The Rise of David Levinsky (22 page)

He was a passionate phrase-maker. Indeed, it would have been difficult to determine which afforded him more pleasure—his self-laudations or the colorful, pungent, often preposterous language in which they were clothed.

“I am writing something with hot tears in it,” I once heard him brag. “They’ll be so hot they’ll scald the heart of every one who hears it, provided he has a heart.”

He had given me some nickels, yet his boasts would fill me with disgust. On the occasion just mentioned I was so irritated with my poverty and with the whole world that I was seized with an irresistible desire to taunt him. As he continued to eulogize his forthcoming masterpiece I threw out a Hebrew quotation:

“Let others praise thee, but not thine own mouth.”

He took no heed of my thrust. But since then he never looked at me and I never dared ask him for a nickel again.

He had a ferocious temper. When it broke loose it would be a veritable volcano of revolting acrimony, his thin, firm opening and snapping shut in a peculiar fashion, as though he were squirting venom all over the floor. He was as sensual as Maximum Max, only his voluptuous talks of women were far more offensive in form. But then his lewd drivel was apt to glitter with flashes of imagination. I do not remember ever seeing him in good humor.

O
NE Friday evening in September I stood on Grand Street with my eyes raised to the big open windows of a dance-hall on the second floor of a brick building on the opposite side of the lively thoroughfare. Only the busts of the dancers could be seen. This and the distance that divided me from the hall enveloped the scene in mystery. As the couples floated by, as though borne along on waves of the music, the girls clinging to the men, their fantastic figures held me spellbound. Several other people were watching the dancers from the street, mostly women, who gazed at the appearing and disappearing images with envying eyes.

Presently I was accosted by a dandified-looking young man who rushed at me with an exuberant, “How are you?” in English. He was dressed in the height of the summer fashion. He looked familiar to me, but I was at a loss to locate him.

“Don’t you know me? Try to remember!”

It was Gitelson, my fellow-passenger on board the ship that had brought me to America, the tailor who clung to my side when I made my entry into the New World, sixteen months before.

The change took my breath away.

“You didn’t recognize me, did you?” he said, with a triumphant snicker, pulling out his cuffs so as to flaunt their gold or gilded buttons.

He asked me what I was doing, but he was more interested in telling me about himself. That cloak-contractor who picked him up near Castle Garden had turned out to be a skinflint and a slave-driver. He had started him on five dollars a week for work the market price of which was twenty or thirty. So Gitelson left him as soon as he realized his real worth, and he had been making good wages ever since. Being an excellent tailor, he was much sought after, and although the trade had two long slack seasons he always had plenty to do. He told me that he was going to that dance-hall across the street, which greatly enhanced his importance in my eyes and seemed to give reality to the floating phantoms that I had been watching in those windows. He said he was in a hurry to go up there, as he had “an appointment with a lady” (this in English), yet he went on describing the picnics, balls, excursions he attended.

Thereupon I involuntarily shot a look at his jaunty straw hat, thinking of his gray forelock. I did so several times. I could not help it. Finally my furtive glances attracted his attention.

“What are you looking at? Anything wrong with my hat?” he asked, baring his head. His hair was freshly trimmed and dudishly dressed. As I looked at the patch of silver hair that shone in front of a glossy expanse of brown, he exclaimed, with a laugh: “Oh, you mean that! That’s nothing. The ladies like me all the same.”

He went on boasting, but he did it in an inoffensive way. He simply could not get over the magic transformation that had come over him. While in his native place his income had amounted to four rubles (about two dollars) a week, his wages here were now from thirty to forty dollars. He felt like a peasant suddenly turned to a prince. But he spoke of his successes in a pleasing, soft voice and with a kindly, confiding smile that won my heart. Altogether he made the impression of an exceedingly unaggressive, good-natured fellow, without anything like ginger in his make-up.

After he had bragged his fill he invited me to have a glass of soda with him. There was a soda-stand on the next corner, and when we reached it I paused, but he pulled me away.

