Max (18 page)

‘What's to say? I'm dizzy.'

‘Sure, join the club. We're all dizzy. It's no lead pipe cinch. We work eighteen hours a day, but someday – Well, what do you say?'

‘Max, stand up.' Max stood up, and Bert went around the desk and embraced him, not freed of his anger but diluting it with guilt.

‘The hell with that,' Max said. ‘You want to be loving, go out and get yourself laid. I'll see you at the Bijou, nine o'clock tomorrow morning.'

After Bert left, Max went into Feldman's office and said, ‘Well, Freddy, what do you think of him?'

‘Just caught a glimpse of him.'

‘Give me your impression.'

‘Good-looking man. He's not Jewish, is he?'

‘I'll tell you something, Freddy. North of Rivington Street, the world stops being Jewish. That's always a surprise to me when I think about it, but it's a fact.'

‘It certainly is, Mr Britsky.'

‘Something else, Freddy.'

‘Yes.'

‘When Bert comes to work for me –'

‘You hired him?'

‘Absolutely. Bert is almost as smart as I am. We started together when we were kids. I owe Bert something, and when I owe I pay. That's a principle of mine. Maybe you didn't think I got principles, Freddy, and while I confess I ain't overloaded, I got two or three. Anyway, what I started to say is that when Bert comes to work here, he will call me Max and I'll call him Bert. So maybe enough Mr Britsky, and from now on you call me Max.'

‘Yes, certainly, Mr Britsky.'

‘Max.'

‘Max.'

Sally was a welter of mixed feelings – confusion, fear, excitement, distaste for herself – all of it combined with a strange kind of anticipation. Her father and mother were correct in one thing: every boy she had known or been introduced to in the Flatbush community was now married, and she herself was no longer considered eligible for marriage in the terms structured by the tight Jewish community in which she lived. Twenty-six or twenty-seven, it mattered little; she was already a spinster, one of a whole class of unmarried schoolteachers. She spoke like them, reproduced their mannerisms, and, indeed, had taken on their approach to many things; and in that part of her being, she had always rejected the notion of marrying Max. She had also rejected Max again and again, a rejection which he at first refused to accept. On the other hand, she had never met anyone whom she could successfully compare to Max. Max was exciting; any evening with him promised a surprise. Max was always bursting with himself; and compared to Max, every other man she knew was dull and dreary and only half alive.

Whereby the rejections by Sally and the refusal to accept rejection on the part of Max had become a pattern in their relationship – until finally Max tired of it. Two years before, she appeared to be on the brink of a willingness to accept Max and become his wife, then she moved back from the brink, slowly yet firmly. And now she had not seen or heard from Max for over a month when she took the bit in her teeth, called him, and invited him to her room for a ‘chafing dish' dinner. The chafing dish fad was sweeping New York at that time. Thousands of young men and women flooded into the city from every state in the Union, and most of them could only find living space in furnished room houses that had no kitchen facilities. The invention of a baked crockery dish held in a metal frame over an alcohol burner was welcomed, and the newspapers were full of recipes to be done in a chafing dish. Sally had decided upon a Welsh rabbit and with it, a bottle of excellent French wine. She had also purchased a small ice-block, which she chipped into pieces to fill the wine cooler. This with candles, a lace tablecloth that her mother had given her, and French pastry to finish the meal was the basis of Sally's plan for entrapment.

And thereby her mixed feelings of fear, excitement, and anticipation. Somehow, this evening, she would maneuver Max into asking her to be his wife, and this time she would seal a bargain. Her parents were right; she had to be married. She was not a white Protestant schoolteacher, like her colleagues; unmarried, she had no place in her world, and if she were to be married, why not Max? Already, he was reasonably rich, he was exciting, he was bright, and he was quite good-looking. What more did she expect? Her romantic dreams? She was too old for romantic dreams.

‘My own dream,' Max said later that evening, his stomach full of melted cheese, toasted bread, wine, and French pastry, ‘was that someday we would be married. But the kind of game you were playing with me –' He shook his head.

‘You think it was a game?'

