Max Read online

  In any case, they were a community of paupers with no money to build anything, whereupon they put their small funds together and rented stores here and there all through the East Side. Each store was given a proper holy name, furnished with homemade benches and a pulpit, and turned into a quickly contrived house of worship – all done in ignorance of the fact that the Quakers and the Congregationalists had done more or less the same two centuries before. It was the memory of this functional alteration of space which combined with Mr Schimmelmeyer’s sign and propelled Max into the action which determined the course of his life.

  Ever since he had witnessed the film of the Fitzsimmons-Corbett prizefight, Max had been under its spell, utterly enthralled by the fact that pictures of people in motion could be projected onto a screen. To him, it was one of the most exciting moments imaginable, and his fancy had spun endless variations of what might be projected.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he pressed Sally. ‘There’s never been anything like this.’

  ‘Max, the kinetoscope’s been around for years.’

  ‘This isn’t a kinetoscope.’

  ‘Max,’ she said patiently, ‘no one wanted to stay there and watch that dreadful fight. Half the audience walked out.’

  ‘Because they were teachers and because it was a prizefight. But the idea – don’t that excite you?’

  ‘Doesn’t it, Max,’ she said, correcting him. ‘Not very much, no.’

  Still, he refused to allow himself to be swayed by Sally. If he could be so enthralled and excited, so could other people, and if people paid money to watch the cheap and mindless routine he and Bert did each night at the Bijou, then they would more eagerly pay for motion pictures. That was the notion that excited Max and which he brooded over for months. He made inquiries about cameras and projectors, and he discovered that it would be difficult but not impossible to get the Edison equipment, possibly somewhat less difficult to buy French equipment. There was also a man called Dickson, who had worked for Edison and who had now patented his own projector. One Sunday, Max made a trip across the Hudson River on the Erie Ferry. It was the first time he had ever taken the ferry across the river to New Jersey, since his trip to play the West was north from Grand Central Station, and the trip on the boat plowing across the vast river thrilled him. He would have to take Sally on a ferry trip, but this resolve slipped from his mind once he reached West Orange in New Jersey and saw the place where Edison made his moving pictures. It was a workman there who mentioned Louis Lumière, who had developed cameras and projectors independently in France, and grasping at the name, hardly able to pronounce it, Max went to the import-export houses down on Pearl Street to learn how one bought something from France or, indeed, how one communicated with people or companies in France. He had little knowledge of anything and no background for anything, and strangely enough, none of the people he spoke to had any notion that a motion picture might be something that people would pay money to watch.

  In New Jersey, Max looked at some of the Edison motion pictures. Their length varied from three to six minutes. One was of a girl dancing. Another showed two puppies playing. Another showed two acrobats and two jugglers. It cost him ten dollars to get into the studio and get the men there to run film for him, and after the prizefight film, this stuff was disappointing indeed. The same workman who had mentioned Lumière, Sam Snyder by name, a round-faced young man of twenty-seven years, allowed Max to buy him a beer in a saloon in West Orange and informed Max that the process had been around for three years. Did Max know where Koster and Bial’s Music Hall was?

  ‘Maybe I didn’t know where West Orange is,’ Max said, ‘but I sure as hell know every music hall in New York. That’s way uptown on Thirty-fourth Street. Me and my partner, Bert, we played five nights there. We work mostly at the Bijou.’

  ‘Hey, you’re a music hall guy?’ Snyder asked excitedly.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, I was going to mention that Mr Edison put on a motion picture exhibition there three years ago, which was supposed to be the first exhibition of moving pictures, except that two guys in Germany, Skladanowsky by name, put something on the year before. They’re supposed to be pretty good, but Mr Edison’s show was a washout. How come you’re so interested in this stuff?’

  ‘I think that if you opened a theatre to show just moving pictures, people would pay to watch it. I think there’s a lot of money in it.’

  ‘I heard that before,’ Snyder admitted, ‘but nobody thinks it could work.’

  ‘Suppose I could pull it off,’ Max said. ‘Would you come to work for me?’

