Free Tiffany Street by Jerome Weidman

Times Square (gowns), in the buildings around 39th Street, where the more expensive gowns were manufactured, the smell was not unlike that of the perfume shop in Macy’s. The models were higher priced. The things with which they sprayed themselves came from distant countries. The Roon building was totally different. This building smelled clean.
    “Twelve, please,” I said.
    The door marked I. G. ROON, LTD. 1201 was at the end of a long brown marble corridor. Except for being obviously very old, the door looked like any other office door. What I found behind it did not. The room into which I stepped could have served as the model for the Phiz drawing of the office in which the brothers Cheeryble functioned in Nicholas Nickleby.
    The floor was covered with very old green carpeting. It was dotted here and there with small islands of brown where the green nap had worn away and the cording showed through. On the walls hung what looked like steel engravings of rolling farm country. I counted eight. Somehow they all looked alike, perhaps because they were all framed by the same kind of narrow bands of black wood.
    One picture, over the door at the far end of the room, I did recognize. I had seen it many times in my high school history textbook. It was a picture of Queen Victoria, full-face, arms folded across her plump little middle, looking exactly the way a few years later Helen Hayes would look. There was nothing unusual about most of the furnishings. Rows of very old dark green filing cabinets. I could tell they were old by the way the drawers sagged at the corners. A couple of long dark brown tables, stacked neatly with what looked like fat reference books, stood side by side against one wall. In one corner a wooden umbrella stand with a square brass pan in the bottom leaned over slightly because one of the knobbed legs was missing.
    Two things, however, were so unusual that I felt, for a startled moment, they must have been purchased from the Cheeryble brothers when Dickens was shoehorned into the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Two things I had never seen before. A couple of stand-up desks. One on either side of the room.
    Then I saw the two people in the room, and I forgot the desks.
    At one of them, working busily over a fat ledger, stood a tall old lady. She wore a black alpaca dress buttoned up to her throat and held at the neck by a yellowing ivory cameo. At the other desk stood an old man working over two ledgers. He was bald, with tufts of white over the ears. He wore a gray alpaca jacket. What looked like a pair of black stockings without bottoms were pulled up on his arms from wrist to elbow, apparently to protect the sleeves of his coat. As he moved his head from side to side, glancing from one ledger to the other, I could see he had a pencil tucked over each ear.
    Even more arresting than the appearance of these two people, and the desks at which they were working, was the way they were working: facing opposite walls, their backs to each other.
    I had time to take all this in for a somewhat disconcerting reason. Or rather, I realized after a while I was disconcerted because I’d had time to take all this in. There was a small, black bell over the door. An old-fashioned bell with a clapper. It was fixed in such a way that, when somebody entered, the corner of the door punched the bell and set it tinkling. It was not until the tinkling stopped that I realized neither the old man nor the old woman had looked up. They went right on working away at their ledgers.
    It was the sort of situation I had never before experienced. I don’t suppose my experience was unique, but it seems likely. How often would a young man have occasion to attract the attention of adults who are ignoring him? Clawing through my mind for examples of such occasions, I remembered a comic-strip character named Harold Teen who suffered endless misadventures every morning in the pages of the Daily News. Harold was constantly being ignored by