Max (15 page)

‘You really mean that about the fur coat?' Snyder asked him. ‘You'd really buy her a fur coat, or are you kidding her?'

‘What do you think?'

‘I don't know, Mr Britsky, I just don't know. I never worked for a –' He caught himself.

‘For a Jew – that's what you were going to say?'

‘Not exactly,' Snyder muttered uneasily.

‘First of all, you call me Max, I call you Sam. Second, you going to work for a Jew, you face up to it. Either you figure I'm a human being like everyone else or screw the whole thing.'

‘I didn't mean it that way,' Snyder said, his face reddening. He was a large, fat young man, slow-moving and good-natured and, as Max had instinctively felt and would put it later, ‘smart as hell.' He had a round, pleasant face, wide-set baby blue eyes, and a thatch of sandy hair. ‘Look,' he went on, ‘I think you got something, something big, otherwise I never would have left my job to go to work for you, and I respect you. Sure, there are lots of them that hate Jews, but I ain't one of them, and let me tell you, I'm a Lutheran, and plenty of times when I was a kid, I was a “lousy Kraut” because my pop came over from old Germany and he spoke with an accent. So how do you feel about Lutherans?'

‘I don't know. You're the first one I ever had a conversation with.'

‘Same here.'

‘We'll manage.' Max grinned. ‘You married, Sam?'

‘I got two kids, and my wife can cook. How about having dinner with us?'

‘Someday, sure. And about that fur coat – I don't make promises to kid people. She'll get the fur coat. Stick with me, and I'll make you some promises.'

‘I'll give it a try,' Snyder said, holding out a hand to catch the wet flakes of November snow. ‘It's letting up.'

Max nodded. Snyder was blocking the card that read:
GRAND OPENING.
Max drew him aside. One or two people had paused in front of the store. It was a weekday. ‘Maybe you should have opened on a Saturday,' Freida said. The Grand Opening card announced: ‘A new entertainment.
MOVING PICTURES.
For five cents, enjoy the ultimate in entertainment. A thrilling, marvelous display of science and artistry. An experience you will never forget.'

Freida had unwrapped the ticket roll. They were old, unused tickets that Max had purchased from Guttman, who had raised his prices and had no use for the old tickets. There were a thousand tickets on a roll. ‘It says, Bijou Palace, thirty-five cents,' Freida told him worriedly.

‘Nobody reads it. If they do, they're getting a bargain. Anyway, we got a better show than the Bijou.'

‘You should have someone to collect the tickets, Max. Inside, like in the Bijou.'

‘Forget it. Just tear the ticket in half when you sell it. Keep half of it for our records. You got the cigar box I told you to bring?'

‘Right here.' She held it up.

‘Good, good.'

Snyder sighed and went inside to set up his projector. At eleven-forty, Freida sold the first tickets. They were four ladies of the street, their business slack in the early hours, strangers to Max and very excited about the notion of moving pictures. They were followed by a man and a woman – tourists, Max decided; and then Silverman, who had a grocery store across the street and who said to Max, ‘For a nickel, I can spend half an hour. My wife's at the store. She'll come when I go back.'

A carriage with four passengers pulled up by the curb. ‘What is it?' a man in the carriage shouted to Max.

‘Moving pictures.'

‘What are moving pictures?'

‘Like the kinetoscope!'

‘Vincent, what's the difference?' a woman in the carriage demanded of the man. ‘Just get us out of this wretched carriage.'

They sent the carriage away and bought four tickets. By now, the wet flakes of snow had slowed almost to a halt, and a small crowd gathered outside of the Britsky Orpheum. At five minutes to twelve, Freida had sold a hundred and eleven tickets. Even Schmidt and his wife appeared, informing Max that as his landlords they should have complimentaries. Max took a dime from his pocket, bought two tickets from Freida, and handed them to Mr and Mrs Schmidt.

At noon, Max went inside. He poked his head into the projection booth. ‘Ready?' he asked Sam Snyder.

‘Ready.'

‘Roll it,' Max said exuberantly. Snyder flicked a switch, began to turn the handle, and at the other end of the store, on Mr Eastman's silver screen, appeared the legend,
MAX BRITSKY PRESENTS MOVING PICTURES
.

