What's in It for Me?

by Jerome Weidman

  “There’s George Olsen,” I said suddenly, looking over their heads. “The band leader.”

  “Where?” asked Teddy. He turned and craned to get a good look. “I don’t see—?”

  “Over by that post, passing the woman in the red dress. See?” I touched Martha’s foot with my shoe and she looked at me. I nodded toward the door and she nodded back. “The guy with the blond hair and the sort of pink healthy face?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Teddy said. “I see him now. Nice-looking guy, no?”

  “Damn nice,” I said. “Some day, I get the chance, I’ll introduce you to him.”

  “You know him?” Teddy asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said carelessly. “We’ve met.”

  Martha picked up her purse and began to wiggle out of her chair. Even a thing like that she had to do like she was playing advance man for a traveling boff joint.

  “Will you gentlemen excuse me?” she said. “I’ve got to run out and call the theatre. To see if my understudy is taking my part tonight or not.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But don’t be long, though.”

  “I won’t,” she said, and swept off across the restaurant, gathering hungry looks as she went like a piano gathers dust.

  Teddy turned back when she disappeared through the door and shook his head admiringly.

  “What a kid!” he said. “Christ, Harry. I don’t know. If you ever fell into a toilet, you’d come up with a box lunch. You got more luck than any four guys I ever met.”

  “I’m not so lucky,” I said with a sour look. “You think you can support a dame like that with buttons? Don’t worry, boy, you gotta have plenty of ink in the fountain pen. And plenty of checks to spread it on, too.”

  He grinned at me.

  “I suppose so,” he said. “But goddam it, I’ll bet it’s worth it. Hah?”

  “It’s not bad,” I admitted. “Say, let me ask you, Teddy. You—”

  He turned back to the doorway through which she had disappeared.

  “Where’d she go?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Who the hell knows. Drop a tear, probably, I guess. But she’s gotta act like a lady about it, you know, so she says she’s gonna make a phone call.” He wasn’t listening to me. From his face it was plain that he could have been arrested for some of the things he was thinking. “Teddy!”

  He looked up at me with a start.

  “Yeah! What’s—?”

  “I want to talk to you something about those velvets of yours,” I said. “Didn’t get much chance to say a hell of a lot on the street today because I was in a kind of a hurry. But I wanted to tell you how I wanna buy them.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “What are they, Teddy, twelve-seventy-fives?”

  “Uh-huh. My regular stuff. I make a one-piece garment and these—”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll tell you, Teddy. You made them up for twelve-seventy-five, it’s true, and I guess if you could’ve gotten that much for them you would’ve taken it four months ago. But now they’re—”

  “Listen, Harry,” he said sharply. “My stuff is twelve-seventy-five and that’s what I sell it for to everybody. I’m not jobbing out any of my goods at lower prices just because the damn market is slow a little and I can’t move the stuff as quickly as—”

  “Who the hell said anything about letting it go for less or jobbing it?” I demanded.

  He scowled at me.

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I’m willing to pay you twelve-seventy-five apiece for them,” I said. “But in exchange for that I want you to do me a little favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to bill them out to my clients for fifteen-seventy-five,” I said calmly.

  His little V-shaped face hung somewhere between anger and amazement.

  “My God,” he said finally, “that’s—!”

  “Never mind guessing what it is, Teddy,” I said, “I’ll tell you what it is. You have to move those velvets pretty badly and you have to move them pretty quick. You’d be damn lucky if you could get eight or ten bucks a piece for them now, the way the market is. But I’m willing to give you your regular. price, twelve-seventy-five. I’m doing that because we’re old friends and because I expect a favor in return.”

  He shook his head in disgust.

  “Jesus Christ, Bogen, I bet you’d sell the whites out of your own mother’s eyes for two bits!”

  I grinned quickly.

  “Eight per cent discount off for cash, Teddy.”

  He smiled in spite of himself.

  “But this,” he began, it’s—!”

