Max (14 page)

It was not easy. In a time of large families, they had only one child, whom they adored. She had never been abused, spanked, punished. She was a good girl, as they so often said, and they were very proud of her. But Max Britsky –

‘I don't want to try to upset any apple carts,' Arthur Levine began, ‘and your mama and me, we respect a choice you make. But have you thought about it enough? A vaudeville performer, a man from a family you say yourself he never wants you to meet with a twelve-year-old's education. Sally, Sally, think of yourself. You're a beautiful, talented young lady. Sam Goldman's boy, he would get down on his knees to make you a proposal of marriage, and Sam's got his own cloak-and-suit business. Or Jack Kanter, or Richard Cohen – boys who could offer you something. Mrs Cohen tells Mama all her son wants is a chance to take you out and keep company a little, and he passed the bar. Kanter's a doctor, already a resident. Why should you throw yourself away?'

‘I'm not throwing myself away, Papa. You don't know Max. It wasn't his fault that he had to leave school when he was twelve. It wasn't because he's stupid. He's one of the brightest boys I ever met. In fact, it was a very noble act. I told you how he took care of his mother and his brothers and sisters –'

‘You told us,' Lillian Levine said shortly. ‘He's also four years younger than you. What kind of a match is that?'

‘You know how hard you worked and saved to put away that money,' Sally's father said. ‘And you give it to him like that. What should I say, Sally? What should I say?'

‘You never brought him here. Tell me, Sally, what kind of a boy keeps company and he don't meet the father and mother?'

Sally's eyes misted over. She was at the point of tears, and her father, unable to bear the sight of his daughter weeping said, ‘Enough. We got no right to talk until we meet him, so you must bring him here. Then we'll see.'

In the end, Adolf Schmidt decided not to go to court to void Max as his tenant. After all, he explained to his wife, a seven-year lease was not something you found every day of the week, and the rent was better than the rent Schimmelmeyer paid. In his own mind, Schmidt had faced the possibility that he might even have to lower the rent. The store was too large, and at the time in the development of New York City, a large store was more difficult to rent than a small one, the age of oversized markets being in the future. Overcome with curiosity, Schmidt watched glumly as Max took over the findings store and created what appeared to Schmidt as chaos. The display cases and counters were taken out and loaded onto a huge dray in spite of Schmidt's wails of protest.

‘In seven years I'll replace them,' Max told him. He had sold the lot for twenty dollars. Then the inside walls were painted a soft gray, the floor dark gray. That was Sally's suggestion. In spite of herself, in spite of her parents' foreboding, she was becoming intrigued with Max's project. If nothing else, she was completely in awe of his energy. He did everything, watched everything, supervised everything. He had to invent a projection booth in which to place the magic lantern device that would throw the moving pictures onto a screen. He sat in her room until two in the morning while Sally made sketch after sketch, until at last they put together a blueprint of what he wanted. When he found that the folding chairs were too light and would be thrown out of line, he devised a method of fastening ten chairs together. He took a train one night for Rochester, New York, disdaining the extra cost of a Pullman berth, and blustered his way into a meeting with George Eastman, who at first reacted with contempt to this skinny, pushy Jew with his ghetto speech. But there was something about Max, an energy, an intensity, that made Eastman listen instead of throwing him out. Max was neither awed nor abashed in the presence of the great inventor and industrialist, and Eastman in turn glimpsed the vastness of Max's dreams. He took time to show Max the newest developments in roll film, and he showed Max a screen, silvered instead of white, that he had been experimenting with.

‘I want one,' Max said. ‘What'll it cost me?'

‘Won't cost you a nickel. I'll ship you a silvered one and a white one, and see which brings you the best response.'

Sitting up all night on the train out of Rochester, Max basked in the afterglow of his meeting with George East-man. Mr Eastman might not have known who Max was, but Max knew who Max was, and as he said to Sally the next day, ‘There I was, little Maxie Britsky, sitting there with one of the biggest men in America and a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, and he could have tossed me out on my
tush
, but he didn't. He listened to my idea.'