  Snyder grinned. ‘Sure, if you pay me enough. But I think you got a lot of opium in your pipe and a lot of pipe dreams.’

  ‘Mostly it’s the theatre,’ Max said. ‘Do you know what it costs to rent a theatre? I think if I had a theatre, I might work out the rest of it. Except,’ Max added, ‘the kind of people I’m thinking about, they never get to a theatre. They can’t afford it, and even if they could, most of them wouldn’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘Which leaves you where?’

  ‘Up shit creek, I suppose,’ Max muttered.

  A week later, walking down West Broadway, he saw Mr Schimmelmeyer’s going-out-of-business sign and remembered his visits to Beth Sholom to pray for his father’s soul.

  He was adjusting these two possibilities in his mind – a findings store going out of business and a synagogue in a storefront on Hester Street – when Joe Guttman, his boss and the manager of the Bijou Theatre, asked his opinion on the question of motion pictures. ‘I hear from Bert you are a little crazy on this subject, maybe a mayvin? Yes?’

  ‘I’m interested,’ Max said carefully.

  ‘Oh? Me, too.’

  ‘You mean you might turn the Bijou into a moving picture place?’ Max asked eagerly.

  ‘I should be so crazy. No, never! But in the Keith places and on the Procter Circuit, they put in projectors to show three-minute films between the acts.’

  ‘I know,’ Max said with disgust. ‘They’re schmucks! They don’t know what a moving picture is!’

  ‘So they’re schmucks and you know, I see.’

  ‘You think when you sell a ticket for thirty-five cents and fill a music hall, that’s the end of the world? Like hell it is! I’ll tell you something, Mr Guttman, there are millions of people never set foot in a music hall because they never had thirty-five cents to spend on a ticket, and maybe because they’re afraid to go into a music hall, especially with kids.’

  ‘Ah-hah! Tell me, Mr Mayvin, how much should I charge?’

  ‘A nickel – and three cents for the kids.’

  ‘A nickel. Go have your head examined, Max. Go do your shtick and leave high finance alone.’

  That night, Max did his shtick, and when he left the music hall, he walked over to Mr Schimmelmeyer’s findings store on West Broadway and stood in front of it for at least half an hour, brooding, counting, calculating.

  The following morning, Max was up at seven instead of sleeping until eight-thirty or nine o’clock. When he joined the family at the breakfast table in the kitchen, Sarah said, ‘Ah-hah, look who’s here, our actor, he does us the honor.’ In all truth, it was the first time in weeks; but on the other hand, his mother’s remark was in character. He could not remember a kind word from her. He lived with the feeling that she blamed him for his father’s death and, unreasonable as it was, blamed rather than felt grateful to him for their survival.

  The four youngest Britskys – Benny, now nine, Esther, now eleven, Sheila, thirteen, and Ruby, sixteen – finished eating and scrapping and went off to school. Freida, recovered and healthy, but hardly her old cheerful self, and now with a job in a shirtwaist factory on Houston Street, got ready to leave while Sarah removed the dishes from the table. Max said to her, ‘Mama, let the dishes stay for a moment. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Sure. Let them stay. They wash themselves.’

  ‘A few minutes.’

  She fa
ced him, a cup and a saucer in her hands, staring at him without pleasure. ‘Go on.’ At the door, Freida paused to listen, her curiosity piqued.

  ‘Mama, all these years I been giving you money … You put away a few dollars, didn’t you?’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘I’m asking you, Mama.’

  ‘So if I did? Who’s going to take care of me?’

  ‘I take care of you, Mama. I take care of the whole family. I always did. But right now I need money, and if you could give me a few hundred dollars –’

  ‘I should be so crazy?’

  ‘Just for a few months and then I pay it back.’

  ‘And you go away and we starve.’

  ‘Mama, why should I go away?’

  ‘You’re no different from the bums you’re with, the actors and the whores –’

  ‘Max,’ Freida said, ‘I got sixty dollars saved. You can have it.’

