Last Respects Read online

  Last Respects

  A Novel

  Jerome Weidman

  To the memory of Annie Falkovitz

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Preview: Tiffany Street

  “Happy he with such a mother!”

  The Princess,

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Foreword

  New Words for Objects New and Old

  16 October 1998

  An old friend of mine, an Englishman, was saying how close British English and American English have come together compared with the days, say, of my boyhood when nobody in Britain, except kings, statesmen, ambassadors and bankers had ever heard an American speak. I was 21 when sound (what we called ‘talking pictures’) came in, and I remember the shock to all of us when we heard the weird sounds coming out of the mouths of the people on the screen.

  And of course, quite apart from becoming familiar with the odd pronunciations of Americans of all sorts, we began to notice differences in the usage of words; we became aware for the first time of the great changes and unknown additions to the language that had been made by Englishmen who had been settling in America for three hundred years. It occurred to most of us rather late that this was bound to happen when Englishmen arrived on a new continent, saw a new landscape which had to be described with different words (tidewater, creek), new foods, new habits of life and work, not to mention the adoption, first from the Dutch, of new words for objects new and old. Englishmen who’d eaten buns found themselves eating crullers, and sitting out on the stoops of their houses. If you want to follow the impress of Spanish, Russian, German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, and the other European languages on the English of America, all you have to do is go to the library and take out the 2,400 finely printed pages of Mr H. L. Mencken’s massive work, The American Language. And that will take you only as far as 1950.

  The point my old friend was making was that after almost seventy years of talking pictures, and with the radio and television now becoming universal media, nothing in American speech or writing surprises us any more and the two languages have rubbed together so closely for so long that they are practically indistinguishable.

  Well, there’s much in this. But there are still little signs in any given piece of American prose playing a mischievous devil’s advocate. One time last year I wrote a piece of English prose, quite guileless stuff, a page of fiction about a single mild adventure of a young man in New York. I asked this same old Englishman to go over it and strike out words which proved that, though the locale of the story was New York City, and the presumption of the story and all the fixings was that it had been written by an American, there were lots of little signs which showed it could not have been written by anyone but an Englishman. I’ll just say two things: that my friend missed them, and that most Englishmen would have, too.

  Just last week there was printed in the New Yorker magazine a phrase about Californian wines, proving that the writer or copy editor was English. No American talks or writes about Californian wines. California wines. ‘California’ is the adjective. ‘Californian’ is a noun: a native or resident of California. The other most gross and most frequent trick which not one Englishman in a thousand ever seems to notice is this: I say or write, ‘I have a friend in England called Alan Owen.’ That is an immediate giveaway. No American could say or write it unless they’d been corrupted by long close association with the Brits. Americans write and say, ‘I have a friend in England named Alan Owen.’ Maybe he’s called Al. ‘Called’ would refer to a nickname. ‘Named’ is used where the English use ‘called.’ In other words, a President named William Jefferson Clinton is called Bill Clinton. ‘Named’ always for the baptismal name … right?

  We went on to discuss American words, phrases, usually slang, that are picked up in England (E. B. White said it usually took fifteen years) and there go wrong, quite often assuming an opposite meaning. A beauty close to home is the word ‘bomb’. When a book, a play, a movie flops with a sickly thud, it is said to have bombed. ‘It ran a year in London, but bombed in New York.’ Inexplicably, it got to England and took on the opposite meaning. I shall never, you’ll appreciate, forget a telephone call from my daughter in England when a book of mine, a history of America carrying the succinct title America, had just come out. ‘Daddy,’ she shouted across the Atlantic, ‘your book is a bomb!’ I very much prayed it wasn’t so. Indeed, the fact it wasn’t is one reason why I’m sitting here talking to you at this late date – in comfort.

  All this amiable light talk sprang from a darker happening: the passing of a great American writer, who received a large, worthy obituary in the New York Times but, to my surprise and dismay, did not rate a mention in the news magazines. I’m afraid it’s because the writers of literary obituaries are too young to have remembered the splendid prime and great popularity of the man. His name was Jerome Weidman, and, if we were living in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s and he had died, you would no more have been ignorant of his name than today you would say, Who is John Updike, Martin Amis? (Who, asked a contemporary of a grandson of mine, who was Ernest Hemingway?) There you have it, the frailty, the treachery, of fame. Jerome Weidman was not just a popular novelist, in the sense that James Michener or Dorothy Sayers were popular novelists. Jerome Weidman was a popular novelist who greatly impressed the literary world of New York with his first novel. He was 24 years old and earning $11 a week as an office boy and starting secretary, when in the spring of 1937, he published I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

  Here was a story mining a new vein by a young man who, even at that tender age, knew the subject, the terrain and the people inside out. It was about Manhattan’s garment centre – the hub and vortex of maybe half a million New Yorkers who whirled every day around the making of pants and coats; a mainly Jewish industry, because so many immigrant tailors originally had set it up.

