Tiffany Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

west and didn’t know what was gonna happen to him. The only time a hackie goes to Penn Station these days is when he gets stuck, and then he gets the hell out of that neighborhood as fast as he can. Like this lady flagged me over on Fifty-seventh and Lex. She says take me to the Sheraton on Seventh. I’m stuck. I gotta take her. But I want to get out of there fast. So I take her to the Thirty-third Street entrance and then I lock the door. When I turn into Seventh, getting the hell out of there, I see you in the gutter. I’m heading south, down Seventh, so I figure okay, and I stop. But then I see these two guys behind you. Boy, I tell you, mister, I want to get the hell out of there.”
    All at once so did I.
    “You can go a little faster,” I said. “I’m okay now.”
    I wasn’t. But I knew as soon as I set eyes on Miss Bienstock, my secretary, I would be. She was what people mean when they say somebody is no longer a kid. And indeed Miss Bienstock was not.
    When I had first met her in the offices of Maurice Saltzman & Company in 1930, she had been a pretty girl with dimples who had come to work in that office directly from her graduation at seventeen from Washington Irving High School. When I came to work in that same office, directly from my graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School, I had just passed my seventeenth birthday, and Miss Bienstock had been working there for five years. Any way you figured it, she was my senior by five years.
    In 1930 it had seemed quite a gap. Especially since Miss Bienstock had been private secretary to our boss, and I had been the sort of office boy who was known in the slang of the day as a chief cook and bottle-washer. I did everything, including many things Miss Bienstock asked me to do.
    It is the word asked that lingers. Even though Miss Bienstock had the authority, she never ordered. She always asked.
    “Benny, I wonder if I could ask, some time today, no rush, any time at all, you’re out on some errand, could you stop in at Pennsylvania Stationers and get me a box of these eight and a half by eleven manila file folders?”
    I always did, and I was always pleased to do it. Years later, when I went into business for myself and needed a secretary, I happened to run into Miss Bienstock at the Riverside Chapel funeral service for another girl who had worked in our office. The sight of Miss Bienstock made me feel good. I had one of those inspirations that with more fortunate men lead to the White House or 10 Downing Street. But what’s the White House? What’s 10 Downing Street? Compared with a good secretary? Nothing? Everything!
    The relationship was never difficult. Even though she was then, and naturally still is, older by those five years. The key to our relationship is that, even though I am in my late fifties, a married man with a grown son, to Miss Bienstock I am still Benny Kramer, the Maurice Saltzman & Company office boy. And you know something? I like it. “Something went wrong in Philadelphia,” she said through a troubled frown when I came into the office. “I can tell.”
    I was on the verge of denying it, when my awareness of Miss Bienstock’s concern for my welfare, to which I was accustomed, took an odd turn. I was suddenly jolted by curiosity. As though I had received a message that something important was about to be revealed to me.
    “How can you tell?” I said.
    Miss Bienstock continued to stare at me through her anxiously troubled frown. I stared back at her, with the same sort of anxiety. Perhaps an anxiety that cut even deeper. Her great talent, even as a young girl in the office of Maurice Saltzman & Company, had been a kind of innocent clairvoyance. I never knew how her mind worked. I doubt that she did. But she always seemed to cut through confusing irrelevancies.
    Miss Bienstock always knew I had a head cold before I did. She sensed—there was no other way she could have known—when my shoes needed resoling, and would suggest that I