Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

But it had to be. Hot Cakes was the only person who had ever asked how he could get in touch with me. Only yesterday, when I had jumped down from the Built-in Uplift Frocks truck at 21st and Seventh, I had yelled after him: “I’m in the phone book!” Who else would know such a thing?

  “I say, are you there?”

  Then I caught the British accent

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s Mr. Roon.”

  “No,” he said. “Sebastian.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He laughed. “Wrong again. Mister Roon and sir are hardly what one calls a chap with whom one’s been sozzled at high noon. Try Seb.”

  “Seb?”

  “Why not?” he said. “All my friends call me Seb.”

  How many did he have? And if I called him Seb, would he now have one more?

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Try it.”

  “Seb,” I said.

  It sounded wrong. I had spent my life in a world where people were called Benny and Hot Cakes and Ira. Seb? It sounded like one of those games that came in cardboard boxes with decks of cards and small celluloid counters of various colors which you pushed around on a marked board.

  Sebastian Roon laughed again. “There, you see? Not difficult, really, is it?”

  Up through my confusion came a distressing thought. Was I dealing with a type that would almost certainly have been identified at Thomas Jefferson High School as a wise guy? I hoped not. I had liked young Mr. Roon. Roon? That, too, sounded odd.

  “What can I do for you?” I said.

  It didn’t sound very friendly, but I had noticed it was the way Mr. Bern started a great many of his telephone conversations.

  “Nothing, really,” Mr. Roon said. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d give you a tinkle.”

  The statement made just about as much sense as if he had said he was heading toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and it had occurred to him to check the directions with someone he knew who lived along the way. Happened to be in the neighborhood meant happening to be in the Bronx, and nobody “happened” to be in the Bronx. You got there the way Lewis and Clark got to Oregon. By setting out deliberately, as you would set out on an expedition, with a specific destination in mind. I couldn’t believe a young Englishman who was in a position to invite guests to lunch at Shane’s on West 23rd Street “just happened” to be in the neighborhood of our apartment house in the Bronx.

  “Well, uh, hello,” I said.

  “Are you all right?” Roon said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Good,” he said. “Delighted to hear it. One couldn’t help wondering, you know. And feeling guilty. I mean to say, when I left you in Mr. Bern’s office yesterday, you did look a bit on the bleak side.”

  He laughed. My face grew hot.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry about that. But I’m okay now. I really am.”

  There was a pause. I had the feeling I had missed something.

  “Look here,” Roon said “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  I looked across the narrow hall into the kitchen. Our telephone sat on a small table near the front half of the hall. It was tiny. A sort of cupboard just inside the front door. My mother was laying out her “turning” on the table near the stove. On Saturdays and Sundays I came home directly from my chores in the Maurice Saltzman & Company offices. On Saturdays I did not even expect a meal from my mother. I came home about six or six-thirty, gave my mother the salary envelope Mr. Bern had given me, and started cleaning up for my weekly meeting with Hannah Halpern.

  This started at her home, which I reached by walking north across to 180th Street for perhaps half a mile, and then east for four blocks to Vyse Avenue. It was not much of a journey and, with the visions of sugarplums that danced in my head as I walked, it was scarcely noticeable.

  In subsequent years, indeed even today, I have on occasion wondered if my mother had any notion of those sugarplums.

  In 1930 the age of sexual permissiveness had not yet really surfaced. True, there was D. H. Lawrence. Every literate kid at Thomas Jefferson had waited his turn at George Weitz’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And Chink Alberg had charged a nickel a shot at his older brother’s copy of Krafft-Ebing. But these were literary experiences. The real stuff was hearsay. For Benny Kramer, anyway. Until we moved up to the Bronx. Then my mother introduced me to the Halperns.

  It was an eye-opener. They were an eye-opener? Well, one member of the family was. Hannah.

