As Time Goes By (7 page)

"I love Victor, Mother. Whatever he and his work demand, I am ready to give, including myself. What
greater love can a woman have?"

"And Rick?"

"I love Rick, too. He makes me feel like a woman.
When we are together, his kisses overwhelm my
senses, drive all other thoughts from my mind, make
me want to be with him forever. What greater love can
there be?"

Inghild clutched her daughter tightly. "I haven't seen you in two years, and I can only begin to imagine what
you have been going through. But I know my daughter. I know that she is strong and honest, and that she would
never do anything but what was right. Besides, I think
you have already made your choice."

"I thought I had, too." Ilsa raised her head, and with
her free hand, Inghild brushed away her daughter's
tears. "Until Casablanca, when I saw Rick again. Rick
was the one who got the letters of transit for me and
Victor. He saved our lives." She told Inghild the story of their three days in Morocco, of meeting Rick again,
of his bitterness, of the renewal of their love, and of his
sacrifice at the airport.

"You want me to tell you what you should do," said
Inghild, and Ilsa nodded. "I won't."

Ilsa's face fell. "Why not, Mother?" she pleaded.

"Because I can't. This is your life, Ilsa, not mine.
Whatever you decide, my blessing goes with you. All
I can say is this: Look in your heart. The answer lies there."

It did. To love Rick would be to betray both her mar
riage vows and the Resistance itself. Rick said he stuck
his neck out for nobody. She would show him: she would stick her neck out for everybody—for Victor, for Europe. Even for Rick Blaine, whether he liked it
or not.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

New York, June 1931

Yitzik Baline, whom everybody called Rick, met Lois
Horowitz on his way downtown to buy a knish for his mother. He met Solomon Horowitz on his way back
uptown to deliver Lois to her father.

He was riding the Second Avenue el down from his
mother's apartment on East 116th Street, having
walked over to visit her from his dump up in Washington Heights. He liked walking around New York and
didn't mind the hike. Besides, he didn't own a car. He
couldn't afford a car. He didn't mind visiting his
mother from time to time either, even if that meant hav
ing to sit in her dining room and listen to her
kvell
about his good looks and
yiddische kopf
and kvetch
about bis lack of a job.

Strictly speaking, she was incorrect, for he had a
job—or, rather, he had several. It was just that none of
them was either very respectable or very good. Most of
his time was spent trying to figure out how a guy as smart as he could be so poor.

Some small-time crap games here, a little bootleg
ging there, even running a team of newspaper
shtarkers
in Harlem to make sure the vendors were selling Pulit
zer's
World
and not Hearst's
Journal.
The
shtarkers
were a fixture of the newspaper business in those days.
Their function was to encourage newsstand vendors to
carry their paper instead of its rivals, and their means
of persuasion were generally baseball bats and suspi
cious fires. He wasn't proud about this line of work,
but it paid reasonably well—even after kicking back
part of his money to the cops so they might continue
to look the other way until they got a better offer—well
enough to keep him from looking like a bum, even if
he often felt like one.

What he really wanted to do was run a speakeasy.
Everything about nightlife attracted him, starting with
the hours; he was a night owl living in an early bird
world. Although he didn't play an instrument, an ear for music ran in the family, as his mother never tired
of reminding him. The clink of glasses, the sound of
fresh liquor being poured from a bottle, the satisfying
whoosh
of a beer keg being tapped—these were his
instruments.

And the money! At his age, other fellows who ran
speaks were riding around town in Duesenbergs, with
a doll on each arm. Him, he was lucky to scare up car
fare. He wanted to blame it on the Depression but knew
he couldn't. He couldn't blame it on anybody but him
self.

His destination, Ruby's Appetizing and Delicates
sen, sat on the corner of Hester and Allen Streets in
their old neighborhood, handy to the local el stop. This
was his weekly
mitzvah,
going downtown to buy his
mother a knish when there were perfectly fine knishes
up and down Second Avenue. Miriam insisted that the
best knishes—and the best latkes and the best gefilte
fish and the best everything—were still to be found on the Lower East Side.

He liked to think of himself as a tough guy, and here
he was, riding the el to buy an old lady a knish.

The Lower East Side was where he spent most of
his childhood. The "old neighborhood," the old folks
called it, using the same tone—nostalgia mixed with
audible relief at not having to live there anymore—that
they used when they talked about the old country.
Which, for the Balines, as for most of the other Jewish families in East Harlem, was Russia, the Ukraine, or
Poland. Ninety thousand Jews lived in East Harlem and
eighty thousand more in Harlem proper, which made
the area north of Central Park the second-largest Jew
ish neighborhood in the country, after the old neigh
borhood.

New York had plenty of German Jews, the
Deutscher
Yehudim,
but many of them were established, rapidly assimilating snobs who took one look at their embar
rassingly unwashed brethren pouring in from Eastern Europe and promptly changed their names. Take that
fancy pants August Belmont, the big
macher
at the
Metropolitan Opera: he had been born Sch
ö
nberg. Rick
swore to himself that he would never change his name.
"Yitzik" to "Rick," maybe; but Baline he was born
and Baline he would stay.