‘Of course he did!' Sally exclaimed. ‘He could see that you were just about the brightest thing that ever walked into his office.'

‘And how could he see that?'

‘Well, I see it, and if he's so smart, he could see it. Anyway, if your dream works out, think of all the film he'll sell.'

‘That occurred to me,' Max said.

‘Will you have enough money? If you need more, I still have –'

‘No, sir,' Max said, holding up his hand, palm out. ‘I am going to make it. We open next week, and I still got eighty-five dollars. I had to pay Sam Snyder his first week's wages and then I had to send him to Philadelphia to look at two other pictures we found out about. One is of a cowboy, one of them badmen types from out West –'

‘One of
those
, Max,' Sally pleaded. ‘Try. You can speak correctly when you try.'

‘Sure, sure. Believe me, I'm trying. You know, a pistol-shooter, he pulls out his gun and shoots.'

‘Do you see what he's shooting at?'

‘No, it's only three minutes. I think he drinks a bottle of booze first. The other picture is a little girl who crawls around the room, and she pulls a tablecloth off a table loaded with junk, and something hits her, I think a piece of fruit, and then she begins to cry and then her mama comes and picks her up. Very cute. Sam says it's supposed to be a real good thing and we can get it very cheap. We're not paying for the films; I just sign notes to pay for them next month, God willing, otherwise I kill myself.'

‘You shouldn't talk like that. I still have some money.'

‘Sure, and I got eighty-five dollars, except that fifty is for the sign painter, and I got to pay him tomorrow.'

Max could have had a sign for as little as five dollars, but he didn't want to skimp in that area. There was no way he could have anything like the Bijou or any of the valid music halls. No matter how he dressed it, a store was still a store, perhaps a cut above the little synagogues that had established themselves in stores all over the East Side, but still a store. Fortunately, it had double doors opening into the street, inside of which Max built a tiny vestibule, a swinging door into the makeshift theatre, and a glassed-over small counter on the right, behind which he had arranged to station Freida. All his instincts told him that his venture would live or die depending on the honesty of the person who sold the tickets. He could trust Freida. Yet the store was still a store, which prodded Max to invest almost the last of his money in the sign. The sign was forty feet long, stretching the whole length of the storefront, and on it, in bold yellow letters against a crimson background, the legend: M
AX
B
RITSKY
'
S
O
RPHEUM
.

It was a cold, nasty day toward the end of November, in the year 1899, at twelve o'clock noon, that the sign was lifted into place there on West Broadway. It was an event that went unnoticed in the annals of history. Other things were remembered: the fierce battles of the Boers against the British in South Africa; the births of Charles Laughton and Noel Coward, whose lives would be shaped to a large degree by that sign over Max Britsky's store; and also remembered although unknown to almost all of the folk alive then, the first magnetic recording of sound. But people in motion and action on a cold day are not concerned with history, and the workmen cursed the size and unwieldiness of the sign, and Mr Schmidt, watching glumly, told Max that his property was being ruined.

‘Orpheum,' he muttered. ‘What's an orpheum?'

‘You heard of Guttman's Orpheum, you heard of Keith's Orpheum, so that's what an orpheum is.'

‘You open tomorrow?'

‘Tomorrow, you bet.'

‘Tomorrow it snows.'

Schmidt was right. The following morning the snow began, nasty wet flakes that melted when they touched the sidewalk. It was too early in the season for a real snowfall, but when Max looked at the gray skies, he felt his heart sink.

‘You still want me there? You still going to open?' Freida asked him.

‘You're damn right I am.'

