Max (9 page)

His face still bore traces of home when Sally Levine opened the door of her furnished room for him, and she asked him what had happened.

‘Nothing happened.'

‘Oh? You just decided to be miserable tonight?'

‘O.K. So that's what I decided.'

She bent over the chair he had dropped into and kissed him on his forehead. ‘All right, Maxie,' she said. ‘If we go on this way, we'll have a fight, which we don't want, do we? So we'll just start all over from the beginning and forget that I ever asked you what was wrong.'

He couldn't stay angry when she was around, and he grinned and asked her whether he should get up and come into the room again.

‘If you wish.'

‘Jesus,' he sighed, ‘I'm not twenty years old and I got five kids and a mother who never gets off my back, and sometimes I get to feeling that I'm ready for the nuthouse.'

‘Why don't you think about what a good, noble thing you're doing?'

‘Noble?'

‘I think so. No, I don't want to go on talking about that. I made some lamb stew, to show you that I really can cook, and you don't have to buy me dinner every time we spend an evening together, and it's not very fancy. All I have is this one little burner. But I do think it's good, and then we don't have to rush. The Chautauqua is at Cooper Union, just a few blocks away.'

‘The what?'

‘The Chautauqua? Well, it's just a fancy name for an assembly or a lecture, and you remember that I told you about it. All the teachers from our school will be there –'

‘Oh, no! No, sir. You want me to meet all your fancy, educated friends and make a horse's ass out of myself –'

‘Oh, Max, come on. I told you about this long ago, and you were really interested. And you don't have to meet anyone if you don't want to, and it's not just a lecture, it's a demonstration.'

‘Of what?'

‘Do you remember, you once told me how excited you got when you were a kid and you looked into a kinetoscope?'

‘Yes, at Rowdy Smith's place. I wonder if the old guy's alive or dead.'

‘Well, tonight at Cooper Union, the New York Educational Alliance is showing something very new and exciting. It's like a kinetoscope, but it's an improvement on it, and people are talking about it. It's called a moving picture.'

‘A what?'

‘A moving picture, just as I said.' While she spoke, Sally placed two small tables in front of chairs. A straw mat on each, a bowl of lamb stew and a glass of wine. ‘It's a very simple meal, but in one room – Do you like soft rolls?'

Max had long ago decided that whatever Sally did was right. The one room she lived in was his other world. If he had the expression, he would have said that she had taste; his own world was tasteless. He didn't think about it in precisely those terms, yet that was his view of her.

‘This is good,' Max said, tasting. ‘What about this moving picture?'

‘It's something that was invented by a man named Thomas Alva Edison, the same man who invented the electric light bulb.'

‘Come on, you got to think I'm an idiot. I know who Edison is.'

‘Well, I don't think you're an idiot. I think you're so bright it frightens me sometimes, and you know that. But I'm a teacher, and I can't shake the habit of explaining everything.'

‘What's a moving picture?'

‘The pictures in the kinetoscope moved, didn't they?'

‘So that's it. I seen it. Big deal.'

‘Will you stop being the tough, know-it-all street kid for a moment and let me explain.'

‘Yeah, explain,' he allowed, waving an arm.

‘All right. I'll try not to be didactic if you'll stop being a smart East Side Jew.'

He didn't know what didactic meant, and he put her down with the observation that an East Side Jew kid was just what he was, take it or leave it.

‘Oh, Max,' she said, ‘why does this happen? You're so sensitive, and you always think people are being superior. Well, I don't feel superior, not a bit, and all I wanted was for you to enjoy tonight because it's just the kind of thing that interests you. It's new. You've seen the magic lanterns we use in school. Well, this is something like a magic lantern, as it was told to me, except that the picture moves. It really moves, and not in a kinetoscope but on an enormous screen.'

‘I'll believe that when I see it,' Max said.

He sulked on his way to Cooper Union, and he muttered about her friends and a word like ‘didactic,' and how did she think he felt when she spoke to him and used words no one ever heard of before?

‘Didactic, Max.'

