The Rise of David Levinsky (41 page)

Her voice broke. She was confused and agitated, but she soon regained her self-mastery. She spoke in sad, solemn, quietly passionate tones, and gradually developed a homespun sort of eloquence which I had never heard from her before. But then the gift of homely rhetoric is rather a common talent among Yiddish-speaking women.

The revolting sight of the dog-faced old fellow who was ogling Dora so fascinated me that it interfered with my listening. I made a point of looking away from him every time we came round to his bench, but that only kept me thinking of him instead of listening to Dora. Finally we confined our walk to the farther side of the little park, giving him a wide berth.

“I love you more than I can tell you, Levinsky,” she resumed. “But it is not my good luck to be happy. I dreamed all my life of love, and now that it is here, right here in my heart, I must choke it with my own hands.”

“Why? Why?” I said, with vehemence. “Why must you?”

“Why!” she echoed, bitterly. “Because the Upper One brought you to me only to punish me, to tease me. That’s all. That’s all. That’s all.”

“Why should you take it that way?”

“Don’t interrupt me, Levinsky,” she said, chanting, rather than speaking. As she proceeded, her voice lapsed into a quaint, doleful singsong, not unlike the lament of our women over a grave. “No, Levinsky. It is not given to me to be happy. But I ask no questions of the Upper One. I used to live in peace. I was not happy, but I lived in peace. I did not know what happiness was, so I did not miss it much. I only dreamed of it. But the Lord of the World would have me taste it, so that I might miss it and that my heart might be left with a big, big wound. I want you to know exactly how I feel. Oh, if I could turn this poor heart of mine inside out! Then you could see all that is going on there. Listen, Levinsky. If it were not for my children, my dear children, my all in all in the world, I should not live with Margolis another day. If he gave me a divorce, well and good; if not, then I don’t know what I might do. I shouldn’t care. I love you so and I want to be happy. I do, I do, I do.”

A sob rang through her voice as she repeated the words.

“You do, and yet you are bound to make both of us miserable,” I said.

“Can I help it
^?
”

“ If you would you could,” I said, grimly. “ Get a divorce and let us be married and have it over.”

She shook her head sadly.

“Thousands of couples get divorced.”

She kept shaking her head.

“Then what’s the use pretending you love me?”

“Pretending! Shall I turn my heart inside out to show you how hard it is to live without you? But you can’t understand. No, Levinsky. I have no right to be happy. Lucy shall be happy. She certainly sha’n’t marry without love. Her happiness will be mine, too. That’s the only kind I am entitled to. She shall go to college. She shall be educated. She shall marry the loved one of her heart. She shall not be buried alive as her mother was. Let her profit by what little sense I have been able to pick up.”

A bench became vacant and we occupied it. The momentary interruption and the change in her physical attitude broke the spell. The solemnity was gone out of her voice. She resumed in a distracted and somewhat listless manner, but she soon warmed up again.

“What would you have me do? Let Lucy find out some day that her mother was a bad woman? I should take poison first.”

“A bad woman!” I protested. “A better woman could not be found anywhere in the world. You are a saint, Dora.”

“No, I am not. I am a bad, wicked, nasty woman. I hate myself.”

“ ‘S-sh! You mustn’t speak like that,” I said, stopping my ears. “I cannot bear it.”

“Yes, that’s what I am, a nasty creature. I used to be pure as gold. There was not a speck on my soul, and now, woe is me, pain is me! What has come over me?”

When she finally got down to the practical side of her resolution it turned out that she wanted me to move out of her house and never to see her again.

I was shocked. I flouted the idea of it. I argued, I poured out my lovelorn heart. But she insisted with an iron-clad finality. I argued again, entreated, raved, all to no purpose.

“I’ll never come close to you. All I want is to be able to see you, to live in the same house with you.”

“Don’t be tearing my heart to pieces,” she said. “It is torn badly enough as it is. Do as I say, Levinsky.”

“Don’t you want to see me at all?”

