Last Respects (49 page)

To see him pushing this huge pen now, in the middle of the month, across one of his letterheads was an event so unusual that it jolted me.

“Now, Benny,” Mr. Bern said. “Here’s what I want you to do.” He signed his name with a flourish, pulled an envelope from his drawer, and carefully lettered a name and address on the envelope. “I want you to take this over to Mr. Roon’s office right away and give it to him personally. Personally, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Mr. Bern lifted the envelope flap and licked it wet. Then he sealed it down with broad, totally unnecessary sweeps of both palms across his desk blotter. It was as though the more energy he poured into sealing his handwritten letter the more confidence he gained in what the contents could do for him.

“You know where Mr. Roon’s office is?” Mr. Bern asked.

I didn’t. I had never been there. But I knew how to read an address, and Mr. Bern had inscribed this one on the envelope in letters half an inch high.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Mr. Bern handed me the envelope. “Remember what I told you,” he said. “To Mr. Roon in person. Anybody in the office, a bookkeeper or somebody, they say give it to me, I’ll see he gets it, nothing doing. You want to deliver this to Mr. Roon personally. He’s out? You’ll wait. He’s in a meeting? You’ll wait until the meeting is over. To Mr. Roon in person only. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Then Mr. Bern did a surprising thing. He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket, slid out a dollar bill, and placed it on top of the envelope in my hand.

“Take a taxi,” he said.

A man who was capable of giving his office boy a dime every morning so the boy could enjoy a cuppa cawfee and a ruggle while he watched his boss’s shoes being shined, obviously possessed at least some generous instincts. But I was fairly certain none of these instincts was involved in Mr. Bern’s astonishing gesture on that morning of the Shimnitz-Roon confusion. In 1930 generosity to office boys stopped at a dime.

The address was on West 21st Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues. A mere fifteen blocks. On nights when I could get out of the office early enough to save the nickel fare, I walked almost twice that distance to my classes in the 23rd Street branch of C.C.N.Y. I knew I could almost certainly walk from the offices of M.S.&Co. to the Roon office in a quarter of an hour. But I knew something else: the contents of the letter Mr. Bern had entrusted to my care.

Though I had not read the words, I knew the emotion out of which they had come. It was evident from the whispering Miss Bienstock had done in Mr. Bern’s ear immediately following his request that she get Mr. Roon on the phone. The letter was obviously a substitute for the spoken apology Mr. Bern had planned. Perhaps Miss Bienstock always looked perplexed because she was constantly struggling inside her head to invent improvements on Mr. Bern’s moves.

They were, on the whole, good moves. Good enough, at any rate, to keep M.S.&Co. afloat in a time of many sinkings. But Mr. Bern was erratic. From a man like Mr. Bern a personal note was bound to be more effective than a phone call. Not only would it indicate an honest regret for a boorish mistake without the distraction of a boorish voice. It would also keep Mr. Bern off the phone, where he sometimes forgot whether he was cajoling or threatening.

Unlike Mr. Bern’s morning dime, however, which represented an attempt to bring a few moments of pleasure into the bleak life of an underling, his dollar represented a dilemma of distressing dimensions for that same underling.

If I took a taxi and got to Mr. Roon with Mr. Bern’s letter in the next few minutes, the Roon account might be saved for M.S.&Co. If I walked, and pocketed the dollar, the letter might come into Mr. Roon’s hands too late. His anger might be building up right now to explosive proportions. Written apologies would be too late. Maurice Saltzman & Company would lose the Roon account. And I, of course, as the firm’s newest and youngest employee, would be the first to be fired. My first lesson in irony.

At that time I don’t remember getting many. Which is why I remember this one.

That dollar was killing me.

Before it did, I was saved. By something out of my past. At that time I didn’t have much past. But for this moral dilemma I had just enough.

“Hey, Benny!”

