Last Respects (48 page)

Slam of receiver. Stamp of left foot. Ouch!

This particular morning, as I was sucking my bruised thumb, Mr. Bern’s secretary opened the door.

“Could you see Mr. Shimnitz?” she said.

Mr. Bern glared at her. “What do you mean, could I see him?” he demanded. “I just hung up on the son of a bitch.”

Miss Bienstock looked the way she looked every morning when she handed me the sorted mail for distribution around the office. Or when I brought her a midafternoon container of coffee. Perplexed.

“Oh, no, Mr. Bern,” said Miss Bienstock. No change of expression. No change, that is, from her normal perplexity. “That was Mr. Roon you just hung up on.”

“Oh, my God,” Mr. Bern said. “No!”

“Mr. Bern,” Miss Bienstock said. “I don’t understand. Mr. Shimnitz is out in the reception room. He came in a few minutes ago. You couldn’t have been talking to him on the phone.”

Consternation gave way to appalled astonishment. Not for the first time, incidentally. With Mr. Bern it was a common parlay.

“And it was Mr. Roon I was talking to?” he said in a choked voice.

“Yes, sir,” Miss Bienstock said.

I suddenly couldn’t stand the way Mr. Bern looked.

“Mr. Bern,” I said, “I think all that happened, I think you got the names wrong, that’s all, Mr. Bern.”

He turned to stare at me. “What?”

I had a stab of revelation: Mr. Bern did not know who I was!

I had been crawling around his feet for seven months, shoehorning him into his vici kids, but to Ira Bern, it came to me in a moment of shock, I was not a human being. I was just a presence that did things. For the first time in my life I felt the compulsion to establish my identity.

“All you did, Mr. Bern,” I said firmly, “you thought you were talking to Mr. Shimnitz, but you were actually talking to Mr. Roon. That’s all.”

In the realm of seminal revelations my statement hardly ranked with the “Eureka!” of Archimedes. Yet in the mind of Ira Bern, which I could not of course fathom, but in his eyes, which were as clearly visible as the sun at high noon, I could see that I had struck a hopeful note.

“That’s right,” Mr. Bern said slowly. Then, a bit more quickly. “Sure that’s right.” His expression shifted frantically from horror to nervously troubled scrambling for a rope ladder, so to speak, out of disaster. “It was just a mistake,” Ira Bern said. “I would never talk that way to Mr. Roon.”

I wouldn’t have thought so. Mr. Roon was the president of I.G. Roon, Ltd. The most important client on the Maurice Saltzman & Company list. Most important in those days meant, as I suppose in these days it still does, most lucrative. Mr. Roon, or his Ltd., was in the rabbit business.

Mr. Roon had been born in Adelaide, Australia. Of how he spent his life between 1865, when all my research indicates he surfaced, and 1930, when he came into my life, I am totally ignorant. All I know is that in 1930, while I was just beginning my tour of duty with Maurice Saltzman & Company, Mr. Roon was sixty-five years old, he was the central figure in a British corporation with offices on West 21st Street in New York City, and he or his corporation owned rabbit farms in Australia. These farms supplied a good deal of the raw material for the hat factories of Danbury, Connecticut.

I had never as a boy thought much about hats. The kids I grew up with on East Fourth Street never wore hats except when we went to
cheder,
or Hebrew school, and to the synagogue on Saturdays. On these occasions we wore what were then known as caps. I think they still are. I see them regularly in newspaper photographs, looking not much different, on the heads of world-famous golfers playing at the Royal and Ancient in St. Andrews. Loose round affairs, somewhat like flat cabbages on top, with peaks in front presumably to shield the player’s eyes from the sun. Nobody played golf on East Fourth Street, and there was very little sun, but that’s what we wore to
cheder
and synagogue.

Hats were different. Hats were homburgs and fedoras and snap brims. Things I saw only rarely. Grooms wore them to their weddings. Or relatives to funerals. But in my youth on East Fourth Street I had attended very few weddings, and fewer funerals. Life, as I lumbered through my first two decades of it, had not yet struck an elegiac note. I was surprised, therefore, to discover when I came to work for M.S. & Co. that many men wore hats regularly, that the material from which hats were made was rabbit fur, and that one of the leading suppliers of rabbit fur to the hat manufacturers of Danbury, Connecticut, was I.G. Roon, Ltd. Our client.

Indeed, our best client. With Mr. Roon it was never necessary for Ira Bern to play either of his two highly dramatic roles on the telephone. Mr. Roon always paid his auditing bills promptly.

