Max Read online

  ‘Was it worth five dollars?’ Sally asked him when they got outside.

  ‘You bet your life.’

  ‘But why? I do think it’s extraordinary, but the sight of two men beating each other to death – I could live without that.’

  ‘No, that’s nothing. I don’t give a damn about the fight. It’s the camera and the projector. Can’t you see, it’s the beginning of something that never existed before.’

  ‘It’s just a trick, Max. We’ve always had the magic lantern. This is a magic lantern that moves, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s all it is.’

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked him as he turned east down the street. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Max, what’s come over you?’

  ‘I don’t know –’

  ‘You got to be crazy,’ Bert said to Max. ‘You got a brain in your head, you’ll leave it alone.’

  ‘It’s my sister.’

  ‘So it’s your sister. So it’s the queen of England. It’s the nature of a broad to get knocked up. Where’s it get you to beat him up?’

  ‘He learns. It’s the only way.’

  ‘There are times,’ Bert said, ‘when you show a nasty streak.’

  ‘That’s the way I feel.’

  ‘You could make him marry her.’

  ‘I need that. I got her on my back, I don’t need two of them. Anyway, she says she’d kill herself first.’

  His name was Joe Greenthal. Max got his name out of her by the simple process of threatening to turn his back on her if she tried to protect the boy or cover up for him, and then he went down to the corner outside the candy store on Pike Street and he asked around for a boy called Joe Greenthal. Compassion was not something Max had a large store of, but he almost felt sorry for this kid called Joe Greenthal, who was pudgy and had a round face and soft brown cow-eyes, and he might have walked away from it had he not spelled out his position to Bert. In all truth, what he had spelled out was only what he could articulate: the complex of pride, of family honor, of his own male macho, of his feelings about the stupidity and witlessness of the rest of his family with only himself to put some stamp of worth and importance upon them – these things he could not put into words.

  Nevertheless, they drove him to acts hardly basic to him. He had a deep inner disgust of violence that was almost genetic and certainly tribal and cultural, but he told the boy, Joe Greenthal, that he had to talk to him, alone, concerning Freida, walking him away from the candy store toward the river.

  The boy was frightened. ‘Geez,’ he whimpered, ‘I didn’t know it was going to happen. I didn’t mean anything bad. I like Freida.’

  ‘That’s why you knocked her up? Because you like her?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was going to happen, I swear I didn’t.’

  ‘So what do you think? The stork does it, right? So I’m going to teach you different. I’m going to teach you there ain’t no stork, just snotty little shits like you.’ And with that, Max drove a fist into his belly. When the boy doubled over, Max brought up his knee and laid him flat on his back. He lay on the pavement, doubled up, whimpering with pain, and Max shouted at him, ‘Stay away from her, you little son of a bitch, or I’ll come back and break both your arms.’

  The next day Freida said to him, ‘You’re a crazy lunatic. You knocked out two teeth from Joey. I hate you. I’ll always hate you.’

  ‘So you hate me. He has to learn. He learns. You learn.’

  But Max hated himself, which was also a new sensation. He kept thinking of the boy’s soft cow-eyes. A few days later, placatingly, he said to Freida, ‘I didn’t want to hurt him. I had to learn him.’

  ‘Oh, big shot!’ Freida exclaimed. ‘You’re so goddamned great. You think because you’re keeping company with that fancy teacher, you’re too good for all of us, but you can’t even talk right. I had to learn him. You don’t learn people, you teach them. You’re so smart. Why don’t you tell your teacher friend how you beat up a kid because he liked me?’

  Max was impressed. He had never thought of Freida as someone with enough guts to talk back to him.

  Freida’s anger turned into self-pity, and she began to weep. ‘Oh, Max,’ she wailed, ‘what will I do? What’s going to happen to me? All I can think of is that I have to kill myself.’

  ‘Don’t kill yourself,’ Max said.

  ‘What do you mean, don’t kill myself? What else?’

  ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’ll take care of it? You think you can do anything, you think you can twist the whole world around your finger, you’re so goddamn smart and sure of yourself!’

  ‘I said I’ll take care of it.’

