Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker

by David Remnick

  What the blazes am I getting into? Rogin thought. To be the father of a throwback to her father. The image of this white-haired, gross, peevish old man with his ugly selfish blue eyes revolted Rogin. This was how his grandson would look. Joan, with whom Rogin was now more and more displeased, could not help that. For her, it was inevitable. But did it have to be inevitable for him? Well, then, Rogin, you fool, don’t be a damned instrument. Get out of the way!

  But it was too late for this, because he had already experienced the sensation of sitting next to his own son, his son and Joan’s. He kept staring at him, waiting for him to say something, but the presumptive son remained coldly silent though he must have been aware of Rogin’s scrutiny. They even got out at the same stop—Sheridan Square. When they stepped to the platform, the man, without even looking at Rogin, went away in a different direction in his detestable blue-checked coat, with his rosy, nasty face.

  THE whole thing upset Rogin very badly. When he approached Joan’s door and heard Phyllis’s little dog Henri barking even before he could knock, his face was very tense. “I won’t be used,” he declared to himself. “I have my own right to exist.” Joan had better watch out. She had a light way of bypassing grave questions he had given earnest thought to. She always assumed no really disturbing thing would happen. He could not afford the luxury of such a carefree, debonair attitude himself, because he had to work hard and earn money so that disturbing things would not happen. Well, at the moment this situation could not be helped, and he really did not mind the money if he could feel that she was not necessarily the mother of such a son as his subway son or entirely the daughter of that awful, obscene father of hers. After all, Rogin was not himself so much like either of his parents, and quite different from his brother.

  Joan came to the door, wearing one of Phyllis’s expensive housecoats. It suited her very well. At first sight of her happy face, Rogin was brushed by the shadow of resemblance; the touch of it was extremely light, almost figmentary, but it made his flesh tremble.

  She began to kiss him, saying, “Oh, my baby. You’re covered with snow. Why didn’t you wear your hat? It’s all over its little head”—her favorite third-person endearment.

  “Well, let me put down this bag of stuff. Let me take off my coat,” grumbled Rogin, and escaped from her embrace. Why couldn’t she wait making up to him? “It’s so hot in here. My face is burning. Why do you keep the place at this temperature? And that damned dog keeps barking. If you didn’t keep it cooped up, it wouldn’t be so spoiled and noisy. Why doesn’t anybody ever walk him?”

  “Oh, it’s not really so hot here! You’ve just come in from the cold. Don’t you think this housecoat fits me better than Phyllis? Especially across the hips. She thinks so, too. She may sell it to me.”

  “I hope not,” Rogin almost exclaimed.

  She brought a towel to dry the melting snow from his short, black hair. The flurry of rubbing excited Henri intolerably, and Joan locked him up in the bedroom, where he jumped persistently against the door with a rhythmic sound of claws on the wood.

  Joan said, “Did you bring the shampoo?”

  “Here it is.”

  “Then I’ll wash your hair before dinner. Come.”

  “I don’t want it washed.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, laughing.

  Her lack of consciousness of guilt amazed him. He did not see how it could be. And the carpeted, furnished, lamplit, curtained room seemed to stand against his vision. So that he felt accusing and angry, his spirit sore and bitter, but it did not seem fitting to say why. Indeed, he began to worry lest the reason for it all slip away from him.

  They took off his coat and his shirt in the bathroom, and she filled the sink. Rogin was full of his troubled emotions; now that his chest was bare he could feel them even more distinctly inside, and he said to himself, “I’ll have a thing or two to tell her pretty soon. I’m not letting them get away with it. ‘Do you think,’ he was going to tell her, ‘that I alone was made to carry the burden of the whole world on me? Do you think I was born just to be taken advantage of and sacrificed? Do you think I’m just a natural resource, like a coal mine, or oil well, or fishery, or the like? Remember, that I’m a man is no reason why I should be loaded down. I have a soul in me no bigger or stronger than yours. Take away the externals, like the muscles, deeper voice, and so forth, and what remains? A pair of spirits, practically alike. So why shouldn’t there also be equality? I can’t always be the strong one.’”

