The Rise of David Levinsky (34 page)

Lucy’s school-reader achievements stirred a novel feeling of rivalry in Dora’s breast. When the little girl could spell half a dozen English words she hated herself for her inferiority to her.

“The idea of that kitten getting ahead of me! Why, it worried the life out of me!” she said. “You may think it foolish, but I couldn’t help it. I kept saying to myself, ‘She’ll grow up and be an educated American lady and she’ll be ashamed to walk in the street with me.’ Don’t we see things like that? People will beggar themselves to send their children to college, only to be treated as fools and greenhorns by them. I call that terrible. Don’t you? Well, I am not going to let my child treat me like that. Not I. I should commit suicide first. I want my child to respect me, not to look down on me. If she reads a book she is to bear in mind that her mother is no ignorant slouch of a greenhorn, either.”

A next-door neighbor, a woman who could read English, would help Lucy with her spelling lesson of an evening. This seemed to have established special relations between the child and that woman from which Dora was excluded.

She made up her mind to learn to read. If Lucy could manage it, she, her mother, could. So she caused the child to teach her to spell out words in her First Reader. At first she pretended to treat it as a joke, but inwardly she took it seriously from the very outset, and later, under the intoxicating effect of the progress she was achieving, these studies became the great passion of her life. Whenever Lucy recited some new lines, learned at school, she would not rest until she, too, had learned them by heart. Here are two “pieces” which she proudly recited to us:

Her voice, as she declaimed the lines, attracted Lucy’s attention, so she sent her and Beckie into the kitchen.

“She doesn’t know what a treasure she is to me,” she said to us. Then, after she finished the two verses, she remarked, wistfully, “Well, my own life is lost, but she shall be educated.”

“Why? Why should you talk like that, Dora?” Sadie protested, her fishy eyes full of tragedy. “Why, you are only beginning to live.”

“Of course she is,” I chimed in.

“Well,” Dora rejoined, “anyhow, I am afraid I love her too much. Sometimes it seems to me I am going crazy over her. I love Dannie, too, of course. When he happens to hurt a finger or to hit his dear little head against something I can’t sleep. Is he not my flesh and blood like Lucy? Still, Lucy is different.” She paused and then rose from her seat, saying, with a smile: “Wait. I am going to show you something.” She went into the kitchen and came back, holding a tooth-brush in either hand. “Guess what it is.”

“Two tooth-brushes,” I answered, with perplexed gaiety.

“Aren’t you smart! I know they are not shoe-brushes, but what kind of tooth-brushes? How did I come by them? That’s the question. Did I use a tooth-brush in my mother’s house?”

She then told me how Lucy, coming from school one day, had announced an order from the teacher that every girl in the class must bring a tooth-brush the next morning.

Sadie nodded confirmation.

“Of course, I went to work and bought, not one brush, but two,” Dora pursued. “I am as good as Lucy, am I not? If she is worth twelve cents, I am. And if she is American lady enough to use a tooth-brush, I am.”

Lucy is not a usual name on the East Side. It was, in fact, the principal of the school who had recommended it, at Dora’s solicitation. The little girl had hitherto been called Lizzie, the commonplace East Side version of Leah, her Hebrew name. Dora never liked it. It did not sound American enough, for there were Lizzies or Lizas in Europe, too. Any “greenhorn” might bear such a name. So she called on Lizzie’s principal and asked her to suggest some “nicer name” for her daughter.

“I want a real American one,” she said.

The principal submitted half a dozen names beginning with “L,” and the result was that Lizzie became Lucy.

Dora went over every spelling lesson with the child. It was so sweet to be helpful to her in this way. Lucy, on her part, had to reciprocate by hearing her mother spell the same words, and often they would have a spelling-match. All of which, as I could see, had invested Lucy with the fascination of a spiritual companion.

