Last Respects (51 page)

Natie Farkas. George Weitz. Chink Alberg. Kids I saw every day, all day. At school. At
cheder.
In the evening at boy scout troop meetings. Someone to walk to school with. Bat out a few fungoes. Play lievio. Swap dirty stories. Someone to discuss a piece of bad news with, or a rumor, or a plan, or make jokes with. Someone you could bring a piece of good news to, or a scrap of juicy gossip, or a troubling question, or with whom you could just share an idle hour sitting on the dock staring out at the river traffic. I no longer had any friends.

But I was keeping my eyes open. Which is why I was pleased when, in the elevator coming down from the I. G. Roon offices, I felt I had passed muster with Sebastian Roon. The thought that this might lead to our becoming friends was a startling mental leap, but pleasant to contemplate.

An Englishman and I? Friends? Like in the newsreels the Prince of Wales? Or in Dickens, David Copperfield and Steerforth? My friend? Jesus! On the other hand, he had invited me to lunch. Maybe...?

I did not know it at the time, but this was my first experience with the heady temptations of snobbery.

“Do you mind if we go to Shane’s?” Sebastian said when we were out in the street. Sebastian, eh? Not Sebastian Roon? Or Mr. Roon? Take it easy, Benny. You’re not friends yet.

“On Twenty-third Street?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I see you know it.”

I knew it the way I knew the Metropolitan Opera House. Something I passed every day but had never been inside. Shane’s was one of those restaurants that were mentioned regularly in the newspapers, usually in the Broadway columns, in connection with the activities of famous people: politicians, actors, sports figures, and radio personalities. The windows were curtained in heavy accordion-pleated brown rep, so it was impossible to see what went on inside. Whenever I walked by the restaurant on my way to C.C.N.Y., however, I would break step for a moment in the hope that someone would shove the door open and I might get a glimpse of the interior.

I never did. All I ever saw was the disemboweled deer that hung by its tied rear legs on a hook at one side of the door when venison was in season, and the cluster of grouse, tied together like a bouquet of feathers, heads down, that replaced the deer when the venison season was over. Or maybe it was the other way around. I never understood why Shane’s did not serve venison and grouse at the same time, but I did understand that I had just had an unusual invitation.

“No,” I said, “I don’t know it. But I know about it. I mean I’ve never been there, but I read about Shane’s in the papers all the time.”

“Good,” Sebastian Roon said. “Then you’re in for a treat. At least I hope you’ll find it a treat. The food’s jolly good.”

I didn’t doubt it. Not only because it was a reasonable guess to draw the inference that a restaurant frequented by famous people would have to serve food that was jolly good, but also because coming to work on my first job uptown—now downtown—had caused me to experience a shock of disloyalty to my mother.

Like most kids on East Fourth Street, I had never eaten anything but my mother’s cooking. I had always found it adequate. This may sound disparaging. Not at all. It seems to me the accurate word for describing a piece of daily existence without which you could not continue to exist and about which you have no complaints. Like breathing. Or sleeping. Some of the things my mother cooked pleased me more than others, of course, but none displeased me. Whether her best was better or worse than the cooking of somebody else, I did not know. The question never crossed my mind. How could it? I had never eaten anybody else’s cooking.

Then I went to work on 34th Street, and my horizons, which I had been prepared to see widen, did more than that: they exploded. It happened one day while I was waiting for Mr. Bern’s shoes to be shined.

I had got out of bed with a slightly upset stomach. So, instead of having my usual ruggle and cuppa cawfee, I kept the dime in my pocket. Later in the day, on my way to Lou G. Siegel’s delicatessen on 39th Street for Mr. Bern’s daily pastrami sandwich, I made the discovery that my morning queasiness had given way to midday hunger. Fortunately, I was on my way toward, not back from, Lou G. Siegel’s. So I was not yet carrying the sandwich that would be considerably reduced in temperature if, before delivering the pastrami sandwich to Mr. Bern, I took time out to get something to eat for myself. Also, at that moment on my way uptown, I happened to be passing the Automat next to Macy’s.

