Tiffany Street

by Jerome Weidman

  But now, all at once, without a discussion or even a conversation, certainly without an argument, I sensed that her quickly and quietly spoken words—“Neither do I”—were in the fuck off stage.

  I gave myself a moment, then remembered what she had called to me from the kitchen when I came into the apartment.

  “You said you have something to tell me,” I said. “Yes,” Elizabeth Ann said. “I have something to tell you. Jack called from Bloomington this afternoon.”

  “Anything wrong?” I said.

  “He seems to have suffered an attack of intelligence,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Four of his Harvard friends have been killed in the Mekong Delta in the last three weeks. It occurred to Jack to wonder why. They were very close, you know.”

  I did know. I even knew their names. And I could in my head see their faces. I am a City College boy. Evening session. I am jealous of kids who went to Harvard. Including my son Jack. He made it. Benny Kramer never did. I wished I didn’t have enough brains to understand how I felt. More and more, as the years go by, I find myself confronted by the heretical conviction that it is better to be stupid.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do know.”

  “And what have you done with your knowledge?” Elizabeth Ann said.

  The trouble with being a lawyer is that you detect at once, even in the voices of people who love you, the metallic rasp of the attorney for the prosecution.

  “I went to Philadelphia today,” I said. “That’s what I’ve done.”

  “To help a real-estate crook,” Elizabeth Ann said. “For a fat fee.”

  Among the more distressing horrors of life are the little terminal crevices into which people hurl their way in order to win a minor verbal battle. You have to strike back.

  “That fat fee is paying our rent on this apartment in which you and I are now battling while you can enjoy the luxury of trembling about whether or not the crust of your crème brûlée will work.”

  Elizabeth Ann scowled. The scowl is rarely thought of as an increment to beauty. Next time you get scowled at, by a woman I mean, pay attention. And count yourself a nice little blessing.

  “You did not go to Philadelphia to help that real-estate crook,” Elizabeth Ann said. “You had another reason.”

  No wonder Scotland Yard has had to reorganize from the ground up. The methods of Inspector Lestrade are outmoded. Women have taken over.

  “That real-estate crook paid my fare and provided my cover story,” I said. “He didn’t know it, but I went to Philadelphia to have a secret meeting with a Dr. McCarran.”

  Elizabeth Ann looked troubled. She sent the look down into her glass. It made her look—well, I’ll skip it. I’m too old to take on an imitation of Booth Tarkington describing Gentle Julia. That Hoosier could write.

  “And it was about Jack,” Elizabeth Ann said. “Wasn’t it?”

  And that Hoosier could also call the turn. Gentle Julia would have put it exactly the same way.

  “Yes,” I said. “Jack is obviously going to be summoned any minute now for his physical. And since you are his mother who has known him from the womb out, you know that that kid is going to pass his draft board physical with depressingly flying colors.”

  “So you went to Philadelphia to organize a way for him to flunk,” Elizabeth Ann said. “And you kept it a secret because you knew I would disapprove.”

  “That,” I said, “as my old boss Ira Bern would have put it, that is one hundred and ten percent correct.”

  Elizabeth Ann gave her drink another scowling examination.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “I guess you better tell me.”

  I did.

  “In other words,” she said when I finished. “The life of our son depends on his ability to convince a draft board doctor that he wets his bed at night.”

  Succinct is a word I do not have many opportunities to employ. So I don’t. But opportunities do come along. Elizabeth Ann had just provided one.

  “You could put it that way,” I said.

  Elizabeth Ann made a weary gesture with her head.

  “You are not the most brilliant man I have ever known,” she said. “But you are the most brilliant man I have ever been in love with.” She looked across the room toward the windows that faced Central Park. “This is the first time,” she said. “In almost thirty years of marriage,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve ever known you to do something almost belligerently unbrilliant.”

  The phone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I said.

  “No, you won’t,” Elizabeth Ann said. “It’s Jack. I want to talk to him first.”

  She crossed to the desk.

