City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder Read online

  “You have no right to sell!” The voice of Jacob Bookbinder was so harsh, strained, and stern that Herbie hardly knew it. “This is our place, mine and Krieger's. We built it and we've run it for fifteen years, and you, Mr. Powers, who have put your head into the building, if I may say so, a dozen times in your life, are not doing the right thing to discuss selling without our consent.”

  “Jake, why excited? I say this way, peaceable. Powers honest man. One way, another way. Maybe better off. Talk, decide. Friendly. Nobody rob us. Lot of cash. Reliable people. I say this way, cool off. Maybe—”

  Herbie recognized the hasty high voice and the curious speech of his father's partner, Mr. Krieger. The partner was a timid, tall man with grizzled hair and tiny eyes surrounded by wrinkles. His most striking feature was his language, a scramble of words which might have graveled a military decoder. Mr. Krieger had astonishing lack of confidence in himself. He believed any one sentence he uttered might be enough to entrap him and ruin his life. He therefore took great care never to utter a sentence. Having framed a statement in his mind, he would dance tiptoe over it, so to speak, with his tongue, touching only about one word out of four. This ingenious principle enabled him to deny anything he said, on the grounds that he had been misunderstood, if it happened to sound wrong once out of his mouth.

  Jacob Bookbinder, familiar with the code after years of unraveling, turned on Krieger with a fierce look that Herbie remembered well from a couple of historic lickings.

  “Krieger, will you do me the favor to let me talk? Better off to give away our place for half of what it's worth and be left with a few dollars and our hands in our pockets?”

  “Who means? Only peaceable. This opinion, that opinion. Not for two hundred thousand dollars. Only up to the majority. Thirty years in the ice business. I honest man, you honest man, Powers different opinion honest man. I say this way, peaceable—”

  Mr. Krieger's flow of words was interrupted by a strange voice saying, “Pardon me for just a moment,” in accents that indicated the speaker was an outlander, certainly not of the Bronx, possibly not even of New York. Herbie, peering cautiously over the sill, saw a burly, sandy-haired young man who gestured with a smoking pipe. He wore the kind of clothes that men affected in the “love movies” which the boy hated—well cut, new, and of soft materials not seen along Homer Avenue.

  “I want to say you gentlemen are not being fair to me. I could have gone ahead and closed with Interborough on their offer, but I owed you the courtesy of this conference and I arranged it. We seem to be bogged in useless wrangling. It happens to be my wife's birthday today and I have to catch a train, and I'll really thank you to keep the discussion as short as possible.”

  “Please forgive us for taking a few minutes to talk over being thrown out on the street,” said Herbie's father.

  “Now, honestly, that kind of remark is untrue and hitting below the belt,” said Mr. Powers. “Interborough intends to retain both of you in executive positions—”

  “Fine,” said Jacob Bookbinder bitterly. “We've still got jobs. I'm back where I was two months after I landed in this country, only twenty-five years older, but what's twenty-five years?”

  Powers stood up and impatiently donned a wide gray and blue topcoat.

  “Forgive me, gentlemen, trains don't wait and we're getting nowhere. A decision must be made, and I'm sincerely sorry and upset at our disagreement, but I must ask for a vote now—”

  “A vote. Fifty-one to forty-nine, as usual,” said Mr. Bookbinder. “We've had a lot of chances this year to be reminded of the figures.”

  “I regret you are being blunt and sarcastic, but it's your privilege, I suppose,” said Powers, buttoning his coat. “Once again, if you please, I call for a vote.”

  Herbie and Cliff exchanged puzzled looks as they squatted against the wooden panel and listened. They knew that big events were in motion, but the issues were beyond them.

  “Gentlemen, I say this way.” (Krieger again.) “Hard feeling nothing worth. How good? Look future. Everybody young. Unanimous all better. Changing times, a million businesses, could be not so bad. Maybe with Interborough bigger, better? I say this way. All good friends, above board, one, two, three, shake hands. Thirty years in the ice business, everybody knows honest man. If do it, do it—”

  “Thanks, Krieger, for wanting to give our place away unanimously,” broke in Bookbinder. “You, young Mr. Powers, be so kind as to sit down.”