  Jerome Weidman’s mother was Hungarian, and his father a young Austrian who, like George Gershwin’s Russian father, was alerted to the prospect of America and the immigrant ships by hearing the sound of a bugle, the call to fight for the Austrian emperor, which didn’t mean a year or two of military service but a semi-life sentence. He hopped it to New York City and went at once, on the Lower East Side, back to his only trade: he made trousers, pants. His son Jerome maintained against all comers that his father’s unique genius was for making better pants pockets than any other tailor on earth.

  Jerome was brought up on the Lower East Side, with the sights and sounds and idiom of the garment men and their families. That first book created a character, Harry Bogen, a shrewd, quicksilver scamp who in several disguises was to appear in his later books. All the best ones were about this life he knew as well as Dickens knew the East End of London. What was new and liberated the American novel from gentility (or the Hemingway flat protest against it) was the running talk, the exact sound and sense of the lowly characters – the first-generation immigrant sons striving to be free.

  Now you’ll see why such a man, such a writer, prompted our whole talk about the American language. Jerome Weidman was the first American street-smart novelist. (There – there’s another one, turned in England often into ‘street-wise’; nobody’s wise on the streets, but Jerome Weidman and his swarming characters are nothing if not street-smart.) He never adopted this language, but it came so naturally that when he chose titles for his subsequent
works he fell as naturally as Ira and George Gershwin did into simply taking over some prevailing bit of American idiom slang. After I Can Get It for You Wholesale came What’s in It for Me? and The Price Is Right – marvellously constructed short novels that made guessing the next turn of character as tense as tracking down a murderer. His last book, written in 1987, was a memoir, and the then senior book editor of the New Yorker magazine headed his review with the single, simple word: Pro. So he was, the complete professional, as Balzac was a pro, and Dickens. Indeed, it’s not reaching too far to say that Jerome Weidman was the Dickens of the Lower East Side (throw in the Bronx, too). He never started out with an ambition to be a writer. He was going into the garment business, and then, he thought, law school. Then he read Mark Twain and saw how he made literature out of the humblest material. All you needed was insight into character and an ear for the character’s speech. ‘Life for me on East Fourth Street’, Weidman once wrote, ‘when I was a boy was not unlike what life on the banks of the Mississippi had been for young Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. Guileless, untrained and unselfconscious, I put the stories down on paper the way I learned to walk.’

  After a fine rollicking success as a novelist, he wrote a musical play about the incomparable, cocky, little Italianate reform Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia. It was called simply Fiorello. The most prestigious theatre prize in this country (as also for fiction, history, whatever) is the Pulitzer Prize. On a spring day in 1960, in his forty-eighth year, Jerome Weidman was deliciously thunderstruck to hear he had won it with Fiorello. I should tell you that if another famous novelist had lived on a year or two longer, you may be sure that one of the first calls of congratulation would have come from him: Jerome’s old friend, the late W. Somerset Maugham. As it was, the first call came from his mother. Neither Jerome’s father nor mother was comfortable with English. They were of that generation that was forever wary of the outside world they’d moved into – the world of America and Americans. Jerome Weidman recalled with pride, and typical exactness, what his mother said to him in that telephone call: ‘Mr Mawgham was right. That a college like Columbia University, when they decided to give you a price like this should go and pick a day to do it that it’s the twelfth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. If you listened to me and became a lawyer a wonderful thing like this could never have happened.’

  He will be rediscovered, and revived, and read, when many, more famous and fashionable American writers, big guns today, are dead and gone for ever.

  Jerome Weidman, born Lower East Side, New York City, 1913. Died Upper East Side, New York City, October 1998. RIP. Jerome, Harry Bogen, and Momma and Poppa Weidman.

  From Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, 1946–2004, originally published 2004

  1

  MY MOTHER’S BODY DISAPPEARED three weeks ago from the Peretz Memorial Hospital in the Borough of Queens. The event took place sometime between 8:25 A.M. and 11:40 A.M. on the morning before Christmas Eve. It was a Sunday. At 8:25 on that morning I received a phone call at my home from Dr. Herman Sabinson.

  “It’s all over,” he said. “She went in her sleep sometime during the night. There was no pain. She just went quietly. Did you hear me? I said she had absolutely no pain. Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, sure,” I said. “I heard you.”

  I also believed him. Or wanted to. Herman Sabinson and I are old friends. Just the same, I could not help wondering. How did he know? How could anybody know?

  “Now, I want you to do me a favor,” Herman said. “For me as a doctor, I mean. Are you listening?”

  I said, “I’m all ears.”

  A phrase I have never understood. Who has more than two?

  “Not only for me as a doctor,” Herman Sabinson said. “You’ll be doing it for the family as well. Not to mention for yourself.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I said.

  “I want you to allow me to perform an autopsy,” Dr. Herman Sabinson said.

