Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

  “One thinks one is saving time by tearing them apart,” Roon said. “But one isn’t, actually, because then one has to smooth away the clotted bits.” He smoothed away with his thumbnail the two bits of balled-up thread. “Whereas if you snip with a pair of scissors to start with.”

  He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, sat down, and snipped away at the chain of my mother’s turning. With a dexterity that impressed me and clearly surprised my mother, Sebastian Roon flicked two scraps of canvas out from under the fastenings of one of Mr. Lebenbaum’s neatly prepared bundles and poked them into the two rectangles of silk. Then he pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and, with the blunt end, stabbed swiftly into the four corners of each rectangle. This smoothed the canvas inserts absolutely flat. And finally, with obvious delight in his own skill, he slapped the rectangles of silk flat on the table with an almost musical punctuation: tum-ta-ra-ra-ra, tum-tum!

  He laughed, threw his hands up and out, and said, “Voilà!”

  It was the gesture, the mood, the very word he had used the day before. In his office on 21st Street. When he had invited me to lunch and, seeing I was uneasy about taking the time, had called Mr. Bern to fix it. It was the same gesture, the same mood, and the same word, but this time it annoyed me.

  This was Saturday night, remember. And Hannah Halpern was waiting for me under Goldkorn’s clock on 180th Street and Vyse Avenue. The visions of those sugarplums dancing in my head were interfering with my capacity to appreciate the dimensions of an encounter that, I see now, was at the very least a startling confrontation: the meeting of Georgian England with Herbert Hooverian Bronx in a tenement kitchen on a thoroughfare named Tiffany Street. By comparison, “Mr. Livingstone, I presume?” was not even in the running.

  Until the day before I had never met an Englishman. Like most Jewish boys from the Lower East Side, I was from my very early years an Anglophile without knowing what the word meant or how the condition came about. Now I know.

  The New York City public school curriculum, in my youth, at any rate, was built solidly around Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Burke, Swift, Coleridge, Thackeray, Addison, Steele, Lamb, and other prominent members of the Atheneum. I don’t know how they managed to pay their dues. There were no movie sales for Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia or Paradise Lost.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “It’s very nice to see you again, Mr. Roon, but it’s sort of, well, sort of unexpected.”

  “You mean you have an appointment?” he said.

  “Frankly, yes,” I said. “But if there’s anything important, anything I can do for you, I’ll be glad to—”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s not that important I merely thought I’d pop in and explain that strange lunch we had yesterday.”

  He laughed. It occurred to me he did an awful lot of laughing. I had drawn the inference from my reading that, aside from some wine-bibbing types in The Pickwick Papers, most Englishmen were dour.

  “By the time I was in a position to explain it,” he said, “you were in no condition to hear it.”

  “Thanks to you,” I said.

  I was careful to add a laugh. An apologetic little titter, anyway. This was 1930, you must remember. Benny Kramer never allowed himself to forget.

  “Believe me,” Roon said, “it was unintentional. The situation is a bit ridiculous. I’m surprised Mr. Bern didn’t explain it to you. He helped arrange it, you see. My uncle, the I. G. Roon who is I. G. Roon, Ltd., as it were, is a very shrewed man, as I think you will probably have suspected from your brief meeting. A number of years ago he contracted for an insurance policy that says if he is physically incapacitated, and can no longer go to his office, he is to receive a monthly indemnity from the insurance company. Well, a few months ago my uncle did in fact suffer a heart attack. I don’t know how severe it was, but he decided it was severe enough to keep him from going to the office, and he filed his claim. The insurance company was understandably annoyed because the monthly indemnity payments they had contracted to pay are rather large. My uncle sent for me to come over from England. My father is his brother. He installed me in his office in which he no longer sets foot, but I do meet him for lunch every day in some restaurant like Shane’s. The insurance company suspects that my uncle and I do more than consume a few potables and some comestibles at these lunches. In fact, they strongly suspect my uncle is continuing to conduct his business affairs through me.”

  He laughed again.