  I have wondered many times since it happened if my mother had done something casually innocent, or sensibly and calculatedly sophisticated. On East Fourth Street she had never introduced me to anybody. The people I knew were the people I met on my own. In school. On the docks. At the Hannah H. Lichtenstein Settlement House. Here on Tiffany Street, one day my mother told me she thought I ought to meet the Halperns. Who were the Halperns? They were a nice family. Used to live around the corner from us on Lewis Street, a little to the right of the Fourth Street corner, between Mr. Raffti’s barbershop and Mr. Slutsky the glazier. Mr. Halpern was a pocket maker in the shop upstairs over Papa’s factory on Allen Street. They had moved to the Bronx shortly before we did.

  On one of my mother’s Saturday night trips to Mr. Lebenbaum’s store for her weekly allotment of “turning,” she accompanied me as far as Vyse Avenue. She introduced me to the Halpern family, and then went off on her errand. Mrs. Halpern offered me an apple, which I politely refused, then a piece of honey cake, which I have never been able to refuse, and then she suggested that maybe Hannah and I might like to go out to Bronx Park for a walk. We did.

  Wow!

  It had been wow every Saturday night now for months, and it was wow to which I had been looking forward on this particular Saturday night, when I found myself at the other end of the phone from this character named Sebastian Roon.

  “No, no, you’re not interrupting,” I said. “By the way, I never thanked you for lunch yesterday.”

  “Why should you?” said Roon. “Since you never really had it.”

  “Well, it was nice of you to invite me,” I said. Then, because Hannah’s sugarplums were beginning to move from a dance in my head to a rather uncontrolled mazurka, I said: “Well, it was nice talking to you.”

  “Look here, old chap,” Roon said, “as long as I’m in the neighborhood I wondered if I might pop in for a moment?”

  Leaving aside Hannah and her sugar plums, the vocabulary was all wrong. On East Fourth Street people had never popped in. Nor had they done so during our few brief months on Tiffany Street

  “Sure, but—”

  I got no further. The phone went dead. I hung up slowly.

  “Who was that?” my mother said.

  I stared at her for a long moment, then realized why. “Mr. Reibeisen,” I said.

  “Nachman?” my mother said.

  “No,” I said. “Sebastian.”

  “What?”

  It was a “What?” from the heart, and who could blame her? Not someone who heard her pronouncing the two dissimilar names in Yiddish. It is a language in which Latin verbs can be made to rhyme with the names of Tel Aviv taxi drivers.

  “The man whose number started with a Susquehanna, went on to a two, proceeded to a seven, and then seemed to stop dead.”

  “See?” my mother said. “I told you. Nachman Reibeisen.”

  “No,” I said. “Sebastian Roon.”

  “That’s a name?” my mother said.

  “He says it is,” I said.

  “Who is he?” my mother said.

  I explained the relationship of I. G. Roon, Ltd., to Maurice Saltzman & Company.

  “And he’s coming here?” my mother said.

  “He said he’s in the neighborhood,” I said. “Mr. Roon just said on the phone—”

  There was a knock on the door. My mother and I stared at each other.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s a small neighborhood.”

  She was
not joking. Geographically Tiffany Street was larger than East Fourth Street But emotionally, well—I had not figured it out yet. I went to the door and opened it.

  “Hello, there,” Sebastian Roon said.

  “Hello,” I said. “Come in.” He did, and I said, “This is my mother.”

  “How very nice to meet you,” Roon said, bowing over her hand. I stared. Not because he looked like Lewis Stone bowing over the hand of Barbara LaMarr in The Prisoner of Zenda, but because my mother accepted the gesture with as much casual grace as it was offered.

  “Likewise,” my mother said.

  It was one of her few English words.

  “That was rather quick, wasn’t it?” Roon said. He must have seen the look on my face. He laughed. “I actually rang you from a booth in the chemist’s round the corner.”

  The chemist’s? All at once I could see the biology and chemistry lab in Thomas Jefferson High, complete with high stone-topped tables and Bunsen burners.

  “Ask him he should sit down,” my mother said.

  I wondered where. A visitor was an unusual experience. My mother and father and I spent most of our time at home in the kitchen. The kitchen table, however, was covered with my mother’s “turning.” My father, who lived in a wheelchair, was in the bedroom. Since the accident that had made him an invalid he did not like to be seen by strangers. He spent most of his time in the bedroom, reading “A Bintel Brief” and “Yenta Telabenda” by B. Kovner in the Jewish Daily Forward. He enjoyed the former because it made him ponder, and the latter because it made him laugh.

