Max (2 page)

‘What's this?' Sarah demanded.

‘That son of a bitch Himmelman, he been here yet?' Himmelman was their landlord.

‘Don't use dirty language!' Sarah exclaimed..

‘He been here? That's all I'm asking.'

‘Yes.'

‘So what did he say?' Max asked her.

‘So what did he say – so what did he say!' she cried angrily, forgetting that she was talking to a twelve-year-old boy and talking to him as she might have talked to her husband, in a fierce, almost threatening whine. ‘What should he say, that prince of evil? Tomorrow the rent is due. Pay the rent or get out. He smells death like a dog smells filth. They say he lives uptown with the fancy rich Jews, but he was down here knocking on my door before poor Abe was cold in his grave. He'll turn us out on the street!' she cried, her voice rising.

Little Benny Britsky, one year and a half in age, lay in the crib that had come down from birth to birth. The four remaining Britsky children stood in the kitchen, partaking of the awful drama that had taken them up into itself, watching, listening, trying to comprehend the message of doomsday.

Max pointed to the money. ‘Eighteen dollars,' he said. ‘You got nine dollars to pay the rent and you got nine dollars for food. So nobody ain't going to kick us out into the street.'

‘Where did you get this?' she asked, handling the money.

‘What's the difference? I got it.'

‘You little bum, you stole it!' And she slapped him, but there was no force in the slap.

‘We won't starve,' Max said, ‘and nobody throws us out into the street.'

There have been worse declarations of intent.

It was a conceit of Max to declare in later years that he had been weaned on show business and that it was in his blood. The small operation he embarked on, along with other independent enterprises, had only a tenuous connection with show business, but like others of his enterprises, it partook of imagination. Max thought of things that escaped others. But in his case, imagination was narrowed and directed with the intensity of a laser beam. If Max had been put to introspection and forced to declare why he should have accepted the responsibility for the survival of the seven lives that constituted the Britsky family, he would have been unable to come up with an answer. But the question was not put to him, not by another and not by himself.

Show business, on the other hand, thrived in New York City in the year of 1891. There were, aside from the English-speaking theatre, four Yiddish companies, two German companies, an Italian company, and a Czech company. The czar's expulsion of the Yiddish theatre from his realm a few years before had led to a veritable explosion of Yiddish drama on the Lower East Side. In the English language, over forty theatres thrived on a succession of bad plays, interspersed now and then by the work of Shaw, Ibsen, Barrie, and Shakespeare as well as Strindberg, Hardy, and other accomplished Europeans. The age of the native American theatre was still in the future, but the love of and obsession with theatre was very much a part of the time. New Yorkers adored the theatre. Everyone who could put the price of a ticket together went to the theatre at one time or another – except for European-born shopkeepers, whose long hours and difficulties with the language made them indifferent to the English-speaking theatre.

Of this, Max was well aware, and to this end he had preserved his capital of two dollars. Each morning after his father's death, Max left the house at half-past six, his eight-year-old brother Ruby tagging along with him. They were the two Britsky children old enough to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, which the son repeats each morning and each evening for a year after his father's death. Max made Ruby his surrogate, dropping him at the door to the synagogue with the observation that nobody yet ate a prayer.

They ate bagels, however, the hard, indigestible ring-shaped pieces of bread that had been brought to America in the eighteen-seventies by the Eastern European Jewish immigrants; and since it was still too early in the morning for Max to embark on what would be remembered as his entrance into show business, he went instead to Kurtz's bagel factory on Broome Street. He had been there once before on a Sunday morning with Shutzie Levine, seventeen and tolerating Max as an assistant whom he paid off with ten cents for the morning's work. The East Side sweatshops worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, giving the Jewish workers only one day off, Saturday, and since Shutzie was still in high school, Sunday was the only day he could ply the trade, namely, the sale of hot bagels to the workers.

Max, whose schooling was in the past, entered the business on a weekday. He moved into the bakery almost unnoticed, savoring the smells hungrily, watching the bakers mold the bagels in one swift yet intricate motion, dropping them then into the pots of boiling water, from whence they were fished out and thrust into the oven to be baked to a golden brown.

