Tiffany Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

the train window. As anybody who has been subjected to this ride can testify, there is not much to see. Yet the unattractive roadbed from Philadelphia to Penn Station held my attention. I was not, of course, seeing the dreary landscape. I was seeing that judge. His alive, concerned face. And hearing his totally unexpected words. Over and over again. Why?
    I don’t know. I had gone to Philadelphia to save the life of my son. To do so I had been forced to involve myself in a fragment of a stupid legal brawl. The only justification for its existence was the wealth of the plaintiff. He could afford to snarl the dockets of the nation’s courts with a piece of idiotic vanity. He could afford to enlist my not inexpensive help in this shameful charade. As the train pulled into Penn Station, the core of what was troubling me surfaced in the form of a question. I wished it hadn’t. The question was: Is this a way for a man to spend his life? The question was addressed to Benny Kramer.
    Before I could answer it, things started to happen. There were, of course, no taxis. There have been no taxis at Penn Station since Commodore Perry opened up Japan, though most New Yorkers are either unaware of this fact or refuse to believe it. They emerge from the railroad station into the street, seem astonished to discover that there are no cabs waiting, and do something I feel I have a right to call stupid because I have done it so often myself: they ask a redcap to get one for them.
    I did not. After all, I was carrying no luggage. Only Bleak House. And I knew more about the area around Penn Station than most redcaps. I had spent my early years in the garment center.
    I surveyed the situation. This was a mistake. I should have walked away from it. But the days of my nonage were crowding back into my mind. When I was a boy on these streets the Hotel Pennsylvania had a 33rd Street entrance. And 33rd Street, even when Jimmy Walker was mayor, had always been westbound. Somebody was sure to be arriving at the hotel from the east side. Somebody in a taxi.
    I made my move.
    I leaped out into the stream of Seventh Avenue traffic. I dodged my way nimbly—every morning: twenty minutes of calisthenics, plus ten minutes of jogging—toward the southeast corner of 33rd Street. A man carrying a suitcase might have had trouble. Not a man carrying Bleak House. The prose is uplifting. Halfway across the moving current of savage traffic, I saw a cab do precisely what I had felt some cab would do. It pulled up to the 33rd Street side of the hotel.
    A passenger stepped out. The door slammed shut. The cab started moving toward me. At the 33rd Street corner it turned into Seventh Avenue, as I knew it would have to do; Seventh Avenue is now one-way, southbound. I waved Bleak House. The taxi pulled up and stopped at my feet. I seized the handle of the rear door and twisted.
    Nothing happened. I twisted harder. Nothing. The door was locked. A voice came out of the late afternoon sunlight behind me.
    “That’s my cab, white boy.”
    I turned. In my youth I was a devotee of the work of Rex Beach. He would have written: “I spun around.” I have a feeling Mr. Beach’s account of my movement would have been more accurate. When I stopped spinning I found myself facing, in the middle of the Seventh Avenue traffic, a black young man in a zipper jacket who was eleven feet tall.
    “Oh, no, it’s not,” I said mildly. My mother had taught me to be polite. “I got here first.”
    The black man replied by throwing a punch at my nose. I covered it with both hands and with Bleak House and I crouched away to the left. The black young man’s fist missed my nose, as well as Bleak House, but it grazed the side of my head. My head slammed against the rim of the taxi’s rear window. Time vanished from my consciousness. When I again became aware of it, I grasped that it could not have been gone very long. The young man was still there, right smack in the middle of the insane