The child had not been at school many weeks when she began to show signs of estrangement from her mother-tongue. Her Yiddish was rapidly becoming clogged with queer-sounding “r’s” and with quaintly twisted idioms. Yiddish words came less and less readily to her tongue, and the tendency to replace them with their English equivalents grew in persistence. Dora would taunt her on her “Gentile Yiddish,” yet she took real pride in it. Finally, Lucy abandoned her native tongue altogether. She still understood her parents, of course, but she now invariably addressed them or answered their Yiddish questions in English. As a result, Dora would make efforts to speak to her in the language that had become the child’s natural means of expression. It was a sorry attempt at first; but she was not one to give up without a hard struggle. She went at it with great tenacity, listening intently to Lucy’s English and trying to repeat words and phrases after her. And so, with the child’s assistance, conscious or unconscious, she kept adding to her practical acquaintance with the language, until by the end of Lucy’s first school year she spoke it with considerable fluency.

Dora tried her hand at writing, but little Lucy proved a poor penmanship-teacher, and she was forced to confine herself to reading. She forged ahead of her, reading pages which Lucy’s class had not yet reached.

To take Lucy to school was one of the keen joys of Dora’s existence. Very often they would fall in with Lucy’s bosom friend.

“Good morning, Lucy.”

“Good morning, Beckie.”

As she described the smiling, childishly lady-like way in which the little girls exchanged their greetings and then intertwined their little arms as they proceeded on their way together, Sadie’s fishy eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, how sweet it is to be a mother!” Dora said.

“I should say it was,” her chum and follower echoed, wiping her tears and laughing at once.

There was a curious element of superstition in Dora’s attitude toward her little girl. She had taken it into her head that Lucy had been playing the part of a mascot in her life.

“ I was a bag of bones until she was born,” she said. “Why, people who are put into the grave look better than I did. But my birdie darling came, and, well, if I don’t look like a monkey now, I have her to thank. It was after her birth that I began to pick up.”

She had formed the theory that the child was born to go to school for her mother’s sake as well as her own—a little angel sent down from heaven to act as a messenger of light to her.

Her story made a strong impression on me. “Max is not worthy of her,” I reflected. I wondered whether she was fully aware what manner of man he was.

S
OMETIMES we would go to the Jewish theater together, Max, Dora, and I, the children being left at Sadie’s house. Once, when Max’s lodge had a benefit performance and he had had some tickets for sale, we made up a party of five: the two couples and myself. On that occasion I met Jake Mindels at the playhouse. He was now studying medicine at the University Medical College, and it was a considerable time since I had last seen him. To tell the truth, I had avoided meeting him. I hated to stand confessed before him as a traitor to my dreams of a college education, and I begrudged him his medical books.

I took Max and Dora to see an American play. He did not understand much of what he saw and was bored to death. As for her, she took in scarcely more than did her husband, though she understood many of the words she heard, but then she reverently followed the good manners of the “real Americans” on the stage, and the sound of their “educated” English seemed to inspire her with mixed awe and envy.

 

Once, on a Monday evening, when I called on the Margolises, I found Max out. Dora seemed to be ill at ease in my company, and I did not stay long. It seemed natural to fear that Max, who gave so much attention to the relations between the sexes, should view visits of this kind with misgivings. His playful warnings that we should beware of falling in love with each other seemed to be always in the air, and on that evening when he was away and we found ourselves alone I seemed to hear their echo more distinctly than ever. It had a disquieting effect on me, that echo, and I decided never to call unless Max was sure to be at home. I enjoyed their hospitality too much to hazard it rashly. Moreover, Max and Dora lived in peace and I was the last man in the world to wish to disturb it.

To my surprise, however, he did not seem to be jealous of me in the least. Quite the contrary. He encouraged my familiarities with her, so much so that I soon drifted into the habit of addressing her as Dora.

The better I knew her the greater was the respect with which she inspired me. I thought her an unusual woman, and I looked up to her.

It became a most natural thing that I should propose myself as a boarder. Thousands of families like the Margolises kept boarders to lighten the burden of rent-day.

The project had been trailing in my mind for some time, and, I must confess, the fact that Max stayed out till the small hours four or five nights a week had something to do with it.

“You would be alone with her,” Satan often whispered.

Still, there was nothing definitely reprehensible in this reflection. It was the prospect of often being decorously alone with a woman who inspired me with respect and interested me more and more keenly that tempted me. Vaguely, however, I had a feeling that I was on the road to falling in love with her.

