Max (54 page)

So when Max heard that Benny was in Los Angeles, he made no effort to confront him. What for? As far as he was concerned, he would be happy never to confront either brother as long as he lived. Letters had gone out to every theatre manager, suggesting that criminal action would be taken if there was any improper diversion of funds, and every production manager on the lot had been notified of the ongoing audit. There was no question that Benny knew exactly what was going on, and whatever he was not aware of, Ruby would supply. After three days, Sam Snyder informed Max that Benny had returned to New York and that he would be at the Hobart Building if Max wished to talk to him.

‘How come you're telling me this?'

‘The kid called me to find out how you felt about him,' Snyder said.

‘And what did you tell him?'

‘Max, it's family. I can't get mixed up in it. I told him to call you and ask you.'

‘You know damn well how I feel. I should have beaten the shit out of both of them when they were still kids. I should have taught them the law. I was derelict, derelict.'

‘Yeah, when you were twelve years old.'

‘I was never twelve years old.'

‘He asked me whether you'd let them send him to the can.'

‘Can I stop them?'

But the question Max asked himself was whether he wanted to. He was hurt. He had been hurt before, but never this way. It was one thing to peddle theatre passes to whores so that his family could eat. It was another thing entirely to take care of all six in a style they had never dreamed of, to provide well-paying jobs not only for his brothers but for the deadbeat husbands of two of his sisters, to provide a goddamn Beverly Hills mansion that his mother and poor spinster Freida could live in, not to mention Ruby when he wasn't shacked up at the hotel, and handing Freida a thousand dollars every week for her and Sarah to run the house with – and on top of that, those two bums took him for maybe two, three, maybe four million dollars. He didn't give a damn about the money. When in his whole life had he ever given a damn about money? If they had asked – But to steal it, to make a
putze
, a high-grade schmuck out of him in front of his friends and the board of directors and the studio people and the world; and already he felt that every time he walked down the studio street, a hundred faces turned after he passed, whispering, ‘There he is, the horse's ass who was taken like nobody else was taken since Grant took Richmond.'

The telephone broke into his reverie, and Shelly Greene informed him that his mother wished to speak to him.

‘Tell her I'm not here.'

He went back to the question. Did he want Ruby and Benny in jail?

The following day, Shelly Greene said to him, ‘You can't keep avoiding her forever, Mr Britsky. It's only noon now, and she's called five times.'

‘You'll live through that, Shelly.'

‘I don't know what to tell her anymore, Mr Britsky.'

‘Tell her I'm dead.'

‘I can't do that. You know I can't do that.'

‘All right. Tell her I'll be over this afternoon, about four.'

She saw the look on his face, and she said as gently as she could, ‘Well, it's not a funeral, Mr Britsky. It's your mother.'

‘No, sweetheart,' he said. ‘It's a funeral.'

His sister Freida greeted him at the house in Beverly Hills, as if it actually were a funeral. Her face was swollen, her eyes red, and with a salty handkerchief she was wiping away additional tears. Max had always had a special feeling about Freida. Life had not been good to her. The two other Britsky girls, Sheila and Esther, were married with children of their own. It did not matter to Freida that the men Sheila and Esther had married were, in Max's eyes, deadbeats and bums who could not have earned carfare without his help, without him to make them theatre managers. None of that meant anything to Freida. Her womb was barren and her heart was barren; and she could never shake off the belief that God was punishing her for her abortion in spite of Max's insistence that God had better things to do with His time than worry about Freida Britsky's abortion. Max showered her with gifts, with money. He found jobs for her on the lot, even though she was not very good at anything, and he even found men to introduce her to. But her plump, juicy, youthful attractiveness had turned into fat, and every match Max found for her went sour.

Now, when he asked her where Mama was, she weepingly replied, ‘In bed. What then? You want her to be dancing with joy? Only her two sons are going to prison like common thieves, but you want her to be dancing for joy.'

‘Will you cut that crap out, Freida,' Max said with annoyance.

‘Sure, sure. What's it to you, my beautiful brother Benny goes to jail like a common criminal?'