Sam Snyder had put together a program of six films, and imitating the style of legitimate theatres, Max had purchased an easel and had the program lettered onto a sheet of Bristol board:
MONKEY SHINES, THE ACROBAT, LITTLE ONES, THE HORSE CAR, PUPPIES,
and, finally,
THE MAGICIAN.
The Magician
was the best thing Max had seen. It ran for almost five minutes, and it featured the internationally famous magician Harvey Eddelson. There was none of the camera tricks, which Sam Snyder was so enthusiastic about and which the film experimenters delighted in. The Camera simply fixed on Eddelson, head on, while he went through his assortment of astonishing tricks. All six films added up to a running time of nineteen minutes and thirty-three seconds. Snyder had spliced the films together so that the show would be uninterrupted. It was Sally's suggestion, when she first saw the films, that some sort of title and perhaps a few descriptive words might introduce each of them. She also felt that the man who took the pictures in each case should be given some sort of credit or acknowledgment, as an artist is for a picture or an author for a book. But neither Max nor Snyder considered this to be of any great importance – and, indeed, Snyder admitted that in two instances, he did not know who the photographer was. But they agreed to the title cards, and for
Monkey Shines
, Sally wrote, ‘Are monkeys smarter than people? Who knows? Watch and see.' For
The Acrobat
, she wrote, ‘Who is this man who flies like a bird? He is the acrobat. Watch and be thrilled.' For
Little Ones
, she wrote, ‘Everyone loves a baby. Nothing is cuter than these little darlings.' For
The Horse Car
, she wrote: ‘Will these soon be as obsolete as dinosaurs? Who knows?' For
Puppies:
‘Watch the cuddly darling's. What a pity you can't take one home.' And for
The Magician:
‘In all the world there is only one Eddelson, the master of illusion.'

Max was delighted, and Sally persuaded a friend, an art student, to do the lettering on all the title cards and legends for five dollars. Snyder then took the cards out to New Jersey and had them photographed at Edison's studio. Sally, who had continued to take a dim view of the entire undertaking, came to life when she saw her own words on film.

But it was snowing.

‘You're damn right I'm opening,' Max said to the assembled Britsky family at breakfast in the kitchen of the flat on Henry Sreet. ‘I open if it's another blizzard of eighty-eight.'

They hung on his words. Even Sarah had no caustic, undermining comment on the situation. For years she had screamed at Max, blamed him for every misfortune, and in all truth despised him. In some way beyond her comprehension, she held him responsible for her unmarried state, her hopeless future, her poverty – but all this without any kind of insight, and in her mind it expressed itself simply as irritation and anger. Yet today even that anger had cooled. Her son Max owned some kind of theatre, and today was its opening. She deflected her anger and cursed the weather. The other Britskys absorbed excitement and wanted to know whether they could see the moving picture show.

‘After school,' Max told them, quieting their clamor. ‘Mama will bring all of you.' He placed a dollar in front of his mother. ‘But you pay for them, Mama. Here's the money. Freida will be at the ticket window, but anyway you pay her. A nickel for yourself and three cents for the kids, except Ruby. Ruby is old enough. He pays full price. The difference is twelve years old. I know Sheila, already she's thirteen, but she don't look thirteen.'

Giggling, Freida said, ‘You're cheating yourself, Max.'

‘I'm making a joke.' He grinned.

‘But I know Sheila's thirteen.'

‘Why should we pay?' Sarah demanded. ‘I'm your mother. Your mother should pay?'

‘Because everyone pays,' Max said decisively. ‘No freeloaders.' Excepting, of course, the passes he had handed out at the local police precinct, entitling the captain and the lieutenants to enter free with their families as often as they desired.

He had arranged with Sally for her to have dinner with him and then to accompany him to the evening performance, which ensured a reasonable gap of time between his family's appearance and Sally's appearance. Max, shepherding Freida, got to the store at eleven, an hour before the opening. Sam Snyder was there waiting for him, his normal round, cheery face set and worried, shaking his head at the dismal weather. ‘This stinks,' he said. ‘This really hits us.'

‘We'll make it,' Max replied with a confidence he hardly felt. ‘Take your place,' he said to Freida.

‘It's cold.'

‘So keep your coat on. I'll tell you something, Sis. If we're not wiped out today, a month from now I'll buy you a fur coat.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘So help me – it's a promise.' He went into his coat pocket and came up with two rolls of pennies and a bag of nickels, dimes, and quarters. ‘Here's the change, seven dollars' worth.' He did not add that this left him with exactly eighty-five cents as his total worldly wealth.