The Last Princess (58 page)

Startled to see Solly but quickly composing herself and narrowing her eyes on him, she demanded, “Yea, what do you want?”

“Come out into the hall.”

She hesitated for a moment, then shut the door behind her.

He took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know how but I’m going to do it for you.”

She put her arms around Solly’s neck and kissed him hard. Maybe, he thought, this would have been an opportunity to make a deal with her in exchange for what he was going to do for her. But just as quickly he realized that Birdie would not be tricked into any barter. “Come on,” he said, resigned, “let’s go and get a knishe and cream soda at Erna Schimmel’s.”

Solly hung around the tenements, scarcely going anywhere for two nights trying to meet David coming or going. Finally, as Solly stood leaning against David’s crumbling banister, David came bouncing down the stairs two at a time. Before Solly could say a word he was away and down the street, with Solly running behind him up one street and down another until David reached the Christie Street gym, where he sat waiting his turn and watching intently the four other players as they ran and swatted the ball back and forth.

Solly quietly edged onto the seat next to David, being careful not to disturb him. Finally he spoke up, “Hi, Dave. They’re pretty good, huh?”

David looked quickly at Solly, thought momentarily what the hell was he doing here, then mentally shrugged, what did he care? and nodded.

Solly said, “You play a lot?”

David didn’t answer, he simply pretended not to hear. Solly tried again to engage him in conversation, and David again paid no attention.

The first four players left; it was David’s turn now. Taking the handball out of his pocket, he hit it hard against the wall and began the rally. Solly waited through forty-five minutes of torture, and boredom, for David to finish. He hated sports of any kind. There were really only two things he loved or even liked in this whole universe—Birdie Greenberg and the movies. The movies he loved, he ate, he slept. He would rather have worked as a part-time usher for no money, if necessary even getting up each morning at four to work at Lipkin’s Bakery so his evenings would be free to usher at the Bijou … he would rather do that than be, well, than be the mayor of New York.

Thank God, Solly thought, the game was over. He resented this arrogant creep. It was all too obvious David wanted nothing to do with him, but damn it he couldn’t turn back now; he wasn’t about to go back to Birdie and say he’d failed without even trying. He moved closer to David.

“You play great handball, Dave.”

David answered without looking at him, “Thanks.”

“You play often?”

Now David looked at him. This guy wants something. Maybe to make a touch, maybe he’s selling something. “O.K., Solly, what’s on your mind?”

Solly worried David could read his thoughts. “Nothing, I just happened by and saw you. Nothing wrong with being a little friendly, is there?”

David knew he didn’t just happen by. Gyms were not exactly Solly’s natural habitat. But David decided not to pursue it and got up and started to walk away, saying, “O.K., Solly, see you around.”

Solly jumped up and called out, “Hey wait a minute, Dave, I want to talk to you.”

Here it comes, David thought. He turned abruptly around, “What about?”

No use prolonging it. “Dave, I know we’ve never been friends, I mean real friends, but I’m going to ask you to do me a very, very big favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

It didn’t make it any easier for Solly that David impatiently volleyed the small ball between his hands as he stood there. Solly cleared his throat. He just couldn’t find the right words. It wasn’t easy standing in front of a guy you knew felt so damn superior to you—not at all the same as rehearsing the dialogue, taking both parts at three o’clock in the morning. The things he did for Birdie … so who asked him to be so crazy for her? Who forced him? “I’d like to ask you to double date with me and Birdie Greenberg and her best girl friend,” he finally blurted out.

David looked at him in amazement. “Solly, what do you want, what are you really after?”

“Nothing, Dave, honest, that’s it.”

“Oh, come on, Solly.”

“I know it sounds crazy. We were never out together before, and for me suddenly to ask you to blind date a girl sounds nuts, but please, Dave, would you do this for me? It means a lot, honest.”

“You’re right, it does sound crazy. But why me?”

“Well it’s kind of a mixed-up thing. Birdie gets an idea, nobody can talk her out of it.”

“What’s this got to do with me?”