“Oh, it’s cruel of you to ask questions like that. You have no heart, Levinsky. It’s just because I am crazy to see you that you have got to move.”

“Don’t you want me even to call at your house?” I asked, with an ironical smile, as though I did not take the matter seriously.

“Well, that would look strange. Call sometimes, not often, though, and never when Margolis is out.”

“Oh, I shall commit suicide,” I snarled.

“Oh, well. It isn’t as bad as all that.”

“I will. I certainly will,” I said, knowing that I was talking nonsense.

“Don’t torment me, Levinsky. Don’t sprinkle salt over my wound. Take pity on me. Do as I wish and let the tooth be pulled out with as little pain as possible.”

I accompanied her down the avenue as far as Houston Street, where she insisted upon our parting. Before we did, however, she indulged in another outburst of funereal oratory, bewailing her happiness as she would a dead child. It was apparently not easy for her to take leave of me, but her purpose to make our romance a thing of the past and to have me move to other lodgings remained unshaken.

“This is the last time I shall ever speak to you of my love, Levinsky,” she said. “ I must tear it out of my heart, even if I have to tear out a piece of my heart along with it. Such is my fate. Good-by, Levinsky. Good luck to you. Be good. Be good. Be good. Remember you have a good head. Waste no time. Study as much as you can. God grant you luck in your business, but try to find time for your books, too. You must become a great man. Do you promise me to read and study a lot?”

“I do. I do. But I won’t move out. I can’t live without you. We belong to each other, and all you say is nothing but a woman’s whim. It’s all bosh,” I concluded, with an air of masculine superiority. “I won’t move out.”

“You shall, dearest. Good-by. Good-by.”

She broke into a fit of sobbing, but checked it, shook my hand vehemently and hastened away.

I
HOPED she would yield, but she did not. I found myself in the grip of an iron will and I did as I was bidden.

When I set out in quest of a furnished room I instinctively betook myself to the neighborhood of Stuyvesant Park. That park had acquired a melancholy fascination for me. As though to make amends for my agonies, I determined to move into a good, spacious room, even if I had to pay three or four times as much as I had been paying at the Margolises’. I found a sunny front room with two windows in an old brown-stone house on East Nineteenth Street, between Second Avenue and First, a short distance from the little park and near an Elevated station. The curtains, the carpet, the huge, soft arm-chair, and the lounge struck me as decidedly “aristocratic.” To cap the climax of comfort and “swellness,” the landlady—a gray little German-American—had, at my request, a bookcase placed between the mantelpiece and one of the windows. It was a “regular” bookcase, doors and all, not a mere “what-not,” and the sight of it swelled my breast.

“I shall forget all my troubles here,” I thought. “I am going to buy a complete set of Spencer and some other books. Won’t the bookcase look fine! I shall read, read, read.”

When I reported to Dora that I was ready to move, her face clouded.

“You seem to be glad to,” she said, with venom, dropping her eyes.

“Glad? Glad? Why, I am not going to move, then. May I stay here, darling mine? May I?”

“Are you really sorry you have to move?” she asked, fixing a loving glance at me. “ Do you really love me?”

There were tears in her eyes. I attempted to come close to her, to kiss her, but she held me back.

“No, dearest,” she said, shaking her head. “Move out to-morrow, will you? Let’s be done with it.”

“And what will Max say?” I asked, sardonically. Will nothing seem strange to him nothing at all?”

“Never mind that.”

She never mentioned Max to me now, not even by pronoun.

“Then you must know him to be an idiot.” Now I hated Max with all my heart.

“Don’t,” she implored.

“Oh, I see. He’s dear to you now,” I laughed.

“Have a heart, Levinsky. Have a heart. Must you keep shedding my blood? Have you no pity at all?”

“But it is all so ridiculous. It will look strange,” I argued, seriously. “He is bound to get suspicious.”

“I have thought it all out. Don’t be uneasy. I’ll say we had a quarrel over your board bill.”

“A nice dodge, indeed! It may fool Dannie, not him.”