I had walked in and looked around the place several times. I was fascinated by the little windows out of which popped foods I had never heard of, but my fascination did not lead me to satisfy my curiosity. For a man working on a three-dollar-a-week base allowance, the prices were too high. On this day, however, I had a windfall: the dime I had not spent on my morning ruggle and cuppa cawfee. I did not wait to hear the arguments of caution surfacing in my head like bubbles of fat in a pot of boiling soup. I turned into the Automat.

The first thing you saw when you came in was the wall of sandwiches on the left. And the first thing I saw was in the top window of the first vertical row of windows: a big round roll, dark brown, covered with sesame seeds. It was sliced in half horizontally across the middle. The top half was separated from the bottom half by two thick slabs of pink meat. To the right of the window, in black letters on a white celluloid card set in a silver slot was printed:
HAM SANDWICH 2 NICKLES
.

It could not have been more terrifying to a boy from East Fourth Street and Tiffany Street if the words on the card had read:
ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

My mother had always, of course, operated a strictly kosher kitchen. The concept of ham had never even crossed my consciousness, much less my lips. But I was not at the moment in my mother’s kitchen. Nor was I, in actual fact, in my right mind. It was as though the notion of committing murder had crossed my consciousness as an idle fancy and then, to my horror, I found myself knife in hand, standing over a helpless victim.

I sent cautious glances around the crowded restaurant. Quickly, furtively, I dropped in my two nickles. I twisted the knob. The small glass door popped open. I pulled out the plate. Head bowed, I went to a table against the wall, sat down and picked up the sandwich. I took my first bite, and was lost. I have never been the same since.

Not only because until that moment I had never tasted anything so good. My life was changed irrevocably because with that initial pleasure came the knowledge that there were more delicious things in the world than the boiled chicken my mother had all my life set before me.

I carried the burden of disloyalty with a dismay and pain that were, of course, foolishly disproportionate. But I kept right on eating ham sandwiches, and soon the pain of my disloyalty vanished. Especially when I discovered bacon and eggs.

Nonetheless, any discussion of food in my presence would jog the old tremors. By assuring me that I would find the food in Shane’s jolly good, Sebastian Roon had hit me where I still, on occasion, lived. I forgot the address, so to speak, as soon as we entered the restaurant.

The only restaurants in which I had previously set foot were, as I have indicated, the Automat and Stewart’s cafeteria. They were dissimilar, of course, but the dissimilarity was mechanical: the way the food was dispensed. In the Automat it came popping out of little holes in the wall. In Stewart’s you picked it up from steam tables and long glass shelves arranged like showcases. The atmosphere in both restaurants, however, was the same.

Hurrying people. Bright lighting. A ceaseless assault of confusing noise: voices calling; the whir of revolving doors; dishes and silver being dropped into metal carts; knives and forks clattering onto trays; serving spoons being banged free of excess gravy against the aluminum pots on the steam tables; shouts from the kitchen across the ledges of the windows through which batches of freshly cooked food were passed to the servers; an occasional plate or coffee cup shattering to fragments on the marble floors.

I had always found the noise attractive. I had come to expect it as a natural accompaniment to the pleasant activity of consuming food in public. I did not think it through, but I see now how my thoughts must have been going.

If you got this much action when you stepped into comparatively modest-priced restaurants like the Automat for a ham sandwich or Stewart’s for a plate of pot roast, the least you could expect when you entered a joint that hung gutted deer and clusters of grouse on the part of the front door where my father nailed our mezuzah, was the Edwin Franko Goldman band playing a Sousa march while Al Jolson bellowed “Mammy.”

You could expect it, yes. But what you would get is what I got: a feeling that I had stepped into the place of worship dedicated to an obscure but well-to-do sect. The priests wore black mess jackets with red vests fastened by silver buttons. They moved about on their toes as, in hushed silence, they carried food and drink to votaries seated at tables covered with red and white checked tablecloths.

We were approached by a tall white-haired old man with a face he had obviously stolen from El Greco’s portrait of St. Jerome. He bowed to Sebastian Roon. I couldn’t believe I had actually seen it. But I had. The old man bowed!

“Mr. Roon,” he said.

“Hello, George,” Sebastian Roon said. “This is a friend of mine, Mr. Kramer.”