  That night, sitting before his dressing room mirror, staring at his lean, hawklike face, Max felt a wave of disgust that included the rouge and cream he was smearing on his face, the ridiculous baggy checked pants he wore, the routine waiting for him and for Bert when the curtain rose, the whole way of a living that brought life and sustenance to the six members of his family. Sally, trying to smooth his rough edges, read poetry to him on occasion, hoping it might interest him. There was a long poem about an ‘ancient mariner’ and a line that went: ‘Instead of a cross, an albatross about his neck was hung.’ They were all of them his albatross.

  ‘Do you know what a ransom is?’ he asked Bert, who was using a lipstick to double the size of his mouth.

  ‘Kidnap money, you mean?’

  ‘You got it. I need a million dollars’ ransom.’

  ‘Who’d they kidnap – Vanderbilt?’

  ‘Me, and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of this shit. I’m sick of everyone’s peckle on my back.’

  ‘What’s a peckle?’

  ‘Yiddish for burden.’

  ‘Your sister really got to you, didn’t she?’

  ‘Eh, she’s nothing. Dumb, stupid kid. I found someone to take care of her, but it’s got to cost me fifty bucks.’

  ‘How do you find someone like that?’

  ‘Suzie. You got to hand it to those floozies – when you’re being squeezed, they come up with something. They always do. But fifty bucks down the drain, that hurts.’

  ‘Are you so broke?’

  ‘I’m not broke.’

  ‘Then what are you crying about money for? A lousy fifty bucks is not the end of the world. If you need money –’

  ‘Yeah, I need money, but not to square Freida. I can take care of that. It’s peanuts. Right now, I need money like a kid needs his mother’s milk, and I ain’t got it. I got maybe two hundred bucks put away, and how the hell I managed to squirrel away two yards with six yelping, shrieking hungry mouths, I don’t know. All right, I did it, and it wasn’t enough anyway, so what the hell!’

  ‘Enough for what?’

  Max turned to Bert, staring at him as if he was seeing him for the first time. ‘You’re not even married. What do you do with your dough?’

  ‘I live it up.’

  ‘Ah, bullshit. You’re no looser with a buck than I am. How much you got soaked away, Bert?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I got an idea. I been living with it for weeks, eating on it and letting it eat out my guts. It’s an idea that maybe it works, we can end up millionaires.’ He thrust a finger at Bert. ‘Throw in with me, huh? This lousy, stupid life is getting us nowhere. It stinks. It’s degrading.’

  ‘What’s degrading?’

  ‘This shit we go out there and do every night, shoving a broomstick up our pants to get a laugh, cheap double-entendres and dirty jokes, pratfalls – fuck the whole stupid routine! I need a thousand bucks. We’ll forget we ever saw a music hall.’

  ‘Max, you need fifty bucks for your sister, you got it. But don’t come to me with any get-rich-quick baloney. I’m a street kid, like you. You don’t like what we do – shit, it’s better than a goddamn sweatshop or being a stock clerk. So I’m happy.’

  ‘You’re happy?’

&n
bsp; ‘You are damn right.’

  ‘So be happy,’ Max said sourly. ‘But let me talk frankly, and just remember what I say. I say you got shit in your blood – friendly, because we’re old buddies – but I still say you got shit in your blood. Now remember, you won’t work with me in something like this, then you know what?’

  ‘What?’ Bert asked amiably.

  ‘You’ll be working for me.’

  ‘As long as the pay is good,’ Bert said.

  He had gone to Suzie, Suzie the floozie, as the kids called her. He had always gone to Suzie when he was troubled. At the age of fifteen, he had been introduced by Suzie into the world of sex. She loved Max – as much as she could love any man and perhaps because he was more a little boy than a man – and she told him, ‘You stay away from the whores or I’ll break your neck, because if you get a dose, you are washed up and your whole life is washed up, because there ain’t no cure, and anyone who says there’s a cure is sweet-talking you. Every snatch in this town is dirty, and don’t you ever think any different.’ She provided a prophylactic and instructed him: ‘This is the only thing that’ll keep you clean. Any other way, you got a dose, and then it’s yours until they put you away in the booby hatch.’

  ‘But you’re clean, aren’t you?’ Max argued.