At four o'clock, precisely, the Britsky family appeared. For years, Sarah had carefully hoarded pennies and an occasional nickel, hiding her fortune in a white ironstone milk pitcher, and in the course of time she had accumulated fifty-three dollars, four and a half dollars of which had gone for material for a new dress, heavy green velvet. Six dollars had gone for a new cloth coat, the first coat she had bought since her husband died, not secondhand but new. She wore all her finery now, including a hat with colored feathers, as she marched up to the ticket window of Max Britsky's Orpheum with all her family behind her, Benny, Esther, Sheila, and Reuben. It was a very fine moment for Sarah. With a straight face, Freida asked, ‘How many, please?' to which Sarah replied, ‘Two for grown people and three for children, and I shouldn't have to wait on line,' she added.

‘Mama, that's good,' Freida explained. ‘It's good business. We been doing wonderful business.'

‘I'm still his mother.'

Inside, Max awaited them. ‘I saved five seats for you,' he whispered.

‘In front?'

‘No, Mama. It's better not in front. You see better not so close.'

Grudgingly, Sarah accepted the seats, certain that Max had given the front seats to more favored people. Then her attention and the attention of the other Britskys was hooked to the screen, and for the next twenty minutes they sat enthralled when Max suggested that they sit through the show a second time, they accepted eagerly.

Afterward, Sarah dissolved, cast off anger and frustration for the moment, and said to Max almost tenderly, ‘Darling, it was beautiful, so beautiful I couldn't believe my own eyes.'

On Max's part, he couldn't believe his own ears. His mother was being both kind and complimentary. If it had happened before, he could not recall it.

Sally kept her own counsel. Admittedly, Max had done something no one else had done, at least here in the United States. He had put together a program of moving pictures and established a theatre of sorts in which they could be shown. But until Max picked her up at seven o'clock on the day his theatre opened, she was not at all sure that people would pay money to look at his moving pictures. Aside from the incredible fact that the pictures moved, they held little of interest for Sally, and although Max argued that the bulk of the population of New York – or, indeed, any other of the country's large cities – never went to a theatre or a music hall, Sally wondered whether they would pay money, even as little as a nickel, for what Max had to sell. But when Max came into her room that evening, he was euphoric.

‘By six o'clock,' he informed Sally, ‘we took in fifty-two dollars and twenty-four cents. Do you know what that means – daytime on a weekday? It means before we close tonight, we'll hit a hundred and fifty dollars, or close to it. You know, they love it. They go out and come back with their friends. I had to put Ruby in as an usher – that's something I never thought about. I'm paying him five dollars a week; after school. And this is the first day. You know, I didn't even have the brains to put an announcement in the newspaper, except Sammy Snyder knows a guy, he works for the
Tribune
, and Sammy says he'll write a story about us. Sally, I can't take you to dinner tonight. Anyway, how could I eat the way I'm so excited? I got to go back to the theatre. All right, it's only a store – to me it's a theatre. Sally, what does orpheum mean?'

Max was never quiet or contemplative, but Sally had never seen him in this state of excitement, pacing back and forth the length of her small room, refusing her invitation to sit for a moment.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean orpheum, orpheum, what does the word mean?'

‘It means a theatre, Max.'

‘Yeah, of course. Can you meet me there later?'

‘You're sure you want to, tonight, Max?'

‘Absolutely. I know you seen the show, but I want you to see it with the place filled with people. It makes a difference.'

It did make a difference, Sally realised, as she stood with Max next to the projection booth, looking over the packed rows toward the screen. ‘Only, there's something missing,' she whispered to Max.

‘What's missing?'

‘It's too quiet.'

‘Quiet? Listen to them laughing.'

‘I don't mean that. Max, you should have a piano, and the pianist can match the music to the pictures.'