Finally, someone noticed him and asked him what he wanted.

‘One hundred bagels,' Max said, flattening a dollar bill on the counter.

‘Why ain't you in school?'

The whole world of adulthood was nosy, officious, and suspicious. Storekeepers were walking into the place and walking out with huge bags of bagels. No one questioned them. Their money was sufficient.

‘School don't open until nine o'clock.'

At Stylish Shirtwaists, Inc., on East Broadway, it was the same thing. A fat janitor, sitting at the door of the old loft building, demanded to know why Max wasn't in school.

Unspoken, Max thought, Up yours, you old shithead. Aloud, he poured out the tale of his dead father and the many mouths to feed.

‘Costs you twenty cents to go in there.' The janitor was unaffected by sentiment and beyond compassion. He lived in a world of lies and liars, and Max would have been surprised if he had accepted the story as the truth.

‘Ten cents,' Max countered.

They settled for fifteen cents after Max informed him that it could be a daily source of income. Upstairs, between the clattering rows of sewing machines, Max sold his bagels, still hot, charging two cents for each and making a hundred percent profit. When the floor boss would have thrown him out, the women at the machines took pity on him and defended his right to sell his merchandise. He elicited pity and sympathy. He could assume an air of wistfulness that made his face quite lovely; he was small and skinny. When he explained his case to the women workers, their hearts went out to him. In that one building, from Stylish Shirtwaists to Sylvan Frocks to Ben's Blouses, he sold his hundred bagels, and with his capital increased almost fifty percent to three dollars, less the fifteen cents he had to pay the janitor, he went on to his beginning in show business.

In those days, when a theatrical piece opened in New York City, they placed showcards in the windows of hundreds of retail stores. The showcards were usually eighteen by twenty-four inches, and they announced the name of the show and the lead players and included a puff about the contents. In return for the use of his window as a display place, the merchant was given two tickets to the performance. Most of the merchants on the Lower East Side were indifferent to the English-language plays, performed in another world that existed uptown, and as often as not they gave away the tickets or sold them for a few cents. Once, in a grocery store on an errand for his mother, Max saw a woman pay fifty cents for a pair of tickets that the storekeeper would just as soon have given away. But since the woman was a prostitute, the storekeeper exacted payment as a sop to his moral indignation. Max, who had never seen a theatrical performance and who had no desire to see one, could not understand what a woman in his neighborhood, where money was spent on food and clothes and not much else, was doing when she put out good money for theatre tickets. Reasoning simply and directly, he decided that whores were addicted to the theatre. While this was very poor deductive reasoning, it was a lucky guess, for among the hundreds of prostitutes who plied their trade on Allen Street and Orchard Street and Ludlow Street, the uptown theatre was very much in vogue. It was their lifeline to a little class, a veneer of culture and a glimpse of life outside the ghetto.

Thus, balancing one need against another, Max made his approach directly and specifically. He went into Sal Marietta's shoe repair place and said, ‘How about the tickets for them showcards in your window? I'll buy them.'

Sal had neither the time nor the inclination for the English-speaking theatre. ‘I hear your poor mama pass away.'

‘My papa.'

‘Worse, terrible.' In Italian, he observed that this place stank, that life was an oversized outhouse, and that the poor ate shit. Max nodded in agreement, his wide blue eyes moist and vulnerable. ‘I give you this,' Sal said, offering Max a dollar. ‘Helps, maybe.'

‘I don't want money,' Max said. ‘Thanks, Sal, but that ain't what I want. I want the tickets for the showcards.'

‘What for? Your mama's dead, you go see shows?'

‘My papa. I buy the tickets. Two bits a pair.'

He left Sal's with two pairs of tickets, one for a performance of
Devil May Care
, starring Lucy Demar, and the other for a rerun of
The Mikado
, by Gilbert and Sullivan, which had a triumphant opening in New York some six years before.

