But things got jollier after a while. For one thing they were both delighted with Joan—and I’ll have to admit I never met anyone who wasn’t—and for another the talk soon turned to the marvelous fact of their knowing Wade Manley, which gave rise to a series of proud reminiscences. “Bernie never takes nothing off him, though, don’t worry,” Rose assured us. “Bernie, tell them what you did that time he was here and you told him to sit down and shut up. He did! He did! He kind of gave him a push in the chest—this movie star!—and he said, ‘Ah, siddown and sheddep, Manny. We know who you are!’ Tell them, Bernie.”
And Bernie, convulsed with pleasure, got up to reenact the scene. “Oh, we were just kind of kidding around, you understand,” he said, “but anyway, that’s what I did. I gave him a shove like this, and I said, ‘Ah, siddown and sheddep, Manny. We know who you are!’”
“He did! That’s the God’s truth! Pushed him right down in that chair over there! Wade Manley!”
A little later, when Bernie and I had paired off for a man-to-man talk over the freshening of drinks, and Rose and Joan were cozily settled in the love seat, Rose directed a roguish glance at me. “I wouldn’t want to give this husband of yours a swelled head, Joanie, but do you know what Dr. Corvo told Bernie? Shall I tell her, Bernie?”
“Sure, tell her! Tell her!” And Bernie waved the bottle of ginger ale in one hand and the bottle of rye in the other, to show how openly all secrets could be bared tonight.
“Well,” she said. “Dr. Corvo said your husband is the finest writer Bernie’s ever had.”
Later still, when Bernie and I were in the love seat and the ladies were at the credenza, I began to see that Rose was a builder too. Maybe she hadn’t built that credenza with her own hands, but she’d clearly done more than her share of building whatever heartfelt convictions were needed to sustain the hundreds on hundreds of dollars its purchase must be costing them on the installment plan. A piece of furniture like that was an investment in the future; and now, as she stood fussing over it and wiping off little parts of it while she talked to Joan, I could have sworn I saw her arranging a future party in her mind. Joan and I would be among those present, that much was certain (“This is Mr. Robert Prentice, my husband’s assistant, and Mrs. Prentice”), and the rest of the guest list was almost a foregone conclusion too: Wade Manley and his wife, of course, along with a careful selection of their Hollywood friends; Walter Winchell would be there, and Earl Wilson and Toots Shor and all that crowd; but far more important, for any person of refinement, would be the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Alexander Corvo and some of the people who comprised their set. People like the Lionel Trillings and the Reinhold Niebuhrs, the Huntington Hartfords and the Leslie R. Groveses—and if anybody on the order of Mr. and Mrs. Newbold Morris wanted to come, you could be damn sure they’d have to do some pretty fancy jockeying for an invitation.
It was, as Joan admitted later, stifling hot in the Silvers’ apartment that night; and I cite this as a presentable excuse for the fact that what I did next—and it took me a hell of a lot less time to do it in 1948 than it does now, believe me—was to get roaring drunk. Soon I was not only the most vociferous but the only talker in the room; I was explaining that, by Jesus God, we’d all four of us be millionaires yet.
And wouldn’t we have a ball? Oh, we’d be slapping Lionel Trilling around and pushing him down into every chair in this room and telling him to shut up—“And you too, Reinhold Niebuhr, you pompous, sanctimonious old fool! Where’s your money? Why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?”
Bernie was chuckling and looking sleepy, and Joan was looking humiliated for me, and Rose was smiling in cool but infinite understanding of how tiresome husbands could sometimes be. Then we were all out in the alcove trying on at least half a dozen coats apiece, and I was looking at the bugler’s photograph again wondering if I dared to ask my burning question about it. But this time I wasn’t sure which I feared more: that Bernie might say, “Just for the picture,” or that he might say, “Sure I was!” and go rummaging in the closet or in some part of the credenza until he’d come up with the tarnished old bugle itself, and we’d all have to go back and sit down again while Bernie put his heels together, drew himself erect, and sounded the pure, sad melody of taps for us all.