‘What else? One day you liked me, maybe you loved me, the next day it was no, no, Max, I'm sorry, I can't possibly see you tomorrow; no, for the next few weeks I must be with myself, I have to take stock of myself –'

‘Oh, no!' Sally exclaimed. ‘Did I sound like that?'

‘More or less. You're always taking stock of yourself, like you were some kind of dry goods store.'

‘And that's how you think of me, as a dry goods store?'

‘That's not what I meant. You always take what I mean and twist it around.'

‘Now wait a moment,' Sally said. ‘Did you ever ask me straight out to marry you?'

‘Maybe fifty times. You want me to ask you again? Hey, Sally, how about us getting married? I'm twenty-three years old, which means I'm sort of grown up. I draw four hundred dollars a week out of my company, and I have my own hansom cab standing by eight hours a day.'

‘That's just the way you would ask someone to marry you,' Sally said.

‘What's the difference? You wouldn't marry me when I didn't have a pot to piss in –'

‘That's why!' she shouted. ‘You think that's so tough and clever – a pot to piss in! Doesn't anything matter to you? Don't you have any standards of politeness or decency? Can't you learn anything? I ask you here and try to make everything as nice and proper as possible, and then you come in here and use language that a stevedore wouldn't use –'

‘Sally, I forgot myself.'

‘– and you spoil everything.' She burst into tears, aware that she had blown it beyond repair, ready to run into another room and slam the door behind her; but there was no other room. This was all of it, this one single room that was suddenly chokingly small and intolerable.

Max got up and went over to her and put his arms around her. ‘Sally, Sally darling, don't cry, please. You're right. Please forgive me. I can understand why you don't want to marry me.'

‘But I do,' she sobbed.

‘You do what?' He let go of her and turned her face up to him.

‘Don't look at me. I look horrible when I cry.'

‘What did you say before?'

‘I said –' She took a deep breath. ‘I said I do want to marry you.'

‘That's what you said?'

‘Yes, Max, that's what I said.'

Max walked into the precinct house, telling himself, I hate these places. Every time I set foot in one, it means trouble. Since I was a kid, I been paying them. It's no goddamn police station, it's a bank.

Sergeant Carney, sitting behind the desk, nodded at him with a long, doleful face.

‘What is it now?' Max asked.

‘Your brother Benny.'

‘So that's where he is. My mother's only tearing out her hair and he's here in jail, right? You got the kid locked up?'

‘That's right, Mr Britsky.'

‘He's thirteen years old,' Max said indignantly.

‘You'd better take that up with Captain Clancy.'

‘Is he all right?'

‘Your brother? Full of piss and vinegar, the little bastard.'

‘You can say that again,' Max agreed, and he went up the stairs to Clancy's office. Clancy's two hundred and forty pounds, a balanced mixture of fat and muscle beneath a beet-red face and thinning hair, sat behind a littered desk. He was finishing a sandwich and drinking beer from a tin lunchpail.

‘Ah, Max,' he said, ‘me heart goes out to you. You break your ass for that family of yours, and what does the little bastard do but end up in the clink.'

‘What did he do?' Max asked.

‘Not what
he
did, Max. He was enticed, the poor little bastard. The Slunsky twins broke into Cohen's fur place over on Division Street, but we got them now. They're a bad lot, the Slunskys.'

‘But Benny? Where does he come into it?'

‘They gave him a dollar and hired him to be their lookout, and when Officers Delaney and Coogan approached the place, there was this brother of yours hooten and yelling copper, so we collared him along with the Slunskys. Now what am I to do with the little bastard?'

‘Let me do it,' Max said. ‘He'll eat standing up for a week.'

‘But he was nabbed in the commission of a crime, Max.'

Max went into his pocket and came up with a roll of bills. ‘Three hundred and fifty tonight –'

Clancy's pink face remained sad and unresponsive.

‘– and a hundred and fifty more tomorrow.'

Clancy smiled. ‘Sure, Max, take the little bastard home and teach him the law.'

They brought Benny out to where Max was waiting. Benny's dirty face was streaked with tears, and when he saw Max's expression, he would have gladly turned around and gone back to the holding pen where he had spent the past two hours. Outside the station house, he wailed to Max, ‘What are you going to do to me? You going to kill me?'