  “I do seem to be interrupting,” Roon said. “I’m awfully sorry. I think I’d better be going. It was very nice to meet you, Mrs. Kramer.”

  “What did he say?” my mother said.

  “He said it was very nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Twice he said it,” my mother said. “Bring him in the front room. I’ll get some honey cake.”

  “No, no, Mrs. Kramer,” Roon said. “Please don’t bother.”

  I gave him a quick look. My mother, as usual, had spoken in Yiddish.

  “Bother?” my mother said. “Since when is honey cake a bother?”

  And she left the hall. I nudged Roon’s elbow and we followed her into the kitchen. My mother went to the large blue plate covered with a damp dishtowel under which she kept her honey cake. I went with Sebastian Roon toward the door that led to the front room. He was, after all, a guest

  I realized, in a moment of revelation, that since we had moved up to the Bronx we had not had any. The moment was unexpected, yes, and then unexpectedly unwelcome. I felt a stab of panic for what we had left behind. We had moved up in the world. Yes. But we had also moved out of it. Out of the part we had known. I was flooded by a sudden sense of loss. Then I heard Sebastian Roon’s voice.

  “I think you’ll do better, Mrs. Kramer, if you snip the squares apart with a pair of scissors. It prevents the thread from clotting.”

  My mother stopped lifting the damp dishcloth from the honey cake and waited. The way she always waited when anything but the simplest statements in English—Yes. No. Go. Why? Who? Where? How much?—were made in her presence. She waited for a translation.

  I was usually equal to the occasion. The English spoken in my mother’s presence on Tiffany Street was not, as it had not been on East Fourth Street, very complicated. So far as I was concerned, however, Sebastian Roon might have just uttered a quotation from the Koran in the original Arabic.

  He laughed at what I assumed was the expression on my face. Who could blame him? Not I. Slack-jawed, pop-eyed, open-mouthed confusion is not really an expression. It is a look. The look of a dim-witted fool, and that’s precisely how I felt at the moment. Roon laughed again.

  “Here, note if you will,” he said. He stepped to the kitchen table. He picked up a strip of my mother’s “turning” and pulled a small pair of scissors from his jacket pocket. He made a few deft snips at the skein of thread. “You see?”

  I did, and I’m sure my mother did, too, but I think an explanatory pause would not at this point be what Jane Austen identifies as amiss.

  Our family had always been poor. Not desperately so, but the lack of desperation was due to my mother. She was a no-nonsense girl. Early in her marriage she had accepted without complaint the fact that my father was never going to earn enough to support us. She accepted it, and she did something about it. What she had done down on East Fourth Street was become a bootlegger. In a very small way, of course. Al Capone and Dutch Schultz were unknown to her. What my mother knew was a minor source of supply. She learned how to find an occasional bottle for a wedding or a bar mitzvah. Her share of the transaction now seems ludicrously small: twenty-five cents, or half a dollar. But it was a time when, and East Fourth Street was a place where, twenty-five cents or half a dollar was important.

  On Tiffany Street things were different. Not because I was earning more than I had earned when we lived on East Fourth Street, although I was. Things were different on Tiffany Street because Tiffany Street was different. It was a quiet place. Too quiet. I missed the noises of East Fourth Street. The river traffic. The horse-drawn wagons carrying coal and lumber from the docks. Mothers yelling from their windows to their children in the street. I did not miss the noises as much as my mother did because I was almost never at home during the day.

  On East Fourth Street my mother had been on intimate terms with all our neighbors. On Tiffany Street she did not know the names of our neighbors. Neither did I. The Tiffany Street tenements were smaller than the monstrous gray stone buildings in which I had been raised on East Fourth Street. The toilets were indoors. We even had a bathtub. The sidewalks were cleaner. But they were deserted. People did not sit out on the stoops in the evening eating Indian nuts and gossiping. In fact, there did not seem to be any people. It was my first experience with a neighborhood that was essentially a bedroom for people who worked in other parts of the city.