  ‘You got sixty dollars!’ Sarah yelled.

  ‘Forget it,’ Max said.

  ‘Everyone’s got secrets,’ Sarah wailed. ‘I slave for you, and that’s how I get paid, with secret money I never see.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mama. Forget it,’ Max said and left the apartment.

  ‘You can have the money, Mama,’ Freida said. ‘You were so good to me. I was saving to buy you something.’

  Mr Schimmelmeyer told Max of his despair. ‘It ain’t the location,’ he explained. ‘You stand on West Broadway, and the whole world walks past, but look at the size of this place. Findings. A thousand items, maybe five thousand – who could count them. My wife, may she rest in peace, she knew everything and where everything was and what the price was. Where do you find someone like her? Me, I’m going crazy. There are ten more days to the month, and I don’t pay another month’s rent. Either I sell out by then or my whole stock goes to that goniff Meyers, over on Orchard Street. Five hundred dollars, he says to me, take it or leave it. I got five thousand dollars’ worth of goods here if I got a nickel’s worth, but what should I do, kill myself?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Max said. ‘And I’m sorry to hear all this, Mr Schimmelmeyer, I certainly am. Tell me, who owns the store?’

  ‘Adolf Schmidt, and he ain’t Jewish but he thinks Jews are rich. I tell you something, he’s rich. You know what they call a building like this, a storefront with one story over it? They call it a taxpayer. Schmidt bought it for peanuts from an old Yankee, name of Culbertson. Some taxpayer. His taxes are three hundred dollars a year. From me, he collects a hundred dollars a month, twelve hundred dollars a year. Upstairs, he has three apartments. Two flats he rents, twenty dollars a month for each, and the other one he lives in. So he has a hundred and forty dollars a month without lifting a finger. My wife, she should rest in peace, and myself, we work our finger to the bone and we have a profit of maybe sixty, seventy dollars a month. So just don’t let him tell you he’s poor and Jews are rich.’

  Which was exactly what Adolf Schmidt said to Max. ‘You Jews,’ he said, ‘you’re all rich. I’m a poor man, struggling. The rent is eighteen hundred a year.’ Schmidt was having his lunch in the kitchen of his apartment over the store. He was a very fat man and his wife was a very fat woman, and as a gesture of either good will or good business, he invited Max to join him and help himself from a platter of white sausage and red kraut. Max refused the food and accepted a bottle of beer.

  ‘I know,’ Schmidt said. ‘Sausage, it ain’t kosher.’

  ‘Neither is the price,’ Max said. ‘Schimmelmeyer pays a hundred dollars a month.’

  ‘So you talked to Schimmelmeyer. I tell you something about Schimmelmeyer. He has an old lease from that stupid Yankee, Culbertson. The store is worth twice what he pays.’

  ‘I could buy his lease,’ Max said, venturing a shot in the dark.

  ‘So you get three months more the lease has to run, and then we ain’t friends. We are enemies. Now I like us to be friends.’

  ‘Sixteen hundred a year,’ Max said.

  ‘Seventeen hundred.’

  ‘Sixteen hundred and I sign a lease for five years.’

  ‘Seven years.’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘Seven years.’

  ‘Seven years,’ Max agreed. ‘You’re a hard man, Mr Schmidt.’

  ‘You deal with Jews, you got to be a hard man or you’re out of business. You pay me a month’s rent, you can open up first of next month. Hilda,’ he said to his wife, ‘give me my receipt book.’

  Max counted out one hundred and thirty-four dollars, which left him with a total available capital of sixty-one dollars. Schmidt counted the money, wrote out the receipt, and signed it. As Max was folding it into his wallet, Schmidt said to him, ‘I hope Schimmelmeyer didn’t bleed you for his stock. He pleads he don’t know nothing, but he’s a cunning old man, believe me.’

  ‘I’m not buying his stock,’ Max replied.

  ‘You’re putting in a whole new stock? What’s wrong with Schimmelmeyer’s stock? You can buy it cheap.’

