The Rise of David Levinsky (64 page)

We were furtively eying each other. Finally our eyes met. He greeted me with a respectful nod and then his face broke into a good-humored smile. He moved over to my table and told me his story in detail. He spoke in brief, pithy sentences, revealing a remarkable understanding of the world. In conclusion he said, with a sigh:

“But what is the good of it all? The Upper One has blessed me with one hand, but He has punished me with the other.”

It appeared that his wife had died, in Austria, just when she was about to come to join him and he was preparing to surprise her with what, to her, would have been a palatial apartment.

“For six years I tried to bring her over, but could not manage it,” he said, simply. “I barely made enough to feed one mouth. When good luck came at last, she died. She was a good woman, but I never gave her a day’s happiness. For eighteen years she shared my poverty. And now, that there is something better to share, she is gone.”

O
NE of the many Jewish immigrants who were drawn into the whirl of real-estate speculation was Max Margolis, Dora’s husband. I had heard his name in connection with some deals, and one afternoon in February we found ourselves side by side in a crowd of other “boomers.” The scene was the comer of Fifth Avenue and One Hundred and Sixteenth Street, two blocks from Tevkin’s residence, a spot that usually swarmed with Yiddish-speaking real-estate speculators in those days. It was a gesticulating, jabbering, whispering, excited throng, resembling the crowd of curb-brokers on Broad Street. Hence the nickname “The Curb” by which that comer was getting to be known.

I was talking to Tevkin when somebody slapped me on the back.

“Hello, Levinsky! Hello!”

“Margolis!”

His face had the florid hue of worn, nervous, middle age.

“I heard you were buying. Is it true? Well, how goes it, great man?”

“How have you been?”

“Can’t kick. Of course, compared to a big fellow like David Levinsky, I am a fly.”

I excused myself to Tevkin and took Margolis to the quieter side of the Avenue.

“Glad to see you, upon my word,” he said. “Well, let bygones by bygones. It’s about time we forgot it all.”

“There is nothing to forget.”

“Honest?”

“Honest! Is that idiotic notion still sticking in your brain?”

“Why, no. Not at all. May I not live till to-morrow if 486 it does. You are not angry at me, are you? Come, now, say that you are not.”

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.

“Well, shake hands, then.”

We did and he offered to sell me a “parcel.” As I did not care for it, he went on to talk of the real-estate market in general. There was a restaurant on that side of the block—The Curb Café we used to call it—so we went in, ordered something, and he continued to talk. He was plainly striving to sound me, in the hope of “hanging on” to some of my deals. Of a sudden he said:

“Say, you must think I’m still jealous? May I not live till to-morrow if I am.” And to prove that he was not he added: “Come, Levinsky, come up to the house and let’s be friends again, as we used to be. I have always wished you well.” He gave me his address. “Will you come?”

“Some day.”

“You aren’t still angry at Dora, are you?”

“Why, no. But then she may be still angry at me,” I said, indifferently.

“Nonsense. Perhaps it is beneath your dignity to call on small people like us? Come, forget that you are a great capitalist and let us all spend an evening together as we used to.”

Was he ready to suppress his jealousy for the prospect of getting under my financial wing? The answer to this question came to me through a most unexpected channel.

The next morning, when I came to my Fifth Avenue office (it was some eighty blocks—about four miles—down-town from “The Curb” section of Fifth Avenue), I found Dora waiting for me. I recognized her the moment I entered the waiting-room on my office floor. Her hair was almost white and she had grown rather fleshy, but her face had not changed. She wore a large, becoming hat and was quite neatly dressed generally.

The blood surged to my face. Her presence was a bewildering surprise to me.

There were three other people in the room and I had to be on my guard.

“How are you?” I said, rushing over to her.

She stood up and we shook hands. I took her into my private office through my private corridor.

“Dora! Well, well!” I murmured in a delirium of embarrassment.

“ I have come to tell you not to mind Margolis and not to call at the house,” she said, gravely, looking me full in the face. “It would be awful if you did. He is out of his mind. He is—”

“Wait a minute, Dora,” I interrupted her. “There’ll be plenty of time to talk of that. First tell me something about yourself. How have you been? How are the children?”