“Come on,” he said, disdainfully. “We’ll go into a drug-store, or, better still, let’s go to an ice-cream parlor.”

This I hesitated to do because of my shabby clothes. When he divined the cause of my embarrassment he was touched.

“Come on!” he said, with warm hospitality, uttering the two words in English. “When I say ‘Come on’ I know what I am talking about.”

“But your lady is waiting for you.”

“She can wait. Ladies are never on time, anyhow.”

“But maybe she is.”

“If she is she can dance with some of the other fellows. I wouldn’t be jealous. There are plenty of other ladies. I should not take fifty ladies for this chance of seeing you. Honest.”

He took me into a little candy-store, dazzlingly lighted and mirrored and filled with marble-topped tables.

We seated ourselves and he gave the order. He did so rather swaggeringly, but his manner to me was one of affectionate and compassionate respectfulness.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you,” he said. “You remember the ship?”

“As if one could ever forget things of that kind.”

“I have often thought of you. ‘I wonder what has become of him,’ I said to myself.”

He did not remember my name, or perhaps he had never known it, so I had to introduce myself afresh. The contrast between his flashy clothes and my frowsy, wretched-looking appearance, as I saw ourselves in the mirrors on either side of me, made me sorely ill at ease. The brilliancy of the gaslight chafed my nerves. It was as though it had been turned on for the express purpose of illuminating my disgrace. I was longing to go away, but Gitelson fell to questioning me about my affairs once more, and this time he did so with such unfeigned concern that I told him the whole cheerless story of my sixteen months’ life in America.

He was touched. In his mild, unemphatic way he expressed heartfelt sympathy.

“But why don’t you learn some trade?” he inquired. “You don’t seem to be fit for business, anyhow” (the last two words in mispronounced English).

“Everybody is telling me that.”

“There you are. You just listen to me, Mr. Levinsky. You won’t be sorry for it.”

He proposed machine-operating in a cloak-shop, which paid even better than tailoring and was far easier to learn. Finally he offered to introduce me to an operator who would teach me the trade, and to pay him my tuition fee.

He went into details. He continued to address me as Mr. Levinsky and tried to show me esteem as his intellectual superior, but, in spite of himself, as it were, he gradually took a respectfully contemptuous tone with me.

“Don’t be a lobster, Mr. Levinsky.” (“Lobster” he said in English.) “This is not Russia. Here a fellow must be no fool. There is no sense in living the way you do. Do as Gitelson tells you, and you’ll live decently, dress decently, and lay by a dollar or two. There are lots of educated fellows in the shops.” He told me of some of these, particularly of one young man who was a shopmate of his. “He never comes to work without some book,” he said. “When there is not enough to do he reads. When he has to wait for a new ‘bundle,’ as we call it, he reads. Other fellows carry on, but he is always reading. He is so highly educated he could read any kind of book, and I don’t believe there is a book in the world that he has not read. He is saving up money to go to college.”

On parting he became fully respectful again. “Do as I tell you, Mr. Levinsky,” he said. “Take up cloak-making.”

He made me write down his address. He expected that I would do it in Yiddish. When he saw me write his name and the name of the street in English he said, reverently:

“Writing English already! There is a mind for you! If I could write like that I could become a designer. Well, don’t lose the address. Call on me, and if you make up your mind to take up cloak-making just say the word and I’ll fix you up. When Gitelson says he will, he will.”

The image of that cloak-operator reading books and laying by money for a college education haunted me. Why could I not do the same? I pictured myself working and studying and saving money for the kind of education which Matilda had dinned into my ears.

I accepted Gitelson’s offer. Cloak-making or the cloak business as a career never entered my dreams at that time. I regarded the trade merely as a stepping-stone to a life of intellectual interests.

T
HE operator to whom Gitelson apprenticed me was a short, plump, dark-complexioned fellow named Joe. I have but a dim recollection of his features, though I distinctly remember his irresistible wide-eyed smile and his emotional nature.