That was in October. I’m a little vague on how many “By Bernie Silver” stories I turned out during the rest of the fall. I do remember a comic-relief one about a fat tourist who got stuck at the waist when he tried to climb up through the skyview window of the cab for better sight-seeing, and a very solemn one in which Bernie delivered a lecture on racial tolerance (which struck a sour note with me, considering the way he’d chimed in with Rose’s views on the brown hordes advancing over the Bronx); but mostly what I remember about him during that period is that Joan and I could never seem to mention him without getting into some kind of an argument.
When she said we really ought to return his and Rose’s invitation, for example, I told her not to be silly. I said I was sure they wouldn’t expect it, and when she said “Why?” I gave her a crisp, impatient briefing on the hopelessness of trying to ignore class barriers, of pretending that the Silvers could ever really become our friends, or that they’d ever really want to.
Another time, toward the end of a curiously dull evening when we’d gone to our favorite premarital restaurant and failed for an hour to find anything to talk about, she tried to get the conversation going by leaning romantically toward me across the table and holding up her wineglass. “Here’s to Bernie’s selling your last one to the Reader’s Digest.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Big deal.”
“Oh, don’t be so gruff. You know perfectly well it could happen any day. We might make a lot of money and go to Europe and everything.”
“Are you kidding?” It suddenly annoyed me that any intelligent, well-educated girl in the twentieth century could be so gullible; and that such a girl should actually be my wife, that I would be expected to go on playing along with this kind of simpleminded innocence for years and years to come, seemed, for the moment, an intolerable situation. “Why don’t you grow up a little? You don’t really think there’s ever been a chance of his selling that junk, do you?” And I looked at her in a way that must have been very much like Bernie’s own way of looking at me, the night he asked if I’d really thought he meant twenty-five a time. “Do you?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, putting her glass down. “Or at least, I did. I thought you did too. If you don’t, it seems sort of cynical and dishonest to go on working for him, doesn’t it?” And she wouldn’t talk to me all the way home.
The real trouble, I guess, was that we were both preoccupied with two far more serious matters by this time. One was our recent discovery that Joan was pregnant, and the other was that my position at the United Press had begun to sink as steadily as any sinking fund debenture.
My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask. I was hunching lower and lower over my clattering typewriter there all day and sweating out the ax—the kind, sad dropping of the assistant financial editor’s hand on my shoulder (“Can I speak to you inside a minute, Bob?”)—and each day that it didn’t happen was a kind of shabby victory.
Early in December I was walking home from the subway after one of those days, dragging myself down West Twelfth Street like a seventy-year-old, when I discovered that a taxicab had been moving beside me at a snail’s pace for a block and a half. It was one of the green-and-white kind, and behind its windshield flashed an enormous smile.
“Bob! What’s the matter, there, Bob? You lost in thought or something? This where you live?”
When he parked the cab at the curb and got out, it was the first time I’d even seen him in his working clothes: a twill cap, a
buttoned sweater and one of those columnar change-making gadgets strapped to his waist; and when we shook hands it was the first time I’d seen his fingertips stained a shiny gray from handling other people’s coins and dollar bills all day. Close up, smiling or not, he looked as worn out as I felt.
“Come on in, Bernie.” He seemed surprised by the crumbling doorway and dirty stairs of the house, and also by the whitewashed, poster-decorated austerity of our big single room, whose rent was probably less than half of what he and Rose were paying uptown, and I remember taking a dim Bohemian’s pride in letting him notice these things; I guess I had some snobbish notion that it wouldn’t do Bernie Silver any harm to learn that people could be smart and poor at the same time.