She was like an old song that had once held me under its sway, but which now appealed to me as a memory only. I was conscious of my consuming passion for Anna. Dora interested and annoyed me at once.

I treated her as a dear old friend. She, however, persisted in wearing a mask of politeness, as if she had come strictly on business and there had never been any other relations between us.

“Everybody is all right, thank you,” she answered.

“Is Lucy married?”

“Oh, she has a beautiful little girl of two years. But I do want to tell you about Margolis. The man is simply crazy, and I want to warn you not to take him seriously. Above all, don’t let him take you up to the house. Not for anything in the world. That’s what brings me here this morning.”

“Why? What’s the trouble?”

“Oh, it would take too long to tell,” she answered. “And it isn’t important, either. The main thing is that you should not let him get into business relations with you, or into any other kind of relations, for that matter.”

Her English was a striking improvement upon what it had been sixteen years before. As we continued to talk it became evident to me that she was a well-read, well-informed woman. I made some efforts to break her reserve, but they failed. Nor, indeed, was I over-anxious to have them succeed. She did speak of her husband’s jealousy, however (though she dropped her glance and slurred over the word as she did so); and from what she said, as well as by reading between the lines of her statement, I gathered a fairly clear picture of the situation. Echoes of Max’s old jealousy would still make themselves 488 felt in his domestic life. A clash, an irritation, would sometimes bring my name to his lips. He still, sometimes, tortured her with questions concerning our relations.

“I never answer these questions of his,” she said, her eyes on my office rug. “Not a word. I just let him talk. But sometimes I feel like putting an end to my life,” she concluded, with a smile.

I listened with expressions of surprise and sympathy and with a feeling of compunction. A thought was sluggishly trailing through my mind: “Does she still care for me?”

Margolis had built up some sort of auction business, but his real-estate mania had ruined it and eaten up all he had except three thousand dollars, which Dora had contrived to save from the wreck. With this she had bought a cigar-and-stationery store on Washington Heights by means of which she now supported the family. He spent his days and evenings hanging around real-estate haunts as a penniless drunkard does around liquor-shops. He was always importuning Dora for “a couple of hundred dollars” for a “sure thing.” This was often the cause of an altercation. Quarrels had, in fact, never been such a frequent occurrence in the house as they had been since he lost his money in real estate, and one of his favorite thrusts in the course of these brawls was to allude to me.

“If Levinsky asked you for money you would not refuse him, would you?” he would taunt her.

Now, that he had met me at “The Curb,” he had taken it into his head that his jealousy had worn off long since and that he had the best of feelings for me. His heart was set upon regaining my friendship. He had spoken to her of our meeting as a “predestined thing” that was to result in my “letting him in” on some of my deals. Dora, however, felt sure that a renewal of our acquaintance would only rekindle the worst forms of his jealousy and make life impossible to her. She dreaded to imagine it.

We spoke of Lucy again. It was so stirring to think of her as a mother. Dora told me that Lucy’s husband was in the jewelry business and quite well-to-do.

She rose to go. I escorted her, continuing to question her about Lucy, Dannie, her husband. It would have been natural for me to take her out by way of my private little corridor, but I preferred to pilot her through my luxurious show-rooms. We found two customers there to whom some of my office men and a designer were showing our “line.” I greeted the customers, and, turning to Dora again, I asked her to finish an interrupted remark. We paused by one of the windows. What she was saying about Lucy was beginning to puzzle me. She did not seem to be pleased with her daughter’s marriage.

“She has three servants and a machine,” she said, with a peculiar smile. “She wanted it and she got what she wanted.”

“Why?” I said, perplexed.

“Everything is all right,” she answered, with another smile.

We spoke in an undertone, so that nobody could overhear us. The fact, however, that we were no longer alone had the effect of relieving our constraint. Dora unbent somewhat. A certain note of intimacy that had been lacking in our talk while we were by ourselves stole into it now that we were in the presence of other people.

In the course of our love-affair she had often spoken to me of her determination not to let Lucy repeat her mistake, not to let her marry otherwise than a man she loved. We were both thinking of it at this minute, and it seemed to be tacitly understood between us that we were.

