Max (22 page)

‘You'll put in a good word with Charlie Murphy? There'll be no more trouble with Monk or Vaccarelli or any other of the dirty hoodlums who infest this fine city. That's a promise.'

Charles F. Murphy had just become the new boss at Tammany Hall, which made him the most politically powerful man in New York. He had taken over from Dick Croker, a brawling, foul-mouthed political hoodlum whose sins had finally caught up with him. Murphy, on the other hand, was a good-looking, ingratiating Irishman who preferred intelligence to brute force and whose soft brogue could be captivating and seductive. Only a week after the executive committee of Tammany had dethroned Croker and voted Murphy into office, a well-dressed young man turned up at Max's office and informed him that Mr Murphy would like to lunch with Mr Britsky at Delmonico's new restaurant at Forty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue – at Mr Britsky's convenience. Shakily, Max chose a date. It was his first entry into Delmonico's, but he came armed with serious sartorial advice from Bert and financial advice from Fred Feldman.

‘Blue serge,' Bert said, ‘nothing else. Blue serge, black shoes, white shirt, and dark striped tie. Just look snotty and knowledgeable and like you consider the waiter to be pure shit.'

‘The goddamn menu,' Max said. ‘It's supposed to be in French.'

‘Screw the menu. Just tell the waiter you'll have an
entrecôte
– that's French for a steak and a salad. Steak first, then salad. I'll write it down. Let Murphy order the wine. It's class to order without looking at the menu. If Murphy asks about dessert, tell him you'll have whatever he has.'

Fred Feldman, on the other hand, said, ‘Careful, Max, like you're walking on glass. They say that Murphy wants a piece of everything. Croker wanted to rule the city, but they say that Murphy wants to own it. We're sitting on a gold mine, and word has got to him. There's no way to keep him out, but fight like hell over how much he comes in for.'

‘We got to give?'

‘Or else go to Philadelphia or Boston.'

But Murphy's warm greeting and his easy charm as he led Max to a table belied Feldman's warning. He was instantly ingratiating, to Max, to people who recognised him and greeted him as they made their way through the restaurant, to the maître d'hotel, who knew him well, to the waiters and the busboys. ‘You're only a lad,' he said to Max. ‘Now what age would you be?'

‘Twenty-three.'

‘Now there's the finest recommendation a man could have. Myself, I was nothing at your age, a poor boy.' Bit by bit, he drew Max out, established his background, itemised his family, admired ‘a kind of guts and love you don't see much these days. And now you're to marry a sweet lassie?'

‘Next month,' Max said.

‘Would I be presuming to ask that myself and my lady be present at the wedding?'

‘Well – yes, oh, yes, absolutely. We'd be honored, Mr Murphy. But it's just a small Jewish wedding out in Flushing.'

‘There are no small Jewish or small Irish weddings, my lad. It's the size of the heart that measures it. And it's time I showed my face in Flushing. When you're too long away from any part of this populous and wondrous city, you lose touch.'

‘We'll be happy to have you,' Max said, charmed, but still wondering why the lunch had been arranged.

‘I been hearing good thing about you. They call you the young tycoon. But I had no idea you were this young.'

‘I've had some luck,' Max agreed.

‘You call it
masel
, I call it
sechel,
' Murphy said, using the Yiddish words for ‘luck' and ‘brains.' ‘You got a string of moving picture places all over the city. I trust there'll be more.'

‘There'll be more,' Max agreed, lighting the excellent cigar Murphy had offered him. ‘We have seventeen storefronts, but in the next five years I plan to replace them with real theatres. Our first real theatre, the Bijou, is operating already. We're renovating two others, one on Fourteenth Street and one on Twenty-third Street, and we bought two lots uptown where someday I'll build, both in Harlem.'

Murphy suddenly changed the subject, asking Max abruptly, ‘What do you know about Tammany Hall, Max?'