‘Your beautiful brother Benny and your beautiful brother Ruby are both miserable, conniving shitpots. Jail is too good for them.'

She burst into tears again, and Max put his arms around her and told her, ‘It's all right, baby. Don't you worry about it.'

‘Go talk to Mama. She's waiting for you.'

Sarah Britsky was seventy-one years old, but as the poet remarked, time had not withered her charms. After some initial protest and sulking, Sarah Britsky had taken to Beverly Hills like a fish to water. If Max had been a philosopher, he might have speculated upon the fact that his mother possessed the essential nature and qualities of those women who live in palaces; but since he had other things on his mind, he was simply content that she was content in the huge nine-bedroom neo-Louisana plantation house. Facing the competition of other elderly worthies on the newly created Beverly Hills scene, she took eager advantage of all the good things that flowed there from every corner of the nation – the expensive hairdressers, the couturières, the masseuses, the makeup experts, the furriers – all the little bits of sparkling water thrown off by that fountain of youth called money. She took for her own bedroom the largest bedroom in the house, fourteen by twenty-two feet, with two huge walk-in closets that offered at least two or three years of shopping, and it was in this room, in her bed, wearing a pink and blue silk and satin and lace bedjacket that had cost almost two hundred dollars, that Sarah received her son. Her hair, dyed light auburn, was marcelled tightly; her cheeks were touched up with rouge and her lips painted with lipstick. The silk and lace bedspread was folded back, and Sarah was propped on three pillows. The room had thick white carpeting, blue silk for wallpaper, a chaise, and two bedroom armchairs.

Seeing his mother this way made Max somewhat sick to his stomach, but what to do? You don't tell your mother she looks like a hideous old crow, and do what he might, he could never overcome a very deep-seated fear of Sarah.

‘Come over and give your mother a kiss, Maxie darling,' she said, dabbing at her eyes, not wiping, which would ruin her eye makeup.

Max kissed her, feeling that he was plunging into a choking miasma of strong perfume.

‘Sit down, Max.'

He sat down in one of the small white wicker armchairs.

‘I should be dying here, right here on my bed, you'd lift a finger to help me?'

‘What?'

‘Who hears a mother's cry? The world goes on. Who hears? Who cares?'

‘Mama, what on God's earth are you talking about?'

‘See? I talk, but you don't hear me.'

‘Mama, I hear you. Of course I hear you. I didn't know you were sick. You only had to say a word to my secretary about being sick and I'd be right over here.'

‘You know what kind of sickness I got? My heart is broken.'

There was a long silence after that, and finally Max said, ‘Well, nobody dies from a broken heart.'

‘Ha! That's something to say to your mother.'

‘Mama, what do you want?'

‘I want your brothers, my two beautiful sons, they should not go to prison. That's what I want.'

‘Mama –' Max stopped. She was staring at him with that same grim look of power she had exercised when he was a little boy. He dropped his gaze and said, ‘Mama, your two beautiful sons are crooks, thieves. When crooks are caught stealing, they go to prison. This is not something that I do or anyone else does. It's the law of the land.'

‘What is stealing? So they took a few dollars. It's family. Family. From strangers they weren't taking.'

‘Not a few dollars, Mama,' Max said slowly. ‘A few million dollars.'

‘So? So? Are you starving? Is your company going into bankruptcy because of this? I look out the window, I see you drive up in a Cadillac limousine with a chauffeur yet. For you the whole world – you sit like a king out there in the valley – but for your brothers nothing. Don't think I don't know. Don't think Sarah Britsky is such a fool. Sam Snyder you make into a millionaire and put on the board of directors, and he's not even Jewish – a
goy
, like Bellamy, who was nothing but a cheap entertainer in a music hall. And Feldman, whose father owned a candy store on Division Street, and you make them into millionaires and they sit on the board of directors. Oh, don't think I don't understand, because Ruby and Benny tell me everything, but for your brothers, for your own flesh and blood, nothing, not one share of stock –'

He interrupted her. ‘That's not true. You have stock in the company. Freida has stock in the company.'

‘So I'm a liar?'

