Max (7 page)

‘Which house?'

‘That one will do,' she said lightly, pointing to a lovely red brick mansion.

‘I'll remember that.'

Frustrated, fuming in the tiny bedroom that he shared with Ruby, both of them sleeping together in an ancient three-quarter bed, his two suits hanging from a hook on the wall, his linen stuffed into the drawers of a battered chest, Max tried to construct a bow-tie knot and failed. He rooted in the drawer and came up with a wrinkled four-in-hand. It needed ironing, but Sarah was otherwise engaged. Max listened to his mother scream at his sister Freida. Cramped and crowded into the little cold-water flat, cheek by jowl with an endless and undefeatable army of roaches and bedbugs as well as each other, they lived with tension. They screamed and raged at each other, and now, hearing his mother, Max contemplated bringing Miss Sally Levine into this madhouse. ‘Come right in, Miss Levine, this is my mother and my sisters and my brothers.' Sarah had just finished denouncing her daughter Freida, fifteen and a half years old, as a tramp and a bum.

Freida defended herself in the only way she knew, by attempting to outscream her mother. ‘What am I?' she demanded. ‘Am I some kind of freak? We're not in Europe! I'm not a prisoner of yours, you should decide who I see and who I marry!'

‘God forbid!' Sarah interjected.

‘A boy looks at me, right away I'm a tramp. That's all you ever got to say to me, I'm a tramp. Beautiful words!'

‘You act like a tramp, you dress like a tramp, you're a tramp!' Sarah stated. ‘You hang out with bums at a candy store! Who else does it but a tramp? Tell me. Just tell me.'

‘All right! From now on I go to cotillions. At the Waldorf, naturally. You will please arrange my debut! Or should I sit here with you every night and bite my nails?'

Unable to endure it any longer, Max stamped into the kitchen and shouted, ‘Will you two stop that! Every time I come in here, you're screaming at each other.'

‘You two! You two!' Sarah exploded. ‘Suddenly, I'm not your mother! I'm something called you two! I'm nothing! I'm dirt!' She grabbed a dishtowel and tried to wipe off the bit of rouge that Freida had applied. Freida fought back. Max pulled the two of them apart.

‘You're demented, both of you. Crazy.'

Sarah began to weep. ‘I'm crazy,' she sobbed. ‘I got a son, he's a bum who runs around with whores and actors, and I got a daughter, she's a tramp, but I should be happy. So I'm not happy, I'm crazy.'

Max put his arms around her. ‘Mama, I don't mean you're crazy. It's just you're making me crazy.' He waved Freida away, and she slipped out. ‘No, I don't mean that, only you shouldn't upset yourself over nothing.'

‘Nothing, what's nothing? What's the clean shirt for?' she demanded.

‘I'm going out.'

‘Every night you go out –'

‘Mama, I work at the music halt. You know that.'

‘Five o'clock? And you need a clean shirt to work at the music hall? My food ain't good enough? You got to eat the poison from the Chinks and the Italians?'

‘It's not poison, Mama.'

Suddenly Sarah discovered that Freida was gone. ‘Where is she?'

‘So she went out, Mama. She'll be back in an hour,' thinking to himself, Poor kid. It's a lunatic asylum.

Freida, on the other hand, renewed herself each time she escaped from the flat on Henry Street. Whatever romantic fantasies she cherished, the only reality she knew was the street outside and its population. The candy store was on the corner of Pike Street, and it was run by Mr Rabinowitz. The times were innocent of dope, and if one wanted to ease out of the torments of the world, one could buy Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound quite legally, laced though it was with opium, not to mention a dozen other products dispensed from drugstore shelves and equally modified with opium. But the kids, born of the new immigrants who had pushed across the Atlantic to populate New York City's East Side, were not given to dope or whiskey. In their eager adolescence, they stepped into the twentieth century with nothing more deadly than sweets, leaving aside their gang wars and petty thievery. Mr Rabinowitz had a counter stocked with over one hundred varieties of penny candy, nothing more than a penny, and for a nickel you could eat yourself sick with licorice, candy sticks, mints, creams, buttons, gumdrops, hard candy, soft candy, twists, streamers, jawbreakers, gunshots, sponges, hard toffee, soft toffee, and dozens of other varieties whose names are lost in the mists of time. In the warm months of summer, Mr Rabinowitz would always have an enormous cake of ice in his store, and for two cents, he would scrape a large lump of crushed ice onto a paper plate and then flavor it with one or two of a shelf of colorful flavors, shaking the flavoring out of the same type of bottle barbers used to dispense hair tonic. The rest of Mr Rabinowitz's shop was taken up with newspapers, magazines, cigars, and the pads, pencils, and crayons school kids required. Mr Rabinowitz and his wife, small, gray-haired, gray-faced people, accepted their store's role as a hangout for the kids. There was no other. It was the norm. If the store became too crowded with kids horsing around, pushing, shouting, stealing, Mrs Rabinowitz would take a broom to them and chase them out onto the sidewalk.