‘Well, you know, it's like the Democrats with all kinds of influence in the city, but I guess everyone knows that –'

‘Trouble is, nobody knows much of anything. Back in the old days, a hundred years ago, when it began, it was Tammany and only Tammany that stood for the people against the rich and the powerful owners who were ready to wipe out everything the revolution brought us. There's many a curse thrown at Tammany, but who remembers that after the American Revolution, the rich and the powerful decided that they'd do here what they have done in England, and make themselves a proper aristocracy. They organised a thing called the Society of the Cincinnati, an organisation of the officers of the revolution and of their kids as well. And who was to stand for the people, the foot soldier?

‘That's how Tammany came about, the common people against the Cincinnati, and since they named their organisation after the fancy aristocrats of old Rome, we decided to name ours after old Chief Tammany of the tribe of Delaware Indians, who was well noted for his wisdom and his love of liberty. We had thirteen trustees to govern our society, one for each of the thirteen original colonies – grand sachems, they were called, after them that ruled the old Indian tribes. And when the dirty schemers tried to undo all the good of the revolution and institute a government based on fear and privilege, who stood beside Jefferson for liberty but Tammany Hall, and you'll hear many a slur cast against the fine and decent name of Aaron Burr because he killed Hamilton in fair fight, but Tammany never turned its back on Burr, and with him we stood for liberty. Sure, every Protestant minister could make a name for himself with an attack on old Willie Tweed, giving him a character that would fit the worst devils in hell and making great stories of how he robbed the city of hundreds of millions of dollars. All you had to do was say ‘Boss Tweed,' and the devils were conjured, but you and me, laddie, you as a Jew and myself as a Roman Catholic, we got no illusions about Protestant ministers.

‘Well, there it is, a bit about the old organisation. I thought it might clarify things in our dealings.'

Max listened to this long, rambling story of Tammany Hall with respectful and almost total confusion. Tammany Hall, as everyone knew, ran the city. Tammany Hall owned the police and enforced or failed to enforce the law according to the wishes of whoever led Tammany. In New York, as it was put, one pissed because Tammany raised the toilet seat. Tammany had looted the city, over the past half-century, of enough money to ransom all the kings of Europe, but if one was starving, rest assured that come Thanksgiving or Christmas, Tammany would provide a free dinner; and why not, since Tammany took its tithe from every prostitute, pimp, gambler, and gangster who plied his or her trade in the city. This was common knowledge and Max's knowledge as well, but the rest of it – the talk about Jefferson and Burr and sachems and the Delaware Indians – made no sense whatsoever to Max. Nevertheless, he thanked Murphy for enlightening him and waited for Murphy's demands.

‘I have made a few inquiries,' Murphy said. ‘I hear you have taken care of your mother and your brothers and sisters. That's a fine, elegant thing to do, Max, and God will reward you. And you've got a head on your shoulders. This moving picture thing is only beginning.'

‘I have to agree with you,' Max said.

‘And as you spread out, every cheap hoodlum is going to try to horn in on you, not to mention them that call themselves legitimate businessmen and are just waiting to cut the throat of a young Jewish lad with more brains than they got.'

Max nodded and waited.

‘You need Tammany,' Murphy said. ‘You need me.'

‘What will it cost me?' Max asked slowly.

‘Twenty percent of the profit.'

‘That's too much.'

‘A year with our cooperation and your profits will double.'

‘It's too much,' Max said stubbornly.

‘You name it.'

‘Five percent,' Max said.

‘You're pulling my leg,' Murphy said without anger. ‘But I got to respect you. You're a tough cookie, Mr Britsky. We have just taken over Cappy's Music Hall, up on West Twenty-third Street. Cappy drank and gambled himself into bankruptcy, and we possessed the place for back taxes. You could take title for a hundred dollars and pay the thirty-two hundred in back taxes over the next ten years, and the property's worth a hundred and fifty thousand if it's worth a penny. All very quiet but legal, and that is only an indication, laddie, only an indication of what it will mean to have a friend in the hall. Sixteen percent.'

‘Seven,' Max said.

A half-hour later they shook hands, and Murphy owned eleven percent of Max's operation, with the agreement that Max would take over Cappy's Music Hall and that Murphy would bend the zoning laws to Max's advantage and to the disadvantage of his competitors.

‘This is nothing you will regret,' Murphy said.

‘It will be just a small Jewish wedding in Brooklyn,' Max said.

‘I would not miss it for the world.'