The old man bowed again. “Delighted to meet you, Mr. Kramer.”

Then I realized the old man had bowed to me.

“We’re famished,” Sebastian Roon said. “Can you feed us?”

“With pleasure,” George said. “This way, please.”

It was only because he turned so promptly that he did not notice I had bowed back to him. But Sebastian Roon had noticed, and he grinned.

“Not necessary, old boy,” he said, taking my arm. “He gets tipped quite liberally.”

George stopped at a small round table to the left of the door and waited for us to catch up. He helped Sebastian Roon into his chair. By the time George turned to help me, I was already seated. I wondered if I should have waited for him. Nobody had ever helped me into a chair. Not since I was a little boy, anyway, when I could not get up to the seat on my own. I decided not to do anything on my own. I would watch Sebastian Roon and do whatever he did. The next thing he did was sneeze.

“Gesundheit,” said George.

“Thank you,” said Roon. He gave me a funny look, as though he wanted to say something but was not sure I would understand. Finally, he turned to George and said, “I think we might risk a couple of cups of coffee to start.”

“Very good,” said George.

He bowed and went away. I have never been in this sort of restaurant, so I assumed things were done not quite the way they were done in the Automat and in Stewart’s. Starting a meal with a cup of coffee seemed peculiar, but so did having El Greco’s St. Jerome bow to a kid from Thomas Jefferson High School who fetched hot pastrami sandwiches from Lou G. Siegel’s for Ira Bern.

“Do you know this city very well?” Sebastian Roon said.

It was like asking Ulysses if he knew the Aegean.

“Parts of it,” I said. “I know downtown pretty well. I was born on East Fourth Street.”

“What’s that?” Roon said.

The question jolted me. I had never heard one like it. I didn’t know how to put together the words of a sensible answer. What was East Fourth Street? It was my life, that’s what it was. Up to six months ago, anyway.

“Well, it’s sort of a poor section,” I said, and because I didn’t want him to think ill of me, I added: “We don’t live there anymore.”

“Who is we?” Roon said.

“My father and mother,” I said.

“They’re alive, then, are they?” Roon said, and then he laughed. “Sorry. That is a bit silly, isn’t it? I mean if they weren’t alive you wouldn’t be living with them, would you? What I meant was it must be very pleasant to have a family. Where do you live now?”

“A place called the Bronx,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of it,” Sebastian Roon said. “Do you like it?”

Again his question jolted me. Did I like the Bronx? I must have. We’d fought so hard to get there.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s okay.”

What I meant was do you like it better than East Fourth Street?” Roon said.

How could I not like it better? East Fourth Street was a slum. The Bronx was uptown.

“It’s a much nicer neighborhood,” I said.

George arrived with two coffee cups. He set down one in front of me and the other in front of Sebastian Roon.

“Thank you,” Roon said.

George bowed and went away. I stared into my cup. It contained two lumps of ice. No coffee. Just two lumps of ice. Since it is not necessary to say I was surprised, I will not say it. But I will say that I had a sudden glimpse of the fact that education is a long and endless process. In my six months as an employee of Maurice Saltzman & Company, I thought I had learned a good deal about the customs and practices of the businessmen in the midtown area. At least during the business day. I had no idea what they did at night or where they did it. Perhaps I thought I had learned it all. Now, staring at the two lumps of ice in what was supposed to be a cup of coffee, I realized I had a long way to go.

The obvious move was to stick to my resolve of a few minutes ago. I would do nothing until Sebastian Roon did it first. What he did now was pull from his breast pocket a silver flask. It was flat, about the size and shape of the
Othello
we had used in English class at Thomas Jefferson. I had never seen such a thing before except in movies about Flappers with John Held, Jr., faces and college boys in raccoon coats.

“This stuff is perfectly reliable,” Roon said. “My uncle gets it from one of the best merchants in town.”

He twisted off the silver cap, leaned across the table and poured a couple of inches of amber fluid into my cup. Then he did the same for his own cup. He recapped the flask, slid it back into his breast pocket, and from the cluster of salt cellars, pepper mills, and mustard pots in the center of the table he picked up a small pitcher of water.