Max (5 page)

The office was on the main floor, and on a bench outside the door to the office, three kids sat, staring sullenly at the floor. It was a time when the free public school was a sort of holy place, the teacher's word accepted as law, the whole system and structure sacrosanct in the eyes of the immigrant children and their parents. There were few breaches of discipline, and when they occurred, the school itself was turned into a jail of sorts, with the offending child kept sitting in his classroom for hours after closing time, writing the nature of his offense over and over. Yet this was not the source of order and obedience in the schools; rather, it was the fact that the immigrants themselves, the Irish and the Jews and the Italians who composed the bulk of the parents, regarded the free school as a shrine, an incredible and unbelievable gift to their children. Whatever they themselves suffered and endured, the filth, the poverty, the cold and hunger, there was the school as a promise for their children. And within this system, the offender was sent to the office, as these three kids had been, sitting on the bench outside and awaiting their turn and fate.

Max paused to glance at them. At least today Ruby wasn't among them. Inside the office, a matronly woman looked at him inquiringly.

‘I have a letter from Miss Sally Levine to come here,' Max explained.

‘You're too young to be a parent,' she said suspiciously.

‘Yeah,' Max agreed. ‘That's right. It's about my brother Ruby. He's in Miss Levine's class. My mother got a letter, she should come. Well, my mother can't come.'

‘Why?'

‘She's sick,' Max said, choosing the shortest explanation.

‘I'm sorry. Yes, I suppose you ought to talk to Miss Levine. You'll find her in Room Three twenty-two. That's up two flights, and when you come out of the staircase, you turn right.'

Max nodded and left, pausing outside to grin at the three sinners. ‘Mind your manners, little bastards,' he said softly. On his way up to Room 322, he silently vented his anger against Ruby. ‘Little son of a bitch, making me come to this stupid place!' Yet he too was in the grip of the place, directed and constrained by the mythology that permeated the old building. He opened the door of Room 322 gently and tentatively.

The door was at the back of the room, so only the teacher and one student saw him enter. Max was surprised at the youthfulness of Miss Levine. His last appearance in school had been at age eleven, and at that time Miss Levine's twenty-two years – as he learned later – would have appeared quite mature; at age eighteen, he might have described her as a kid. She had good features, brown eyes, a small, delicate mouth, and a great mop of rich brown hair that she wore in a large bun at the back of her neck, a severity that was
de rigueur
in her profession. The same severity accounted for her high-buttoned white blouse with long sleeves and a long gray skirt, yet in spite of the severe and colorless costume, Max had the impression of a slender yet well-rounded body.

Miss Levine stood at the front of the room at one side. Between her and Max, at the back of the room, there were six rows of desks six in a row, with an aisle down the center separating three from three. Each desk was a single unit, bolted to the floor. The student at either end of the group of three could slide out; the student in the center was trapped until one of the others gave way. Even as a kid, Max had considered it to be a silly system. The whole front wall of the room was covered with a blackboard, upon which was neatly chalked: ‘The sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines. The rhythm of the words it contains is called iambic pentameter. It must have a rhyme scheme, which can vary but which must conform to certain historical restrictions.'

Max had never heard of a sonnet, and he had no notion of what iambic pentameter meant. He felt a sudden rush of fury against his goddamn little son of a bitch kid brother who had all this handed to him and showed his appreciation by lousing it up, and at the same time, thinking this, he listened to the fourteen-year-old girl, wide-eyed and open-faced, standing in front of the class opposite Miss Levine, declaiming:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth –

The girl noticed Max at the back of the room, hesitated, stopped; and now the other students followed her eyes, turned in their seats to look at Max. He tried to put it together – the writing on the blackboard, the poem the girl was reciting, which made no sense to him, the fact that Ruby was not present, for by now all the faces had turned to him, and Miss Levine striding toward him.

‘Who are you and why are you interrupting my class?' She was certainly not the timid type, at least on her own ground.

‘I'm Max Britsky. You wrote a letter about Ruby, my brother.'

She was speaking while he was speaking: ‘Ruth, please go on. “The heroic wealth of hall and bower.” Continue with that line.'

Ruth recited:

– the heroic wealth of hall and bower
Have forfeited their ancient English dower –

Against her voice, Miss Levine said sharply, ‘If you will please wait outside, Mr Britsky, I will join you in a few minutes.' She opened the door for him and practically propelled him into the hall, and there he stood, angry, frustrated, deflated with the awareness of his own ignorance in terms of an eighth-grade class, telling himself, That bitch – that hard-assed stuck-up little bitch! Where the hell does she come off pushing me around like I'm dirt in front of a broom? I ought to go in there and tell her the right time right in front of her class.

But he didn't do that. He remained at the door, waiting, and when Miss Levine finally appeared, Max mumbled, ‘Sorry – I didn't mean to bust in there like that. In the office, they said I should come up here.'

‘Yes, of course, and that meant march in and disrupt my class.'

‘I didn't mean to disrupt your class,' Max told her, his anger returning. ‘Damnit, what was I supposed to do? They tell me, go up to Room Three twenty-two, and now you're ready to take my head off!'

She looked at him thoughtfully, then she nodded. ‘Yes, I've been rude, haven't I? I don't know whether you can understand, but this poetry session is the most meaningful thing in my teaching. To have that child, who comes from a background where no English is spoken … Well, to have her stand up in front of the class and recite from memory Wordsworth's ode to Milton, well, it's just something incredible, and that's why I was so short with you, Mr Britsky. Please accept my apology.'