“Nothing, really. Birdie thinks you’ve got class, she thinks you’re a regular Buddy Rogers, and she wants you to meet a girl friend she thinks you’d like.”

“And I suppose she looks Just like Jean Harlow.” He turned and began to walk out of the building. Solly hurried after him and stood in the doorway, but David pushed by him. He hated anyone who begged. Solly’s anger came out, his face grew red.

“David, can’t you even listen? I just asked you to do me a favor, that’s all. But no, your nose might fall off. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? You always thought you were too good for me, for anyone around here. You were born in the same place as me. We went to school together. We’re cut from the same cloth. So what makes you think you’re so damn great?” Even though the anger had subsided, leaving him drained, Solly rambled on. “I’m in love with a meshuggena … she’s crazy but I’d go to hell for her if she wanted me to … I didn’t want to do this, I knew what you’d say …”

The consequences of failure came rushing at him as he thought of Birdie. Now more quietly he said, “I know she’ll hate me and think I’m stupid because I couldn’t get you to go. Knowing her she’ll never talk to me again and if that happens I’ll go kill myself somewhere. She doesn’t know you the way I do.” Then quietly he said, “All it would have meant to you was one lousy night. So she was pretty, or she wasn’t pretty, or you liked her or you didn’t like her, what the hell difference would it have made? Big deal. Only one night, Dave, that’s all for you, but for me it could mean the rest of my whole life.” Shoulders hunched, Solly looked very alone as he walked out to get lost in the crowd.

David watched Solly walking away, his teeth clenched, the muscles in his jaw taut. His first reaction when Solly had begun his attack on him was a desire to smash him one. That’s what he had wanted to do … but he didn’t, which was not a role that became David, He’d never taken any grief from anybody. When it came to defending himself, he was afraid of no one. He could never remember a time when he had deliberately started a fight, but if someone wanted to take him on that was O.K. with him. He was angry with himself because he let Solly get away with this, but even more angry because he didn’t know why, and that was what bothered him. He didn’t owe Solly anything. Besides, who had ever done anything for him, why should he do anything for Solly? Or for that matter for anybody, except his best and only friend, Abe Garfinckel, who had proved over and over again that he was a friend. Why should he? He asked for nothing from anybody, gave nothing in return. That was the way he wanted it, no obligations.

By his own design, David had been considered somewhat eccentric all his life by everyone in the community. A loner was a phenomenon in this closely knit society, and his aloofness was interpreted as conceit. David himself did nothing to dispel this impression and the effect snowballed. But conceit was the result rather than the cause of his isolation, and there were depths of intelligence and sensitivity within David that few would ever know existed.

To outward appearances David had all the physical attributes to attract people to him, but on the other hand he didn’t have the desire to attract the people who surrounded him. He had never been able to accept this network of humanity into which he had been born. They lived always with the fear of tomorrow, always with the threat of hunger, of illness, of old age, of dying. It was true that all of them had fled from the threat, or near threat, of annihilation, and understandably what they found here, if not utopian, was better than what they had before. Here was something they called freedom, but David constantly asked himself how much better was it, this kind of freedom? A ghetto without fences, a Diaspora without dignity?

What plagued David above everything else was the fear of poverty there seemed to be no escape from. He was driven to study in secrecy and to bear his doubts and dreams in loneliness. He would not capitulate to life, this he promised himself. If he had to remake himself he would; he would rise above the complacency of his family and his contemporaries, even if he had to forsake relationships that might have brought some companionship and comfort. To him, though, the risk of being
like
them was greater than the pain of being separate. He could bear that … he would be somebody, if only in his own eyes. It took discipline and loneliness, and David found his own private island, reading everything he could get his hands on, even from time to time going to a concert or a play with Abe. He held to his dream, and these things he did were less important for themselves than as part of his overriding plan of escape.

His aloofness did make him particularly attractive to the opposite sex. The more “hard to get,” the more desirable he became, and the girls pursued him. However, he didn’t avoid them just to play hard to get. They never bettered themselves, they never even tried, which was what he hated most of all.

