Last Respects (46 page)

“Kick,” Corporal Isherwood had snapped at us over and over again. “Kick,” he had barked. “As hard and as straight out at the bahstids as you can. The foot reaches further than the hand, and to do it you don’t have to lean forward and expose the body’s voytal parts. Kick, gentlemen, always kick.”

A quarter of a century later, on a sunny afternoon in front of Penn Station, I did Corporal Isherwood’s bidding. I kicked. And I added a touch of my own: I closed my eyes. The toe of my shoe caught the wielder of the headsman’s ax right smack in the middle of the target that the Marquis of Queensbury spent his life telling Western Man no civilized pugilist must even approach.

I did better than approach it; I practically demolished it. Closing my eyes had obviously done the trick. The man screamed. He tumbled backward, clutching his voytal parts, and he flopped onto the black boy who had damaged my head. They went down together, amid a wild rasping of brakes and an insane honking of horns.

I heard a click behind me. The taxi driver had leaned over and snapped back the catch on the lock of his rear door. I twisted the handle and jumped in. Pulling the door shut with a bang, I fell back on the seat.

“Where to?” the driver said.

I looked at the card next to his meter. Ramon Fuentes. I looked at his Puerto Rican face. Twenty-five? Perhaps thirty. Certainly no more. He had not yet been born when Benny Kramer was being taught in Kent to “kick, always kick.”

“Madison and Forty-ninth,” I said. “Drive slow.”

“They hurt you bad?” Ramon Fuentes said.

Not physically. Only in the place where I lived.

“I’ll be all right in a few minutes,” I said.

But I knew in my belly I would never be all right. Never again. A couple of hours ago, in Philadelphia, my life had turned a corner. A few minutes ago, in front of Penn Station, a road block had been dumped behind me. There was no way to go back.

The streets I had roamed at night, as a boy at N.Y.U. Law School, dreaming of Toby Wing and Judge Brandeis, those streets were no longer safe in the brilliant afternoon sunlight.

“Listen,” I said to the taxi driver. “When you stopped the cab for me in the middle of the traffic back there, why didn’t you open the door?”

“No taxi driver in this town goes to Penn Station to look for a fare,” the driver said. “It’s too tough. Even the cops are scared. It’s all gangs. They tell a man or a woman, We’ll get you a cab, mister. Then, when they get it, they surround him and his family and they say, That’ll cost you ten bucks, mister. Or twenty. The poor guy, he’s there with his wife, he’s stuck. He doesn’t pay? They get rough. Sometimes with the bags. Sometimes with the man. His wife and kids, too. He usually pays. Like those two guys who jumped you. They were probably promoting a cab for some poor sucker who just got off the train from some hick town out west and didn’t know what was gonna happen to him. The only time a hackie goes to Penn Station these days is when he gets stuck, and then he gets the hell out of that neighborhood as fast as he can. Like this lady flagged me over on Fifty-seventh and Lex. She says take me to the Sheraton on Seventh. I’m stuck. I gotta take her. But I want to get out of there fast. So I take her to the Thirty-third Street entrance and then I lock the door. When I turn into Seventh, getting the hell out of there, I see you in the gutter. I’m heading south, down Seventh, so I figure okay, and I stop. But then I see these two guys behind you. Boy, I tell you, mister, I want to get the hell out of there.”

All at once so did I.

“You can go a little faster,” I said. “I’m okay now.”

I wasn’t. But I knew as soon as I set eyes on Miss Bienstock, my secretary, I would be. She was what people mean when they say somebody is no longer a kid. And indeed Miss Bienstock was not.

When I had first met her in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company in 1930, she had been a pretty girl with dimples who had come to work in that office directly from her graduation at seventeen from Washington Irving High School. When I came to work in that same office, directly from my graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School, I had just passed my seventeenth birthday, and Miss Bienstock had been working there for five years. Any way you figured it, she was my senior by five years.

In 1930 it had seemed quite a gap. Especially since Miss Bienstock had been private secretary to our boss, and I had been the sort of office boy who was known in the slang of the day as a chief cook and bottle-washer. I did everything, including many things Miss Bienstock asked me to do.

