Max (44 page)

‘Mama,' Max said, ‘it's not a wild place filled with Indians. Nobody walks up to you and shoots you. Believe me, I swear to you.'

‘Freida was crying her eyes out. You realise that? Or maybe you're too busy running around with
shiksas
to remember you got a sister, she's thirty-four years old and she ain't married. What will she find out there, cowboys?'

‘We should be that lucky.'

‘Yeah? That's a way to talk?' Sarah began to weep. ‘Kill me. Then you got no responsibilities.'

‘Mama, don't cry. Please. I can't stand it when you cry.'

‘All my life I slaved my heart out for my children. I worked my fingers to the bone. And what do I get –' She submerged herself in her tears.

‘Mama, please.'

‘First,' she sobbed, ‘you pull me out of my home in Henry Street and drag me uptown, I don't know a soul. So now I make myself a little life here, now I got two married daughters and my sons are married, with grandchildren, what a woman dreams about, and you tell me I should leave this and be killed by Indians.'

‘There are no Indians in California, Mama. I swear to you.'

‘What then? Wild Buffalo Bills?'

‘It's a place like any other place.'

‘What does Sally think about all this?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What do you mean, you don't know?'

‘Nobody told you?' Max said uncertainly.

‘What should they tell me?'

‘Sally and me, we're separated. We're going to be divorced.'

‘What!'

‘Don't get excited, Mama,' Max begged her.

‘Oh? Sure, I shouldn't get excited. Only my home is taken away from me and my grandchildren are taken away from me, and I shouldn't get excited.'

‘Mama, I'm not taking away your home. You can live here with Freida, if she wants to, only she told me she wants to go to California. Ruby and Benny are both going to California. I gave that bum Esther is married to a job mismanaging the Bijou, but Sheila's husband seems to like the idea of moving to California –'

‘So I should stay here!' Sarah snapped. ‘Then you're rid of me, and I'm left with that cold-fish stuck-up wife of yours, thinks she's better than anybody in the world. So why bother? Kill me! Throw me out in the street to die from the cold! That's better.'

‘Mama, nobody's getting rid of you. I told you, I bought this lot in Beverly Hills, and Clifford Abel's designing a house for us. It's a seven-bedroom house, with plenty of room for you and for Freida. And there's no hurry, because the house won't be ready for another six months at least, and maybe a year.'

Actually, it was a year and a half before Max's Beverly Hills home was complete, and during most of that time, Max lived in a tiny cottage that had been part of the three-hundred-acre tract he purchased in the San Fernando Valley. During that time, he made five two-way train trips between Los Angeles and New York, but it was after his return from his first trip to Los Angeles that he spoke to his mother and Sally. Even though his mother's house and Sally's house stood side by side – his own living quarters having been transferred to a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria – he could not take the few steps from Sarah's house to Sally's. The door was barred to him, and Sally's response to his voice on the telephone was to slam the receiver down on its cradle. Finally, after several discussions with Fred Feldman, Sally agreed to see him, and for the first time in months he went up the steps of the brownstone that had once been his home. The date had been made for two o'clock in the afternoon, when the children were still in school, but Max had every intention of prolonging the visit until they returned. It could not be said that he actually missed his son and daughter. Richard and Marion were far too much strangers for him to feel any real pangs of separation, but he had a gnawing sense of duty combined with guilt.

Sally answered the door herself. She was wearing a white, lace-trimmed blouse of cambric and an ankle-length gray skirt of fine, thin wool. Her hair was drawn back and held by a ribbon at the nape of her neck, and there was just the faintest touch of rouge on her face and lips. Except that her face had become somewhat more severe, her mouth tightened and held in place by tiny lines at the corners, she looked no different than she had when Max married her twelve years before. She had gained little if any weight, her figure trim and tight; yet, looking at her now, Max could not find any response in himself, any emotional quiver that would explain to him why he had been so compulsively driven to her years before.

