Max (11 page)

‘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 being 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.

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.