“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Sergeant Gilpin said. As she brought the car to a stop in front of a red brick house near the top of the crescent, the sirens went. “On time,” Sergeant Gilpin said. “They always try to spoil your tea. Don’t let it spoil yours, sir.”
I went up the cement walk and rang the bell. The door was opened by Hannah Halpern. It was opened so promptly that I knew she’d been waiting near the knob. There was a small diamond-shaped window at eye level above the bell pull. I could see her peering through it ever since Colonel Morpurgo’s adjutant had established contact by phone. It was only a mental image, of course. But it pleased me. It’s nice to be expected.
Hannah laughed and threw her arms around my neck and gave me a kiss. Not a peck. A kiss. One of those great big fat wet jobs that were the joys of my 1930 life in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street.
“Hannah,” I said. “Is there any place around here where I can buy a couple of Gabilla’s knishes?”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “I’ve laid on a proper tea.”
A what? But my thoughts went no further. Hannah had enveloped me in another great big welcoming kiss.
“Hannah,” I finally managed to gurgle. “For God’s sake!”
“Oops, sorry,” she said. “You’re right.” She pulled me into the house and slammed the door. “That girl in the car saw me do that.”
It was my turn to laugh. “So what?” I said.
“You’re an officer, by George,” Hannah said.
The “by George” jolted me. I no longer ate Gabilla’s nickel knishes but I remembered what if had been like in the days when I did. In those days Hannah would have said, “Jesus Christ, Benny, you’re an officer!” Now she said about Sergeant Gilpin, “And she’s in uniform so she must be one of those ATS’s.”
“She is,” I said, “but don’t worry about it. I have a feeling she expected you to kiss me.”
Hannah gave me a sly look. “Did you?” she said.
I hadn’t thought about it. But I realized now that I would have been hurt if she hadn’t.
“Hannah,” I said, “I am now a respectable married man.”
She giggled. But it was a disappointing giggle. Not the way she used to giggle on the bench near the Small Mammals House in Bronx Park.
“I wish I’d known,” she said. “I would have sent you a wedding present. Anyway, do come in and let’s tuck into the tea.”
Tuck into the tea, eh? Benny, what’s happened to your old flame? She sounds like Aunt Peggotty calling David Copperfield to the table.
I dropped my khaki cap on a chair in the tiny hall, hung my coat on a wall rack, and followed her into a small living room. From the window I looked out on another window that had obviously been built onto the adjoining house by the same man who had built Hannah’s house. In that other window sat an incredibly ugly creature. It had at least one, possibly two glass eyes, a full beard, no forehead, and the relentless and disapproving inquisitorial gaze of Abraham Lincoln staring out of the center of the five-dollar bill.
“Hannah,” I said. “Before we tuck into the tea, don’t you think you should pull down the shade?”
I nodded toward the face in the window at the other side of the driveway. Hannah turned to look, then exploded in a laugh. It took me by surprise. I had forgotten the sound. Had I ever really noticed? Well, at least that had not changed. Her laugh was one of the wonders of the western world.
A sound that came at you not through your ears but through your stomach. Not even a sound, actually. A feeling of warmth. A sense of well-being. For God’s sake, Hannah’s laugh said, stop looking so grouchy and sour. The world isn’t all that bad. How about handing over my knish? Major Kramer wished he had one to hand over.
“That’s not a Peeping Tom,” Hannah said. “That’s Mrs. Rampole’s gorilla.”
“Mrs. Rampole’s what?”
“Mrs. Rampole’s gorilla,” Hannah said. She motioned for me to sit down facing her across the tea tray. “Mrs. Rampole is my neighbor. She won that gorilla in the lottery on the Music Pier. The last lottery they had on the Front before the war. Cream or lemon?”
I brought my glance from the window to the tea tray. “Uh, lemon,” I said.