  Across his head I could see Martha making her way toward the table.

  “Don’t be such a jerk about this,” I said sharply. “If your conscience is giving you any trouble, just think of the trouble the commission houses’ll give you when they see your statement at the end of the year.”

  “Hell, Harry—”

  He stopped. Now that she was almost at the table and the whole room was looking at her, he couldn’t help seeing her himself.

  “What’d you say, Teddy?” I asked.

  “I said I’d see,” he said as she reached the table. He jumped up and pulled out the chair for her and then slid it back gently as she sat down. Where the hell he’d learned that since I’d seen him last was a mystery to me. “We were beginning to wonder what happened to you, Miss Mills,” he said with a smile.

  “Really?” she quipped brilliantly.

  Now it was his turn to say something witty.

  “You bet,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder and also to worry.”

  “I’m afraid you’re as big a flatterer as Harry is, Mr. Ast,” she said.

  “Harry going around flattering people?” he asked in surprise.

  “Oh, but you ought to hear him, Mr. Ast,” she said with a trilling little laugh. “He says some of the most extravagant things.”

  I got up quickly and the way I scraped my chair doing it, there was very little danger of confusing me with Walter Raleigh.

  “It’s my turn to do things by the telephone company,” I said. “Excuse me, will you? I’ve got to call my mother. She hasn’t been feeling so well lately, and I—”

  Martha looked up at me sweetly.

  “Give her my regards, will you, Harry?” she said. “And tell her I’m terribly sorry she’s—”

  “Don’t worry,” I said acidly. “I’ll know what to say.”

  I walked out and went down to the men’s room. I washed my hands carefully and combed my hair and lit a cigarette. When it was burned halfway down I tossed it into the urinal and went upstairs again. They were bent over the table, talking and laughing like a couple of high school kids telling each other what they did over the summer vacation.

  “Listen, folks,” I said very seriously. They looked up at once. “I’m afraid I’ll have to pull out of here in a hurry. My—”

  “Why, what’s the matter, Harry?” Teddy asked.

  I shook my head.

  “She’s not feeling so well,” I said. “In fact, she’s pretty sick. I’ll have to rush right up to the Bronx now. I’ll be sleeping over there all night.”

  “Gee, that’s too bad,” Teddy said.

  It would be, if it were true.

  “Would you do me a favor, Teddy,” I said, “and take Martha to the theatre for me or take her home, whichever she wants?”

  “Sure,” he said quickly. “I’ll be glad to, Harry.”

  “Thanks, Teddy.” I turned to Martha. “Hope you don’t mind, Martha, but this is a—”

  “Of course not,” she said. “I understand, Harry.”

  “Well, so long,” I said.

  “So long,” they said. “Hope she feels all right.”

  The deep interest in their voices was overwhelming.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  As I left the restaurant and walked to the corner I was going over a lis
t of the fairly good but inexpensive hotels in my mind. Finally, I stopped in a drugstore. I called the New Bedford and spoke to the desk.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’d like to reserve a single room with a shower for tonight. I’ll be over within an hour. Will you hold one for me?”

  “Just a moment, please.” Pause. “Yes, sir. We’ll hold it for you. What name, please?”

  “Bogen,” I said. “Harry Bogen.”

  “A, n, or e, n, sir?”

  “E, n,” I said.

  “All right, sir, we’ll have it for you.”

  “Be there in an hour,” I said, and hung up.

  I took a taxi to the Montevideo and as I walked into the lobby I almost dropped dead. Seated in one of the swanky and uncomfortable chairs that clutter up the place and that nobody ever uses, was my mother.

  5.

  I STOPPED SHORT INSIDE the revolving door and blinked a little. But there was no mistaking the pleasant face with the creases in it, the gray-streaked hair, or the way she sat.

  “Mr. Bogen!” Charlie called to me from the desk. “Your—”

  “Okay, okay,” I snapped at him. “Never mind.” She turned as soon as she heard my voice and her lips puckered into her faintly sarcastic smile. I hurried up to the chair she was sitting in and kissed her.