“Sure it was a mistake,” Mr. Bern said desperately, as though he were pleading for forgiveness. “I would never talk like that to Mr. Roon. Would I, Miss Bienstock?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Then it’s got to be a mistake,” Ira Bern said. His expression changed. A look of accusation invaded his rubbery face. “Miss Bienstock,” Ira Bern said sternly, “how could I make such a mistake?”

If you stand still long enough, life catches up with you. If your face is fixed permanently in the same expression, moments will inevitably arrive when you could not have worn a more perfectly appropriate expression. This was such a moment. Miss Bienstock’s moment.

“I don’t know,” she said. Even her voice sounded perplexed. “The phone rang, and a man’s voice said he wanted to talk to you, and it sounded like Mr. Shimnitz, so I put him through.”

“You mean you didn’t ask him what his name was?” Mr. Bern said. The stern expression vanished. Disbelief, like the tides of Fundy, came racing in. “You mean without knowing who you were putting on my wire you told me it was Mr. Shimnitz calling?”

“I thought it was Mr. Shimnitz,” Miss Bienstock said. “I talk to him all the time. It certainly sounded like Mr. Shimnitz.”

“It sounded like Mr. Shimnitz?”

A new expression on Mr. Bern’s face. Not quite incredulity. Not quite astonishment. A shading of both.

“Miss Bienstock,” he said. “To you Mr. Roon sounded like Mr. Shimnitz?” He strode to the door, hauled it open, and bellowed: “Mr. Shimnitz, come on in here!”

Mr. Bern’s office door was perhaps four feet from the reception room. His roaring voice came bouncing back from the walls of that tiny chamber like a basketball snapped back into play. Mr. Shimnitz came hurtling with it. Mr. Bern stepped back. Mr. Shimnitz, looking somewhat confused, stood among us.

“Say a few words,” Mr. Bern ordered.

Like all chronic debtors, Mr. Shimnitz had only two speeds on his gearbox: the bluff and the cringe. He swung his head to look at everybody in the room, as though reading our faces could help him decide which switch to throw. Since I was as confused as he was, Mr. Shimnitz could see at once that I was a total loss to him, and Miss Bienstock’s expression of permanent perplexity was no road out of his dilemma. The only possible guide was Mr. Bern, and Mr. Bern was glaring. Mr. Shimnitz chose the cringe.

“A few words about what?” he said.

“What the hell do I care about what?” Mr. Bern thundered. “Just say a few words!”

Mr. Shimnitz scratched his head. It was bald. I could hear his fingernails rasping across the naked scalp.

“Good morning?” he said tentatively.

“Jesus Christ!” Mr. Bern shrieked. “Is that the best you can do?”

Mr. Shimnitz stepped back, as though he expected to be punished physically. I would not have been surprised if he had been.

“I don’t understand what you want,” he said.

“Who gives a damn what you understand or don’t understand?” Mr. Bern said. “I’m not asking you to pay your lousy past due bills. I’m asking you to do something it won’t cost you a nickel. Just say a few words.”

Miss Bienstock leaned over and whispered in Mr. Bern’s ear. He nodded and turned back to Mr. Shimnitz.

“Tell us why you came here today.”

Having opted for the cringe, Mr. Shimnitz could not reverse himself. He looked around the room the way, in silent movies, the innocent country girl who has been kidnapped by a white slave ring looks around at the captors who have just ordered her to disrobe.

“I would like to tell you that in private, Mr. Bern, please.”

“For a guy who is five months behind in his bills,” Ira Bern said, “this is as much privacy as you’re going to get. Speak up. Why did you come here today?”

“Well, uh, I’m afraid I won’t be able to pay this month’s bill either, Mr. Bern, but please don’t cut me off because I got this letter from the Internal Revenue on my nineteen twenty-nine return, and I need your help to deal with them, and I promise, I honest to God promise, next month, honest, I’ll clear up the whole bill, honest I will, if you’ll just—”

Mr. Bern cut into the flow of words that weren’t really words, but a sort of open faucet of tearless tears, with a sharp question directed at Miss Bienstock.

“This sounds to you like Mr. Roon?”

“I don’t know,” Miss Bienstock said. “I never heard Mr. Roon speak.”

Ira Bern blinked at her. “You never heard Mr. Roon speak?” he said.

“No, sir,” Miss Bienstock said. “He’s never been here in the office, and I never had occasion to speak to him on the phone.”