That was his mother's influence. His father might
have had an influence, too, but Rick had never known
his father; Morris Baline had died before Rick was
born. Miriam wanted better for her boy, but she also
wanted him to remember where he had come from. She
kept up with the news in the Yiddish-language
Daily Vorw
ä
rts,
one of the city's biggest and most important
newspapers, and she never lost the opportunity to remind him about the importance of social justice. Mir
iam was an expert on social justice, since, coming from
the old country, she had experienced so little of it, and she had a sense of noblesse oblige that was positively Belmontian; if the Jews could not be a lamp unto the feet of the gentiles, then who could? If there was one thing she taught her son, she was proud to say, it was tolerance; for Miriam, tolerance was a cardinal virtue
because if you were tolerant of others, they would
surely be tolerant of you. It was a kind of insurance
policy against pogroms, and that was why she was
proud to be an American, living here in the
goldeneh
medina,
even though she spoke almost no English, read
not a word of it, and, at her age, didn't intend to start.
It was the el and its younger sibling, the subway, that
had made it possible for the immigrants jammed into
Manhattan's most crowded precincts to escape the
Lower East Side. Miriam Baline worried about losing
her fatherless boy to the streets, and the streets of the
Lower East Side were worse than any—prime recruiting territory for some of the toughest gangs in the city.
Like mothers all over New York, she prayed that her
son would not fall into gangland's clutches, not take
up with a group of like-minded youngsters who would
rather knock over a pushcart peddler or rob a stuss
game than put in an honest day's work, not gawk at the
gangsters like Dopey Benny and Gyp the Blood in their
fancy suits and their shiny shoes, with a girl on their
arm, a gun in their pocket, and a look on their face that
dared you to crack wise about it.

Like many mothers all over New York, though, Miriam had been doomed to disappointment. Her son was
heading south, not north.

The long ride downtown gave him ample time for
reflection on his depressing trajectory. He had been
born, he decided, under an unlucky star. He was too young to have been able to fight in the Great War; too
poor to have gone to anywhere except City College,
where he had been an indifferent student and finally
had dropped out; too disinterested in knowledge for its own sake to pay very close attention to his lessons; and
too easily distracted by girls to do much of anything.
He had no motivation and, aside from a growing fond
ness for the bottle, no interests. Except for the speed of the elevated train, he was going nowhere slowly. He
needed a cause.

It was hot that summer, the way it was always hot in
New York, only hotter. All the men wore suits and ties,
and underneath them the sweat ran down their arms
like tiny rivers. Rick often wondered whether it would
puddle high enough in your shoes to splash onto the floor and embarrass you in front of the ladies. With everyone packed into the el, cheek to jowl with their
equally sweaty neighbors at rush hour, it was never a
pleasant ride, but it was cheap and a lot faster than
walking. With luck, Rick could get downtown and
back again in less than an hour with a cloth sack filled
with goodies from old man Ruby's display cases.

On this particular afternoon, however, the el was nearly empty. As he looked down into the city, Rick
thought the only New Yorkers who were not stoop sit
ting or fire escape napping or standing with their heads
in the icebox were himself and the sole other occupant
of the car, an exceptionally pretty young woman who was sitting across from him.

To say she was the most beautiful creature he had
ever seen would be an understatement. Her hair was jet
black, her skin translucent white. Her figure was only
partly concealed by her clothing, and the part that
wasn't concealed had had his full attention for several stops. Although her skirts were long, her ankles were revealed, and as any young man would, Rick had instantly done the sum, extrapolating from the width of
her ankle to the precise angle of the curve of her calf,
to the length of her thigh, and so on right up to the top
of her head. Before he even got there, he knew he hiked
what he saw.

The girl, who appeared to be about eighteen, kept
her hands folded in her lap, as she was probably taught
by her mother, and her eyes on the floor, as no doubt she had already learned from experience. No matter
how well brought up, however, any woman could suc
cumb to the heat when it was hot enough or when she
wanted to. Rick was hardly surprised when the young
lady suddenly slumped to the floor with the daintiest of
sighs: a puff of breath, and then she keeled over like
one of the tugboats in the harbor that had just been
holed below the waterline by a rock.

Rick's stop was coming right up, but he forgot all about it as he leaped to her assistance. The el rattled
past another ten blocks or so of third-floor windows
before she opened her eyes, which were the purest blue Rick Baline had ever seen. Slowly he helped her to her feet, but she was still a little woozy from the inhalation
of so much of Manhattan's dubious air, so he sat her down again, this time beside him. "Are you okay,
miss?" he asked.

For a long moment she didn't answer. Then she
turned her head to the right and looked him in the face.
"Thanks, mister," she said. "That sure was swell of
you, helpin' me up like that."

She had a shy, almost apologetic little smile that
seemed out of place on such a gorgeous face. He was trying to think of something to say when she grasped
him by the arm and tugged hard.

"We've missed it! We've missed it!" she said with
agitation.

"Missed what?" asked Rick.

"My stop," she said. "It was for my father." As if
that explained everything.

"What is?" said Rick, mystified, not for the first
time, by the female mind.

"The gefilte fish," she said. "At Ruby's." She
smiled. "It's the best."

Here he had thought she was an Irish girl from Mor
risania. "Don't worry," he said soothingly. "We'll go
right back. The conductor's a personal friend of mine."

That made her laugh. "My name's Lois," she said,
extending her hand.

"Mine's Yitzik," he said, "but my friends call me
Rick." He gave her what he thought might be a flirta
tious wink. "You can call me Rick."