He taught me to bind seams, and later to put in pockets, to stitch on “under collars,” and so forth. After a while he began to pay me a small weekly wage, he himself being paid, for our joint work, by the piece. The shop was not the manufacturer’s. It belonged to one of his contractors, who received from him “bundles” of material which his employees (tailors, machine - operators, pressers, and finisher girls) made up into cloaks or jackets. The cheaper goods were made entirely by operators; the better grades partly by tailors, partly by operators, or wholly by tailors; but these were mostly made “inside,” in the manufacturer’s own establishment. The designing, cutting, and making of samples were “inside” branches exclusively. Gitelson, as a skilled tailor, was an “inside” man, being mostly employed on samples.

My work proved to be much harder and the hours very much longer than I had anticipated. I had to toil from six in the morning to nine in the evening. (Joe put in even more time. I always found him grinding away rapturously when I came to the shop in the morning, and always left him toiling as rapturously when I went home in the evening.) Ours is a seasonal trade. All the work of the year is crowded into two short seasons of three and two months, respectively, during which one is to earn enough to last him twelve months (only sample-makers, high-grade tailors like Gitelson, were kept busy throughout the year). But then wages were comparatively high, so that a good mechanic, particularly an operator, could make as much as seventy-five dollars a week, working about fifteen hours a day. However, during the first two or three weeks I was too much borne down by the cruelty of my drudgery to be interested in the luring rewards which it held out. Not being accustomed to physical exertion of any kind, I felt like an innocent man suddenly thrown into prison and put at hard labor. I was shocked. I was crushed. I was continually looking at the clock, counting the minutes, and when I came home I would feel so sore in body and spirit that I could not sleep. Studying or reading was out of the question.

Moreover, as a peddler I seemed to have belonged to the world of business, to the same class as the rich, the refined, while now, behold! I was a workman, a laborer, one of the masses. I pitied myself for a degraded wretch. And when some of my shopmates indulged in coarse pleasantry in the hearing of the finisher girls it would hurt me personally, as a confirmation of my disgrace. “And this is the kind of people with whom I am doomed to associate!” I would lament. In point of fact, there were only four or five fellows of this kind in a shop of fifty. Nor were some of the peddlers or music-teachers I had known more modest of speech than the worst of these cloak-makers. What was more, I felt that some of my fellow-employees were purer and better men than I. But that did not matter. I abhorred the shop and everybody in it as a well-bred convict abhors his jail and his fellow-inmates.

When the men quarreled they would call one another, among other things, “bundle-eaters.” This meant that they accused one another of being ever hungry for bundles of raw material, ever eager to “gobble up all the work in the shop.” I wondered how one could be anxious for physical toil. They seemed to be a lot of savages.

The idea of leaving the shop often crossed my mind, but I never had the courage to take it seriously. I had tried my hand at peddling and failed. Was I a failure as a mechanic as well? Was I unfit for anything? The other fellows at the shop had a definite foothold in life, while I was a waif, a ne’er-do-well, nearly two years in America with nothing to show for it. Thoughts such as these had a cowing effect on me. They made me feel somewhat like the fresh prisoner who has been put to work at stone-breaking to have his wild spirit broken. I dared not give up my new occupation. I would force myself to work hard, and as I did so the very terrors of my toil would fascinate me, giving me a sense of my own worth. As the jackets that bore my stitches kept piling up, the concrete result of my useful performance would become a source of moral satisfaction to me. And when I received my first wages—the first money I had ever earned by the work of my hands —it seemed as if it were the first money I had ever earned honestly.

By little and little I got used to my work and even to enjoy its processes. Moreover, the thinking and the dreaming I usually indulged in while plying my machine became a great pleasure to me. It seemed as though one’s mind could not produce such interesting thoughts or images unless it had the rhythmic whir of a sewing-machine to stimulate it.

I now ate well and slept well. I was in the best of health and in the best of spirits. I was in an uplifted state of mind. No one seemed to be honorable who did not earn his bread in the sweat of his brow as I did. Had I then chanced to hear a Socialist speech I might have become an ardent follower of Karl Marx and my life might have been directed along lines other than those which brought me to financial power.