He drew her outside, thinking to himself, She's crazy. Still and all, it was Sally, and Sally was smart. He gave her credit as the single person he knew who might be smarter than himself, for if there was one thing Max never doubted, it was his own intelligence. Outside, there was a line in front of the ticket window. Max didn't want anyone standing. As the day had worn on, he improvised his method of operation, instituting Ruby as the usher, instructing him to check for empty seats and report to Freida. Freida complained that she was tired. ‘I been here all day, Max. I don't even get a chance to pee.'

‘She peed,' Ruby said. ‘I brought her a sandwich and coffee.'

‘I paid for it myself,' Freida said.

‘Take it out of the ticket money. We'll work it out,' Max said. ‘It's the first day.'

Freida and Ruby were looking at Sally. So this was Max's school-teacher. ‘What's so great about her?' Freida asked Ruby afterward. ‘She's skinny if you like skinny.'

Max steered Sally away, walking down the street. ‘Let's have a cup of a coffee.'

‘That's your sister, isn't it?'

‘Yeah, well –'

‘She's so pretty. Why didn't you introduce me, Max? The boy is your brother, isn't he?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I don't understand you,' Sally said. ‘Why won't you have me meet anyone in your family?'

‘You'll meet them. When I'm ready, you'll meet them.' He changed the subject. ‘Here's a place where we can have coffee. I'm freezing. You know, I forgot my coat. I been walking around in a jacket all day.'

‘You haven't answered me.'

He busied himself with the waiter, explaining to Sally that sudenly he was hungry. He had forgotten to eat lunch. He ordered ham and eggs and a side order of pork and beans. When he was euphoric and defiant, he ate ham. Sarah kept a kosher kitchen. All the annoyance and bitterness Max felt about his mother, denied, suppressed, was momentarily put to rest when he ate ham. In terms of Sarah, it was his act of independence and defiance, although he explained it to himself as proof to Sally that he was as indifferent as she to the rules of Orthodox Judaism. ‘You see,' he said to Sally, ‘what you said about it being too quiet, I keep thinking about that. What do you mean, a piano player could match the music to the pictures?'

‘Well, for example, with the children he could play light, lovely music like Debussy's
Girl with the Flaxen Hair
. With
The Magician
, perhaps something from
The Hall of the Mountain King.
'

‘What's the
Girl with the Flaxen Hair
?'

‘It's just a sweet, lovely piece of music. But there's so much music, so many piano pieces and songs, that a facile pianist could find something to match any kind of a motion picture. But all this doesn't make me forget about your family. I want to meet them, and you must meet my family.'

‘All right, sure. Just give it time.'

‘Is it because of where you live, in that terrible flat on Henry Street? Are you ashamed of that place, Max? But you told me all about it. I know.'

‘You don't know,' Max said. ‘You just don't know.'

The next day, Max went over to the Bijou and spoke to Isadore Lubel, who was a fill-in pianist. ‘What do you get paid here?' Max asked him.

‘Four dollars a day – when I work.'

‘I'll give you five dollars, steady work, no layoffs.'

‘You got me. For that kind of steady money, Max, I kiss your ass every day.'

‘Never mind the ass-kissing. Just play good. I got to go rent a piano now, so meet me in two hours at the picture place, and I'll explain to you what kind of thing I expect you to do.'

Five weeks after the opening of Britsky's Orpheum, Max opened his second store on First Avenue, just north of Houston Street. It was a corner two-story building that had been constructed on an empty lot occupied by Hungarian squatters, who lived in tarpaper shacks and grew vegetables in small truck gardens. They gave way to progress, and Max rented two stores, removing the wall that divided them. His experience with Britsky's Orpheum paid off. Sam Snyder enticed two of Mr Edison's employees to join what was already becoming the Britsky organisation. Snyder himself was more valuable as a film scout, hunting down bits and pieces of moving pictures to feed the insatiable appetite of two moving picture theatres.

‘You got to understand why I can't pay you back that thousand dollars right now,' Max told Sally.

‘I'm not asking you for the money, Max.'

‘Sure, I know that. But I want to pay you back. It means a lot to me to pay you back, but you know, every cent I make is going into the First Avenue place. It's bigger, three hundred and forty seats.'

‘I don't need the money, Max, but why are you rushing so? You're so young.'

‘Young! I don't know what the word means. But just give me time and stick with me, kid.'