I looked up. Struggling with my moral dilemma, I had not realized I had come down from the M.S.&Co. office into the street. I saw now that the flow of Seventh Avenue traffic had stopped for a red light at the 34th Street corner. Most of the traffic on Seventh Avenue, then as now, consisted of huge garment-center trucks. They were hearselike affairs, not unlike the vans in which horses are transported from race track to race track. On the front seat of the truck that had stopped practically at my feet sat Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. He had been in my scout troop down on East Fourth Street. Troop 244, of which I had been senior patrol leader. I had not seen him since the graduation exercises at Thomas Jefferson High.

“How you been?” he said.

“Pretty good,” I said. “You?”

“Fine. How’s your mother?”

The driver leaned across Hot Cakes. “You two mind stopping this class reunion? That light’s gonna change.”

“Where you going?” Hot Cakes said.

“Downtown,” I said.

He opened the door of the truck and slid his rear end over toward the driver. “Hop in,” he said.

I hopped in and pulled the door shut. The light changed. The driver put the truck into gear and we rolled off down Seventh Avenue.

“Whereabouts downtown?”

“Twenty-first and Seventh,” I said.

“This is your lucky day, kid,” the driver said. “We’re taking this load to Ohrbach’s on Fourteenth. Okay if we drop you at the corner of Twenty-first and Seventh?”

“That will be fine,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

Then Hot Cakes and I seemed to become aware of each other. He was wearing a pair of battered khaki pants, a torn and sweaty T-shirt, a pair of scuffed sneakers, and he smelled like the locker room in Thomas Jefferson High after a basketball game. I was wearing my graduation suit and shoes, my mother’s beautifully laundered shirt, a tie that had been given to me for my bar mitzvah by my Aunt Sarah from New Haven, and I was certain I smelled better than Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. It would have been difficult to smell worse.

“You look like you’re doing pretty good,” Hot Cakes said.

“Not bad,” I said. “It looks better than it is only because it’s clean. A firm of certified public accountants. How about you?”

“I’m with Built-in Uplift Frocks, Inc.,” Hot Cakes said. “It’s actually not as bad as it looks because it looks so dirty. Right, Al?”

Al was dressed exactly as Hot Cakes was dressed, but Al was older, in his forties, I guessed, and he had not shaved for several days.

“It stinks,” he said. “But these days what doesn’t?”

“You still down on Fourth?” Hot Cakes said.

“No,” I said. “We moved to the Bronx three months ago.”

“Us, too,” Hot Cakes said. “Just a coupla weeks ago. Where you?”

“Tiffany Street,” I said.

“Jesus,” Hot Cakes said with a grin. “We’re just around the corner. Fox Street.”

“Okay, Tiffany,” the driver said as he pulled the truck up to the curb at 21st Street. “Here’s your stop.”

“Maybe we could get together?” Hot Cakes said.

We had never been close friends. In fact, I knew very little about him except that he had been very good at wigwagging one-flag Morse code. But we had come from the same country, so to speak, and now we had rediscovered each other in an alien land. Previous friendship was unnecessary. From now on only death could us part.

“I’d like that,” I said.

I opened the truck door and jumped down to the sidewalk. Hot Cakes moved over to the window and pulled the door shut. Al started the truck.

“Where can I reach you?” Hot Cakes called.

I replied with a phrase I’d learned from listening to Mr. Bern. It packed weight.

“I’m in the phone book,” I called back.

The track disappeared into the flow of downtown traffic. I turned west. Walking up 21st Street toward Mr. Roon’s address, I was in the grip of two emotions. I felt virtuous, and I felt clever. I felt virtuous because I had arrived at Mr. Roon’s address as rapidly as a taxi could have carried me. I felt clever because I had made a dollar on the deal. In the lobby I forgot my feelings.

It did not look much different from the lobbies of the other loft buildings in which Maurice Saltzman & Company clients functioned, and yet it seemed totally different. The difference puzzled me. I looked around the brown marble walls, but learned nothing. I walked over to the directory, found on the black felt the little white metal letters that spelled out
I. G. ROON, LTD.
1201, and pushed the elevator button. As the car came rumbling down the shaft, I found myself sniffing. For what? The car arrived. As soon as I stepped in, and the operator slammed the door, I knew what was different about this building. It was the smell.