But it was mere formality. They were on the sidewalk now when Freida joined them, Rocky, Joe, Shutzie, Stumphead, Izzy. Lizzie was there. She was always there and appeared to have no other home. She was called Lizzie-snatch, and she was easy, even to the point of inviting gangshags, which meant having intercourse with all the boys, one after the other. Miriam, like Freida, fought the boys off, or pretended to or attempted to, and there were two or three other girls, Josie and Becky and Clara; but aside from Lizzie, it was mostly necking and horsing around, and when they got bored horsing around in and out of the candy store, they drifted over to South Street and the river and the docks and the fishing boats, but always in a group. They were Jewish kids, and when they moved they had to be wary of Irish territory and Italian territory and in particular of the cops, who would beat up on them just for the sake of beating up on them.

This was Freida's escape, her land of romance, her relief from the closeness and stink of the flat on Henry Street, her reward, as she felt it, for enduring life. By her lights, there was no other escape. Yet there were moments, when they all went over to the East River and sneaked out to the end of a wharf and sat there and saw the stars in the sky and the shimmering reflected city lights on the water and the river-boats passing by, when Freida tasted a moment of another reality. But it never lasted.

Long after this, recalling her first date with Max Britsky, Sally told an interviewer, ‘It was the manner of the man. He had a grand manner, if you can think of an eighteen-year-old kid whose world was confined to the ghetto of the Lower East Side as having a grand manner. Not manners. I don't mean manners –] he had no manners; he was crude – I mean the manner, the bearing. Max never felt inferior. Perhaps that was his secret. Where did we go? Who can remember! I think it was an Italian restaurant …'

It was Mama Maria's restaurant, over on Elizabeth Street, which was on the edge of the newly burgeoning Italian ghetto. Dinner was thirty cents, table d'hôte, and included antipasto, pasta, a main dish of veal or chicken, dessert, and coffee. The bottle of red wine which Max grandly ordered was twenty-five cents.

The price was of no consequence; it was the gesture and manner that counted. This was a new and different and intriguing Max Britsky, and in the light of the candle that stood in the center of the checked red and white tablecloth, he was quite handsome, his lean face with its pointed chin and hawklike nose and bright blue eyes reminding Sally of illustrations she had seen of buccaneers and Spanish conquistadors. That image combined with his intensity and confidence gave her a feeling of excitement she had never experienced with any other man. It was exciting and frightening all at once. The small, skinny, and very young man had turned into a person of power and persuasion, and she, on the other hand, responded to this as a very different Miss Levine.

She had abandoned the white blouse and the drab skirt of the schoolteacher and now she wore a pretty blue dress of crêpe de Chine, and while no makeup was noticeable on her face, Max suspected that there was a flush of rouge across her cheeks. She thought the little Italian restaurant was ‘delightful' and the food ‘quite delicious.' ‘But I don't have so many dates with young men, Mr Britsky,' she added, her open honesty very charming, ‘that I would dare pose as a connoisseur. Perhaps someday, when you have achieved your Mount Olympus, you'll let me see some of those places like Delmonico's and the Albemarle and the Brunswick.'

Max was sensitive enough to realise that she was doing her best to impress him. Though he was uncertain of the precise meaning of connoisseur and totally blank concerning her reference to Mount Olympus, he nevertheless felt that he was sitting opposite a very innocent and unsophisticated young woman. It gave him the courage to insist that she call him Max.

‘No more of this Mr Britsky,' he reminded her. ‘You're Sally and I'm Max. And don't think this is a line I pull with every girl, because the truth is you're the first girl I ever had this kind of a date with.'