  ‘I’m not in the findings business.’

  ‘Oh? Didn’t you say –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what kind of business you’re putting in the store?’

  Max was sorely tempted to tell Schmidt that he intended to turn the store into a synagogue, but he resisted the temptation and said shortly, ‘A moving picture theatre.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A moving picture theatre.’

  ‘What’s a moving picture theatre?’

  ‘A place where you show moving pictures.’

  ‘I never heard of such a thing,’

  ‘Neither did anybody else. We’re the first, Mr Schmidt.’

  ‘You’re crazy. A store ain’t a theatre.’

  ‘This one will be.’

  ‘Take your money. I don’t want any business with you.’

  ‘You took my money and gave me a receipt,’ Max said with a confidence he did not wholly feel. ‘It’s as good as a lease, and you try to back out and you’ll have a damn big lawsuit on your hands.’

  ‘So you trick me,’ Schmidt said. ‘I should know better than to do business with a Jew.’

  ‘You should,’ Max agreed. ‘You certainly should.’

  ‘Yankee’ was the word used throughout the Lower East Side as a sort of negative designation. When dealing with a person who was obviously not Jewish or Polish or Hungarian or German or Russian or Rumanian, or any of the various other ethnic groups who inhabited the area, one dealt with a Yankee. Mr Hodgkins was a Yankee. He sat behind his desk at the Rivington National Bank and regarded Max dubiously as he informed him, ‘A bank, Mr Britsky, does lend money. In that surmise, you are absolutely right. However, it appears to me that your experience with banks is somewhat limited. We lend money for reasonable enterprises, but we require collateral.’

  Max took a deep breath, cursed his own ignorance, said to himself, Fuck you, mister, so you think I’m a schmuck, and then asked, ‘What is collateral?’

  Unable to control a curl of amusement at the corner of his mouth, Mr Hodgkins explained that collateral was a thing, a bond, a piece of property worth at least thirty percent more than the amount lent by the bank, which was taken over by the bank as security for the repayment of the loan.

  ‘In other words,’ Max said, ‘you operate the same as a hock shop.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A pawn shop, Mr Hodgkins. I come here with an idea that’s maybe unique, and you tell me to bring you this collateral of yours. Mr Hodgkins, if I had something worth a thousand bucks, I’d hock it and not come brownnosing around a horse’s ass like you.’

  ‘I went to three more banks,’ he told Sally that evening. ‘The same thing.’ They were in Sally’s room. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said to her. ‘I feel choked. I feel the whole goddamn world is choking me.’

  ‘Where, Max? Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Out of here! One goddamn little furnished room!’

  ‘I don’t complain. It’s m
y home.’

  ‘What’s a home? I spend my life in that shitbasket on Henry Street! Seven of us in that lousy, roach-infested flat, pissing on each other –’

  ‘Max,’ she cried, ‘I won’t have you talk like that! I won’t have such language here, and if this room isn’t good enough for you, you can just get out of here and go back to your hooligans!’

  The unexpected outburst of anger and independence on Sally’s part amazed Max. For a long moment he stared at her, then he exclaimed, ‘You’re right! I ain’t in your class, Miss Levine! Where does the gossen jung come off, consorting with a high-class school-teacher?’ And with that, he stormed out of her room, slamming the door behind him, and leaving Sally bewildered and frightened. She had forced the issue, and now he was gone. She had never been able to accept the fact that she wanted Max; now she felt an awful shudder of fear. He was gone, and perhaps he would never return.

  In the downstairs hall of the boarding house where Sally lived, there was one of the marvelous new instruments called telephones. Mrs Schwartz, the landlady, had it installed a year before after fighting the demands and persuasions of her guests for months. An hour and a half after Max had fled from her room, Mrs Schwartz knocked at the door, complained about having to run up and down stairs for that rotten telephone, and told Sally that there was a call for her. Sally ran down the stairs, but it was not Max. It was Bert, calling from the Bijou, and he wanted to know where the devil Max was.