  “Sit here,” said Joan, bringing up a kitchen stool to the sink. “Your hair’s gotten all matted.”

  He sat with his breast against the cool enamel, his chin on the edge of the basin, the green, hot, radiant water reflecting the glass and the tile, and the sweet, cool, fragrant juice of the shampoo poured on his head. She began to wash him.

  “You have the healthiest-looking scalp,” she said. “It’s all pink.”

  He answered, “Well, it should be white. There must be something wrong with me.”

  “But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you,” she said, and pressed against him from behind, surrounding him, pouring the water gently over him until it seemed to him that the water came from within him, it was the warm fluid of his own secret loving spirit overflowing into the sink, green and foaming, and the words he had rehearsed he forgot, and his anger at his son-to-be disappeared altogether, and he sighed, and said to her from the water-filled hollow of the sink, “You always have such wonderful ideas, Joan. You know? You have a kind of instinct, a regular gift.”

  [1955]

  S. J. PERELMAN

  FAREWELL, MY LOVELY APPETIZER

  Add Smorgasbits to your ought-to-know department, the newest of the three Betty Lee products. What in the world! Just small mouth-size pieces of herring and of pinkish tones. We crossed our heart and promised not to tell the secret of their tinting.

  —Clementine Paddleford’s food column

  in the Herald Tribune

  The “Hush-Hush” Blouse. We’re very hush-hush about his name, but the celebrated shirtmaker who did it for us is famous on two continents for blouses with details like those deep yoke folds, the wonderful shoulder pads, the shirtband bow!

  —Russeks adv. in the Times

  I CAME DOWN the sixth-floor corridor of the Arbogast Building, past the World Wide Noodle Corporation, Zwinger & Rumsey, Accountants, and the Ace Secretarial Service, Mimeographing Our Specialty. The legend on the ground-glass panel next door said, “Atlas Detective Agency, Noonan & Driscoll,” but Snapper Driscoll had retired two years before with a .38 slug between the shoulders, donated by a snowbird in Tacoma, and I owned what good will the firm had. I let myself into the crummy anteroom we kept to impress clients, growled good morning at Birdie Claflin.

  “Well, you certainly look like something the cat dragged in,” she said. She had a quick tongue. She also had eyes like dusty lapis lazuli, taffy hair, and a figure that did things to me. I kicked open the bottom drawer of her desk, let two inches of rye trickle down my craw, kissed Birdie square on her lush, red mouth, and set fire to a cigarette.

  “I could go for you, sugar,” I said slowly. Her face was veiled, watchful. I stared at her ears, liking the way they were joined to her head. There was something complete about them; you knew they were there for keeps. When you’re a private eye, you want things to stay put.

  “Any customers?”

  “A woman by the name of Sigrid Bjornsterne said she’d be back. A looker.”

  “Swede?”

  “She’d like you to think so.”

  I nodded toward the inner office to indicate that I was going in there, and went in there. I lay down on the davenport, took off my shoes, and bought myself a shot from the bottle I kept underneath. Four minutes later, an ash blonde with eyes the color of unset opals, in a Nettie Rosenstein basic black dress and a baum-marten stole, burst in. Her bosom was heaving and it looked even better that way. With a gasp she circled the desk, hunting for some
place to hide, and then, spotting the wardrobe where I keep a change of bourbon, ran into it. I got up and wandered out into the anteroom. Birdie was deep in a crossword puzzle.

  “See anyone come in here?”

  “Nope.” There was a thoughtful line between her brows. “Say, what’s a five-letter word meaning ‘trouble’?”

  “Swede,” I told her, and went back inside. I waited the length of time it would take a small, not very bright boy to recite “Ozymandias,” and, inching carefully along the wall, took a quick gander out the window. A thin galoot with stooping shoulders was being very busy reading a paper outside the Gristede store two blocks away. He hadn’t been there an hour ago, but then, of course, neither had I. He wore a size-seven dove-colored hat from Browning King, a tan Wilson Brothers shirt with pale-blue stripes, a J. Press foulard with a mixed-red-and-white figure, dark blue Interwoven socks, and an unshined pair of ox-blood London Character shoes. I let a cigarette burn down between my fingers until it made a small red mark, and then I opened the wardrobe.