Hannah laughed again. “Naturally,” she said. “Nobody ever heard of tea with cream on Tiffany Street or Vyse Avenue. I wish I could serve it to you the way your mother and my mother served it. From a glass. With a lump of sugar that you held in one hand, took a bite, then took a sip of hot tea through the bite of sugar. But we can’t get any lump sugar now. There’s a war on, you know.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know.” But the war did not seem particularly important at the moment. Aside from the fact that I was aware of my uniform, the war seemed to have receded. A thought crossed my mind. It was silly. I knew that. Yet I could not help saying, “Hannah, would you like some lump sugar?”
“Oh now, come on, Benny,” she said with another laugh. “Don’t tell me you’ve got some sort of black market thing going through your officers’ PX down in London, and you can get me all the lump sugar I want.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t have any sort of black market thing going, and I could probably get you a couple of cans of grapefruit juice, or a carton or two of lousy cigarettes called Chelsea, but I don’t think the PX has any lump sugar. That’s not why I asked. I asked because—”
Hannah gave me a funny little look. “Because lump sugar is the Bronx?” she said.
I was startled. But even then I had my moments of perception. Hannah had said exactly the right thing.
“Yes,” I said. “I was thinking...”
My voice drifted away from me. I knew what I had been thinking, but I was not sure I could put it into words. Hannah did it for me.
“You were thinking I’m a girl from the Bronx,” she said. “And now I’m not a girl from the Bronx any more.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I was wondering how it happened.”
This time, when she laughed, the sounds jolted me into a puzzling thought. Puzzling for me, anyway. I was suddenly wondering if I had missed something. Something important. Something that had been puzzling me ever since I asked Colonel Morpurgo’s adjutant to find the Rubin family in the telephone book. I hadn’t known until this moment why I had wanted to come here today. What I was wondering was: Isn’t this the girl with whom Benny Kramer should have fallen in love?
“I always liked you, Benny,” Hannah said.
She handed me a cup. The delicacy of the china surprised me. It was very thin and very white. Small pink roses climbed gently around the handle of the cup and over the rim into the tea. It was so different from Vyse Avenue and Tiffany Street and the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street that I took another look at Hannah. She was different, too.
In what way? My mind tracked back through our last few minutes of conversation and I realized she had been dropping her aitches. Hannah Halpern talking like Sam Weller? Why not? I didn’t know why not. When in Rome?
Then I looked at what she was wearing. A sort of wraparound tan smock. The sort of thing Sergeant Gilpin and the other girls in the motor pool wore when they were washing their Daimlers. I tried to remember what Hannah used to wear in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street. I couldn’t. All I could remember was my difficulties with snaps and fasteners. The zipper had not yet made its crucial entry into America’s sex life.
“I think you liked me, too,” Hannah said. “Have one of these. I baked them myself.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Of course I liked you.” She shook her head and took a sip from her cup. I was pleased to notice she did not lift her pinky. What would Sam Weller have said?
“I don’t mean that way,” Hannah said. She giggled. “That was, oh, you know.”
“Yes,” I said.
What would you have said? Edging upon thirty? In the middle of a war? Wearing the uniform of your nation’s armed forces? In a place called Islington Crescent, within spitting distance of the Fr
ont at Blackpool? To a girl you had once been dead stuck on, but not in love with, who was now living in a country invented by Charles Dickens?
“But something was missing?” Hannah said.
“Yes,” I said again.
When you get to the point where you can’t get words out, and a small bleating sound seems to do the trick, stick with it.
“During the week,” Hannah said, “when I was pounding that typewriter for Gold-Mark-Zweig, Inc., on Mosholu Parkway, I used to have dreams about you.”
“Me?” I said.
“Well, why not?” Hannah said. “You were a nice boy. Clean-cut. Polite. Good-looking.”
“Me?” I said.
“Good-looking enough,” Hannah said. “All you talked about was the new bankruptcy cases down at Maurice Saltzman & Company, and how if you could get a raise out of Mr. Bern you were going to N.Y.U. Law School, and I could practically see you in that black robe getting sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.” I now came up with an attempt at kidding myself, but I knew I was kidding on the square.