  “I'm sorry, Mr. Bookbinder, but my train—”

  “You're going to miss the train.”

  At a new desperate note in his father's voice, Herbie felt a peculiar thrill. He saw the beleaguered ice man walk to the heavy safe built into the wall of the office, and pause with his hand on the combination dial.

  “The Bible says that for everything there is a time,” he said to Powers. “This is the time for both of you to learn something.” The two men stared at him as he spun the dial.

  “You will be interested to know, Mr. Powers, the combination is my son Herbie's birthday, 1–14–17. I gave him that little honor because with his small hands he smeared the plaster for the cornerstone of this place when he was three years old.”

  Herbie wanted to whisper to Cliff, “Sure, I remember that,” but he couldn't take his eyes off his father. Mr. Bookbinder swung open the safe door, slid from the back of a narrow shelf a green metal box marked “J.B.” in rough letters of white paint, and began to unlock it. “Sit down, Krieger, and you, too, kindly, Mr. Powers,” he repeated grimly. He set the open box on the desk before him, and faced the two men with a cornered air.

  If Jacob Bookbinder had been hanging by his fingers to the edge of a cliff, or if he had been trapped in a pit with a cobra slithering toward him, his son would have recognized the state of things at once, and might have plunged to the rescue with a hurrah. He would even have recognized so abstract a catastrophe as the loss of a map to a gold mine. But his movie education went no further, and so he was unable to appreciate this scene. The disasters of parents usually happen inside a maze of arithmetic, hidden from the eyes of boys who are still struggling with improper fractions. The fact is, though, that Herbie's father was in peril.

  Of one important fact Herbie was ignorant: namely, that his father and Mr. Krieger did not own the Place. They had started to build it with so little money that halfway through they had been forced to stop, and no bank had been willing to lend them funds to finish the construction. Faced with ruin, Bookbinder contrived an escape by selling a mortgage and fifty-one per cent of the stock of the Place to a rich, wise old Irishman named Powers, who had sold them the land on which the Place was being built, and saw in Bookbinder a man who would not fail to deliver dividends. With this help the ice company came to life again. The building was finished, the Place flourished, and Bookbinder did not greatly regret the cruel price he had paid—loss of ownership—because Powers was a kindly, silent master, content with the interest he reaped each year.

  Seven years later, he died. His control of the Bronx River Ice Company passed, with the rest of his large property, to his son Robert, who soon showed himself a different kind of mortgagee. To be brief, Bob Powers was a gambler and a drinker. Sizable inheritances do often go to such young men; the effect is generally the same as placing a snowball for safekeeping on a hot stove. Some say that this is a good thing for society, as it brings about the redistribution of wealth without socialism. In any case, it was not a good thing for the ice company. When young Mr. Powers got into difficulties, he began hounding Jacob Bookbinder for more dividends and higher interest. He hoped for the day when he could find a buyer for the Place and convert his holding into a large lump of cash.

  Now, there was a tremendous secret, known only to Mr. and Mrs. Bookbinder.

  The mortgagee, a month before his death, had called Jacob Bookbinder to his bedside in a beautiful Catholic hospital overlooking Van Cortlandt Park. There the dying man and Herbie's father had talked heart to heart, and Jacob Boo
kbinder's eyes had filled with tears as the old rich man praised his faithful toil and honesty.

  “You should really be the owner of the Place, Jake,” he said at last, his gray face, sunk among white pillows, lit by a weak smile. “Even if you aren't, the best thing I can do to protect my son from himself is to make sure you are in control. —I wish you better luck with your boy than I had with mine, Jake.” He took out of a folder on his bed a sheet of light blue paper, scribbled on it with a pencil, and gave it to Herbie's father. The puzzled ice man read the few lines written on the paper; then he walked to the window, stared out at the park that glowed with autumn colors, and began to sob. The paper contained these words:

  For one dollar and other valuable consideration I hereby sell to Jacob Bookbinder two percent of the total voting stock of the Bronx River Ice Company. My purpose is to restore control of the company to Mr. Bookbinder and his partner.

  It was shakily signed, “Robert Powers.”