One evening, as I complained of my restaurant meals and of certain inconveniences of my lodgings, Max said:

“Nothing like being married, Levinsky. Take my advice and get you a nice little wifey. One like mine, for instance.”

“ Like yours! The trouble is that there is only one such, and you have captured her.”

“Don’t worry,” Dora broke in. “There are plenty of others, and better ones, too.”

“I have a scheme,” I said, seriously. “Why shouldn’t you people let me board with you?”

Natural as the suggestion was, it took them by surprise.

For a second or two Max gazed at his wife with a perplexed air. Then he said:

“That would not be a bad idea. Would it, Dora?”

“I don’t know, I am sure,” she answered, with a shrug and an embarrassed smile. “We have never kept boarders.”

“You will try to keep one now, then,” I urged.

“If there were room in the house, I should be glad. Upon my health and strength I should.”

“Oh, you can make room,” I said.

“Of course you can,” Max put in, warming to the plan somewhat. “He could have the children’s bedroom, and they could sleep in this room.”

She held to her veto.

“Oh, you don’t know what an obstinate thing she is,” Max said. “Let her say that white is black, and black it must be, even if the world turned upside down.”

“What do you want of me?” she protested. “Levinsky may think I really don’t care to have him. Let us move to a larger apartment and I’ll be but too glad to give him a room.”

The upshot was a compromise. For the present I was to content myself with having my luncheons and dinners or suppers at their house, Dora charging me cost price.

“Get him to move to one of those new houses with modern improvements,” she said to me, earnestly; “to an apartment of five light rooms, and I shall give you a room at once. The rent would come cheaper than it is now. But Max would rather pay more and have the children grow in these damp rooms than budge.”

“ Don’t bother me. By and by we shall move out of here. All in due time. Don’t bother. Meanwhile see that your dinners and suppers are all right. Levinsky thinks you a good cook. Don’t disappoint him, then. Don’t run away with the idea it’s on your own account he wants to board with us. It is on account of your cooking. That’s all. Isn’t it, Levinsky?”

“ I t’s a good thing to know that I am not a bad cook, at least,” she returned.

“But how about the profits you are going to make on him? I’ll deduct them from your weekly allowance, you know,” he chaffed her.

“Oh no. I am just going to save them and buy a house on Fifth Avenue.”

“You ought to allow me ten per cent. for cash,” I said.

“She does not want cash,” Max replied. “Your note is good enough.”

 

I had been taking my meals with them a little over a month when they moved into a new apartment, with me as their roomer and boarder. The apartment was on the third floor of a corner house on Clinton Street, one of a row of what was then a new type of tenement buildings. It consisted of five rooms and bath, all perfectly light, and it had a tiny private corridor or vestibule, a dumb-waiter, an enameled bath-tub, electric and gas light, and an electric door-bell. There was a rush for these apartments and Dora paid a deposit on the first month’s rent before the builder was quite through with his work. My room opened into the vestibule, its window looking out upon a side-street. The rent for the whole apartment was thirty-two dollars, my board being five and a half dollars a week, which was supposed to include a monthly rental of six dollars for my room.

The Shorniks moved into the same house.

M
Y growing interest in Dora burst into flame all at once, as it were. It happened at a moment which is distinctly fixed in my mind. At least I distinctly remember the moment when I became conscious of it.

It was on an afternoon, four days after the Margolises had taken possession of the new place. The family was fully established in it, while I had just moved in. I had seen my room, furniture and all, several times before, but I had never seen it absolutely ready for my occupancy as I did now. It was by far the brightest, airiest, best-furnished, and neatest room that I had ever had all to myself. Everything in it, from the wall-paper to the little wash-stand, was invitingly new. I can still smell its grateful odor of freshness. When I was left to myself in it for the first time and I shut its door the room appealed to me as a compartment in the nest of a family of which I was a member. My lonely soul had a sense of home and domestic comfort that all but overpowered me. The sight of the new quilt and of the fresh white pillow, coupled with the knowledge that it was Dora whose fingers had prepared it all for me, sent a glow of delight through my heart.