The Rise of David Levinsky (23 page)

The girls in the shop, individually, scarcely interested me, but their collective presence was something of which I never seemed to be quite unconscious. It was as though the workaday atmosphere were scented with the breath of a delicate perfume—a perfume that was tainted with the tang of my yearning for Matilda.

Two girls who were seated within a yard from my machine were continually bandying secrets. Now one and then the other would look around to make sure that the contractor was not watching, and then she would bend over and whisper something into her chum’s ear. This would set my blood tingling with a peculiar kind of inquisitiveness. It was reasonable to suppose that their whispered conferences mostly bore upon such innocent matters as their work, earnings, lodgings, or dresses. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that their whispers, especially when accompanied by a smile, a giggle, or a wink, conveyed some of their intimate thoughts of men. They were homely girls, with pinched faces, yet at such moments they represented to me all that there was fascinating and disquieting in womanhood.

The jests of the foul-mouthed rowdies would make me writhe with disgust. As a rule they were ostensibly addressed to some of the other fellows or to nobody in particular, their real target being the nearest girls. These would receive them with gestures of protest or with an exclamation of mild repugnance, or—in the majority of cases—pass them unnoticed, as one does some unavoidable discomfort of toil. There was only one girl in the shop who received these jests with a shamefaced grin or even with frank appreciation, and she was a perfectly respectable girl like the rest. There were some finisher girls who could not boast an unsullied reputation, but none of them worked in our shop, and, indeed, their number in the entire trade was very small.

One of the two girls who sat nearest to my machine was quite popular in the shop, but that was because of her sweet disposition and sound sense rather than for her looks. She was known to have a snug little account in a savings-bank. It was for a marriage portion she was saving; but she was doing it so strenuously that she stinted herself the expense of a decent dress or hat, or the price of a ticket to a ball, picnic, or dancing-class. The result was that while she was pinching and scrimping herself to pave the way to her marriage she barred herself, by this very process, from contact with possible suitors. She was a good soul. From time to time she would give some of her money to a needy relative, and then she would try to make up for it by saving with more ardor than ever. Her name was Gussie.

Joe, the plump, dark fellow who was teaching me the trade, was one of the several men in the shop who were addicted to salacious banter. One of his favorite pranks was to burlesque some synagogue chant from the solemn service of the Days of Awe, with disgustingly coarse Yiddish in place of the Hebrew of the prayer. But he was not a bad fellow, by any means. He was good-natured, extremely impressionable, and susceptible of good influences. A sad tune would bring a woebegone look into his face, while a good joke would make him laugh to tears. He was fond of referring to himself as my “rabbi,” which is Hebrew for teacher, and that was the way I would address him, at first playfully, and then as a matter of course.

One day, after he had delivered himself of a quip that set my teeth on edge, I said to him, appealingly:

“Why should you be saying these things, rabbi?”

“If you don’t like them you can stop your God-fearing ears,” he fired back, good-naturedly.

I retorted that it was not a matter of piety, but of common decency, and my words were evidently striking home, but the girls applauded me, which spoiled it all.

“If you want to preach sermons you’re in the wrong place,” he flared up. “This is no synagogue.”

“Nor is it a pigsty,” Gussie urged, without raising her eyes from her work.

A month or two later he abandoned these sallies of his own accord. The other fellows twitted him on his burst of “righteousness” and made efforts to lure him into a race of ribald punning, but he stood his ground.

By and by it leaked out that he was engaged and madly in love with his girl. I warmed to him.

The young woman who had won his heart was not an employee of our shop. Indeed, love-affairs between working-men and working-girls who are employed in the same place are not quite so common as one might suppose. The factory is scarcely a proper setting for romance. It is one of the battle-fields in our struggle for existence, where we treat woman as an inferior being, whereas in civilized love-making we prefer to keep up the chivalrous fiction that she is our superior. The girls of our shop, hard-worked, disheveled, and handled with anything but chivalry, aroused my sympathy, but it was not the kind of feeling that stimulates romantic interest. Still, collectively, as an abstract reminder of their sex, they flavored my sordid environment with poetry.