So David Rezinetsky remained a loner, and let life swarm around him without being touched by it. Poverty and the ghetto bred mutual suffering, but David refused to share in any part of their lives. Still … that night, he had difficulty in getting to sleep. Solly stuck in his craw like a hard morsel he couldn’t spit up. He had to be honest with himself that Solly had touched a sore spot. The armor he had forged over the years had been chipped away just a little bit by some of the things Solly had said.

There was no denying, as Solly had said, that they were cut from the same piece of cloth, never mind how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, the truth was that—no matter how offensive the thought—chances were he would never escape from this sewer any more than Solly would. Face it, for every one who had, there were a hundred who couldn’t. The only lines of escape were either crime or education. The first was out of the question, so was the second. He had no diploma, no profession; he had no family to help him rise out of all this the way Abe’s family had done, and besides, what kind of a world waited outside for David Rezinetsky? He was a Jew living in a time when there were signs of blatant discrimination, signs that even literally read “No Jews Allowed.” At least here in this dismal ghetto, discrimination was one thing they didn’t have to contend with. Token compensation from a world that said “Leave this place and we’ll crush the dignity out of you, we’ll annihilate you.” Quotas at universities so subtle they hit you between the eyes, and you wanted to lash out and smash to pieces the world that didn’t want you. He asked himself where he did belong; and in a moment of honesty he had to say … here. Maybe he and Solly were not so different after all. They were Jews, a fact he could not be reconciled to, a fact that even in acknowledgment did not comfort him.

In his mind’s eye David again saw Solly standing there trying to reach him, his face sweating, his hair in his eyes, his glasses askew—and for some reason that David couldn’t sort out Solly now made him feel pity and admiration. It was as though he were looking at Solly for the first time in his life, Solly standing up to him. That had taken a hell of a lot of courage—David was also a head taller and thirty pounds heavier—fighting for a girl he loved so much he would take the chance of getting beaten up. David wondered what it would feel like to love someone with that much passion, and whether he ever would, or if in fact he were capable.

Anyway, it really wouldn’t hurt him if he did this for Solly … And now suddenly he wondered if Solly might actually have been serious about killing himself. At first he told himself it was a show of dramatics, but Solly was awfully convincing for once … what if Solly really meant to do what he had threatened … then David would be at least partly responsible … he had not even been willing to give Solly a chance, show him the courtesy of listening. Like it or not, he at least owed him that much. Everybody owed somebody something—even David Rezinetsky.

D
AVID DID NOT GO
home to supper the next night. Instead he ate at Plotkin’s delicatessen right next to the Bijou Theater, sitting at a window table and keeping his eyes on the street to catch Solly before he went to work. As Solly crossed the street, David got up quickly, went out, and called to him.

When Solly saw David he became frightened. The other night had been different. He had been geared up by anger that reinforced his boldness. But standing here in front of David, in his usher’s uniform, which was baggy and ill-fitting, its tarnished braid making him look like a reject from Kaiser Wilhelm’s army, he didn’t feel so brave. “O.K., O.K., Dave, don’t hit. I’m sorry about last night. What the hell, you don’t owe me anything.”

That’s all right, Solly, forget it. Did you eat?”

Solly blinked. What was this, David being civil to
him
? Maybe David had a plot to poison him, he was being so nice. Sheepishly, without looking at David, he answered, “Sure, I ate at three when I came home from the bakery. Who doesn’t eat at my mother’s house?”

“Well, come on in anyway and have a cup of coffee before you go to work.”

As he brought Solly his coffee, Mr. Plotkin said in Yiddish, “The big general is here. You want a piece of strudel, General?”

Solly wanted to say, you know where you can put your strudel, Mr. Plotkin, but he thought of his mother and nodded yes.

It was still a little new for David, giving in to Solly, so for just a moment more he diverted the conversation by asking Solly—and not much caring—“How do you like your job?”

“Don’t ask, Dave. Outside of Birdie it’s my whole life, I love it. Someday I’m going to own my own theater, you wait and see, I promise you …”