  “Hello?” she said into the phone. “Yes, he just got back from Philadelphia, and it’s pretty much what I suspected and told you as a guess. Yes, I know that, and I love you, too, but at the moment I think we’d better hew to the line. I’ll put him on, darling.” Elizabeth Ann took the phone from her ear and held it out to me. “Tell him all about Dr. McCarran.”

  I did.

  “Well,” Jack said when I finished. And so I knew there was trouble. Some people begin conversations by saying “Well.” My son does not. Jack begins by saying “Listen, Pops.” I missed that. “It was damned nice of you to go to all that effort for me,” he said. “I mean going to Philadelphia and all.”

  “I was paid for that,” I said. “By Shloymah Berel Schlisselberger.”

  “By who?” Jack said.

  “Never mind,” I said. “He’s one of my clients, and he’s got more money than he knows what to do with, and I synchronized a job I had to do for him with this visit to Dr. McCarran. I didn’t want anybody to know about it”

  “But Dr. McCarran knows about it,” Jack said.

  “And Uncle Seb,” I said.

  Sebastian Roon was not Jack’s uncle. Just his godfather. But it’s awkward to say on the long-distance phone that the other person who knows about it is Godfather Seb.

  “Now, Pops,” Jack said. “Let’s not tell any more people about this. It could give me a bad press with some girls I know.”

  “Of course I won’t,” I said. “But it seems to me the only way out for you.”

  Jack laughed and said, “As the leader of the jail break said to the prisoners he was about to lead over the wall.”

  “Jack,” I said. “This is not a kidding matter. In the Mekong Delta, as your grandmother would have said, a person could get hurt.”

  “Not this grandson,” Jack said.

  “But if you don’t do at your physical what Dr. McCarran suggested,” I said, “what else can you do?”

  Jack laughed again. “Pops, I’ve been reading the literature of your youth,” he said. “As those John Held, Jr., characters used to say: you just watch my smoke, Pops.”

  “Jack,” I said. “What do you want your mother and me to do now?”

  “Stand by for station identification,” Jack said. “I’ll let you know.”

  I could feel the rock slide beginning to rumble into movement.

  “When?” I said.

  “Give me a few days to set some wheels in motion,” Jack said.

  “Set what wheels in motion?” I said. “We’ve talked this out long ago. I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier. Remember?”

  When the draft board had begun breathing down his neck I had told Jack about a Hollywood character named Solly Violinsky. He had insisted that all song titles were too long and all could be reduced to two words. When asked about “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,” Solly had said: “Don’t Go.”

  “The philosophy of Solly Violinsky is engraved on my heart,” Jack said. “Just the same, I do want to set my own wheels in motion.”

  To a dull steak, Dashiell Hammett once wrote, always comes a sharp knife.

  “You betcha,” I said. The slang of East Fourth Street. How it clings to the man in the Brooks Brothers suit. “Let me know what you decide.”

  He said a few other things. None of them t
he business of third parties.

  “Dad,” Jack said, “I’ll call you.”

  I hung up. Elizabeth Ann came across the room. She smiled and kissed me.

  “Now, what’s that for?” I said.

  “For your adorable stupidity,” she said. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  12

  PERHAPS ELIZABETH ANN WAS right. I may not have had any idea of what I had done. But I had a very clear idea of what my rock bottom reaction had been in Will’s when Sebastian Roon had told me about his desire to retire to England. Not surprise. Envy.

  Seb had a place to retire to. Home. I did not. All I had was a sense of dissatisfaction with my life. The way I was living it. The way I had lived it thus far. And what I was going to do with the rest of it. As the comedians of my youth used to say: Try that on your grand piano.

  I once did.

  A dozen years after Hannah Halpern disappeared with Sebastian Roon from the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street while I was buying hot knishes in the Hebrew National next door, I was working in England. The assignment had more or less been arranged by Hitler.

  It was a few months after Pearl Harbor. The draft did not appeal to me. I applied for a commission and got it. The U.S. Army seemed to be impressed by degrees. Even degrees from N.Y.U. Law School, Evening Session. Lawyers were definitely in. It was that kind of war.