  “Hello, Ma,” I said over her shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she released me and when I looked at her the faint smile was setting back into place.

  “I came down to take a look at you,” she said promptly. “So long you’re not charging admission for that yet, and so long I’m still your mother, I thought I’d come take a look. Like to go to a show with a pass, not a regular ticket. You know?”

  “I don’t mean that, Ma,” I said.

  “I mean what—?”

  “I wanted to see how far it was from Honeywell Avenue in the Bronx to Central Park West,” she said. “How long it took to ride, whether it was such a long hard trip that you couldn’t make it even once in three months without getting, God forbid, sick from it. It’s a very easy trip, Hershie,” she said calmly. “I’m not even tired, even with my bad feet.”

  I bit my lip and spoke in a low voice.

  “I been very busy, Ma. I been—”

  “I know,” she said. “You’re always very busy. By you to be busy, it’s like by another person, you should excuse me, to go in toilet. You’re busy regular, Hershie.”

  I grinned weakly.

  “That still doesn’t tell me why you came down here so late at night and—”

  She let that little maneuver bounce right off.

  “Never mind with the questions,” she said. “It’s my turn to ask questions. By me, you know, I ask questions, I want answers. I called you up yesterday, no? Why didn’t you call me back?”

  “I didn’t get the—”

  I stopped because I could tell from the way her eyes furrowed that that was out, too. She acknowledged the retreat with a smile.

  “A better reason you’ll have to find,” she said. “I stopped by the desk, there, when I came in. The boy said he gave you the message.”

  The boy was going to get a poke in the snout one of these days if he didn’t stop saying things at the wrong time.

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say, Ma. I was about to say I didn’t get a chance to call back. I was busy winding things up downtown all day because I was figuring on coming up to the Bronx tonight and surprise you.”

  She smiled more broadly and nodded.

  “That’s why you come running in here quick like there was a fire in your behind.”

  I shook my head emphatically.

  “It’s the truth, though,” I said. “This is once when you’re wrong, Ma. What I was rushing in like this for, I was just going upstairs to get me a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush to take up with me so I could sleep over.”

  She didn’t believe a word of it, but she wasn’t tossing away any made-to-order openings like that.

  “What’s the matter with the pajamas and the toothbrushes you got doing nothing in the Bronx?” she demanded. “For when you are saving them, for when?”

  “Come on, Ma,” I said. “Enough of this bellyaching. Next stop Bronx.”

  She held back slightly and looked surprised.

  “All the way downtown I came and you’re not even going to take me upstairs?” she said. “For my trip I don’t even get a chance to look at that fancy high-class heaven of yours.”

  “Four walls and a floor you can look at some other time,” I said. “Right now we’re going to the Bronx. You’re so anxious to get me there, so now I’m not gonna waste a minute.”

  I didn’t have enough things to explain to her; all I needed was to take on the additional job of explaining lingerie draped all over my bedroom and silk stockings drying in my bathroom.

  “So come on,” she said, getting up. “I just wanna see if to look on Honeywell Avenue is for you poison, if it’ll maybe, God forbid, kill you or something.”

  Maybe it wouldn’t kill me, but it wouldn’t add anything to the pleasure of my day, either.

  “Just give me one second, Ma. While I make a call.” I stepped over to the desk and spoke to Charlie. “Give me a wire in the booth.” He nodded and I stepped in and called the New Bedford. “Hello, desk?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Bogen. I—”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I reserved a room about a half hour ago for tonight and—”

  “Just a moment, please.” Pause. “Mr. Harry Bogen?”

  “That’s right. I—”

  “Yes, Mr. Bogen?”

  “Well, cancel it please. My plans are changed. I’m not coming over.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  I stepped out of the booth and took her arm.

  “Let’s go, Ma.”