It is the word asked that lingers. Even though Miss Bienstock had the authority, she never ordered. She always asked.

“Benny, I wonder if I could ask, some time today, no rush, any time at all, you’re out on some errand, could you stop in at Pennsylvania Stationers and get me a box of these eight and a half by eleven manila file folders?”

I always did, and I was always pleased to do it. Years later, when I went into business for myself and needed a secretary, I happened to run into Miss Bienstock at the Riverside Chapel funeral service for another girl who had worked in our office. The sight of Miss Bienstock made me feel good. I had one of those inspirations that with more fortunate men lead to the White House or 10 Downing Street. But what’s the White House? What’s 10 Downing Street? Compared with a good secretary? Nothing? Everything!

The relationship was never difficult. Even though she was then, and naturally still is, older by those five years. The key to our relationship is that, even though I am in my late fifties, a married man with a grown son, to Miss Bienstock I am still Benny Kramer, the Maurice Saltzman & Company office boy. And you know something? I like it. “Something went wrong in Philadelphia,” she said through a troubled frown when I came into the office. “I can tell.”

I was on the verge of denying it, when my awareness of Miss Bienstock’s concern for my welfare, to which I was accustomed, took an odd turn. I was suddenly jolted by curiosity. As though I had received a message that something important was about to be revealed to me.

“How can you tell?” I said.

Miss Bienstock continued to stare at me through her anxiously troubled frown. I stared back at her, with the same sort of anxiety. Perhaps an anxiety that cut even deeper. Her great talent, even as a young girl in the office of Maurice Saltzman & Company, had been a kind of innocent clairvoyance. I never knew how her mind worked. I doubt that she did. But she always seemed to cut through confusing irrelevancies.

Miss Bienstock always knew I had a head cold before I did. She sensed—there was no other way she could have known—when my shoes needed resoling, and would suggest that I stop in at the cobbler down the street. Before I had made up my mind, she would tell me she did not think a certain client would ever move beyond his big talk about buying a certain property with the hard fact of a contract and the hard cash of a down payment. I remembered all at once that she had felt I should not go to Philadelphia to testify in Mr. Schlisselberger’s antitrust suit. She did not, of course, know the real reason why I went. Miss Bienstock was crazy about Jack. She always sends him Hallmark birthday cards. But I had never discussed with her Jack’s draft problem.

“I don’t know,” Miss Bienstock said softly. “I don’t know,” she repeated worriedly. “All of a sudden, the few hours you’ve been gone, all of a sudden you look older.”

“That’s no surprise,” I said. “Every hour that goes by, we all get older.”

Miss Bienstock shook her head. It was a very attractive head. Her hair was going white, and even though she was almost sixty-four, she still had an enviable figure. And she had never lost that look of innocent, some might say mindless, girlish prettiness. The look I had found so attractive on West 34th Street in 1930. There was something indomitable about her.

“Sticks and stones can break my bones,” we used to say on East Fourth Street, “but names can never harm me.”

That, it seemed to me, was the word for Miss Bienstock. She was unharmed. It was as though the years, passing by, had taken their expected swipes at her but she had parried them, fended them off, kept her basic self intact. I had always liked her. All at once I realized I admired her. She was what my father, who had spent his life making pockets in a pants shop, used to call good goods. I wondered how she had managed it.

“I don’t mean getting older like in arithmetic,” Miss Bienstock said. “I mean getting older like in...”

She paused. She seemed surprised by something that had apparently crossed her mind.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I remember once my mother said about one of our neighbors—something terrible had happened, I think the woman’s husband got killed by a truck on his way home from work, something like that—and I remember my mother saying about this woman, my mother said her hair turned white overnight.”

“Well, I don’t have any to turn,” I said. “Anything important happen while I was away?”

“Nothing you have to worry about until tomorrow,” Miss Bienstock said. She hesitated, then said, “Are you sure nothing happened?”

I went to the window and looked down on Madison Avenue at 5:30 in the afternoon. Once, when I was a boy on Seventh Avenue, this street had seemed as unattainable as a seat in the House of Lords. Now that I had been a part of it for a quarter of a century it seemed pointless. The question that had hit me as the Metroliner pulled into Penn Station came back with a rising inflection: Is this a way for a man to spend his life?