‘Didactic'

‘All it means is to teach. People who can't stop teaching attitudes, even in ordinary conversation, are said to be didactic'

‘Then why didn't you say “teaching”?'

‘Because it's not exactly the same thing. That's the beauty of words, the delicate shades of meaning. Don't be impatient, Max. You pick up everything so quickly, like a chameleon –'

‘There you go again.'

They were at Cooper Union now, fortunately for Sally, who was regretting her comparison of Max to a lizard that changed color at the drop of a hat, and she busied herself with introductions. Max smiled and nodded and said little; and as he met the teachers who were Sally's colleagues, his respect for her grew. He couldn't place any other among them as being Jewish; they were for the most part the ladies he remembered from his own schooldays, tight-lipped, tightly corseted white Protestant ladies, many of them spinsters. He felt that the ease with which Sally greeted them and moved among them was absolutely wonderful. It was a strange, different world he was entering here, and he noted every aspect of it with care and curiosity.

He followed Sally and her colleagues into a large room on the main floor. Evidently, its normal use was as an artist's studio, for there were easels against one wall and racks packed with canvases. For tonight, six rows of folding chairs had been set up, a dozen chairs in each row. A large sheet of white cloth, about eight by eight, had been nailed to one wall of the room, facing the chairs, and at the back of the room, two men were working on a curious machine, which reminded Max of an oversized camera with three large wheels and a crank. A tangle of wires led to a converter and from the converter to an electric light socket.

Max, fascinated, paused to stare at the projector until Sally whispered that soon there'd be no seats left, and pulled him away to a seat in the very last row.

‘You can examine it later,' she told him. ‘That's Mr Benton,' nodding at a stout, baldish man who had taken his place at the front of the room and who stood there now, polishing his pince-nez and waiting for the murmur of voices to cease. ‘He's our science teacher for the eighth grade. Most science teachers are men. I suppose they feel that a woman couldn't possibly master any science.'

As if he had heard Sally's words, Mr Benton nodded, smiled slightly and finished polishing his pince-nez, placing them not on his nose but in a small case he took out of a breast pocket. Then he rubbed both his hands together, gazing upon the audience with beneficence, pleased that he had prior knowledge of the world they were about to enter. ‘Good evening and welcome,' he said.

There was a slight ripple of polite applause, and Mr Benton went on. ‘I'm Mr Benton, and I teach science at Public School Nine. Those of you from our school know me and my sometimes unorthodox methods. To those of you who do not know me, I must say that I try to incorporate the latest developments in the field of science into my teaching. However, I am not sure that my regular students are ready for this development, unless of course it can be directed toward the goal of a new area in education. This is indeed the thought of Mr Enoch Rector, who was kind enough to arrange this evening for us and who will welcome your response and suggestions –'

‘How long is he going on?' Max asked impatiently. Faces turned toward him disapprovingly. Sally squeezed his arm, whispering, ‘Just be patient.'

Mr Benton was asking his audience to be broad-minded, to see the implications of the method beyond the content. ‘We could wish for other content,' he said, ‘but alas, this is the only motion picture – well, perhaps not the only one, but one of two or three in the country. “Motion picture” is possibly a term you have never heard before. It is a new term, or, I should say, one of two new terms, “moving picture” and “motion picture,” of which I prefer the latter, and it is used to define the difference between what we shall see tonight and what you may have seen in the kinetoscopes of the penny arcades – if indeed you frequent such places. Ah, the difference! Tonight, you will see a magic lantern that moves. And I will not try to explain or dilute the magic in any way. Let the magic take over of its own accord.' He paused to allow his words to quiver under their own weight.

‘He's a real big talker,' Max whispered. ‘He's going to talk the whole evening away.'

Benton spread his arms, and Max twisted around to see the men at the projector in the back of the room. They stood there, shaking their heads and looking bored.