“Leave it all to me. Better tell me what sort of lodgings you have got. Is it a decent room? Plenty of air and sunshine? But, no. Don’t tell me anything. I mustn’t know.”

I sneered.

She was absorbed in thought, flushed, nervous.

Presently she said, with an effect of speaking to herself:

“It’s sweet to suffer for what is right.”

 

I moved out according to her program. I came home at 10 the first evening. My double room, with its great arm-chair, carpets, bookcase, imposing lace curtains, and the genteel silence of the street outside, was a prison to me. I attempted to read, but there was a lump in my throat and the lines swam before me.

I went out, roamed about the streets, dropped in at a Hungarian café, took another ramble, and returned to my room.

 

I tossed about on my great double bed. I sat up in front of one of my two windows, gazing at a street-lamp. It was not solely Dora, but also Lucy and Dannie that I missed. Only the image of Max now aroused hostile feelings in me.

Max called at my shop the very next day. The sight of him cut me to the quick. I received him in morose silence.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” he inquired, with pained amazement. “What did you two quarrel about?”

I made no answer. His presence oppressed me. My surly reticence was no mere acting. But I knew that he misinterpreted it into grim resentment of Dora’s sally, as though I said, “Your wife’s conduct had better be left undiscussed.”

“What nonsense ! She charged you too much, did she? Is that the way it all began? Did she insult you? Well, women-folk are liable to flare up, you know. Tell me all about it. I’ll straighten it out between you. The children miss you awfully. Come, don’t be a fool, Levinsky. Who ever took the words of a woman seriously? What did she say that you should take it so hard?”

“You had better ask her,” I replied, with a well-acted frown.

“Ask her! She gets wild when I do. I never saw her so wild. She thinks you insulted her first. Well, she is a woman, but you aren’t one, are you? Come to the house this evening, will you?”

“That’s out of the question.”

“Then meet me somewhere else. I want to have a talk with you. It’s all so foolish.”

I pleaded important other engagements, but he insisted that I should meet him later in the evening, and I had to make the appointment. I promised to be at a Canal Street café on condition that he did not mention the disagreeable episode nor offer to effect a reconciliation between Dora and myself.

“You’re a tough customer. As tough as Dora,” he said.

When I came to the café, at about 11, I found him waiting for me. He kept his promise about avoiding the subject of Dora, but he talked of women, which jarred on me inordinately now. His lecherous fibs and philosophy made him literally unbearable to me. To turn the conversation I talked shop, and this bored him.

About a week later he called on me again. He informed me that Dora had taken a new apartment up in Harlem, where the rooms were even more modern and cheaper than on Clinton Street.

“I wouldn’t mind staying where we are,” he observed. “But you know how women are. Everybody is moving up-town, so she must move, too.”

My face hardened, as if to say: “Why will you speak of your wife? You know I can’t bear to hear of her.” At the same time I said to myself: “Poor Dora! She must have found it awful to live in the old place, now that I am no longer there.”

His next visit at my shop took place after a lapse of three or four weeks. He descanted upon his new home and the Harlem dwellings in general, and I made an effort to show him cordial attention and to bear myself generally as though there were no cause for estrangement between us, but I failed.

At last he said, resentfully: “What’s the matter with you? Why are you so sour? If you and Dora have had a falling out, is that any reason why you and I should not be good friends?”

“Why, why?” I protested. “Who says I am sour?”

We parted on very friendly terms. But it was a long time before I saw him again, and then under circumstances that were a disagreeable surprise to me.

W
EEKS went by. My desolation seemed to be growing in excruciating intensity. From time to time, when I chanced to recall some trait or trick of Dora’s, her person would come back to me with special vividness, smiting me with sudden cruelty. The very odor of her flesh would grip my consciousness. At such moments my agony would be so great that I seemed to be on the brink of a physical collapse. During intervals there was a steady gnawing pain. It was as though the unrelenting tortures of a dull toothache had settled somewhere in the region of my heart or stomach, I knew not exactly where. I recognized the pang as an old acquaintance. It had the same flavor as the terrors of my tantalizing love for Matilda.