  ‘Like shit I am. I could have been, but I’m no damn good and I pissed away my life. The Brinkerhoffs are just as good as the Kuhns and the Lehmans and the Strausses or any of the classy uptown Jews, and I could have been in silks and velvets all my life and eating in Delmonico’s and having a carriage ride me up and down Fifth Avenue, but I had to piss it all away and become a floozie, but I’m not going to dose a nice kid like you. I’ll just give you a little loving for your sake and because I like you.’

  She was telling the truth. Max had heard the story from other girls many times, that Suzie was the daughter of one of those half-mythical German Jews who had come to America two or three generations before the flood of Eastern European Jewish peasants, who had garnered wealth and influence, who ran great banking houses and industries and who lived in brownstone and granite mansions on Fifth Avenue and on Madison Avenue. What had happened to turn Suzie into a ghetto whore he didn’t know, nor did he ever have the courage to ask her; and now Max was no longer a kid of fifteen, and Suzie was a fat, aging whore in her mid-forties who clucked with sympathy.

  ‘I should have broken her ass,’ Max said.

  ‘Why, you stupid jerk?’ Suzie demanded, suddenly enraged. ‘Because you’re a man with a stinking little pecker that don’t know a damn thing except to fuck? Suppose you were a girl. Did you ever ask her how she felt, what she needed, what her life is in that hole on Henry Street?’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘Ah, what do you know! What do any of you know! I never met a man who was more than an oversized stiff putz attached to a whimpering, whining baby. All right, I’ll help you. I’ll tell Mrs Kaner that you’re coming to see her.’

  ‘Who’s Mrs Kaner?’

  ‘She used to be a midwife in the old country, and now she takes care of kids who got your sister’s disease, but it will cost you.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty.’

  It hurt. He told Freida how it hurt. ‘You know what,’ he said to his sister, ‘all my life I broke my ass to feed this lousy family and maybe put a few bucks aside. It took a year to put away fifty bucks.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whined. ‘I’m sorry and I’m so scared. What are they going to do to me, Max? Are they going to cut me open?’

  ‘Stop it! There’s no they, just this Mrs Kaner. She was a midwife. She knows what she’s doing. So stop crying. You only got yourself to blame.’

  ‘I think Mama knows,’ Freida wailed.

  ‘Mama doesn’t know. For Christ’s sake, will you stop that!’

  The tenement in which Mrs Kaner functioned was on Orchard Street, and to reach it, Max and Freida made their way through a tangle of pushcarts, screeching kids, carthorses urged on by demented, cursing teamsters, garbage, shoppers, dogs, cats – and eyes that turned to them as they went into the tenement. Evidently, Mrs Kaner’s profession was public knowledge, and Max led a trembling Freida through a hallway that stank of urine even more than their own domicile on Henry Street to a ground-floor rear apartment. The door opened a crack to Max’s knock, and a heavily accented voice asked who it was.

  ‘Max Britsky. Suzie Brinkerhoff sent me.’

  The door opened a few inches wider, and two suspicious blue eyes peered out of a wrinkled face. ‘That’s your sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Suzie told you how much – fifty dollars?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You got it?’

  Max nodded, and Mrs Kaner opened the door, ushered them in, and closed it behind them. The kitchen, always the first room in a cold-water tenement, was fairly clean.

  ‘First you pay me,’ Mrs Kaner said firmly.

  Max took out his billfold and counted out ten five-dollar bills. Mrs Kaner counted them again, folded them, pulled up her skirt to reveal a skinny leg in a black stocking, and put the money under the top of the stocking, held firm by a surprising pink garter. Then she patted Freida’s shoulder.

  ‘Stop crying, darling,’ she said to Freida, pronouncing it dollink, a word she favored, ‘will be all right, darling, maybe five hundred times I done this, and nobody ever died from it.’

  This last was certainly a lie, and Freida very nearly died. She developed an infection, and for three weeks lay in bed with a high temperature, sweating, burning, in the hot airlessness of the apartment on Henry Street. Max blamed himself. ‘Only get better, Freida,’ he told her, ‘I’ll make this up to you, I swear I will.’

  ‘It’s all right, Maxie,’ she whispered. ‘You didn’t mean for this to happen. You helped me. What I said was true: I’d rather die than marry that little dope.’

  But she didn’t die, and for years after, she recalled the event with a curious mixture of bitterness, anger, and gratitude. For Max, on the other hand, it added another piece to the lifelong puzzle that was his mother, Sarah Britsky. For while he accepted as his normal due that Sarah blamed him for what had happened to Freida – not that she ever knew exactly what had happened – he was amazed by the care and sympathy Sarah lavished on Freida during the course of the illness.