‘There's a Captain Clancy over on Houston Street and Alderman Sweeney. I thought I'd invite them. You wouldn't mind sharing a table with them?'

‘Delighted,' Murphy said.

Arthur and Lillian Levine had been born in Europe, in Austria. Arthur had been brought to America as a child in 1867. Lillian's parents had come to America three years later, bringing her with them. Since both families had come from the Carpathian Highlands to Vienna a generation before their move to America, they could not properly claim to belong to the genus of German Jew, who belonged to a wave of emigration out of Germany and into America between 1820 and 1860; but then, neither could they identify completely with the great mass of Eastern European Jews who began to pour into New York in the 1870s. They were isolated in a middle ground between the wealthy and respectable German Jews, the ‘uptown Jews,' and the bitterly poor ‘ghetto Jews' of the Lower East Side, and this isolation caused them to cling to a sort of lower-middle-class propriety as a shipwrecked man might cling to a tiny life raft.

Their respectability had practically replaced their religion. They had established themselves in the fringe German-Jewish community in Flatbush, and sometimes in their dreams they saw Sally married into one of the great German-Jewish financial empires or at least to a German or Viennese doctor or dentist. Max Britsky they had never anticipated, and as the wedding day approached and as Max stubbornly refused to bring them together with his mother, their trepidation increased. It became even greater when Sally informed them that they could not have the wedding ceremony in the Reform temple they belonged to, to be followed by a small party in their home. Max's mother would not set foot in a Reform temple, which she considered to be the abode of the devil himself.

Max did the best he could under these circumstances. He had come to realise that just as his status in the world was changing, so were his domestic needs changing. Suddenly, Sally was a great asset; she had the qualities he was beginning to encounter in certain business associates: restraint, manners, the ability to speak the language properly, and just enough good looks without the opulent sexuality of women he was instinctively drawn to. In other words, in his enlarging lexicon, Sally was a lady, and he was determined that nothing should occur to make her withdraw from the wedding. He bought her a large diamond engagement ring and a gold wedding ring set with tiny rubies, and gave her carte blanche in the furnishing of the brownstone house. He also purchased a double Victoria carriage and engaged Shecky Blum to drive it and take care of the horse, renting horse and groom space in the Sixty-seventh Street stables, west of the elevated structure.

Sally, overwhelmed by this cornucopia, talked her parents into renting Marcus's Lecture and Catering Hall on St Mark's Place for the wedding. It was not a very large or opulent wedding. The tables at Marcus's held ten people, and each family filled three tables. On Max's side, his family, with Sally and Ruby's girl friend, filled one table; another table seated the people in Max's organization, those he felt should be invited to his wedding. The third table was his Tammany table, as he thought of it, seating Murphy, Clancy, and Sweeney, each with his respective wife, Bert Bellamy and the girl he chose for the occasion, and Sam Snyder and his wife. His wife's name was Alice; a plump, pink-cheeked woman with a mass of pale brown hair piled high on her head and a ready, easy smile. It was the first time Max had met her, and he was taken aback by the uninhibited manner in which she embraced him and kissed him and assured him that she knew all about him, but would find it hard to forgive him if he did not bring his new wife to dinner very soon. The Snyders now had four children, and a fifth was on its way.

‘And then, God willing, she'll stop,' Sam Snyder said.

‘Listen to him.' Alice laughed. ‘Just listen to him.'

This assortment of non-Jewish types was regarded with suspicion and hauteur by Sarah, who lorded it over the occasion in an enormous pink silk dress, sewn all over with white imitation pearls.

The thirty people from the Levine side were so many faces to Max, even after he was introduced to them. Nothing, he decided. Schmucks. And as so often happened on such occasions, the two groups kept coldly apart. ‘They should be grateful,' Sarah said, ‘a boy like Max, who's a millionaire, marrying into a family that's got nothing to show for it.'

Max was far from being a millionaire, in spite of Sarah's new-found financial admiration for her son. In fact, his cash reserve, which he had learned to refer to as ‘a state of liquidity,' had practically vanished, the last bite being taken by a dozen cases of champagne, his gift to the wedding. But, as he assured Sally, his incoming cash – another expression he had adopted – was as uninterrupted as the Hudson River.