  It was my mother’s first experience, too, but she felt it more intensely. After all, I was downtown all day. I came home late at night, as apparently almost everybody on Tiffany Street did, to go to bed. But my mother was there every hour of the day, every day of the week. I see now what I did not see then: my mother was not only frightened, she was also puzzled. Fear is tough to handle. But not as tough as puzzlement. What you don’t know can kill you.

  All of her years in America my mother had dreamed of “improving” herself. Escaping from the slums. Moving her life uptown. Now she had done it. And what did she have? In her own Yiddish words: “A great big fat empty day with nothing to do except cook for Papa and stare out at the trees.”

  But it was the trees that eased her fears and enabled her to turn her back on what I see now was a disappointment A street with trees on it was what America was all about, and she had finally made it to a street with trees. They were pretty terrible trees. Once, when I discovered that I was worrying about my mother and our new home, I made it a point to find out what these scruffy trees were called.

  Ailanthus.

  Can you imagine? I can’t. Not even now. But my mother could. I don’t think she saw them as they were. She saw those miserable trees the way Moses saw Canaan. And to make sure we were not swept back from them to treeless East Fourth Street she went to work for Mr. Lebenbaum.

  Philip Lebenbaum was an entrepreneur who operated what my economics textbook in Thomas Jefferson High School called a cottage industry. Mr. Lebenbaum was a manufacturer of men’s neckwear. Not the sort of neckwear that requires knotting. Mr. Lebenbaum manufactured what we used to call on East Fourth Street “jazz bows.” Permanently knotted bow ties with elastic neckbands that snapped into place. He operated out of a store on Intervale Avenue, around the corner from our home on Tiffany Street. In this store Mr. and Mrs. Lebenbaum performed the groundwork functions, so to speak, that enabled the women of the neighborhood, my mother included, to produce the completed jazz bows.

  Mr. Lebenbaum worked feverishly ove
r a huge table. He sliced up endless bolts of gaudy silk into rectangles twelve inches long and three inches wide. These Mrs. Lebenbaum, bent over her sewing machine like a jockey flogging his mount into the stretch, stitched into endless belts of folded-over cloth that looked like tiny purses. These belts were bundled and tied with lengths of clothesline, then piled up on the floor, like sacks of laundry, for the women of the neighborhood who performed the next step in the manufacture of the Lebenbaum jazz bow. This step was known as “turning.” My mother did a great deal of it

  Every day she would go over to Intervale Avenue. She would pick up a bundle of sewed silk belts and a stack of canvas rectangles that were to be stuffed into them. At home, working at our kitchen table, my mother would rip the silk belts into individual pieces. She would stuff each piece with a rectangle of canvas. And with a deft and curiously graceful movement flip the rectangle inside out. This process was known as “turning.”

  When my mother finished her task, what had been a long ribbon of stitched-together rectangles of silk, and a bundle of canvas scraps, had become a neat pile of colorful rectangles about the size of bathroom tiles. These she fastened with fat rubber bands provided by Mr. Lebenbaum. The next day she carried them to his store, where his wife crimped and sewed the rectangles into finished jazz bows. While she did that, Mr. Lebenbaum counted the results of my mother’s labors and made an entry in her small notebook. At the end of the week he totted up the entries and paid my mother in the most ragged and crumpled dollar bills I have ever seen. They felt like lettuce leaves that should have been eaten a week ago.

  My mother did not mind what those dollar bills looked or felt like. She enjoyed her capacity to earn money. It is a trait her son has inherited, but I don’t think Benny Kramer has ever quite approached the sheer physical relish my mother took in those decayed dollar bills she earned by working for Mr. Lebenbaum on Intervale Avenue. She was up to twelve a week on the night that Sebastian Roon came to visit us without warning on Tiffany Street.

  “If you tear the bits apart, look,” he said, and he tore a couple of bits apart. “You see?”

  My mother and I looked. The threads at the ends of the two bits had balled up. The word Sebastian Roon had used was “clotting.” I was surprised by the accuracy. The two tiny balls of sprung thread did look like bits of clotted blood at the ends of a shaving cut.