  Max could never decide whether Sarah guessed what had happened to Freida. If she had suspicions, she never voiced them, and through the three weeks that Freida lay in bed, her mother nursed her gently and patiently. For all of their poverty, the Britsky children were a healthy lot, and aside from the common childhood diseases of the time, chicken pox and measles and mumps, they had been spared serious illness. Freida’s bout with death was the first that had appeared in their household, and Sarah met it without hysteria. She sat for hours beside Freida’s bed, washed her arms and legs with cold water to cool her in the heat of the miserable little room, kept cold compresses on her brow, cooked broth to feed her, and generally displayed a degree of caring and tenderness that Max had never witnessed before. And while she tempered this by increasing the intensity of her bitterness towards Max, she nevertheless gave Max the impression of his mother as another kind of person. Which added to his confusion, but not to his understanding.

  [ F O U R ]

  There is a school of thinking which holds that individuals influence history and the course of what we call civilization and another school which denies this and hews to a theory of implacable forces. But Mr Isaac Schimmelmeyer was less than an implacable force, possibly less than an individual of any consequence except as a pious Jew and a member of the human race, for his ideas were few, his imagination limited; yet he played a curious and not insignificant role in creating that unique process which came to be called the culture of the twentieth century. But his act of creative input was shrouded. He had given no thought whatsoever to the fact that at the age of sixty, he stood at the threshold of the twentieth century. He knew nothing of a peace conference b
eing held at The Hague, held so that this new cenoury might be a passage without war; he knew nothing of the Filipino resistance fighters who had taken up arms against the American invader in that year of 1899; he knew nothing of the fierce resistance of the Boers in South Africa, tearing to shreds the British troops sent against them; and he knew nothing of the Anti-Imperialist League founded in this very city and backed by representatives from every political party, that this nation might soil its hands no more.

  What Mr Schimmelmeyer did know and what he felt almost to the point of paralysis was the death of his wife, Sadie. She had been the force, the brains, the power, behind his business enterprise, which was a fairly large retail store on West Broadway just south of Broome Street. Mr Schimmelmeyer’s business was findings. A large sign across the front of the store read: SHIMMELMEYER FINDINGS. Perhaps nothing on earth in the way of retail stock is as complicated as the stock of a finding store, which sells at least a thousand items, among them ribbons, buttons in a hundred sizes, stiffening, lining, belting, lace, thread, needles, snaps, hooks, eyes, interfacing, pattern cloth, pattern paper, tapes, scissors, bindings, pins, bobbins, marking chalk, and on and on and on. In an era when most women made their own clothes and most of their children’s clothes, the findings store was the key to successful sewing, but it was before the age of the computer, and it took a special mind to operate a findings store. Mrs Schimmelmeyer had had such a mind; her husband did not; whereupon after her death, bogged down and hopelessly entangled in the complexity of findings, Mr Schimmelmeyer decided to sell his store and go to live with his daughter in Philadelphia, thereby contributing to the unique fabric of the twentieth century. He put up a sign which proclaimed: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE. And in smaller letters: Entire Stock at Half Price.

  Since Max passed by Mr Schimmelmeyer’s store every day, sometimes two or three times a day, he could hardly remain unaware of the sign. At first it did not connect, because what Mr Schimmelmeyer had was a store and not a theatre, but then another piece of causation fell into place. This was the Congregation Beth Sholom, where Max had gone half a dozen times after his father’s death to say a prayer for his father’s soul – not out of any conviction of the efficacy of prayer, but in response to his mother’s pleading. The Congregation Beth Sholom was a shul, the Yiddish word for the combination of synagogue and school that Orthodox Jews had used as a community center from time immemorial. When the great flood of Eastern European Jews came to America toward the end of the nineteenth century, their first need – as great as their need for food and shelter – was for houses of prayer and teaching. Vaguely, they knew that the rich uptown Jews, the German Jews who had come to America half a century before, had built great houses of worship which they called temples; but for the Orthodox Jew, the temple was an abomination and the Reform Judaism of these uptown Jews was almost as alien to the Orthodox as Christianity.