  “Hi,” the blonde said lazily. “You Mike Noonan?” I made a noise that could have been “Yes,” and waited. She yawned. I thought things over, decided to play it safe. I yawned. She yawned back, then, settling into a corner of the wardrobe, went to sleep. I let another cigarette burn down until it made a second red mark beside the first one, and then I woke her up. She sank into a chair, crossing a pair of gams that tightened my throat as I peered under the desk at them.

  “Mr. Noonan,” she said, “you—you’ve got to help me.”

  “My few friends call me Mike,” I said pleasantly.

  “Mike.” She rolled the syllable on her tongue. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name before. Irish?”

  “Enough to know the difference between a gossoon and a bassoon.”

  “What is the difference?” she asked. I dummied up; I figured I wasn’t giving anything away for free. Her eyes narrowed. I shifted my two hundred pounds slightly, lazily set fire to a finger, and watched it burn down. I could see she was admiring the interplay of muscles in my shoulders. There wasn’t any extra fat on Mike Noonan, but I wasn’t telling her that. I was playing it safe until I knew where we stood.

  When she spoke again, it came with a rush. “Mr. Noonan, he thinks I’m trying to poison him. But I swear the herring was pink—I took it out of the jar myself. If I could only find out how they tinted it. I offered them money, but they wouldn’t tell.”

  “Suppose you take it from the beginning,” I suggested.

  She drew a deep breath. “You’ve heard of the golden spintria of Hadrian?” I shook my head. “It’s a tremendously valuable coin believed to have been given by the Emperor Hadrian to one of his proconsuls, Caius Vitellius. It disappeared about 150 A.D., and eventually passed into the possession of Hucbald the Fat. After the sack of Adrianople by the Turks, it was loaned by a man named Shapiro to the court physician, or hakim, of Abdul Mahmoud. Then it dropped out of sight for nearly five hundred years, until last August, when a dealer in second-hand books named Lloyd Thursday sold it to my husband.”

  “And now it’s gone again,” I finished.

  “No,” she said. “At least, it was lying on the dresser when I left, an hour ago.” I leaned back, pretending to fumble a carbon out of the desk, and studied her legs again. This was going to be a lot more intricate than I had thought. Her voice got huskier. “Last night I brought home a jar of Smorgasbits for Walter’s dinner. You know them?”

  “Small mouth-size pieces of herring and of pinkish tones, aren’t they?”

  Her eyes darkened, lightened, got darker again. “How did you know?”

  “I haven’t been a private op nine years for nothing, sister. Go on.”

  “I—I knew right away something was wrong when Walter screamed and upset his plate. I tried to tell him the herring was supposed to be pink, but he carried on like a madman. He’s been suspicious of me since—well, ever since I made him take out that life insurance.”

  “What was the face amount of the policy?”

  “A hundred thousand. But it carried a triple-indemnity clause in case he died by sea food. Mr. Noonan—Mike”—her tone caressed me—“I’ve got to win back his confidence. You could find out how they tinted that herring.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Anything you want.” The words were a whisper. I leaned over, poked open her handbag, counted off five grand.

  “This’ll hold me for a while,” I said. “If I need any more, I’ll beat my spoon on the high chair.” She got up. “Oh, while I think of it, how does this golden spintria of yours tie in with the herring?”

  “It doesn’t,” she said calmly. “I just threw it in for glamor.” She trailed past me in a cloud of scent that retailed at ninety rugs the ounce. I caught her wrist, pulled her up to me.

  “I go for girls named Sigrid with opal eyes,” I said.

  “Where’d you learn my name?”

  “I haven’t been a private snoop twelve years for nothing, sister.”

  “It was nine last time.”