  “I shouldn’t be at all surprised, you know, but the insurance company has to prove it, and so they’ve got my uncle under constant surveillance. We had a near thing the day before you accompanied me to Shane’s. I made the mistake of pulling a bill of lading from my pocket at the lunch table, and the detective saw it. So the next day, yesterday, I thought I’d ask you along as a sort of cover, you might say. I hope you didn’t mind too much?”

  I thought of the gutted venison hanging outside the restaurant door. Well, perhaps some other time. I was still working on ham sandwiches and bacon and eggs.

  “That man who came over to the table?” I said. “Mr. O’Casey? He was a detective?”

  “One of several my uncle and I have come to know.”

  “Well,” I said.

  It did not seem an adequate reply, but I could think of nothing else.

  “If you have a date,” Roon said, “why don’t you just buzz along?”

  “But what about you?” I said.

  He pulled over the bundle of “turning” and started snipping at the rectangles of silk with his scissors.

  “Oh, you mustn’t mind me,” he said cheerfully. “If you’ll just explain to your mother that I’d enjoy staying here for a bit and helping her, I’ll be very happy.”

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Oh yes, quite,” Sebastian Roon said.

  While I explained this odd development to my mother, I noticed the way she was looking at Roon. With suspicion, of course. She never really trusted anybody. But also with something I had noticed on other occasions: interest. My mother had always had an eye for a good-looking man. I looked back at Roon. Ramon Novarro? No. But not Louis Wolheim, either. He was attractive.

  “My mother says fine, if you want to stay,” I said. “I’m sorry that I can’t. I’ve got this date, see?”

  “Of course I see,” Sebastian Roon said. “And of course I want to stay.” He smiled at my mother, then looked around the small room. “It’s very much like our scullery in Blackpool,” he said.

  4

  TO THIS DAY, WHEN I hear smart alecks make cracks about fat girls, I have to restrain a tendency toward uncharacteristic violence. When I hear this sort of talk, I think back to that night in 1930 when I was walking Hannah home from Loew’s 180th Street and we reached the corner of Vyse Avenue and 180th Street, a hundred feet from the stoop of Hannah’s house down the block. I think about it, and everything inside me begins to swell.

  “Hannah,” I said, “how about we go back and pick up a couple more Gabilla’s knishes? We can make the midnight show, easy.”

  We did make it, and the second knish was even better than the first. As a result, I did not get home until three in the morning.

  This was unusual. After all, Maurice Saltzman & Company worked a seven-day week. Even though the next day was Sunday, I was due in the office down on West 34th at 7:45 A.M. This meant I had to leave Tiffany Street no later than 6:30 in the morning. I had done this every Sunday morning since we had moved up to the Bronx.

  Difficult? Not at all. I usually left Hannah on Saturday nights at her house on Vyse Avenue around 1:00 A.M. The walk back to Tiffany Street took about twenty minutes. I was in the sack, snoring away, at 1:30 A.M. Who needed more than five hours of sleep? Not Benny Kramer. Not in 1930.

  On this particular night, however, it turned out that Benny needed something more. Not sleep. Something more important. Something my mother would have identified as koyach.

  I don’t believe Noah Webster was ever put to
this particular test, but I do believe he would have brought to the word koyach some of his more penetrating talents for definition. Thus: koyach, n. koy, as in coy; yach, as in Bach. (Bach, as in composer.) So we have the word koyach. A common Yiddish expression meaning strength. Ex.: Samson, before Delilah gave him his world-famous haircut, had koyach. But the word has a much broader meaning. Of a person who is said to possess koyach the word usually means that he or she is imbued with intestinal fortitude (see Bertha Broygiss, The Brass-Bottomed Barmaid by Damon Runyon). Or guts (see Bull in the Afternoon by E. Hemingway).

  Ex.: Let us take a boy named Benjamin Kramer (1075 Tiffany Street, the Bronx, N.Y., U.S.A., North America). He is walking home in the wee (early) hours of a Sunday morning in May. Benny is tired but his step is light. He has had an exhilarating evening. The streets are deserted. Once you turn off 180th and head south, there are no restaurants or delicatessens or movie theaters. No neon signs. Not even an occasional taxi. And very few streetlamps. Benny has entered one of the more modest residential sections of the Bronx. He is aware that socially it is a cut above East Fourth Street. So he disregards the fact that he wishes he is smelling the sharp, oil-rich odor of the East River, and hearing the creak of the barges as they tug at their moorings. That’s kid stuff, and nobody knows it better than Benny, who is no longer a kid. Ask Hannah Halpern.