T
HE majority of the students at the College of the City of New York was already made up of Jewish boys, mostly from the tenement-houses. One such student often called at the cloak-shop in which I was employed, and in which his father—a tough-looking fellow with a sandy beard, a former teamster—was one of the pressers. A classmate of this boy was supported by an aunt, a spinster who made good wages as a bunch-maker in a cigar-factory. To make an educated man of her nephew was the great ambition of her life. All this made me feel as though I were bound to that college with the ties of kinship. Two of my other shopmates had sons at high school. The East Side was full of poor Jews—wage-earners, peddlers, grocers, salesmen, insurance agents—who would beggar themselves to give their children a liberal education. Then, too, thousands of our working-men attended public evening school, while many others took lessons at home. The Ghetto rang with a clamor for knowledge.

To save up some money and prepare for college seemed to be the most natural thing for me to do. I said to myself that I must begin to study for it without delay. But that was impossible, and it was quite some time before I took up the course which the presser’s boy had laid out for me. During the first three months I literally had no time to open a book. Nor was that all. My work as a cloak-maker had become a passion with me, so much so that even on Saturdays, when the shop was closed, I would scarcely do any reading. Instead, I would seek the society of other cloak-makers with whom I might talk shop.

I was developing speed rather than skill at my sewing-machine, but this question of speed afforded exercise to my brain. It did not take me long to realize that the number of cloaks or jackets which one turned out in a 156 given length of time was largely a matter of method and system. I perceived that Joe, who was accounted a fast hand, would take up the various parts of a garment in a certain order calculated to reduce to a minimum the amount of time lost in passing from section to section. So I watched him intently, studying his system with every fiber of my being. Nor did I content myself with imitating his processes. I was forever pondering the problem and introducing little improvements of my own. I was making a science of it. It was not merely physical exertion. It was a source of intellectual interest as well. I was wrapped up in it. If I happened to meet a cloak-operator who was noted for extraordinary speed I would feel like an ambitious musician meeting a famous virtuoso. Some cloak-operators were artists. I certainly was not one of them. I admired their work and envied them, but I lacked the artistic patience and the dexterity essential to workmanship of a high order. Much to my chagrin, I was a born bungler. But then I possessed physical strength, nervous vitality, method, and inventiveness—all the elements that go to make up speed.

I was progressing with unusual rapidity. Joe criticized my work severely, often calling me botcher, but I knew that this was chiefly intended to veil his satisfaction at the growing profits that my work was yielding him.

I now earned about ten dollars a week, of which I spent about five, saving the rest for the next season of idleness.

At last that season set in. There was not a stroke of work in the shop. I was so absorbed in my new vocation that I would pass my evenings in a cloak-makers’ haunt, a café on Delancey Street, where I never tired talking sleeves, pockets, stitches, trimmings and the like. There was a good deal of card-playing in the place, but somehow I never succumbed to that temptation.

But then, under the influence of some of the fellows I met there, I developed a considerable passion for the Jewish theater. These young men were what is known on the East Side as “patriots,” that is, devoted admirers of some actor or actress and members of his or her voluntary claque. Several of the other frequenters were also interested in the stage, or at least in the gossip of it; so that, on the whole, there was as much talk of plays and players as there was of cloaks and cloak-makers. Our shop discussions certainly never reached the heat that usually characterized our debates on things theatrical.

The most ardent of the “patriots” was a young contractor named Mindels. He attended nearly every performance in which his favorite actor had a part, selling dozens of tickets for his benefit performances and usually losing considerable sums on these sales, loading him with presents and often running his errands. I once saw Mindels in a violent quarrel with a man who had scoffed at his idol.

