What's in It for Me?

by Jerome Weidman

  “Hello, there Mrs. Herman,” I said. “How are you?”

  She looked all ready to begin telling me, too, but she was interrupted.

  “You’re a lucky woman tonight,” mother said as she went back to work at the gas range. “My son remembers your name.”

  Nobody laughed, but Mrs. Herman looked a little frightened. I could understand it, too. The atmosphere of friendliness in the room wasn’t exactly overwhelming.

  “Hello, Mr. Bogen,” she said. Then she looked over mother’s shoulder. “Pancakes you’re making, Mrs. Bogen?”

  Mother nodded.

  “My Hershie is crazy for them. A whole day he can’t think of anything else. He can’t get them out of his head. He goes around for weeks like a wild one, with his tongue hanging out, waiting for them.”

  I wasn’t worried by her sarcasm. I was worried by the fact that I had actually stepped into the house without having my mouth begin to water for them.

  “But so late to make pancakes?” Mrs. Herman protested. “It’s after nine o’clock already!”

  No wonder her son was a lawyer.

  “There used to be a time when I made pancakes at the regular time,” mother said acidly, “the way other people make them. The way regular people with regular families make them. But now, of course, now I got such a big shot for a son, you know, I gotta make them when I catch him, and then I gotta consider myself lucky yet in the bargain.”

  She could go on like that for hours. Without any visible signs of strain, either. I turned to Mrs. Herman politely.

  “How’s Murray doing?” I asked.

  She beamed on me at once. I had asked the right question.

  “Oh, fine, Mr. Bogen! He’s—”

  “You can call him Harry,” mother added without turning.

  Mrs. Herman didn’t take the hint. Any guy wearing clothes like mine was a mister to her. Automatically.

  “Just fine, Mr. Bogen,” she said. Her fat face quivered with pride and happiness. “He’s—”

  “He in practice for himself yet?”

  She looked horrified.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “Not yet. That takes plenty of money, Mr. Bogen, you know that.”

  Or plenty of brains. I had done it. Why couldn’t he?

  “I guess it does,” I said. “What’s he doing, clerking for somebody?”

  “Clerking?” she said indignantly. “Murray finished his clerkship, I don’t know, must be a good two years already! He’s a regular lawyer now. Mr. Bogen! You know what he’s doing?”

  I knew what he should have been doing if he had any sense, but I didn’t have to tell her that.

  “What?” I asked.

  “His boss, Mr. Lefferts, he got appointed not long ago, a few months, to the District Attorney’s office. State? Federal, I think. Anyway, you know, the special lawyers downtown there, by the government. I don’t know exactly what. My Murray, he told me already a dozen times, but my head, you know, for those things! Anyway, Mr. Lefferts, he was so busy, he didn’t have time to do the work. So he let my Murray do it and he did it so good, honest, Mr. Bogen, so good that now the District Attorney, he heard about it, so he said maybe, if there’s an opening, he’s gonna give Murray the appointment in his office. Because Murray did the work so well. Isn’t that wonderful, Mr. Bogen?”

  “It sure is, Mrs. Herman,” I said. “Tell him I wish him a lot of luck, will you?”

  “Thanks, Mr. Bogen.” The way she said it you’d think my wishes were a guarantee of the appointment.

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Herman,” mother said. “You don’t have to be bashful. You can—”

  “No,” she said hastily, “I think I’ll—Well, good-night.”

  Her fat face bobbed up and down and she was gone. Mother broke the silence first.

  “She’s a lucky woman, that woman.”

  “It all depends on how you figure luck,” I said sharply.

  “And how do you figure luck, my smart Hershie?” she asked calmly.

  “I figure it by what you can take down to the bank and deposit,” I said. “I notice she’s still wearing the same pair of shoes I saw on her when I saw her last. What’s the matter, that brilliant son of hers still hasn’t been able to get together enough dough to get her a new pair of shoes?”

  “What you got in your head and your heart, Hershie, isn’t changed by whether you wear good shoes or torn shoes.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe I’m not on any crime committee and I got expensive paintings on my walls instead of law school diplomas, but at least I notice when you come down to see me, Ma, you wear a silver fox collar, and not torn shoes.”

  “I got the fur collar,” she said quietly, “but she doesn’t have to go downtown to see her son. Her son comes home every night to see her.”

  “Aah, hell, Ma, don’t let those things get—”

  “Hershie,” she said suddenly, squinting her eyes at me curiously. “Don’t you ever get lonely?”

  I scowled at her.

  “Lonely? What do you mean lonely?”

  Imagine being in bed with Martha Mills and considering yourself lonely!

  “I mean,” she said, “how about friends? You have friends? People you can—”

  “Of course I have friends. What do you think I am, a criminal or something? I’ve got plenty of friends. I got so many friends, I don’t even remember them all. Why, you know who I met last week, Ma?”

  “Who?”

  “Walter Winchell. I was in a night club with Mar—well, with some friends of mine, and he was there. Somebody brought him over the table and introduced us. He stuck around and talked with me for over twenty minutes. More than that I think. Maybe a half hour even. He’s a great guy, that Walter Winchell.”