  As he approaches the small tenement in which he lives, Benny glances at his watch. It is a pocket watch. A Waltham. A bar mitzvah present from his Aunt Sarah in New Haven. Benny wishes she had given him a wrist watch. Wrist watches are the new thing. Mr. Bern, Benny’s boss, wears a wrist watch. But the wish is a passing fancy (idle thought). Benny is startled to learn from his Waltham that it is three o’clock in the morning. Where have the hours fled?

  Benny comes into the Kramer kitchen. The ceiling light is on. It is electric light. Much better than the Welsbach mantles fed by gas down on East Fourth Street. Electric light. What a marvelous thing. It slides into every corner of a room. Like batter into every corner of a honey cake pan. It shows you things you never saw before. Like Benny’s mother sitting at the kitchen table. At three o’clock in the morning. She looks up at her son.

  “Where were you?” she says.

  This is where Benny realizes he needs koyach.

  “Hannah and I decided to take in the midnight show,” I said.

  “The midnight show?” my mother said. “One movie a night it’s not enough for you?”

  “We didn’t plan to see the midnight show,” I said. “But when the picture was over, around eleven-thirty, the lights went up and a man came out on stage and he said there was going to be a sneak preview.”

  “A what?” my mother said.

  “A sneak preview,” I said. “A movie it has not been shown yet.”

  “Then why do they show it in the middle of the night?” my mother said.

  Because the people who make them wouldn’t dare show them in the broad light of day.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They sort of want to get a reaction from people. The people have come in to see an entirely different movie. Like me and Hannah. A movie that’s advertised outside. They then put on this other one. It’s not advertised yet. They want to know how people like it. So if you stay in your seat, you can see this new new movie. You can see it free. For the price of admission to one picture they surprise you and you get a double feature. Ma, why are you whispering?”

  “Because there’s people asleep,” my mother said. “On East Fourth Street when people were sleeping, other people screamed. Like animals in a farmyard. Here, on Tiffany Street, it’s not animals. It’s people.” I assumed she meant the other people in the building. In our apartment the only people who could be asleep were my father and my mother. My father would have slept through the fall of the Bastille. Down on East Fourth Street he had slept through the celebrations of the False Armistice and then the real one. When he lay down on his bed my father was a toppled statue.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a whisper. “I didn’t realize I was hollering.”

  “I said you were hollering?” my mother said. “I said people are sleeping.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’d better get some sleep myself.”

  “Do it in the front room,” my mother said.

  It was as though my mother had told me to take my bath in the font of St. Peter’s. Our front room was our show-place. The Kramer family’s royal enclosure at Ascot. It contained our dining room “set.” It was the place we entered once a week, on Friday night, to eat the Sabbath meal.

  “In the front room?” I said.

  “Now you’re hollering,” my mother said.

  “Why can’t I sleep in my own room?”

  It was one of the marvels of moving up to the Bronx. I could no longer smell the river, but I had a room of my own.

  “Because that boy is sleeping in your room,” my mother said.

  For a few moments I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I knew she always did. My mother used words the way she used money. With care. Her supply of both was limited. I looked around the kitchen. On the table I saw the neatly stacked piles of “turning.” Like bricks of colored cloth. Held together by rubber bands. Ready for delivery to Mr. Lebenbaum’s jazz bow factory on Intervale Avenue. It was the first time since I had left the house at eight o’clock that our unexpected visitor had crossed my mind.

  “That boy?” I said. “You mean Sebastian Roon?”

  “A mistake,” my mother said. “His name is Rubin.”

  Astonished, I said, “Who? Roon?”

  “No, Rubin,” my mother said.

  My mind darted back to the day before, in the office of I. G. Roon, Ltd., on West 21st Street. I remembered Sebastian Roon’s assumption that Mr. Shimnitz was actually Mr. Shmootz.

  “You mean he’s a Jewish boy?” I said.

  “Why not?” my mother said. “Everybody is Jewish.”