Sally, on the other hand, did give evidence of an emotional response; she regarded Max coldly, almost with loathing, and told him evenly that she had set aside a half-hour for his visit, which would mean that he would not see his children after all. He didn't contest that immediately, but simply nodded and went into the house.

Seated stiffly in the parlor, Sally said without preamble, ‘I suppose you've come to talk about the settlement. I have agreed to Feldman's proposal about the stock for myself and twenty thousand dollars a year support as well as this property and your mother's house. But I also want five percent of the company stock for each of the children.'

‘Why?' Max was taken aback by this. ‘When I die, the kids get everything.'

‘When you die is a long time off, and with that wolf-pack family of yours, they'll fight for every penny, Also, God only knows what low creature you'll be living with then.'

‘I don't understand,' Max said tiredly. ‘I don't want to fight with you, Sally. I just don't understand why you hate me so much.'

‘Hate is not the word. I despise you.'

‘Yeah. I don't know as many words as you. I still don't know why you hate me. What did I ever do to you?'

‘Aside from making me the laughingstock of this city, aside from going to bed with every actress you employ –'

‘That's crazy. What do you mean, every actress I employ? That's a lot of crap and you know it.'

‘I love your elegant English. Are you going to deny that you had an affair with Della O'Donnell and were practically living with her all those years while we were still married? And that slut, Etta Goodman. And Alexa – that bitch you call Natalie Love. Oh, why go on?'

‘Because there's no place to go. So I did it. Why in hell don't you ask yourself why? Going to bed with you was like going to bed with a goddamn iceberg, and since the kids came, your high-class cunt is locked as tight as the vault at the Chase Bank!'

Sally leaped to her feet and snapped, ‘I won't have that kind of filthy talk in my house! I think you should get out!'

‘Damn it, Sally, what did I do to you? Why do you hate me?'

Sally stared at him, her face quivering with rage. ‘You had better go, Mr Britsky. I don't want you here.' Her voice shook, and she appeared to be fighting to get the words out. ‘I don't want you here at all. You disgust me. You're a dirty, nasty little man, and you disgust me.'

Sighing, Max rose and said, ‘I'm sorry, Sally. I didn't want anything like this to happen. Sometimes I think I'm going nuts because I just don't know what happened. We loved each other, didn't we?'

‘Oh, no!' she shouted. ‘No! Love? You can't love anything except your wretched moving pictures – and you wouldn't have those if I hadn't shown you how to make them. I'll tell you what happened. You beat me down. You forced me to marry you – dirty little Max Britsky from Henry Street, who lived like an animal with his family of animals – and I threw away my life and now I have nothing. Nothing.'

He left, and he didn't get to see his children after all, and when he had dinner that evening with Fred Feldman, the session with Sally became something that he could not deal with at all.

‘You did see her?' Feldman asked.

‘Oh, yeah. I saw her.'

‘Did she raise the question of the children's stock?'

‘Yes.'

‘How did it go, I mean the meeting?'

‘OK.'

‘She was friendly?'

‘Well, not exactly friendly.'

‘Oh?' Feldman shook his head. ‘That's too bad. I was hoping the two of you might hit it off, at least for an hour or so.'

‘Freddy, are you crazy?'

‘Yeah, well, that's the way it goes. I tried to convince her that one five-percent piece of the stock would be worth about five million in a year or two.'

‘Did she believe you?'

‘I don't think so. But I did get her agreement to put the kids' stock – providing you agree – into an irrevocable trust, with the voting right retained by you until the kids are thirty. And that's not such a bad idea, Max. You know, you're still a young man, and you could marry again and have more children, and well, well, this protects Sally and her kids.'

‘Do I look like a schmuck who puts his hand in the gearbox twice?'

‘Well, that's up to you. But we got to work out something about the kids, visitation rights. If you're living in Los Angeles and Sally remains here, well, it won't be easy.'

‘I hardly know the kids. They're like strangers to me. I don't even know what I feel for them, and they look at me funny.'

‘What do you mean, funny?'

‘Like I'm some kind of animal, I don't know. I guess Sally tells them things about me. I tried to kiss Marion last time I saw her. She pulled away. God knows what kind of an animal those kids think I am!'