“God,” I said. “I must have been a stuffy little jerk.” Hannah frowned into her tea cup. I waited tensely for her to deny my self-condemnation. Then she looked up at me, still frowning. As though she were trying to bring a memory into focus.
“I guess some people might put it that way,” Hannah said finally. “But me, Benny, I liked that about you.” Women! Jesus, God!
“You liked my being a stuffy little jerk?” I said.
“Sort of, yes,” Hannah said. “Girls have to watch out, you know. You go out with a guy, you know what he wants. So you have to decide. If you give it to him, you could lose not only him, but your reputation as well. If you don’t give, you don’t get invited out again. The best kind of guys, I found in those days, they were the sort of stuffy ones. What they wanted, if you gave it to them, they didn’t act as though they’d won a ball game or something and now they had to challenge another team. They were you could sort of say grateful.”
She had certainly nailed the hide of Benny Kramer of Tiffany Street to the old barn door.
“They were gentlemen,” I said haughtily.
Hannah laughed. “Don’t sound so bitter,” she said. “It’s nice to be with a gentleman. For a girl, anyway.”
She leaned across the tea table to pick up another one of the things she had baked herself. En route she brushed my cheek with her lips. It was the second time in my life when I suddenly wanted to burst into tears in front of a girl. Never mind the first time. That’s none of your business.
“How did you know I was a gentleman?” I said.
“You know those knishes you used to buy downstairs in the Hebrew National?” Hannah said.
Did Hannibal’s elephants know the Alps?
“Sure,” I said. “Gabilla’s.”
“When you brought them up to the balcony,” Hannah said, “under mine, that glazed paper, under mine you always had two pieces.”
Hey, Walter Raleigh! You know what you can do with your cloak?
“That wasn’t chivalry,” I said. “That was so I wouldn’t burn my hand.”
“Who cared?” Hannah said. “It made my heart go.”
My heart now proceeded to go.
“You mind if I ask you something personal?” I said.
“Benny,” Hannah said. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t allow a gentleman to ask me.”
“How do you know I’m still a gentleman?” I said.
“It’s like being a Jew,” Hannah said. “You’re born that way. You can’t change it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then I’ll ask you.”
“Have another one of these,” Hannah said.
“In a moment,” I said. “First tell me this. If you felt that way about me, how come you ran away with Seb?”
Suddenly her voice changed. She sounded like a politician at a convention placing in nomination “a man who.”
“Out of the shadow of the silent screen strides John Barrymore!” Hannah intoned. “In, and as, GENERAL CRACK!”
I laughed. “That’s right,” I said. “That was the night. How come you ran away and left me holding four knishes?”
Hannah looked at the thing she had baked herself, then put it back on the tea tray. I didn’t blame her. Mr. Gabilla would not have risked bankruptcy by putting it on the market.
“I’ll tell you,” Hannah said. “If you promise not to laugh at me.”
A moment ago it had taken an effort of will to keep from bursting into tears in front of her. Now she wanted me to promise not to laugh at her. Do women really have any grasp of the emotional climate in which men spend their lives? Don’t answer. I can’t handle another no.
“I promise,” I said.
“I just told you how I felt about you back in nineteen thirty in the Bronx,” Hannah said. “What I left out is something I didn’t understand until that night you introduced me to Seb.”
“What was that?” I said.
“I had been waiting,” Hannah said.
“For what?” I said.
“For my life to be changed,” she said. “All I knew was the Bronx. School. My mother and father. Vyse Avenue. The office of Gold-Mark-Zweig, Inc. The balcony of Loew’s One Hundred and Eightieth Street. And you.”
“Me?” I said.