  “Who’s Walter Winchell?”

  I stared at her in amazement.

  “You don’t know who—?” I began. “Say, you mean to tell me you never heard of—Ma,” I said, “you must be kidding me.”

  “He’s your friend?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah, sure, in a way, I guess. After all, I, met him.”

  “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean to who do you talk?”

  I scratched my head and then shook it.

  “Talk?” I said, “What do you mean, talk?”

  “Suppose you got a headache, you don’t feel so good, you got a cold maybe, somebody did you something wrong, anything, you want somebody to talk to. What do you do, Hershie?”

  “I don’t talk much,” I said. “They don’t give you any interest at the bank for your choice of words, Ma. And anyway, when I wanna have a real good gab fest, hell, I can always call you up. You can still bend a mean ear, Ma.”

  I grinned at her tentatively, but she wasn’t cooperating.

  “All the talking you and I we did the last few weeks,” she said, “you carry it in one ear and it wouldn’t even tickle. Now if I want to talk to you I have to go downtown to kidnap you from under the noses of those tramps of yours.”

  She’d never met Martha, but the description was fairly accurate.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “that’s because I’m up to my neck in plans right now. But about this business of friends. I don’t know. The kind of friends you mean, Ma, they’re like an anchor around your neck.”

  “There’ll come a time, Hershie, when you’ll need someone.”

  “What are you doing,” I demanded angrily, “wishing things on me.”

  “You’d know that there comes a time in every person’s life, I don’t care who or how smart or what, when he needs friends, when he needs someone he can turn to and—”

  “If he gets to that point,” I said, “then he couldn’t have been so smart to start with.”

  She shrugged and changed the subject.

  “Maybe we better just talk about other things, Hershie.”

  “You’re doing plenty of talking,” I said.

  I jumped up angrily. There’s a limit to what any guy can take, even from his own mother.<
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  “Look here, Ma,” I snapped. “You trying to tell me I’m not welcome here?”

  She shrugged and smiled. It was the sort of smile you see at funerals.

  “Not welcome?” she said. “What kind not welcome? It’s your house, not mine. You paid for everything. The things in it that were mine, the old things, even my clothes and my dishes, you threw them all out a year ago and put in fancy new ones.” She raised her hands a little to take in the house. “Now it’s all yours,” she said.

  For a moment I couldn’t move. I could only look at her. For a single moment, for the first time that night, I saw her clearly and it was all back, the way it had been in the beginning. Then it snapped and she began to shift out of focus again, with the distance climbing between us, and it was so far and so long that I couldn’t stand it.

  “Ma!” I cried suddenly. “Ma, I—I”

  I couldn’t say it. She moved forward at the same time. Then she was in my arms and I was crying. I held her like that for a long time, shaking a little and not thinking of anything, until I could control my voice again.

  “Ma,” I began, “I’m—”

  “Don’t talk Hershie,” she said softly. “It’s all right. I understand.” She stroked the back of my head until I felt the tenseness go out of my arms. “Come, Hershie,” she said finally, in her quiet voice. “Come, I’ll make the bed for you.”

  6.

  I WOKE UP FEELING A lot like a man who rushes desperately to make a train but misses it, and then, hours later, picks up a paper and reads that it had been wrecked and everybody on it has been killed.

  Out in the kitchen I could hear mother humming softly as she prepared breakfast.

  “Hello, Mom,” I said as I came into the kitchen. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “You’ll see when it’s finished,” she said. “How was it to sleep?”

  “Fine. No kidding, I didn’t even turn over once, I’ll bet. You sleep good, Ma?”

  She smiled quickly.

  “Very good.” She looked ten years younger than she had looked the night before. “The Bronx isn’t so fancy. But it’s quiet. At night, I mean.”

  From the way my nostrils were twitching, it had other advantages, too.

  “What is that stuff, Ma? It smells like—”

  “Sit down and see,” she said, as she placed a smoking plate on the table.

  I took one look and let out a yelp.

  “Bacon and scrambled eggs! With fried onions!”

  “Stop hollering and eat while it’s hot,” she said, beaming. “The neighbors’ll think I’m choking you instead of feeding you.”

  I had enough sense to keep quiet until I finished the first helping.

  “You know, Ma,” I began, “I had—”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  I swallowed quickly and watched her refill the plate.

  “You know, Ma, I’ve tried ordering this stuff in every damn restaurant in town. And you know what it tastes like when you get it?”

  “What do they know in restaurants?” she said contemptuously. “All they know is to charge prices.”

  I laughed as she set the second helping before me and I attacked it more leisurely.

  I took out my bill clip and slipped a twenty out from under the gold cross bar.

  I held, the bill out to her, but she pushed my hand away.

  “Don’t be a dope, Hershie. I didn’t mean anything. I have enough to—”

  That’s just what I intended to stop being, a dope.

  “You’re not going to have enough from now on, Ma,” I said quietly. “From now on I’m starting to come home regularly.”

  “But Hershie, honest, I have enough what you give me now to—”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I want you to have more than enough.”