  In the spring of 1942 my CO., Colonel Buchanan, and I had wound up a series of meetings with our RAF opposites in Edinburgh. The meetings had not been satisfactory. The RAF was not very keen on leaflets. They felt, and told us, that to send a Lancaster over Germany involved the risk of a dozen British lives. When they took that risk, they felt they preferred to drop on the Hun high explosive rather than packets of paper. It was a point of view with which it was difficult to quarrel, although Colonel Buchanan did. With considerable brilliance but no success.

  “Look here,” he said on our last day at breakfast in our hotel. “I’m not happy with the way this has gone. I think we can do a bit more if we part company and work on two fronts. I’ll stay on here in Edinburgh for another day, and I’d like you to go over to Blackpool.”

  “Blackpool?” I said.

  It was like being asked to go on to my father’s home town in Austria. Or was it Poland?

  “Yes,” Colonel Buchanan said. “Do you know Blackpool?”

  It did not seem appropriate to say that it was the birthplace of my friend Sebastian Roon.

  “Only that it’s a resort town for Lancashire mill hands,” I said. “Sort of like our Coney Island, I’ve heard.”

  “It is that, yes, but at the moment it’s become a bit more important,” Colonel Buchanan said. “Although the natives are unaware of it. The RAF has a big do just north of the town. It’s quite an operation, and classified, of course. Perhaps that’s why they’ve got some intelligent bodies running the show. One of them is Colonel Morpurgo. Good man. We jumped for Jesus together. He beat me by three quarters of an inch against Oxford in the standing broad, and he ran up good marks in the pole vault. I think if you see him, and tell him what we’re up to, you might get a more sympathetic response than we’ve got here in Edinburgh. You take the car. I’ll lay on another one to get me back to London tomorrow.”

  It was that kind of war. You went everywhere in cars. With drivers, of course. Who were not assigned but laid on. I never knew Kay Summersby, but I didn’t do too badly. On this day in 1942 I drew Sergeant Gilpin. She was a fat little cherub of a girl, cheerful to the point of occasional nausea. She had joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a private at the age of eighteen on the day Hitler invaded Poland. By the time I was assigned to Colonel Buchanan she had risen to what was considered for a girl her age an enviable rank. The best thing about Sergeant Gilpin, for me at any rate, on that day was that she came from Lancashire.

  “Blackpool?” she said when I gave her the slip of paper on which Colonel Buchanan had written my destination. “Do I know Blackpool you ask, sir? Why, Major Kramer, I was born in Blackpool, I was.”

  It was difficult to tell from her voice whether she spoke about her roots with genuine enthusiasm. Sergeant Gilpin was enthusiastic about everything.

  “Well,” I said, “I have a friend in New York who came from Blackpool.”

  “I don’t suppose I’d know him,” Sergeant Gilpin said. “Would I, sir?”

  It didn’t seem likely. In 1942 I was twenty-nine, and Seb was, of course, my age. Sergeant Gilpin had been promoted sergeant six months ago at the age of twenty-one.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “His name is Sebastian Roon.”

  “Not the actor, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The actor.”

  “Why, sir, we had his latest film in our mess just the other night,” Sergeant Gilpin said. “The Hour Before the Dawn. Have you seen it, sir?”

  “Twice,” I said.

  Seb had invited me and Elizabeth Ann to a preview. She couldn’t go. Her mother was dying again in Wynwood. Mrs. Foster again did not die, but Elizabeth Ann felt she had to see everything Seb did. I refer, of course, to his professional life. So I took Elizabeth Ann to see the movie when it opened at the Paramount. The line at the box office went around the corner deep into 43rd Street. I was not surprised.

  The Hour Before the Dawn had been guided through its script and camera phases by the British Ministry of War Information. The film had the good fortune to be released shortly after Pearl Harbor. America, which was suddenly very much in the war, was suddenly very pro-British. We Were In This Together. We were also, Elizabeth Ann and I, in a jam-packed movie palace. I scarcely noticed. The picture got to me. It seemed even better than when I had seen it the first time at the preview.