  “Come, Jake,” said the invalid feebly from the bed. “Pay me.” He drew a thin hand out from between the sheets and extended it to Bookbinder. “You owe me a dollar.”

  So it was that Jacob Bookbinder came into possession of the memorandum, which Herbie and Felicia had heard their parents refer to once or twice, guardedly, as the “blue paper.” And it was this memorandum which Herbie's father now drew out of the tin box and silently placed in the hand of the son of the dead man who had once written it.

  Robert Powers glanced quickly at the paper, and exploded with, “Good God! Where and when did you get this?”

  “Could look see, please? When through, please, of course, look?” said Krieger, sitting on the edge of his chair and stretching both hands forward. Powers passed the paper to him, and Bookbinder quickly told the story of it.

  “Has Louis Glass seen this—this thing?” said Powers.

  “Nobody has seen it until this minute,” said Bookbinder, “except your father, may he rest in peace, and me.”

  The paper rustled in Krieger's trembling hand. “Perfect gentleman. Lovely old man. Justice, fair is fair. No more is right. Stand up a court of law? Maybe not regular. Wonderful family. Like father, like son. Honest men. I say this way thousand times, old man Powers do right thing. What afraid? Nothing—”

  “May I ask,” said Powers, damming Krieger with a wave of a hand, “why none of us have heard of it until now? I question your good faith, Mr. Bookbinder.”

  “Much obliged,” said Bookbinder. “I knew your father when you were in public school, and till the day he passed away he didn't give me such a compliment.”

  “You don't answer my question.”

  “I'll be happy to. On the other hand, maybe we can take the vote and you can still catch your train.”

  “Gentlemen, I say this way, peaceable, all good friends,” began Krieger, but Powers cut him off by walking to the door.

  “All things considered,” he said, “I think the vote had better be postponed, and I propose a meeting a week from today, with Louis Glass present.”

  The other men assented, and Powers walked out without another word, slamming the street door.

  Krieger jumped at his partner and gave him an ungainly hug. “Jake, not for a million dollars. No sale. Why not show me before? Better this way, maybe. Powers first iron, not butter, Nothing doing. I say this way, hundred thousand dollars like dirt. Hooray! Who needs—”

  Bookbinder disengaged himself, carefully took the crumpled blue paper out of Krieger's fist, and, locking it in the tin box, prepared to close the safe.

  “Don't shout hooray till Glass sees it. Whether it stands up legally, I don't know. I hated to use it. Either way we start a lot of trouble. I wish we could have let it lie.” As he swung the heavy steel door Krieger arrested its motion.

  “Jake, I say this way. You do anything. I behind hundred per cent.” He dropped his voice and adopted a tone reminding Herbie of Mr. Gauss in the parlor. “Little short cash. Two hundred. Insurance, auto loan, Bessie sick, it happens. Take petty cash, deduct salary. Up to you. Positive last time—”

  “Krieger, you're on the books for a thousand, two hundred now,” protested Bookbinder. But when he saw Krieger take a deep breath and begin, “I say this way—” he said, “Never mind, never mind,” and pulled another tin box out of the safe.

  The boys watched with large eyes while Herbie's father counted out of the box and into Krieger's hand the immense treasure of two hundred dollars in cash. Bookbinder then locked the safe and the men began talking about machinery repairs in technical jargon that bewildered the lads. Herbie beckoned to Cliff, and the cousins tiptoed back to the window and climbed out of the Place into the sunshine.

  The world looked yellow and green by the river, and the air was sweet and warm outside the gloomy tomb of business. “Come on, we'll go hunt for stuff in the dumps,” said Herbie, and the boys set off to explore the rubbish heaps near the Place. “You know what, Cliff?”

  “Yes, what?” said Cliff, in the idiom meaning “No, what?”

  “Any time we wanted to, we could climb in the Place and get money out of that safe. All we want. We've got the combination.”

  “You wouldn't do it, would you?” said Cliff, stopping and straining his eyes at his cousin unbelievingly.

  “'Course not, fool, come on,” said Herbie. “I'm only saying that's a dangerous way to make a combination. Unless you have honest kids.”

  “How much could we get?” queried Cliff. “A thousand dollars?”