We couldn’t offer him any ginger ale and he said a glass of plain water would be fine, so it wasn’t much of a social occasion. It troubled me afterwards to remember how constrained he was with Joan—I don’t think he looked her full in the face once during the whole visit—and I wondered if this was because of our failure to return that invitation. Why is it that wives are nearly always blamed for what must at least as often as not be their husbands’ fault in matters like that? But maybe it was just that he was more conscious of his cab driver’s costume in her presence than in mine. Or maybe he had never imagined that such a pretty and cultivated girl could live in such stark surroundings, and was embarrassed for her.
“I’ll tell you what I dropped by about, Bob. I’m trying a new angle.” And as he talked I began to suspect, more from his eyes than his words, that something had gone very wrong with the long-range building program. Maybe a publishing friend of Dr. Corvo’s had laid it on the line at last about the poor possibilities of our material; maybe Dr. Corvo himself had grown snappish; maybe there had been some crushing final communication from Wade Manley, or, more crushingly, from Wade Manley’s agency representative. Or it might have been simply that Bernie was tired after his day’s work in a way that no glass of plain water would help; in any case he was trying a new angle.
Had I ever heard of Vincent J. Poletti? But he gave me this name as if he knew perfectly well it wouldn’t knock my eye out, and he followed it right up with the information that Vincent J. Poletti was a Democratic State Assemblyman from Bernie’s own district in the Bronx.
“Now, this man,” he said, “is a man that goes out of his way to help people. Believe me, Bob, he’s not just one of your cheap vote-getters. He’s a real public servant. What’s more, he’s a comer in the Party. He’s going to be our next Congressman. So here’s the idea, Bob. We get a photograph of me—I have this friend of mine’ll do it for nothing—we get it taken from the backseat of the cab, with me at the wheel kind of turning around and smiling like this, get it?” He turned his body away from his smiling head to show me how it would look. “And we print this picture on the cover of a booklet. The title of the booklet”— and here he sketched a suggestion of block lettering in the air—“the title of the booklet is ‘Take It from Bernie.’ Okay? Now. Inside the booklet we have a story—just exactly like the others you wrote except this time it’s a little different. This time I’m telling a story about why Vincent J. Poletti is the man we need for Congress. I don’t mean just a bunch of political talk, either, Bob. I mean a real little story.”
“Bernie, I don’t see how this is going to work. You can’t have a ‘story’ about why anybody is the man we need for Congress.”
“Who says you can’t?”
“And anyway I thought you and Rose were Republicans.”
“On the national level, yes. On the local level, no.”
“Well, but hell, Bernie, we just had an election. There won’t be another election for two years.”
But he only tapped his head and made a faraway gesture to show that in politics it paid a man to think ahead.
Joan was over in the kitchen area of the room, cleaning up the breakfast dishes and getting the dinner started, and I looked to her for help, but her back was turned.
“It just doesn’t sound right, Bernie. I don’t know anything about politics.”
“So? Know, schmow. What’s to know? Do you know anything about driving a cab?”
No; and I sure as hell didn’t know anything about Wall Street, either—Wall Street, Schmall Street!—but that was another depressing little story. “I don’t know, Bernie; things are very unsettled right now. I don’t think I’d better take on any more assignments for the time being. I mean for one thing I may be about to—” But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about my UP problem, so I said, “For one thing Joan’s having a baby now, and everything’s sort of—”
“Wow! Well, isn’t that something!” He was on his feet and shaking my hand. “Isn’t—that—something! Congratulations, Bob, I think this is—I think this is really wonderful. Congratulations, there, Joanie!” And it seemed a little excessive to me at the time, but maybe that’s the way such news will always strike a middle-aged, childless man.
“Oh, listen, Bob,” he said when we settled down again. “This Poletti thing’ll be duck soup for you; and I’ll tell you what. Seeing as this is just a one-shot and there won’t be any royalties, we’ll make it ten instead of five. Is that a deal?”
“Well, but wait a second, Bernie. I’m going to need some more information. I mean what exactly does this guy do for people?”