  The word slid through my mind like a politician’s campaign promise. I had heard it before, many times. Hearing it again made no special impression. It was just a word. It seemed appropriate to the conversation of a man who was intimately concerned every day with a subject about which I knew very little: death.

  “All right,” I said.

  “You’ll have to do more than just say all right,” Herman Sabinson said. “You’ll have to give your written consent.”

  This did not seem unreasonable. I had been signing papers for almost a month. Ever since I found my mother on the floor of the foyer in her three-room apartment on 78th Avenue in Queens. I had signed the papers admitting her to the Peretz Memorial Hospital. I had signed a form giving the surgeon permission to operate on her fractured thigh bone. There had been a number of other documents. They covered her Medicare registration; the activities of a firm of anesthesiologists who serviced the operating room in the Peretz Memorial Hospital; the corporation that owned the ambulance in which she was carried to the hospital; and two or three other printed forms with blank spaces that in one way or another touched on the complicated process of attempting to bring back to normal health an ailing citizen of New York City who had almost no financial resources of her own.

  “You want me to go somewhere to sign a paper?” I said into the phone.

  “That’s correct,” Herman Sabinson said.

  “All right,” I said. “Just tell me where.”

  “Here at the hospital,” Dr. Herman Sabinson said. “I’ll leave the form with Mrs. O’Toole in the Admitting Office. Any time this morning will be okay, so long as it’s before noon, and then you’ll be in the clear.”

  I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. Herman would have thought it unseemly. He would not have understood that he had just said something funny. He had no way of knowing that so far as my mother was concerned, I had never been in the clear. My mind refused to accept the statement of a comparative outsider that I would achieve this state by signing yet another piece of paper.

  My mother had been a burden to me for many years. Not only financially. The money she had cost me had merely been an irritant. What had bothered me more and more during the last decade of her almost ninety years was that I did not know what to do about her.

  This was caused in part by the fact that I felt she did not know what to do about herself. Life for her had never been something you lived. It was something you got through.

  She seemed to get through her first eighty years in a manner that satisfied her. At any rate, I was unaware of any dissatisfaction on her part. Perhaps because I wasn’t paying any attention. Why should I? I had my own problems.

  Then my mother moved into her eighties and I became intensely aware of something she apparently did not herself understand. She was dissatisfied with the scheme of existence. Not her existence. That had always seemed to her to be perfectly sound. When she became a problem to me, and in my efforts to solve it I started paying attention to her, I began to grasp that she felt the world she had always been able to manage had suddenly become unmanageable. It annoyed her.

  “I’ll sign it,” I said into the phone to Herman Sabinson. “I’ll be there in half an hour, if I can get a cab.”

  I couldn’t get a cab. Not at once, anyway. I live in a part of Manhattan that is unpopular with taxi drivers. The subway and several bus lines solve most of my transportation problems, but my mother had died in a part of the Borough of Queens that I was not sure I knew how to reach by subway or bus. Besides, it was Sunday, and it was the day before Christmas, and I could not remember how the mayor was making out in his annual negotiations with the Transport Workers Union to avert the strike that always seemed to be threatened for, or actually came on, Christmas Day. Or perhaps it was New Year’s Eve? I had a feeling that I was somewhat confused about the hard facts of day-to-day life with which most of my neighbors were coping. A taxi seemed a sensible extravagance.

  Even on sunny days in the summer I have to walk se
veral blocks downtown, and move east toward the river, before I can get a taxi to stop for me. The day my mother died was not sunny. It was gray and cold. The sort of day in which, the Brontës seem to have spent their lives. The sky was sullen. I remembered skies like this during the bad days of the blitz in London. I remembered that in those days these skies reduced even my pleasant thoughts to vague, shapeless fears. My thoughts were not pleasant as I moved downtown and eastward, keeping my head down against the wind. How could they be? A man who wants to laugh when he receives word of his mother’s death is at least a son of a bitch, probably worse. Pleasant thoughts indeed.

  At the corner of Lexington Avenue and 77th Street, on my way toward Third, the traffic light changed to red. I stopped. So did a taxi heading down Lexington. I stepped quickly down from the curb, wrenched open the taxi door, plopped onto the rear seat, and pulled the door shut with a bang.

  “Merry Christmas,” said the driver. “Where to?”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said. “The Peretz Memorial Hospital.”

  “You mean in Queens?” the driver said.

  The tone of his voice told me at once I had not made a friend.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Jesus,” the driver said.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “What’s the matter?” the driver said. “It’s an empty ride back, for Christ’s sake, that’s what’s the matter.”

  “I guess you haven’t been there for a long time,” I said. “I’ve been there every day for the past four weeks. Every time I get there, on the front steps there are a dozen people fighting to get a cab back into Manhattan. You won’t ride back empty.”

  “That’s what you know,” the driver said.

  “I tell you I’ve been there every day this whole past month,” I said.

  “Yeah,” the driver said. “But it’s pretty damn early in the morning, and besides, this is the day before Christmas, buddy.”