  It was her most firmly held conviction.

  “I’m talking about our visitor,” I said.

  “He’s a Jewish boy like you,” my mother said. “He doesn’t sound like you, because he doesn’t scream in the middle of the night when people are sleeping, and he doesn’t go to double features, and he comes from a different place.”

  “Who’s screaming?” I said. Like jesting Pilate, I did not stay for an answer. “Blackpool?” I said.

  “That’s the place,” my mother said. “He explained to me. His uncle Isaac—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. Things were falling into place in my head with thuds that left aching reverberations. The I. in I. G. Roon, Ltd., practically dropped through my brainpan into my peritoneal membrane. I said, “You mean I. G. Roon, Ltd., is Isaac G. Roon, Ltd.?”

  “No,” my mother said. “I. G. Roon is Isaac Gustave Rubin, and then those extra things you said. The I, or the L, and the t, and the d.”

  I took a stab at pulling myself together. It was like clawing together the contents of a suitcase that has burst in a railway station.

  “How do you know all this?” I said.

  “We talked,” my mother said. “Me and Seymour.”

  Boing!

  “Seymour,” I said. “You mean Sebastian?”

  “No, Seymour,” my mother said. “He told me his name is Seymour Rubin, but when his uncle brought him over here from this Blackpool, he needed him in the business, the uncle said from now on you’re not Seymour Rubin. From now on you’re like me, a Roon, and also the first name, I don’t know how to say it.”

  I could scarcely manage it myself. “Sebastian,” I said.

  “All right,” my mother said. “You call it what you want. His real name, it’s Seymour Rubin. He told me.”

  Hannah and the Gabilla’s knishes we had consumed in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street fled from my consciousness like Dick Turpin putting the spurs to Black Bess on his way to York. The cold wind of reason swept through my mind.

  “Ma?” I said. “How did he tell you?”<
br />
  Her eyes narrowed. They looked like the penny slots in a child’s coin bank. My mother stared at me as though in the midst of an intimate conversation with a friend or relative it had suddenly occurred to her that she was talking to an impostor.

  “How did he tell me?” she said,

  “Sebastian,” I said.

  “You mean Seymour?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I suppose I do. How did Seymour tell you all this?”

  My mother repeated the words slowly. As though she were dictating a telegram.

  “How—did—Seymour—tell—me—all—this.”

  She shifted her glance. My mother had an impressive glance. When she narrowed it she could split the electric beam guarding the main vault at Fort Knox. I felt nailed to the wall.

  “You mean how did we talk?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “What language?”

  “Yiddish,” my mother said. “How else could we talk?”

  How else indeed? And why not? Being a Jew is an endlessly rewarding thing to be. You start from way back, especially if you are a ghetto or East Fourth Street Jew. No lessons needed in cringing. Or crouching away from blows. Or pretending you have not heard insults. They all come with the package. Including the necessity to learn slowly how to straighten up and close your hands into fists and give as good and better than you are forced to take. This is the exhilarating period of the awakening. Then reason takes over. Reason leads to pride. Pride leads to incredulity. What in God’s name was I afraid of? These pigheaded fools? These savage idiots? The questions answer themselves, and then the fun begins. The dividends of emancipation start rolling in. Tearing away curtains. You meet someone you like. Someone you are drawn to. But you are afraid to be drawn. Or you were, and you can’t forget it. Not yet. You are a Jew from East Fourth Street, functioning uptown, being circumspect. In blunt words, pretending not to be a Jew. There are so many ways to act out the pretense without having to speak the lie, that what you are doing does not seem reprehensible. After all, you’ve made it to Tiffany Street. Let’s not rock any boats at this intermediate stage. You’re not going to remain on Tiffany Street forever, are you? You’ve got to keep your nose clean for the next move. Which will naturally be in the general direction of up. And this guy is an Englishman named Sebastian Roon. Sebastian Roon? Even Dickens wouldn’t dare. Chuzzlewit? Okay. Nicholas Nickleby? Well, all right. Barnaby Rudge? Let it pass. But Sebastian Roon? Jesus Christ on a raft! What’s going on here? Answer: a Jew discovering the pleasure of discovering another Jew.