  The Hour Before the Dawn dealt with the life of a Royal Navy destroyer and its crew. Sebastian Roon played the captain. An aristocratic university man commanding a crew that had to be described, of course, as motley. Not unlike the crews that later appeared in our Air Force films. A cross section of the country for the survival of which the crew was fighting.

  A Cockney with a passion for growing roses. A black boy from the Punjab who had hoped to find in England what he had been unable to find in India. A curate’s son from Harrow who was trying to solve his sexual problem. A Scot who sneered at John Knox but started to pray like mad when the Stukas came over. A radical whose intercourse with his fellows consisted not of human speech but of quotations from the works of Harold J. Laski. A conservative whose family had owned a thousand acres in Lincolnshire since long before the Domesday Book had been composed, and was slowly awakened to the fact that the future of England lay in the hands of all—ALL—the people. A deeply religious Catholic who delivered endless lectures about Father Campion. A sardonic, wisecracking Church of England ex-lorry driver who did imitations of Gracie Fields. And a Jew straight out of Potash and Perlmutter, except that he came from the East End and had cut furs in a shop on Tottenham Court Road instead of taffeta in a dress factory on Seventh Avenue. In our later Air Force films he always came from Brooklyn and he was usually played by John Garfield. Sebastian Roon was superb. When he went down with his ship at Crete the audience sobbed. “My God,” Elizabeth Ann whispered. “How can Seb lend himself to such garbage?”

  “It’s a lovely film, sir, isn’t it?” Sergeant Gilpin said.

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  “Imagine you being a friend of Mr. Roon, sir. Wait till I tell the girls in the motor pool.”

  “I met him a long time ago,” I said. “When he first came to America. That’s why I asked you if you knew Blackpool. As long as we’re going there, I wondered if I could look up his family.”

  “I don’t see why not, sir,” Sergeant Gilpin said. “Do you have the address, sir?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s the trouble.”

  “No trouble at all, sir,” Sergeant Gilpin said. “There’s always the telephone directory, sir, isn’t there?”

  Indeed, there proved to be a couple. After I finished
my talk with Colonel Morpurgo at the RAF operation, I asked if I could bring in my driver so she could look up a phone number in Blackpool for me.

  “Why, Major, we’ll be delighted to do it for you,” Colonel Morpurgo said. “Bert!” he snapped.

  “Sah!” the adjutant snapped back.

  “Get the Blackpool telephone directory for Major Kramer,” Colonel Morpurgo said.

  He pronounced it Krahmer. It reminded me of a dentist I once knew. His name was Blumenstein. But he always corrected me. He wanted his name pronounced Blumensteen. I did not understand why.

  “Right, sah.”

  He brought over a Blackpool telephone directory. I thumbed the pages. I found four Rubins. Colonel Morpurgo may have jumped for Jesus, but I doubt that he had ever met an American until I walked into his office. I think I captured at least a fragment of his interest the way a bird watcher might find his eye drawn to a strange specimen. I could feel him watching me as I thumbed the pages.

  “No luck?” he said finally.

  “Too much,” I said. “There are four Rubins in the area.”

  “Bert,” Colonel Morpurgo said.

  “Sah!” The adjutant snapped back, and went to work. Five minutes later he said, “Fourth try, and bull’s-eye. The Rubin family on Islington Crescent would be delighted if Major Kramer of New York would stop by for a cup of tea.”

  When we reached Islington Crescent I understood at once why Sebastian Roon had said on that first night in our Tiffany Street kitchen that it reminded him of Blackpool. Islington Crescent was exactly that: a curved street that cut in from the main road at one point and emerged in a pleasant sweep at another point about two or three New York City blocks down. Along the crescent, on both sides of the street, were small, neat, well-tended houses, some made of stucco, most put together with red brick, all set in cheerful scraps of hysterically fecund garden. It wasn’t exactly Tiffany Street, but it had that same quality of a clean bedroom inhabited by people who spent their days earning a living downtown, wherever downtown was in Blackpool.