‘I'd like to, you miserable little bum.'

‘Max, I didn't do nothing. They just give me a dollar and tell me to lay chickee.'

‘If it wasn't your mother would know about it, I'd tan your ass so you wouldn't sit down for a week. Meanwhile, you miserable little shithead, I put five hundred dollars into Clancy's pocket, which is maybe five hundred times more than you're worth, even retail, and you are going to pay it back to me, every cent. So from now on, every day after school, you go to work for me, and maybe when you work off five hundred dollars I'll talk to you again.'

He couldn't stay away from the Bijou. It was one thing to rent a store and fill it with folding chairs and put in a projection booth; it was another thing entirely to have an entire theatre for himself. The
New York Times
paid adequate tribute to this action with a story headlined: ‘First Moving Picture Theatre Planned by Max Britsky.' It was the first time Max had seen his name in print, and although the newspaper story went on to say, ‘Old veterans of the theatrical business have little faith in the possibility of the theatre surviving on a program of moving pictures,' Max's elation was not dampened. He had been interviewed by reporters from both the
Times
and the
Herald
. No, he said, he had no intention of changing the name. The name had nostalgic importance for him since he had once worked as an entertainer in the Bijou. With Mr Bellamy, he hastened to add, who would now be managing the Bijou. Mr Bellamy stood in the background, watching, listening, trying to connect this Max Britsky with his old partner. As for the Bijou, it would be called Britsky's Bijou. Max added that he was negotiating for another theatre, the old Garrett Theatre in Brooklyn. It required extensive restoration and repair, but that would be taken care of, and eventually it would be called Britsky's Orpheum. Did they know that orpheum meant a theatre and that it came from a Greek word originally? And here, in Britsky's Bijou, the first moving picture to be shown was a ‘new and brilliant' work, called
The Automobile Thief
.

Two men, Frank Stanford and Jack Calvin, had opened a place near Plainfield, New Jersey, where moving pictures were being made. Stanford and Calvin were not making the pictures themselves; they ran a booking agency out of Philadelphia. Nor was it believed that the money for the moving pictures came from them, rather that they were fronting either for the Edison interests, the Eastman interests, or possibly the Bell Telephone Company. Sam Snyder, who had been dealing with them, was unable to pin down the source of their financial backing, but as he pointed out to Max, ‘It doesn't matter. They're doing the distributing, and we're getting in on the ground floor.' Max told Sam to go ahead and sign a rental contract for the film.

Max ran the film for himself and a handful of others in the Bijou a few days before the scheduled opening of the theatre. The silver screen, enormous when compared to the screens in the storefront movie houses, was in itself an exciting visual treat. Max had invited Sally to join him and Ruby and Sam Snyder, Bert Bellamy, Freddy Feldman, and Isadore Lubel, the pianist, who now doubled as music director, not only playing piano himself, but constantly digging up additional pianists for the nickelodeons Max added to his chain. Since Sam Snyder had' seen the film several times, he took care of the projection booth. Max put himself and his guests in the first row of the balcony, deciding that would be the best angle from which to view the film.

The film was fourteen minutes in length and would have to be boxed in with short fillers to suit Max's plan. The film opened with a card frame that read:
MAX BRITSKY PRESENTS
, and then credits for three men involved in the making. There was no credit for acting, scenario, or any technical work and no identification of the roles of the makers. In the first scene, the camera was fixed on a street, and for about half a minute the camera simply photographed the traffic moving by. At first, this was only hansom cabs, carriages, drays, and carts. Then an automobile appeared. The car was recognisable as one of Ransom Eli Olds' curved-dash Oldsmobiles, but instead of being open to the air, it carried a wagon top, and the stick steering bar had been replaced by a wheel. A man and a woman, both of them covered in long dusters, were sitting in the car. The car drew up alongside the curb, and the man got out and went through an exaggerated pantomime of politeness in helping the woman down out of the car. Now two ragged, dirty-faced kids appeared and began to examine the car, touching it here and there. It was plain that they had never seen an automobile before and were intrigued by it, but their curiosity angered the driver, who drove them away and then chased them down the street. The camera turned to follow them as the three, the driver and the two kids, ran away.