Mindels’s younger brother, Jake, fascinated me by his appearance, and we became great chums. He was the handsomest fellow I ever had seen, with a fine head of dark-brown hair, classic features, and large, soft-blue eyes; too soft and too blue, perhaps. His was a manly face and figure, and his voice was a manly, a beautiful basso; but this masculine exterior contained an effeminate psychology. In my heart I pronounced him “a calf,” and when I had discovered the English word “sissy,” I thought that it just fitted him. Yet I adored him, and even looked up to him, all because of his good looks.

He was a Talmudist like myself, and we had much in common, also, regarding our dreams of the future.

“Oh, I am so glad I have met you,” I once said to him.

“I am glad, too,” he returned, flushing.

I found that he blushed rather too frequently, which confirmed my notion of him as a sissy. Like most handsome men, he bestowed a great deal of time on his personal appearance. He never uttered a foul word nor a harsh one. If he heard a cloak-maker tell an indecent story he would look down, smiling and blushing like a girl.

Formerly he had been employed in his brother’s shop, while now he earned his living by soliciting and collecting for a life-insurance company.

J
AKE MINDELS was a devotee of Madame Klesmer, the leading Jewish actress of that period, which, by the way, was practically the opening chapter in the interesting history of the Yiddish stage in America. Madame Klesmer was a tragedienne and a prima donna at once—a usual combination in those days.

One Friday evening we were in the gallery of her theater. The play was an “historical opera,” and she was playing the part of a Biblical princess. It was the closing scene of an act. The whole company was on the stage, swaying sidewise and singing with the princess, her head in a halo of electric light in the center. Jake was feasting his large blue eyes on her. Presently he turned to me with the air of one confiding a secret. “Wouldn’t you like to kiss her?” And, swinging around again, he resumed feasting his blue eyes on the princess.

“ I have seen prettier women than she,” I replied.

“ ‘S-sh! Let a fellow listen. She is a dear, all the same. You don’t know a good thing when you see it, Levinsky.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“ ‘S-sh! Do let me listen.”

When the curtain fell he made me applaud her. There were several curtain-calls, during all of which he kept applauding her furiously, shouting the prima donna’s name at the top of his voice and winking to me imploringly to do the same. When quiet had been restored at last I returned to the subject:

“Are you in love with her?”

“Sure,” he answered, without blushing. “As if a fellow could help it. If she let me kiss her little finger I should be the happiest man in the world.”

“And if she let you kiss her cheek?”

“I should go crazy.”

“And if she let you kiss her lips?”

“What’s the use asking idle questions?”

“Would you like to kiss her neck?”

“You ask me foolish questions.”

“You
are
in love with her,” I declared, reflectively.

“I should say I was.”

It was a unique sort of love, for he wanted me also to be in love with her.

“If you are not in love with her you must have a heart of iron, or else your soul is dry as a raisin.” With which he took to analyzing the prima donna’s charms, going into raptures over her eyes, smile, gestures, manner of opening her mouth, and her swing and step as she walked over the stage.

“No, I don’t care for her,” I replied.

“You are a peculiar fellow.”

“If I did fall in love,” I said, by way of meeting him half-way, “ I should choose Mrs. Segalovitch. She is a thousand times prettier than Mrs. Klesmer.”

“Tut, tut!”

Mrs. Segalovitch was certainly prettier than the prima donna, but she played unimportant parts, so the notion of one’s falling in love with her seemed queer to Jake.

That night I had an endless chain of dreams, in every one of which Madame Klesmer was the central figure. When I awoke in the morning I fell in love with her, and was overjoyed.

When I saw Jake Mindels at dinner I said to him, with the air of one bringing glad news:

“Do you know, I
am
in love with her?”

“With whom? With Mrs. Segalovitch?”

“Oh, pshaw! I had forgotten all about her. I mean Madame Klesmer,” I said, self-consciously.

Somehow, my love for the actress did not interfere with my longing thoughts of Matilda. I asked myself no questions.