He explained to Sal what he intended to do with the tickets, feeling that Sal would not screw him. Even then, Max was a fair judge of human nature. Sal promised to save the tickets for him in the future. In some way, Max understood the barrier between these hard-working storekeepers and the uptown world of the theatre, of glowing gaslights, of fine restaurants, of men in dinner clothes and ladies in their evening gowns. The nearest theatre center was on Fourteenth Street, which was either a mile away or a continent away, depending upon who you were, and the newer theatre centers in the Twenties and in the Forties were even more unapproachable. It would never have occurred to Sal Marietta to go to the theatre, even as it would never have occurred to Max.

Max's mother, Sarah, had been born in 1856, transported at the age of sixteen to the Lower East Side of New York City. Years later, Max would remember and try to comprehend what life had been for Sarah. She was only thirty-five years old when her husband died, but already worn and defeated, the juice of life squeezed out of her, the fragile bit of youthful beauty she had once possessed gone forever. She was boxed into a room with no exit; she was beyond planning or hoping or dreaming, and the thought that this strange, alien, skinny boy could provide for her and her family was untenable. The ability to love had also been squeezed out of her, replaced by fear and rage and frustration. Left to her own devices, she might well have waited for death or extinction. A woman in her situation in another ethnic group might well have killed herself and her children; Sarah might have allowed life to perform the execution at a slower rate.

But Max brought in money, and they survived. It was an affront to the normal monstrousness of life, and instead of being grateful, Sarah snapped and whimpered and raged at her son. Strangely enough, Max understood this.

But his understanding and acceptance of his mother lay buried deep in his unconscious, almost animal-like; as a despised dog clings to loyalty, Max clung to Sarah. He never asked himself whether he loved this shrike of a woman because in some strange way he was wise enough to understand her. He was guilty of denying her the horrible extinction that would revenge her on life and circumstance. He gave her a preposterous gift – continuing existence – and incredibly, yet naturally, this was something she could not forgive him. He denied her the small, terrible logic of her impending fate and doom. Explicitly, neither of them actually comprehended this; but in the process of living, it became central to their relationship to each other. With his brothers and sisters, it was another matter.

Max never separated himself from the six human beings who depended upon him. Their survival was his survival; their fate would be his fate. It was a fact, not of compassion or duty, but of reality, because he was unaware of any other reality; and as he accepted this, he also accepted his mother's anger and irritation. He tried to protect her. He wrote notes for his sister Freida, thirteen months younger than he, to bring to school, and he lied to his mother about his truancy. When it caught up with him after a visit from the truant officer, he accepted his mother's slaps and her tongue-lashing.

‘You're a bum,' she told him. ‘You're a little bum.' But her rage was weakening; she was emerging from the miasma of despair. Days and weeks had gone by since her husband's death, and still they survived and there was food on the table.

‘I do what I got to do,' Max told her. ‘I'm not a bum, Mama.'

‘Twelve years old with whores!'

‘I don't do nothing with whores, Mama. I sell them tickets.'

‘Mr Greenbaum says you pimp for them.'

‘He's a liar! I'm not a pimp.' He hated the word. He had understood the finances of pimping and prostitution since he was eight years old. It was all part of the streets, and even if he had been less than clear about the emotions and desires that went with the oldest profession, all of it existed within walking distance of his home, where pimps and prostitutes abounded. Once he had guided a customer to Suzie Brinkerhoff, but only once, and Suzie had given him a dollar. Suzie was a large, voluptuous woman in her mid-thirties, with peroxide-dyed blond hair. She was sentimental. She knew the story of Sarah Britsky and her six children, and she adored Max. She was so sentimental that her eyes brimmed with tears every time Max approached her with tickets, for in her eyes Max was not a scrawny little boy but the image of the thoughtful and selfless lover she had never known as well as the wonderful child she had never given birth to. She was indifferent to his ragged clothes and his gutter speech; she clothed him in her own fantasies. And she always bought whatever tickets he offered, cheerfully paying two dollars for a pair. When other prostitutes made obscene remarks to Max, Suzie told them to keep their lousy mouths shut, and she said to Max, ‘Stay away from them lousy whores, because they stink with social disease.' Then she proceeded to deliver an explicit lecture on the nature of syphilis and gonorrhea, leaving nothing out and describing the prognosis of both diseases with fervor and color.