Tiffany Street (6 page)

What drove Mr. Bern crazy was the gap between cajolery and threat. Every morning when I brought his beautifully shined vici kids back into his office he was on the phone playing one or two highly dramatic roles.

First role:

“Lennie, for God’s sake, you think I’m a bank? You haven’t sent me a dime since May. Not a dime. Five months behind, Lennie. Five audits. You know what that means? Twenty weeks I’ve been paying out salaries to my staff. Twenty weeks, Lennie. Where do you think I get the cash to pay my men? You think I got a printing press in the cellar? I make my own ten-dollar bills? For God’s sake, Lennie, you’re one of my oldest and one of my most valued clients. I take care of your books like they were my own. My father should get such attention from me as you get. Be human, Lennie. Have a heart. You can’t pay the whole bill? So all right. Send a check on account. But for God’s sake, Lennie, send
something!
”

One of my most crucial duties as an employee of M.S.&Co. was helping, every morning between 10:15 and 10:30, to get Mr. Bern back into his freshly shined shoes. He had small feet, but Mr. Bern was a vain man and his shoes were smaller than they should have been.

Vanity of vanities, sayeth the Preacher, but the Preacher uttereth not a syllable about tight shoes. With the help of a shoehorn I managed to get Mr. Bern back into his, but I had to do it on my knees. The task was simple enough. A matter of mere leverage. But it was much simpler when Mr. Bern on the phone was playing the first of his two dramatic roles: cajoling.

For this performance he employed only the upper registers of his voice and the hand with which he was not holding the telephone receiver to his ear. When Mr. Bern was playing the second of his dramatic roles, I had trouble. For this performance he employed his feet for emphasis.

“Mr. Shimnitz? This is Ira Bern.”

Stamp of right foot, narrowly missing Benny Kramer’s left hand.

“Ira Bern, Maurice Saltzman & Company. Right. Now, Mr. Shimnitz, I think you should be informed that I am running a business, not an eleemosynary institution.”

Stamp of left foot, not quite missing the knuckle of Benny’s right hand. A small scrape. Not enough to worry about. Even in those days I did not infect easily.

“Do you realize what it means, Mr. Shimnitz, when you are callous enough not to pay one of my bills promptly? Let me tell you, Mr. Shimnitz, let me tell you what it means. It means you are striking a blow at the faith of the average citizen in the country’s movers and shakers. We are in the depths of a depression, Mr. Shimnitz. Are you aware of that? The leaders in the White House don’t know their ass from a hot rock how to get us out of it, Mr. Shimnitz. To be blunt about it, Mr. Hoover is a
putz,
Mr. Shimnitz. Do you know that? Well, Mr. Shimnitz?”

Stamp of right foot. Edge of vici kid toe scrapes Benny’s thumb. Slow, hot, searing pain starts up hand and wrist.

“Well, Mr. Shimnitz, the country knows it. Oh, boy, do they know it, Mr. Shimnitz. The people who make up the country, the men selling apples on street corners, the poor bastards on the bread lines, do they believe in their leaders? Mr. Hoover? Mr. Curtis? The rest of those jerks down in Washington? Does the guy in the street believe them? You bet your ass, Mr. Shimnitz, they don’t. And after you bet your ass, Mr. Shimnitz, you can bet your bottom dollar. What they believe in is the people who are still in a position to pay their salaries. People like me, Mr. Shimnitz. I’m no Herbert Hoover. I’m no Charlie Curtis. I’m just a common ordinary garden-variety American, Mr. Shimnitz. I’m just plain Ira Bern a certified public accountant with a staff of twenty-two. Ira Bern, a simple Paul Revere type patriot. And it’s people like you, Mr. Shimnitz, who are cutting the ground from under the feet of the great patriots of this country. Yes, patriots. People like me, Mr. Ira Bern, who are fighting to prevent the revolution. I am fighting to prevent it for every decent American citizen, including deadbeats like you, Mr. Shimnitz. But you’re acting like a man who doesn’t deserve it. You’re acting like a slob, Mr. Shimnitz, and for slobs a Paul Revere don’t lay down his life. Unless you put a check in the mail at once, unless you clear up your bill but I mean pronto, Mr. Shimnitz, no member of the staff of Maurice Saltzman & Company will ever again show up in your lousy office. As of this moment, Mr. Shimnitz, you can go get yourself a new accountant.”

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?