  I’d been neglecting the wrong people.

  “Only if you promise to come and eat what I make with it,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, Ma. I’ll eat it.”

  “I’m not worrying. I’m waiting for a promise.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  She took the bill and put it into her small black purse. Then she bent down and kissed me quickly. “What should I make you tonight?” she asked.

  “It’s up to you,” I said, getting up. “You make it. I eat it.”

  She smiled at me. That was another thing I’d been missing. It was the only really friendly smile anyone ever turned on me. I didn’t feel like I was being charged for it. I could just stand there and let it warm me all over without feeling that it was going to cost me money.

  “From now on,” she said, “let’s only do what’s right.” It was right for me to get back to something I had almost cut myself off from, but that didn’t mean I had to go burying myself up to the neck in the Bronx again.

  “Then good-by, Mom,” I said, kissing her. “See you tonight.” She held me for a moment in the doorway. It was something to know that there was one person in the world who thought of you and worried about you for yourself alone, good or bad, and not for what you could do in the way of footing bills.

  “Good-by, Hershie,” she said finally. “Remember tonight.”

  “I’ll remember, Mom.”

  In the street, before turning the corner into 180th Street on my way to the subway, I remembered another thing. I turned back and looked toward the house. She was leaning out of the window, resting her elbows on the small pillow. I waved at her. She smiled and threw me a kiss and waved back. I felt at home again.

  Going down to the office in the subway was no bargain, but the pushing and shoving of the crowd helped sober me up a little. By the time I got out at Thirty-fourth Street I had picked up all the loose ends where I had dropped them the night before, and I was ready for action again. “Morning, Miss Vinegard,” I said as I came in. She looked up hastily, and I could see she was sore at herself. I had caught her unawares. “Good morning, Mr. Bogen,” she said.

  She made a quick stab at the smile, but of course, it was too involved a process to be done in haste.

  When the last census was taken, there were eight resident buyers sharing desk space in that one large room in the Nelson Tower. They also shared Miss Vinegard. Or rather, they shared her services as stenographer and switchboard operator. But I had met the type before and it was my suspicion that she was dying to be appreciated for her extra-curricular talents. She was in a spot, though, because resident buyers are like lawyers: they marry young and stay that way. For Miss Vinegard it was like getting on a ski train and landing in Miami. She had all the equipment and she was willing as hell, but there just wasn’t any snow. I can only imagine how black her thoughts were when Pepper sold me his list of clients and his three square feet of desk space, but forty-eight hours after my handsome and officially unattached squash took the place of his in that office, Miss Vinegard blossomed out like a peeled banana. She changed the shade of her lipstick, and the style of her haircomb; she switched to another counter in the five and ten for her perfume; she started to wear uplifts that made it almost dangerous to get too close to her, and she memorized the sound of my step coming down the hall so that when I opened the office door in the morning she had a special smile all ready just for me. I could tell from the pattern that she worked her face and teeth into that this smile was no small thing for her, but I’m a pretty cool customer, with both feet on the ground, so I didn’t let it go to my head. But as soon as I found out what it meant to have eight chiselers fighting and conniving to dictate letters to one stenographer at the same time, and, worse than that, when I found out what Miss Vinegard could do to a telephone message if she didn’t like you, I decided to make the most of my advantage over the other palookas.

  When I got out of the elevator in the morning I usually went banging down the corridor like Tom Mix wearing two pairs of spurs so that she couldn’t possibly miss me and would have plenty of time to wind herself up into the fancy smile. But this morning. I had so many things on my mind that
I forgot all about my place in Miss Vinegard’s heart. I came down the hall quietly, so that when I opened the door Miss Vinegard was caught unprepared and she didn’t get a chance to smile at me that morning. She just looked at me. That was no bargain, either.

  “Anything special for me, Miss Vinegard?” I asked.

  “No calls, Mr. Bogen,” she said. “But I arranged your mail on your desk for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Bogen,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  I stepped over to my desk and started to go through my mail. The correspondence I put in a tray. The orders I slipped into my leather notebook.

  Then I got out the phone book and shuffled through the pages until I found the real estate office I was looking for. I called out the number to Miss Vinegard and picked up the phone.

  “Hello,” I said. “This the Irving Baltuch Associates?”

  “Yes, sir,” a girl’s voice said.

  “Connect me with somebody that can give me some information, will you?”

  “Just a moment, sir.”

  “Hello?”

  A man’s voice.

  “Hello,” I said. “Listen, I’d like to get some information about—”

  “Yes, sir!” the voice said cheerfully

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “I’m not buying yet. I’m just asking questions. We got that straight?”

  “Of course, sir. That’s what we’re here for, just to answer questions.”

  I laughed.

  “How do you pay the rent?” I asked. “In questions?”

  “Well, we manage, sir. We answer enough questions and sooner or later one or two people like our answers so much, they buy.”

  “All right,” I said. “But I’m just asking.”

  “Ask away, sir. By the way, whom am I talking to?”

  “A possible customer.”

  Another chuckle.

  “I mean, sir, what name?”

  “That comes later,” I said. “First the information.”