‘Max, you have legal rights.'

‘I got no rights, Freddy. None. What do I do, tell the kids I'm not a murderer and that it's legal for them to believe it? Ah, the hell with it. Give her whatever she wants and get it over with.'

If Max had possessed the word ‘quintessential' in his vocabulary, he would have termed Clifford Abel the quintessential
goy
. Where Max was short, Abel was six feet and two inches; where Max was dark, Abel had a shock of blond hair and pale skin; and where Max was tightly knit, Abel had a big-boned and fleshless frame. Only their eyes were alike, bright blue, and kindred dreams united them. Abel loved Max. In his mind, Abel clothed Max in a high jeweled turban and silken robes, one who came out of the East, with many beasts of burden carrying fragrant spices, wondrous bales of cloth, and priceless jewels.

Max, on the other hand, thought of Abel in some such terms as the duke of Milan had once considered Leonardo. In terms of business – buying and selling and pricing – Clifford Abel was witless, and it fell to Max to set his wages and fees. But as an artist, Max had supreme confidence in him, assuring him that once his building projects were over, he and no one else would be the art director of the Britsky studio, instead of the young Yale and Carnegie Institute graduates that Max hired and fired and cursed out endlessly.

Clifford Abel understood Max. When Max brought him out to Southern California to look at the three-hundred-acre tract of land in the San Fernando Valley, Abel licked his lips in delight. Where there were only orange trees and pecan trees and weeds, Max said, ‘Right here, the gates. Large enough. Twelve feet wide.'

‘Twenty feet wide,' Abel said.

‘Wood?'

‘Cast iron,' Abel said.

‘Absolutely. Maybe seven feet high?'

‘Ten feet high.'

‘And on top, the name,' Max said.

‘Polished cast brass letters.'

They understood each other. Given his own preference, Abel would have called the studio Xanadu, but Max, leading the way for those more timid than he, Lasky and Zukor and Laemmle and Warner and Mayer, would have none of the ambiguous. The studio would be called the Max Britsky Studio. There was a barn behind the cottage where Max took up his California residence, and with a few renovations and the introduction of electricity, Clifford Abel turned the barn into his studio. He hired two bright young draftsmen from San Francisco, and he sat with Max for hours, poring over the drawings. Max wanted a fifteen-foot-high brick wall to surround the entire three hundred acres; but Abel convinced him that even the wealth generated by Britsky Productions could not easily afford six or seven miles of masonry wall. Prices had changed since the time of Kubla Khan, and they compromised with the inclusion of about twelve acres with the wall and the rest with a nine-foot-high chain-link fence. New York had demonstrated to Max the kind of spectator insanity that surrounded the making of moving pictures, and while by his lights the San Fernando Valley was still an undiscovered wilderness or Garden of Eden – depending upon how one regarded it – he was all too aware of the speed with which cities grew and changed. There would be two large gates into the studio, each well guarded, and inside Abel would construct six stages, each with five thousand square feet of floor space, each capable of holding four good-sized sets. In addition, Max suggested a city street, and Abel felt that it might well be done in the Potemkin manner.

‘Which means what?' Max demanded.

‘Well, this Potemkin was a sort of administrator for Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia at that time, about a hundred and fifty years ago, and. I suppose he wanted her to feel that she ruled over something a bit better than the real thing. So when she traveled, he had pretty little villages constructed along her route, but since it would have been too expensive to build the real thing, he only built the fronts – sort of outdoor sets.'

‘Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.'

‘We might have a, little country village too –'

‘Yeah, but if you do that, Cliff, make the houses real. We start bringing out actors and technicians, and where do we put them?'

‘Do you know what it's going to cost you, Max?'

‘Don't worry about money. Freddy's turning us into a public corporation, and we'll have more money than we know what to do with. Anyway, the banks are breaking down the door wanting to lend me money. With this crazy war going on in Europe, we got the kind of prosperity nobody ever dreamed about. So you just build, and let me worry about paying for it.'