“You bet you,” Hannah said. “You were my sweepstakes ticket. I knew there was a whole world beyond the Bronx. It said so in the movies, in the books I read, on the radio. I was dying to see it. I knew the only way was through a boy who would fall in love with me and marry me and take me away. Don’t be sore. I’m not saying you failed me, because I’m not sure I understood it at the time. I just knew in my heart that you were a boy I liked, you were going places, you were a gentleman, and when the time was right you would take me along.”
You know what’s worse than wanting to burst into tears in front of a girl? Wanting to die.
“I let you down,” I said.
“No,” Hannah said. “You brought me Seb.”
“That bastard,” I said.
Hannah laughed. “You don’t mean that” she said.
I laughed. Anyway, I tried. “No, of course I don’t” I said. “He’s just about the nicest guy I know.”
Hannah frowned. “You mean you’re still friends?” she said.
What struck me was not her surprise, but the fact that she seemed to disapprove.
“Sure,” I said. “Why should you doubt it?”
“Well,” Hannah said. “You said I ran away with him. That means usually—you know.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know.”
I’ve learned this about myself: I can handle pretty much everything that happens to me, so long as I can dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I don’t have a very good mind. But I have a neat one. If the horror is all wrapped up, no loose ends trailing, and it can be tucked away cleanly on the shelf of memory, it won’t come toppling off at odd moments in the future to haunt me. It’s sort of the way I’ve learned to run my office. I never worry about my “closed” files. Miss Bienstock does, of course. But that’s her problem.
“But you want to know,” Hannah said through her extraordinary smile. “Don’t you?”
“Yes, very much,” I said. “You see, I’m jealous.”
The squeal of laughter that came pouring out of her across the tea tray might have made Rudolf Bing wince. But one man’s wince is another man’s music. For me Hannah’s squeal could, as Ring Lardner once put it, have been poured on a waffle.
“Oh, Benny,” she said. “Benny, Benny, Benny, you nice son of a bitch. Maybe...”
Hannah paused. Then she shook her head. The late afternoon light that was making a horror of Mrs. Rampole’s gorilla across the narrow driveway suddenly caught Hannah’s eyes. For the first time, and to my considerable astonishment, I noticed that they were violet. I had never before seen violet eyes. How could I not have noticed that years ago?
True, it was dark up
in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street, but—
Yes? But? But what, Benny?
You know what, Benny. Stop pretending you don’t. Hannah was a girl you liked but were scared to love. Now that she had made her life with somebody else, you wanted to know what your life would have been like if you had made it with her. That’s why you had come to Islington Crescent in the middle of a war. Not a bad objective. If you are going to discover at thirty that you were a louse at seventeen, the best place in which to make the discovery is Islington Crescent, in Blackpool, in 1942, while the air raid sirens are screaming.
“No,” Hannah said firmly. “You live, and you move on, and if you have any brains you know that what you lived yesterday is finished. It’s today that counts. I like my today, Benny. Do you understand that?” I looked around the small, neat, compact room. I looked at the picture of a scowling, fiercely determined Winston Churchill over the fireplace. I looked at the embroidered sampler on the wall over Hannah’s head that said: KEEP THE POKER ON THE HEARTH! I looked at the photograph cut from The Daily Sketch that showed Paddy Finucane in his RAF outfit smiling out gallantly over the message he had radioed a moment after his Spitfire was hit and went down over the Channel: “This is it, chaps!” And then I saw something I had not seen since Miss Bongiorno’s Elocution Class in J.H.S. 64: a framed quote from the “a mighty charge” speech in Henry V: “And on this charge cry God for Harry, England, and St. George!” Benny Kramer of Tiffany Street turned back to Hannah Halpern from Vyse Avenue, both of the Bronx.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I understand.”
Hannah smiled again. “Then I can tell you,” she said. “The way I felt about you, all that was fine. I was happy to coast along and wait. You see, I felt sure of you. So someday you would be a chief justice and I would be Hannah Kramer, the Mrs. Chief Justice.”
“My God,” I said. “I never knew that.”
“Of course not,” Hannah said. “Men never know anything.”
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