And it soon became clear that Bernie knew very little more about Vincent J. Poletti than I did. He was a real public servant, that was all; he went out of his way to help people. “Oh, Bob, listen. What’s the difference? Where’s your imagination? You never needed any help before. Listen. What you just told me gives me one idea right off the bat. I’m driving along; these two kids hail me out in front of the maternity hospital, this young veteran and his wife. They got this little-biddy baby, three days old, and they’re happy as larks. Only here’s the trouble. This boy’s got no job or anything. They only just moved here, they don’t know anybody, maybe they’re Puerto Ricans or something, they got a week’s rent on their room and that’s it. Then they’re broke. So I’m taking them home, they live right in my neighborhood, and we’re chatting away, and I say, ‘Listen, kids. I think I’ll take you to see a friend of mine.’”
“Assemblyman Vincent J. Poletti.”
“Naturally. Only I don’t tell them his name yet. I just say ‘this friend of mine.’ So we get there and I go in and tell Poletti about it and he comes out and talks to the kids and gives them money or something. See? You got a good share of your story right there.”
“Hey, yeah, and wait a minute, Bernie.” I got up and began dramatically pacing the floor, the way people in Hollywood story conferences are supposed to do. “Wait a minute. After he gives them money, he gets into your cab and you take off with him down the Grand Concourse, and those two Puerto Rican kids are standing there on the sidewalk kind of looking at each other, and the girl says, ‘Who was that man?” And the boy looks very serious and he says, ‘Honey, don’t you know? Didn’t you notice he was wearing a mask?’ And she says, ‘Oh no, it couldn’t be the—’ And he says, ‘Yes, yes, it was. Honey, that was the Lone Assemblyman.’ And then listen! You know what happens next? Listen! Way off down the block they hear this voice, and you know what the voice is calling?” I sank to the floor on one trembling knee to deliver the punch line. “It’s calling ‘Hi-yo, Bernie Silver—away!”
And it may not look very funny written down, but it almost killed me. I must have laughed for at least a minute, until I went into a coughing fit and Joan had to come and pound me on the back; only very gradually, coming out of it, did I realize that Bernie was not amused. He had chuckled in bewildered politeness during my seizure, but now he was looking down at his hands and there were embarrassing blotches of pink in his sober cheeks. I had hurt his feelings. I remember resenting it that his feelings could be hurt so easily, and resenting it that Joan had gone back to the kitchen instead of staying to help me out of this awkward situation, and then beginning to feel very guilty and sorr
y, as the silence continued, until I finally decided that the only decent way of making it up to him was to accept the assignment. And sure enough, he brightened instantly when I told him I’d give it a try.
“I mean you don’t necessarily have to use that about the Puerto Rican kids,” he assured me. “That’s just one idea. Or maybe you could start it off that way and then go on to other things, the more the better. You work it out any way you like.”
At the door, shaking hands again (and it seemed that we’d been shaking hands all afternoon), I said, “So that’s ten for this one, right, Bernie?”
“Right, Bob.”
“Do you really think you should have told him you’d do it?” Joan asked me the minute he’d gone.
“Why not?”
“Well, because it is going to be practically impossible, isn’t it?”
“Look, will you do me a favor? Will you please get off my back?”
She put her hands on her hips. “I just don’t understand you, Bob. Why did you say you’d do it?”
“Why the hell do you think? Because we’re going to need the ten bucks, that’s why.”
In the end I built—oh, built, schmilt. I put page one and then page two and then page three into the old machine and I wrote the son of a bitch. It did start off with the Puerto Rican kids, but for some reason I couldn’t get more than a couple of pages out of them; then I had to find other ways for Vincent J. Poletti to demonstrate his giant goodness.
What does a public servant do when he really wants to go out of his way to help people? Gives them money, that’s what he does; and pretty soon I had Poletti forking over more than he could count. It got so that anybody in the Bronx who was even faintly up against it had only to climb into Bernie Silver’s cab and say, “The Poletti place,” and their troubles were over. And the worst part of it was my own grim conviction that it was the best I could do.