She stared at her plate for a long moment, and then asked him what he meant by this kind of a date.

‘Well …' His voice trailed off. He decided that you didn't tell Sally Levine what you meant by this kind of a date. He switched the conversation to the subject of his job, and he discovered that Sally had never been to a music hall.

‘Why?'

‘You know why,' she said. ‘Of course you do. Young ladies don't go to such places.'

Max didn't contest this statement by mentioning the number of girls he saw in the theatre each night. Much of his interest in Sally Levine derived from his concept of her as a person from another world, and if in her world young women did not go to music halls, Max was delighted to accept that. Still and all, he worked in a music hall.

‘Just once,' he said. ‘I mean, you might just want to come out of curiosity. I don't think there's anything there that would offend you.'

‘Perhaps some other time.'

‘But I got you a ticket for tonight. It's the best seat in the house.'

‘Oh, no. I couldn't.'

‘Why not?'

‘Alone? Max, how could I go in there alone?'

‘You won't be alone. I mean, I'm not sitting next to you, I'm up on the stage, but nobody's going to bother you. Maybe you think a music hall is some kind of a sinful, terrible place. It ain't. Families go there.'

She shook her head.

‘Please. Look, we go on, me and Bert, fifteen or twenty minutes after the show starts. There's just a long dog act and then we're on. So all you'd have to spend there is maybe forty-five minutes, and then I change and pick you up, and you said yourself how did I learn to do what I do, when I had no experience or training.'

‘Well …' She was wavering. ‘You would take me in? I wouldn't have to go in alone?'

‘Absolutely. And then I come around and you leave with me. I got you an aisle seat in the fourth row, so there's no problem. And then I got two and a half hours before the next show, so we can have a cup of coffee, and if you want to I'll bring my partner, Bert, along, and then I take you home.'

She was torn between curiosity and the conventions. Ever since she had left her secure, peaceful home, the little frame house in Flatbush where she had been born and had grown to maturity, convention had been her shield and protector. Her father and mother had come to America from Vienna a few years after the Civil War. They were Jewish, but, as they saw themselves, a very different breed from these Eastern European Jews who were pouring into America by the thousands and had become a seething mass of slum-ghetto humanity in New York City's Lower East Side. Sally had gone into this ghetto full of trepidation; this was the jungle, but it was also a wonderland and a place where all things were possible; and while the Lower East Side was only miles from Flatbush geographically, culturally it was a world away. In Brooklyn, there was no Washington Square, no Madison Square, the two incredible and marvelous centers of wealth, culture, and excitement that had turned New York into a rival of London.

Convention-bound and insecure Sally might be, but she was no frightened mouse, and when they arrived at the Bijou Theatre, Sally felt a delicious flutter of excitement. There had been boys who came calling to the house in Flatbush, but they were stodgy, stolid creatures, destined for law or medicine or Wall Street in the best German-Jewish tradition. There had been no one like Max, no one with that air of wildness and daring, and since she had been living and teaching in New York, she had had no dates until Max appeared. Though New York City teemed with men, Sally had no idea how to meet them, and most of the other teachers at the school were women. Thus it was very exciting to be here at night, in all the lights and bustle of West Broadway, with painted women – whom she labeled as streetwalkers – and flashily dressed men all about her, and the pushcarts and the hawkers and the three-card-monte operators and the peanut vendors. It was all wonderful and exciting and alive, and to Sally, who had been reading Émile Zola, it appeared to be very much the streets of Paris tansplanted to the New World. And there she was, walking into a music hall with one of the performers, with Max's strong hand around her arm.

Bert was already in his cop costume and making up his face when Max entered the dressing room and said to him. ‘What the fuck are you up to?'

‘I think I'm coloring my puss. What do you think?'

‘The cop suit.'

‘We're doing the tramp and cop. There's a character outside from the Alderman Circuit. If he likes our act, he can give us twelve weeks outside this shithole, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago – Kansas City. You know what we get for three nights in Kansas City? Three hundred dollars for the act. Guttman says fine, we can take the twelve weeks if this guy from Alderman likes us and come back here to work when it's over. Maybe we don't come back here. Guttman figures it gives the Bijou class to have an act in Chicago or somewhere, but who knows? Maybe we move up to Madison Square.'