‘However,' Benton said, ‘I cannot apologise sufficiently to the ladies present for the subject of tonight's exhibition. The moving pictures you are about to see were taken at the prizefight between James Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons in Carson City in Nevada –'

He paused for the ripple of excitement, shock, and expectant disapproval to work its way through the audience. There were whispers everywhere now, among them Sally whispering to Max, ‘I just can't believe it – a prizefight! I don't think I would have come if I had known.'

Max sat back, relaxed, an evil grin spreading over his face as here and there in the audience ladies stood up to leave. Mostly, they were elderly and exceedingly prim, and perhaps a dozen of them pushed past those who remained seated, their mouths set in tight-lipped disgust, their faces conveying their opinion of those who remained.

Benton pleaded in vain. ‘Ladies, ladies,' he begged them, ‘you are not at a prizefight, which I regard as un-Christian and degrading. You are at Cooper Union, one of the great educational institutions of this city, and privileged – privileged – to witness this scientific discovery, this incredible invention, of Mr Thomas Alva Edison, as firm a Christian as any of you.'

It was no use. Benton gave up and allowed the indignant ladies to leave without further pleading. Most of his audience remained, and, rather deflated, he explained that altogether, eleven thousand feet of film had been taken. ‘But to see it all would keep us here for hours, and I doubt that even you whose devotion to science keeps you here would want to witness the whole of anything as bloody and brutal as this prizefight. We will show two reels, sixteen hundred feet of film, and that will take about twenty minutes, after which I propose to lead a discussion. Now I am going to turn off the lights, since we must have darkness for the projector to work properly.'

Benton then switched off the lights, after which there were a few moments of darkness and a good deal of nervous tittering and whispering – all of which turned into astonished silence as the screen lit up with the figures of two men in a prize ring, two men bruised and bloodstained and battering away at each other with sullen, tired ferocity. What amazed Max was the absolute validity of it. Nothing was faked here, nothing was contrived. He was literally watching the famous Fitzsimmons-Corbett fight where Bob Fitzsimmons, the New Zealand blacksmith, the lumbering ‘Limey Bull,' as they called him, knocked out America's lithe and lovely ‘Gentleman Jim,' who was all things most unlikely in a prizefighter. He knocked him out not with a clean, upright American blow to the jaw but with a typical British sneak blow to the solar plexus, which left poor handsome, decent Gentleman Jim paralysed and unable to lift a hand in his defense. Max had bet money on the fight, lost money, argued the fight a hundred times, with never more than the vaguest notion of where Carson City, Nevada, was located, and now here, miracle of miracles, were the two heavyweights, battering each other right before his eyes. The marvelous, incredible, and unbelievable impossibility of it took hold of Max as nothing else ever had, and he sat staring at the screen in a kind of trancelike intensity.

He was impervious to the cries of protest that began to be heard from the assembled teachers. Afterward he would say to Sally, ‘Those dumb bitches! They watch a miracle and they want it to stop.'

In all truth, they did want it to stop. It mattered not one whit to them that they were watching a process that few human beings had ever witnessed before and even less that they were granted the opportunity of watching perhaps the most skillful boxer that had ever set foot in a prize ring. None of that weighed against their horror of this cruel sport of prizefighting, brought over from England and still illegal in most places in the United States. ‘Oh, enough! Enough!' began to be heard, and other voices saying, ‘It's too horrible' and ‘How can they? How can they?'

Benton should have known. Even in those places like Hoboken and West New York, where illegal prizefights could be staged, no one had ever dreamed of inviting a woman to view one. A tall, lean lady with a commanding voice reminded Benton of that, rising and telling him in no uncertain terms: ‘This has gone far enough, Mr Benton.'

‘But, madam,' Benton argued, ‘we are watching a process, not a prizefight.'

‘We are watching a prizefight, Mr Benton, and if this is what your great scientific advance is to be used for, I for one deplore it!'

They were pushing through the aisles to leave, and Benton, bowing to pressure, flicked on the lights. The men at the projector halted its operation, and the teachers began to leave. They had to push past Max, who sat rigid and unmoving, oblivious to Sally's whispered suggestion that he rise and let others past.