  “A thousand?” said Herbie scornfully. “Fifty thousand! A hundred thousand, more likely. We could be rich like Monte Cristo—if we weren't honest.”

  The boys walked on in silence, each busy with his own picture of himself as Monte Cristo. In Cliff's mind the fabulous count was a young nobleman with an infinitely large array of new bicycles, ice skates, roller skates, hockey sticks, footballs, and the like. Herbie saw him, on the other hand, as a stoutish grandee living on a constant diet of chocolate sundaes and frankfurters, and possessed of a fawning female slave who much resembled Lucille Glass.

  The Party

  Herbie stood before a mirror in his room the following Sunday, preening and preening and preening himself for a visit to Lucille Glass' home.

  He had been at work on himself for an hour. It was not in the matter of washing that his new zeal had broken forth. No, Mrs. Bookbinder had compelled him to take off his tie after he had retied it ten times, and had gone over his neck and ears with a soapy washcloth. After submitting to this indignity, which he regarded as an adult superstition, Herbert went through all the tie trouble again, and then shifted his efforts to his thick curly black hair. He parted it once, twice, a half-dozen times, and each time rejected the result, because of a stray strand that crossed the white line, or because of a tiny jaggedness here or there, or because the part seemed too low or too high. On an ordinary school day, one swipe with a comb was the rule. Two made him feel noble. Three meant that he was in trouble with his teacher and was making a mighty effort to please.

  The cause of all this care, an invitation engraved on thick white paper, was propped before him on the dresser:

  Mr. and Mrs. Louis Glass

  cordially invite you

  to their

  Housewarming

  at 2645 Mosholu Parkway

  The Bronx

  1 p.m., Sunday, May 15th

  R.S.V.P

  At the bottom of the sheet these words were added by hand: “There will be a children's party in the playroom, and Lucille cordially invites Felicia and Herbie to attend.”

  This first visit to an actual Private House, a structure raised by man for only one family to inhabit, would in itself have been a marvel. But happening in this way, it was dwarfed by a vaster event. He was going to spend a whole real-life afternoon with his underground queen.

  Herbie reigned each night before falling asleep in a splendid imaginary palace which he had discovered one night by falling through a trapdoor (in imagination) in t
he floor of the old “haunted house” on Tennyson Avenue—a device borrowed from Alice in Wonderland without acknowledgment. The girls with whom he was smitten succeeded one another as queen of this subterranean pleasure dome. Diana Vernon had been dethroned. Lucille's coronation, a spectacle of incredible magnificence, had already taken place, and she now held court nightly beside him.

  But it was not only in such fantasies that he had seen her. There had been several meetings on the third-floor landing of the girls' staircase at P.S. 50 since the first one. In the entire maze of the school, that landing was the one space Captain Bookbinder never failed to inspect daily at lunch time, and of all possible posts along six flights of the girls' staircase, it was the one area that Policewoman Glass deemed most likely to be the scene of an outbreak of crime. These two guardians of the law therefore managed to greet each other daily. The conversations were brief and weak. Herbie was rendered speechless by romance—an unlucky foible, since nothing else had the same effect on him except acute tonsillitis.

  The strange part was that he found no difficulty at all in having long, tender talks with Lucille when they sat on their golden double throne under the haunted house, eating chocolate frappés on silver salvers and carelessly viewing the gorgeous pageants staged in the great hall for their amusement (the pageants, except for the quantity of gold, diamonds, rubies, and silk in the costumes, were very much like the vaudeville shows at Loew's Boulevard). He not only managed brilliant chatter for himself but also invented the queen's affectionate answers. Something about the light of day, the matter-of-fact iron and concrete of the staircase, and the girl's appearance in street clothes instead of a robe of state, dried up his eloquence.

  As he combed and recombed his hair, he pictured himself strolling with Lucille in the gardens of 2645 Mosholu Parkway, an edifice he had never seen. From the grand sound of the words “Mosholu Parkway,” he imagined it to be something like an English castle in the movies. There, under arching old trees, amid the flower beds, deliciously alone, could Herbie and Lucille fail to come at last to the sweet mutual pledges of love?