  “It seemed like twelve till you came along.” I held the clinch until a faint wisp of smoke curled out of her ears, pushed her through the door. Then I slipped a pint of rye into my stomach and a heater into my kick and went looking for a bookdealer named Lloyd Thursday. I knew he had no connection with the herring caper, but in my business you don’t overlook anything.

  THE thin galoot outside Gristede’s had taken a powder when I got there; that meant we were no longer playing girls’ rules. I hired a hack to Wanamaker’s, cut over to Third, walked up toward Fourteenth. At Twelfth a mink-faced jasper made up as a street cleaner tailed me for a block, drifted into a dairy restaurant. At Thirteenth somebody dropped a sour tomato out of a third-story window, missing me by inches. I doubled back to Wanamaker’s, hopped a bus up Fifth to Madison Square, and switched to a cab down Fourth, where the second-hand bookshops elbow each other like dirty urchins.

  A flabby hombre in a Joe Carbondale rope-knit sweater, whose jowl could have used a shave, quit giggling over the Heptameron long enough to tell me he was Lloyd Thursday. His shoe-button eyes became opaque when I asked to see any first editions or incunabula relative to the Clupea harengus, or common herring.

  “You got the wrong pitch, copper,” he snarled. “That stuff is hotter than Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet.”

  “Maybe a sawbuck’ll smarten you up,” I said. I folded one to the size of a postage stamp, scratched my chin with it. “There’s five yards around for anyone who knows why those Smorgasbits of Sigrid Bjornsterne’s happened to be pink.” His eyes got crafty.

  “I might talk for a grand.”

  “Start dealing.” He motioned toward the back. I took a step forward. A second later a Roman candle exploded inside my head and I went away from there. When I came to, I was on the floor with a lump on my sconce the size of a lapwing’s egg and big Terry Tremaine of Homicide was bending over me.

  “Someone sapped me,” I said thickly. “His name was—”

  “Webster,” grunted Terry. He held up a dog-eared copy of Merriam’s Unabridged. “You tripped on a loose board and this fell off a shelf on your think tank.”

  “Yeah?” I said skeptically. “Then where’s Thursday?” He pointed to the fat man lying across a pile of erotica. “He passed out cold when he saw you cave.” I covered up, let Terry figure it any way he wanted. I wasn’t telling him what cards I held. I was playing it safe until I knew all the angles.

  In a seedy pharmacy off Astor Place, a stale Armenian, whose name might have been Vulgarian but wasn’t, dressed my head and started asking questions. I put my knee in his groin and he lost interest. Jerking my head toward the coffee urn, I spent a nickel and the next forty minutes doing some heavy thinking. Then I holed up in a phone booth and dialed a clerk I knew called Little Farvel, in a delicatessen store on Amsterdam Avenue. It took a while to get the dope I wanted because the connection was bad and Little Farvel had been
dead two years, but we Noonans don’t let go easily.

  BY THE time I worked back to the Arbogast Building, via the Weehawken ferry and the George Washington Bridge to cover my tracks, all the pieces were in place. Or so I thought up to the point she came out of the wardrobe holding me between the sights of her ice-blue automatic.

  “Reach for the stratosphere, gumshoe.” Sigrid Bjornsterne’s voice was colder than Horace Greeley and Little Farvel put together, but her clothes were plenty calorific. She wore a forest-green suit of Hockanum woollens, a Knox Wayfarer, and baby crocodile pumps. It was her blouse, though, that made tiny red hairs stand up on my knuckles. Its deep yoke folds, shoulder pads, and shirt-band bow could only have been designed by some master craftsman, some Cézanne of the shears.

  “Well, Nosy Parker,” she sneered, “so you found out how they tinted the herring.”

  “Sure—grenadine,” I said easily. “You knew it all along. And you planned to add a few grains of oxylbutane-cheriphosphate, which turns the same shade of pink in solution, to your husband’s portion, knowing it wouldn’t show in the post-mortem. Then you’d collect the three hundred g’s and join Harry Pestalozzi in Nogales till the heat died down. But you didn’t count on me.”