It was a perfectly sensible answer, I thought, but I felt there was something odd about it. If I had made it, the oddity would not have struck me. After all, I had been working for M.S.&Co. for only a few months. There were many of the firm’s clients I had never seen, and almost none to whom I had talked on the phone. But Miss Bienstock had been Ira Bern’s secretary for almost five years. In addition to her other duties, she took her turn at the switchboard when the regular operator went to lunch or to the washroom or was out sick. Was it really possible that she had never heard on the phone the voice of the firm’s most lucrative client?

“Mr. Bern, please listen. I’ll pay up next month, honest I will, but first will you handle this tax audit for me, my nineteen twenty-nine return, they say I owe them over—”

“Beat it!” Mr. Bern said. He shoved Mr. Shimnitz out the door. “And don’t come back without a check!” Mr. Bern shouted into the corridor.

He pulled the door shut, went to his desk, and fell into the leather chair with a small, weary sigh of defeat. Miss Bienstock watched him with her usual expression, but I sensed she was frightened. Perhaps I felt this because I was frightened. It was a time when large issues were settled by small things. I didn’t know how lucrative a client Mr. Roon was, but it was possible that if Maurice Saltzman & Company lost his monthly payment, the staff would have to be reduced. And who was more reducible than the newest and youngest employee?

I was reminded of the gas mantles we used for illumination down on East Fourth Street. They were small balls of white material more fragile than eggshells. If you touched them with nothing but flame they would ignite and glow serviceably for months, sometimes longer. But if your hand shook when you applied the match, so that the ball of white was tapped or even brushed, it disintegrated at once into a puff of fine powder. The ambience in Mr. Bern’s office at that moment was, I thought, not dissimilar.

“All right,” he said in a low voice. “Get Mr. Roon back on the phone, and I’ll see what I can do to apologize and maybe make him believe I thought I was talking to somebody else.”

Miss Bienstock seemed to hesitate. Then she stepped around the desk, bent down, and whispered something in Mr. Bern’s ear. My heart lurched. I thought I had heard my name. Mr. Bern’s glance came up. His eyes told me I had indeed heard my name. Mr. Bern’s eyes narrowed. He nodded.

“Good thinking,” he said to Miss Bienstock.

She straightened up. Now they both were staring at me. I might have been a gobbler in a pen of turkeys into which a husband and wife were staring, trying to decide which one to choose for their Thanksgiving table.

“Benny,” Mr. Bern said.

“Yes, sir?”

“I want you to do something.”

“Yes, sir?”

Mr. Bern was writing in longhand on one of the firm’s letterheads. I knew at once something unusual was in the wind. Mr. Bern enjoyed the process of dictating. I had the feeling he felt it was one of the appurtenances of success. There was, however, one office activity that Mr. Bern insisted on performing in longhand: sending out the monthly bills to the firm’s clients. It seemed odd, because the fees were fixed and the list of clients was neatly indexed in a loose-leaf notebook on Miss Bienstock’s desk. All she had to do was run the bills through her typewriter, and Mr. Bern would have been spared an onerous chore. Except that I don’t think he found it onerous. I think he found in it what I imagine I would have found: a small, repeated ritual, in the very discomfort of performing which was contained the repeated reminder that for him the world had changed.

East Fifth Street boys, like Fourth Street boys, spent their early lives on the receiving end of bills. Or rather their parents did. From the landlord, from the gas company, from the coal merchant. What a secret thrill it must have been to Ira Bern to be reminded that now he was on the sending end!

I think it was the pleasure he took in this reminder that had dictated the choice of the instrument he used. It was a memorable tool.

By 1930 the fountain pen had already become a fairly sophisticated implement available to almost everybody. Even I owned a slender salmon-colored Parker, my father’s bar mitzvah present, with at the top a plunger for filling. Mr. Bern, however, used what even in 1930 must have been a museum piece. A very old Waterman, as long and as thick around as a banana. To fill it he needed help, which it was one of my duties to provide.

While I held the pen upright on his desk, writing end toward ceiling, Mr. Bern would unscrew the section that contained the gold penpoint. What remained was an enormous black tube or barrel. Into this he would empty an entire bottle of Waterman’s blue-black, and screw the point back into place. When filled, this implement was not much lighter in weight than a sculptor’s chisel. Yet on the first of every month Mr. Bern, happily hunched over his desk, would shove this writing tool back and forth for three or four hours at a time without pausing for rest.