All the other loft buildings I knew, most of them on Seventh Avenue, had very distinctive odors. Not necessarily unpleasant. In fact, as you moved up the avenue from 34th Street (dresses) to 37th (frocks) toward Times Square (gowns), in the buildings around 39th Street, where the more expensive gowns were manufactured, the smell was not unlike that of the perfume shop in Macy’s. The models were higher priced. The things with which they sprayed themselves came from distant countries. The Roon building was totally different. This building smelled clean.

“Twelve, please,” I said.

The door marked
I. G. ROON, LTD.
1201 was at the end of a long brown marble corridor. Except for being obviously very old, the door looked like any other office door. What I found behind it did not. The room into which I stepped could have served as the model for the Phiz drawing of the office in which the brothers Cheeryble functioned in
Nicholas Nickleby.

The floor was covered with very old green carpeting. It was dotted here and there with small islands of brown where the green nap had worn away and the cording showed through. On the walls hung what looked like steel engravings of rolling farm country. I counted eight. Somehow they all looked alike, perhaps because they were all framed by the same kind of narrow bands of black wood.

One picture, over the door at the far end of the room, I did recognize. I had seen it many times in my high school history textbook. It was a picture of Queen Victoria, full-face, arms folded across her plump little middle, looking exactly the way a few years later Helen Hayes would look. There was nothing unusual about most of the furnishings. Rows of very old dark green filing cabinets. I could tell they were old by the way the drawers sagged at the corners. A couple of long dark brown tables, stacked neatly with what looked like fat reference books, stood side by side against one wall. In one corner a wooden umbrella stand with a square brass pan in the bottom leaned over slightly because one of the knobbed legs was missing.

Two things, however, were so unusual that I felt, for a startled moment, they must have been purchased from the Cheeryble brothers when Dickens was shoehorned into the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Two things I had never seen before. A couple of stand-up desks. One on either side of the room.

Then I saw the two people in the room, and I forgot the desks.

At one of them, working busily over a fat ledger, stood a tall old lady. She wore a black alpaca dress buttoned up to her throat and held at the neck by a yellowing ivory cameo. At the other desk stood an old man working over two ledgers. He was bald, with tufts of white over the ears. He wore a gray alpaca jacket. What looked like a pair of black stockings without bottoms were pulled up on his arms from wrist to elbow, apparently to protect the sleeves of his coat. As he moved his head from side to side, glancing from one ledger to the other, I could see he had a pencil tucked over each ear.

Even more arresting than the appearance of these two people, and the desks at which they were working, was the way they were working: facing opposite walls, their backs to each other.

I had time to take all this in for a somewhat disconcerting reason. Or rather, I realized after a while I was disconcerted because I’d had time to take all this in. There was a small, black bell over the door. An old-fashioned bell with a clapper. It was fixed in such a way that, when somebody entered, the corner of the door punched the bell and set it tinkling. It was not until the tinkling stopped that I realized neither the old man nor the old woman had looked up. They went right on working away at their ledgers.

It was the sort of situation I had never before experienced. I don’t suppose my experience was unique, but it seems likely. How often would a young man have occasion to attract the attention of adults who are ignoring him? Clawing through my mind for examples of such occasions, I remembered a comic-strip character named Harold Teen who suffered endless misadventures every morning in the pages of the
Daily News.
Harold was constantly being ignored by his high school principal, to whose office Harold had been summoned for disciplinary action, or by the fathers of the girls on whom he called. After shifting uneasily from one foot to another for a long time, Harold Teen always broke the silence by saying, in a balloon over his head: “Ahem!”

I could not manage the balloon, but I had no trouble exploding a good, loud “Ahem!”

Without raising his head the old man said, “In a moment. In a moment.”

He said it to one of the two ledgers on which he was working. Then he moved his head, made an entry in the second ledger, and looked up. Naturally, he was wearing thick glasses made of small fat halfmoons that were held to his head by thin gold strands. What else would a man working in the office of the Cheeryble brothers be wearing?

“What is it?” he said.

Staring at me over the halfmoon glasses he looked so severe that I was taken aback by the softness of his voice. He sounded kind.

“I’d like to see Mr. Roon, please,” I said.

“About what?”