflicted on ourselves in those pre-gastronomic days, when Americans still put Miracle Whip on salads and ate desserts constructed from cubes of different-colored Jell-O topped by a squirt of a sweetened petroleum substitute for whipped cream.46 Long after Ben had gone up to his room and Mother to her bedroom where Anne-Marie crawled into bed with her for solace, I sat in the dark, watching the street and worrying about war, and invasion, and death, and what all this would mean for our plans to get out of Pearl Street.
The next day, Monday, Ben went downtown to enlist in the army, but the enlistment offices were packed with men eager to kick Japan’s butt and afraid they wouldn’t get into the scrap before it was over because—well, come on! How long could a bunch of bow-legged, slant-eyed midgets withstand the power of...?47
The line stretched down the street and around the corner, and police went up and down the queue telling men there was no chance of enlisting today, so why not go home and come back later? Ben decided to try again on Tuesday, and this gave him time to consider what might happen if the army discovered that he had deserted from the navy when he was only sixteen. But when he returned to sign up, the recruiting offices were so hungry for bullet-blocking meat that they didn’t look very carefully into a man’s past.
In those early days of the war, the Selective Service System was so overwhelmed by men eager to fight for their country that the system couldn’t immediately absorb them, so after he signed up Ben was told to go home and await orders. These didn’t come until two weeks later, instructing him to take a train for Fort Dix, New Jersey, on January 2 (car and seat numbers given). So Ben passed Christmas with us after all and was a witness to Mother’s reaction to my gift of the ornate tea service.
You might assume that Christmas celebrations were forced and flavorless that year because so many of the block’s men were waiting to be called up, but quite the opposite was true. There was an almost desperate festivity on North Pearl Street that Christmas of 1941, and people were uncommonly solicitous of one another.
Ben appeared at our door on Christmas Eve bearing a lush, soft-bristled tree quite unlike the spindly, prickly runts that were sold on street corners. The tree was freshly cut and still bleeding sap, so we didn’t ask where it came from, but it was so tall that he had to cut several inches off the bottom which, unfortunately, cost the tree some of its lushness and balance, but the ever-resourceful Ben cut branches from the stub and trimmed their ends into points, then he drilled holes here and there in the main trunk and socketed the extra branches in tightly, producing a tree that was the plumpest and fullest we had ever seen.
Ben had been putting a little money aside every week against unexpected emergencies, but he decided to splurge it all on Christmas, assuming that the United States Army would be attending to his needs for the foreseeable future. So our harvest of presents that Christmas was the richest ever. Everyone but me got toiletries of one kind or another. In addition to the ‘Original Hollywood Child-Star Make-Up Kit’ that Anne-Marie had been hinting about for months, she received from Ben something she hadn’t dared even mention because she knew we couldn’t afford them: dancing shoes with ‘jingle taps’ like Miss LaMonte’s: loose taps that made half again as much noise as normal ones. She had those shoes on in a flash and was shuffle-ball-change/ball-change/ball-changing all over the place.
Ben gave me two presents that brought me years of pleasure. The first was his slide rule and a well-thumbed book of logarithms. The second and greater gift was spending all Christmas afternoon teaching me how to use the slide rule. Unlike electronic calculators, a slide rule requires adroit manipulation, predictive thinking, and the ability to conceive of numbers in terms of their multiples, their powers of ten, and their logarithms, and hold these in one’s head while working at the answer. I found it all spellbinding, and for a couple of weeks I felt sure I was destined to become a rich and famous mathematician.
Anne-Marie and I had pooled our Christmas money, as we did every year, to buy Mother a pre-packaged set of her favorite toiletries, Evening in Paris, which was surprisingly affordable considering that it contained half a dozen expensive-looking bottles and boxes in deep blue like our Christmas lights. Mother must have read somewhere that Evening in Paris was ‘common’ (not at all the sort of thing the ritzy hoi polloi would use), but she led us to believe it was her favorite brand because it made a splendid many-packaged gift that was inexpensive yet fun to select and give. I guessed this when I was disposing of her possessions after her death and I found three boxed assortments of blue-bottled Evening in Paris cologne and blue-wrapped soap and blue-boxed bath powder that she had never used, but had saved because they were gifts from her children.
I gave Anne-Ma
rie three presents, two she had asked for and one that was a total surprise. The anticipated two were illustrated biographies of her favorite movie stars, Shirley Temple and Deanna Durban. Each book came with a signed photograph of the star ‘suitable for framing’. She unwrapped her surprise present to find a cigar box. She had done a pretty good job of feigning surprise at the movie-star books, but she frowned with genuine puzzlement as she opened the cigar box and plucked out one of the second-hand riffle books which she held out between her thumb and forefinger like something she would as soon not come into contact with. “What’s this? It’s not me who’s nuts about riffle books. It’s you.”
My eyes widened in astonishment. “Well, I’ll be darned! Maybe you’re right. Maybe Santa sent them to you by mistake. Pass them over.”
“Rat.”
“Pardon me?”
“You heard me.”
Ben surprised Mother with an engagement ring in his birthstone, an opal. She told him with what she believed was admirable frankness that she had never liked opals because they brought bad luck, but Ben said this was true only if you bought them for yourself. Given opals carry no such curse. I could tell that Mother only half believed this, and I was embarrassed by the way she didn’t bother to conceal her disappointment.
Mother, Anne-Marie and I had pooled our ideas and money to buy Ben a genuine imitation leather travel bag with places for men’s toiletries, so he would have them handy in the army. The most fun was filling the travel bag with products that were advertised on the radio: a bar of Ivory soap (‘99.44% pure...It floats!’), a double-edged safety razor (with genuine Gillette blue-blades for a smoother shave, after shave, after shave, after shave!), a small bottle of Brylcreem (‘a liddle-dab’ll-do-ya’), a jar of Mum (‘Even your best friends won’t tell you.’), and a tube of Ipana toothpaste (‘...for the smile of beauty.’).