At last I ventured to ask: “What’s the trouble, Dora? Tell me all about it. It interests me very much.”

“I don’t know whether there’s anything to tell,” she answered, coloring slightly. “She says she cares for her husband, and they really get along very well. He certainly worships her. Why shouldn’t he? She is so beautiful—a regular flower—and he is old enough to be her father.”

“You don’t say!” I ejaculated, with genuine distress.

“She
is satisfied.”

“Are
you?”

“As if it mattered whether I was or not. I had other ideas about her happiness, but I am only a mother and was not even born in this country. So what does my opinion amount to? I begged her not to break my heart, but she would have her automobile.”

“Perhaps she does love him.”

She shook her head ruefully. “She was quite frank about it. She called it being practical. She thought my ideas weren’t American, that I was a dreamer. She talked that way ever since she was eighteen, in fact. ‘I don’t care if I marry a man with white hair, provided he can make a nice living for me,’ she used to say. I thought it would drive me mad. And the girls she went with had the same ideas. When they got together it would be, ‘This girl married a fellow who’s worth a hundred thousand,’ and, ‘That girl goes with a fellow who’s worth half a million.’ If that’s what they learn at college, what’s the use going to college?”

“It’s prosperity ideas,” I suggested. “It’s a temporary craze.”

“I don’t care what it is. A girl should be a girl. She ought to think of love, of real happiness.” (Her glance seemed to be the least bit unsteady.) “But I ain’t ‘practical,’ don’t you know. Exactly what my mother—peace upon her [this in Hebrew]—used to say. She, too, did not think it was necessary to be in love with the man you marry. But then she did not go to college, not even to school. Of what good is education, then?”

It was evident that she spoke from an overflowing neart, and that she could speak for hours on the subject. But she cut herself short and took another tack.

“You must not think her husband is a kike, though,” she said. “He is no fool and he writes a pretty good English letter. And he is a
very
nice man.”

She started to go.

“Tell me some more about Dannie,” I said, on our way to the elevator.

“He’s going to college. Always first or second in his class. And one of the best men on the football team, too.” She smiled, the first radiant smile I had seen on her that morning.

“He’s all right,” she continued. And in Yiddish, “He is my only consolation.” And again in English, “If it wasn’t for him life wouldn’t be worth living. Good-by,” she said, as we paused in front of the elevator door. “Don’t forget what I told you.” She was ill at ease again.

The elevator came down from the upper floors. We shook hands and she entered it. It sank out of sight. I stood still for a second and then returned to my private office with a sense of relief and sadness. My heart was full of love for Anna.

I
N a vague, timid way I had been planning to propose to Anna, all along. My meeting with Dora gave these plans shape. Her unexpected visit revived in my mind the whole history of my acquaintance with her. I said to myself: “It was through tenacity and persistence that I won her. It was persistence, too, that gave me success in business. Anna is a meek, good-natured girl. She has far less backbone than Dora. I can win her, and I will.”

It seemed so convincing. It was like a discovery. It aroused the fighting blood in my veins. I was throbbing with love and determination. I was priming myself for a formal proposal. I expected to take her by storm. I was only waiting for an opportunity. In case she said no, I was prepared for a long and vigorous campaign. “I won’t give her up. She shall be mine, whether she wants it or not,” I said to myself again and again. These soliloquies would go on in my mind at all hours and in all kinds of circumstances—while I was pushing my way through a crowded street-car, while I was listening to some of Bender’s scoldings, while I was parleying with some real-estate man over a piece of property. They often made me so absent-minded that I would pace the floor of my hotel room, for instance, with one foot socked and the other bare, and then distressedly search for the other sock, which was in my hand. One morning as I sat at my mahogany desk in my office, with the telephone receiver to my ear, waiting to be connected with a banker, I said to myself: “Women like a man with a strong will. My very persistence will fascinate her.” And this, too, seemed like a discovery to me. The banker answered my call. It was an important matter, yet all the while I spoke or listened to him I was conscious of having hit upon an invincible argument in support of my hope that Anna would be mine.