‘Mama. I didn't call you a liar.'

‘And you gave stock to Ruby and Benny, so I'm a liar.'

‘Mama, Mama – why do you have to twist my words? I didn't give no stock to Ruby or Benny. I gave them good jobs in the company.'

‘And now, because they had to take a few dollars from you, you must kill them. You must send them to prison and kill them. Kill me, instead, because the day my children go to prison, I die. I die. That's all.'

‘Mama, I can't help them. They did it and they got to pay for it.'

‘Ruby says it's up to you.'

‘It's not up to me.'

‘Ruby says it is. He says you got chips to trade. I believe him. If you do this to my children, Max, I take sleeping pills, so you can live with that. You kill your brothers, you kill your mother too. I won't live to see my boys go to prison.' She began to sob, and through her tears she whimpered, ‘That I should have to endure this. After all my suffering, that I should have to go through this.'

That evening, Max had dinner at Sam Snyder's house. Alice cooked weisswurst with lentils and sauerkraut and fried apples. Snyder had found a place in San Francisco where they made good fresh German sausage, and he had a shipment sent to him each week. Both men stuffed themselves with the food, washing it down with the dark, sweet German beer Max loved so much. For the hundredth time, Alice wondered why, when they both ate the same amount of food, Max remained as skinny as a rail while Snyder's stomach grew larger and larger. Alice had finally put her foot down on the matter of smoking in the house, so after dinner, the two men took their cigars out onto the terrace. It was one of those occasional Santa Ana nights, when the desert wind turns the otherwise chilly Los Angeles evening warm and balmy, and the two men stretched out comfortably on lounge chairs. The scent of night-blooming jasmine mingled with the sweet smell of good cigars, and faintly, from a house nearby, there came the sound of a Victrola playing ‘Barney Google.'

‘You know,' Max said to Snyder, ‘this is as good as I ever felt, except maybe when Della was alive, but I've given up dreaming that I'll find somebody else just like Della, and right now I'm pretty happy, and all it takes to buy a fine Cuban cigar is fifty cents.'

‘Alice's cooking helps.'

‘You can say that again.'

‘Yeah, but I got to sound a sour note. Sally is coming to the board meeting.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘Freddy told me. He was trying to locate you this afternoon, and when he finally tracked you down to your mother's house, you had left.' Snyder was watching Max thoughtfully. ‘I just don't understand it, Max. The woman was in love with you.'

‘Who?'

‘Sally. Who else?'

‘What makes you think so?' Max demanded almost angrily.

‘All right, all right. Don't bite my head off.'

‘Come on, Sam, forget it. The day I start hitting on you, it's time to leave the human race. Sure, everyone thinks Sally was in love with me and we had some beautiful thing going until I screwed it up by leaving her for Della – that is, everyone believes it except Sally and me. No, Sally never loved me, and I don't think I ever loved her very much. When I was a kid, she was everything I wasn't. To me, she had class and brains. Hell, she was a schoolteacher. I never saw a Jewish schoolteacher before I met Sally. Do you know how many Jewish schoolteachers there were in the nineties? Zilch. And I was a crazy kid who had to get what he wanted, especially when she didn't want me. She thinks she married me because her mother and father pushed her into it once they realised that I was on my way to make a few bucks and that their daughter might turn out to be an old maid. No, sir. She married me because I made the other boys she went out with look like shitheads, and that's what she never forgave me for. I spent a lifetime trying to figure it out. She'd do something like putting together that first big picture of ours, and then she'd turn on me like a wildcat. You want to know why she hates me? She hates me because she married me, because she did something she can never forgive herself for.'

Max lit his cigar, which had gone cold. Snyder shook his head.

‘Doesn't make much sense to you, does it?' Max asked.

‘Not much, no. I seen too many ladies go crazy about you.'

‘It didn't make much sense to me at first, but I been living with it a long time. Maybe I figured it right, maybe not. I tell myself I was good to her, but Sally thinks I was a son of a bitch. Who knows? Maybe she's right. I tried to be good to my mother, but that doesn't cut much ice either.'