Why not simply answer yes, and let it go at that? Nobody but Benny Kramer had heard the question. Nobody but Benny Kramer would know that he had turned away from an honest attempt at an answer.

The throb in the back of my head moved down into other parts of my body. The pain was settling into a steady pulsing ache. I turned back to face Miss Bienstock. “No, nothing happened,” I said. I am not the noblest of citizens. I like to dilute my troubles by dumping at least part of them on others. Preferably friends. What else are friends for? But I couldn’t do it to Miss Bienstock.

People who came in and out of the office were constantly reporting incidents of violence. Muggings. Thefts. Outrages on the subway. I had always accepted them as I accepted the news reports from Vietnam. I did not doubt they were true. I deplored them. But they were happening to somebody else. Miss Bienstock had always felt the same way.

“I live on Mosholu Parkway,” she had said many times in my presence. “That’s an hour on the IRT twice a day. And I live across the street from DeWitt Clinton High School, which is now ninety percent black during the school day, and the neighborhood is getting more blacks in it during the rest of the day, and I have never had a moment of discomfort personally on the subway or in the streets. I think people make up all this stuff.”

I had agreed with her. Until a half-hour ago. Now my head throbbed.

“No, nothing happened,” I said. “Mr. Schlisselberger proved once again what we’ve known for years. He’s a horse’s patoot. My testimony is not going to change that. But having to give it proved more depressing than I thought it would be, and so maybe I do look as though my hair turned white overnight. Anyway, if there’s nothing urgent, I think I’ll carry these old bones home.”

The phone rang. Miss Bienstock picked it up. “Yes?” she said.

She listened, still scowling, obviously troubled about me. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to believe. I was reminded of Miss Merle S. Marine in my English class. She used to quote Browning quite a lot.

You know we French stormed Ratisbon: a mile or so away, on a little mound. Napoleon stood on our storming day; with legs out-thrust, you fancy how, legs wide, arms locked behind, as if to balance the prone brow, oppressive with its mind.

Napoleon and Miss Bienstock. They knew their jobs. As long as she was around, even black boys on Seventh Avenue couldn’t really damage Benny Kramer.

“Let me take a look,” Miss Bienstock said into the phone. “I just heard the outer door open. Perhaps it’s Mr. Kramer. He said if he got back from Philadelphia early enough he might stop in here at the office. Hold on, please.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said to me, “It’s Mr. Roon? He called earlier? He wants to have a drink with you at the club. He says you made a tentative date for after you got back from Philadelphia? Could you manage it? He seems quite anxious?”

I reached for the phone, then withdrew my hand. I didn’t mind a drink. Indeed, I wanted one. But I did not want to talk on the phone. I had forgotten it was Seb who had fixed up my date with Dr. McCarran in Philadelphia. My head, which hurt, was full of Jack, and how was I going to break to him and to Elizabeth Ann what Dr. McCarran had told me? It is easy to be a liar. It is difficult to be a convincing one.

“Tell him I’m signing some letters, so I can’t talk to him on the phone,” I said to Miss Bienstock. “But I’ll meet him at the club in ten minutes.”

“I think you’d better tell him yourself,” she said. “I think it would be better.”

Her thoughts were not always clear to me. But they were always concerned with my welfare.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”

S
OME BOOKS ARE WRITTEN.
Others happen. This book started to happen in 1930.

Curiously, I was not aware of this until today, when Sebastian Roon called me after I got back from Philadelphia. Sebastian and I have much in common. We discovered this on Tiffany Street in the Bronx in 1930.

It was a tough year for the country, but for the Kramer family—my mother, my father, and the author of these notes—it was actually a very good year. In fact, the best we had ever known. I had just graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School. With honors, I cannot refrain from adding with toe-shuffling embarrassment. No, I withdraw that. If you’re going to show off, you might as well do it with at least a hint of nuts-to-tradition forthrightness.

So: I am proud of the fact that I graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School as valedictorian of my class. What makes me proud is the way it made my mother and father feel. I could see them doing something I had never encountered except in Jane Austen novels. They preened. And in the process, I discovered the pleasure of giving pleasure.