  She looked at me curiously as we stood on the curb and I hailed a cab, but she didn’t speak even after we got inside and I had given the driver the address.

  I lit a cigarette and as I inhaled the first puff I realized why that tasted so lousy. She hadn’t commented on my smoking too much. In the past I had resented it. Now I missed it. I threw the cigarette out the window and amused myself for the rest of the trip by twisting my gloves.

  “The middle of the block,” I said to the driver finally. “Stop over on the right side, a little ahead of the lamppost.”

  I helped her out and paid the driver. Then I stood on the sidewalk for a moment and looked up at the house curiously.

  “Not like Central Park West, hah?” she said at my elbow. I laughed quickly.

  “Aah, now, Ma, don’t kid me about that. I just do that for business, that’s all.”

  “You do a lot of things for business,” she said quietly.

  “Listen, Ma,” I said, “don’t start that stuff about—”

  But she wasn’t listening. I followed her and took the key from her hand. I opened the door and let her go in first. She went into the bedroom to leave her hat and coat and the fur collar and I paraded through the flat for a minute. After the Montevideo, this felt like a set of pill boxes with slightly worn edges that were going to give at any moment. I fingered a few of the pieces I had bought and sent up recently, but even with all the new stuff, it was still a dive. You wouldn’t think, to see me in bed with Martha Mills or pushing around Seventh Avenue financiers like chessmen on a board, that I’d come from a dump like this. It was only a half hour by taxi, but measured by other standards it was quite a distance. It was a lifetime.

  “What are you laughing at?” she asked behind me. “On Central Park West they keep a house cleaner?”

  I dropped my hat and coat on the sofa in the living room and followed her into the kitchen.

  “No, Ma,” I said. “I was just thinking that after I get myself set well again, which shouldn’t take long, when the real money starts coming in, I’d like to take you out of the Bronx and—”

/>   “You don’t have to bother, Hershie,” she said. “For me the Bronx is good enough. I know where I belong.”

  “I was only making a suggestion,” I said. “I didn’t say you have to do it. I’m not hitting you over the head and dragging you out of here. It’s up to you.”

  “Thanks,” she said dryly.

  “Say!” I began, “What the—?”

  She came up from behind the door of the icebox with a dish in her hand.

  “You want me to make you something eat?” she asked.

  I looked at her and she met my glance. We remained like that for a long moment, until my eyes dropped first.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I ate downtown. But well, all right. I could eat something at that, Ma.”

  If she wanted to cook, let her cook. Maybe she wouldn’t talk so much.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  I shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t care, Ma. Anything you make. It’ll be okay.”

  “Anything at all?” she asked. “You don’t want anything special?”

  “Nah,” I said, waving my hand. “It doesn’t matter, Ma. You can make me whatever you—” Then I stopped. That made the second kick in the belly that night. “Sure,” I said, grinning quickly. “You know what I want, Ma. I want some—”

  “I’ll make them for you,” she said.

  I tried to make up for my stupidity.

  “That’ll be swell, Ma,” I said enthusiastically. “I tell you the truth, I haven’t had any since—”

  “I’ll make them for you,” she repeated. “Stop standing around like a policeman and sit down a little.”

  She busied herself at the gas range and I sat down at the table. Then the bell rang.

  “I’ll go see who it is, Ma.”

  She pushed me back into my chair.

  “Stay better where you are, on your behind, and keep your brains warm. Somebody should see a stranger like you open the door, they’re liable to think you’re a murderer or a crook or something and they’ll run call the police.”

  “I just didn’t want you to walk so much,” I said.

  “Once in three months to go open the door for me,” she shot back, “that’s some vacation for my feet, hah?”

  She disappeared into the foyer and I took a drink of water from the sink. A few moments later she was back, closely followed by the fat woman from upstairs with the worn shoes and the Clarence Darrow for a son. She got a little flustered when she saw me, which gave me an opportunity to recover my impeccable drawing-room manner.