Listening to her, Max was thinking that she was very attractive and very different from anyone he had ever spoken to. Her words were different, her manner of speaking was different, and there was no frame of reference to lock it into. He tried to recall his teachers at age eleven, but where a woman was observed as a woman, there was no subjective connection between age eleven and age eighteen. Miss Levine's name indicated that she was Jewish. Max had never heard of anyone with the name of Levine who wasn't Jewish, but neither had he ever met a Jewish girl who was not the product of the Lower East Side ghetto; and if this had produced Miss Levine, why did she look and talk the way she did? And how did she happen to be a teacher? In the six years of his life between entering public school and leaving it, Max had never encountered a Jewish teacher.

Max stared at her without replying, and Miss Levine went on to point out to him that she could leave her class only for a limited time. ‘I asked for Reuben's mother,' she added.

‘Well,' he said uncertainly, ‘my mother –' He was suddenly acutely conscious of the fact that he pronounced it
mudder
, and he tried to correct himself as he went on. ‘My mother's from the old country. She don't speak much English, and she'd be afraid to come here to a place like this.'

It wasn't at all what he had intended to say. He had anticipated no need for an explanation. He would simply say that his mother was sick and now he couldn't quite comprehend why he had said what he had said, but Miss Levine simply nodded and said that she understood.

‘Most immigrant women live in a state of fear. It's a wretched thing, but it's so.' Max listened and nodded, not entirely sure that he knew what she meant. ‘Still, you're his brother, and you have taken a day off work, so I can see that his education means something to your family.'

‘Well, no, not exactly. I didn't have to take a day off work. I'm an entertainer.' He was bogged down, enmeshed in his attempt to manufacture an explanation. ‘I mean, that don't mean I'm not interested in his education. But today I got no matinee.'

‘Oh?'

What did the ‘Oh' express? Contempt? Disdain? ‘What's wrong with Ruby?' he snapped.

‘Yes. You see he's not here. Is he ill?'

‘Hooky. That –' He bit off the words.

‘It's not simply truancy, although that averages at least a day a week. He forges notes from his mother, well written but transparent. You see, it's not that he's stupid. He's very clever, but he's boisterous, unruly, and very disruptive. I almost breathe a sigh of relief when he is truant.'

‘I wish I had known this,' Max said grimly, so grimly that Miss Levine smiled at the stern, stiff-necked young man who faced her. ‘No more hooky, you can be sure of that, and no more fooling around. He's going to toe the line.'

‘It will certainly help the class deportment, Mr Britsky.'

‘Yeah, I'll take care of it.'

‘Thank you. I must go back to the class now.'

It wasn't until late afternoon that Max returned to the apartment on Henry Street. It was almost five o'clock, and as he entered the kitchen, Ruby was on his way out and Sarah was shouting at him, ‘Now, five o'clock, and you're going out, and it's practically time for supper.'

‘I don't want no supper, Mama.'

‘What is this, you don't want no supper?'

They were all there in the kitchen, spectators at the scene between Ruby and his mother, Freida fifteen already, blooming, tight in her clothes like a ripe plum in its skin; the two other girls, Esther and Sheila, nine and eleven respectively, Esther with unexpected red hair, Sheila skinny and long-legged, built as Max was; and the baby, Benny, almost eight years old – all of them alive and healthy because Max had kept them alive and healthy, all of them integrated as parts in the high-pitched drama that their lives had become, packed as they were into the tiny apartment. They lived in clawing contact with each other, and they screamed and fought and bitched because they were without space or privacy and because they lacked any blueprint to define their lives; yet at the same time they were keenly aware and intrigued by the electric and dramatic quality of their disputes.

‘So you're going out,' Max said to Ruby.

‘Yeah.'

‘Going out for dinner?'

‘Yeah. Maybe.'

‘Tell him!' Sarah cried. ‘Tell him he can eat dinner at home!'

Max ignored her. ‘You going maybe to Delmonico's?'

‘What's Delmonico's? No. I'll pick up a hot dog on the corner.'

‘With what for scratch?'

‘I got thirty cents. Big deal.'

‘You are goddamn right!' Max exploded. ‘You are goddamn right, you miserable little shithead! It's a big deal. You got thirty cents, you put it down there on the table and Mama buys food. You stole it, you little bastard.'

‘Max, I didn't –'

‘Shut up! Put it on the table, or I'll give you a mouthful of teeth for dinner!'

‘Max, please,' Sarah begged him, but facing his brother's rage, Ruby emptied his pocket and threw a quarter and five pennies on the table.

‘Now get to hell inside and do your homework,' Max said.

‘I ain't got homework.'

‘You're damn right. And you know why – because you played hooky today. And how many other times? Now you listen to me. You miss another day of school or make another
wisenheimer
crack to your teacher, and I will personally beat the living crap out of you. Now get to hell in there and do your homework, and if you ain't got any, invent it!'

For the following three days, Max thought of little else than Miss Levine. He held fantasy conversations with her in which he mysteriously emerged as a student at either Harvard or Yale, both of them places about which he knew only the names and certain fuzzy connotations. Or he became a tycoon, a builder of railroads and factories, wealthy beyond measure, driving her through the city in a marvelous open two-horse carriage. Max and his partner, Bert Bellamy, had once tried bridling, as it was called, at Delmonico's restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. The bridler was a kid who grabbed the bridle when the carriages lined up outside of Delmonico's waiting to discharge their dinner guests, his pretense being that he kept the horse from rearing, and sometimes there was a half-dollar tip. But the competition was fierce and the doormen were brutal. When they caught a kid, they beat him unmercifully, and after Bert had been trapped and beaten, he and Max gave it up. But Max remembered the carriages, the men in their evening clothes, the women bejeweled in pearls and diamonds and overdressed in their expensive and incredibly ornate gowns of silk and moiré and taffeta and lace. To Max, they were neither overdressed nor vulgar, only enviable, and he saw himself and Miss Levine descending from one of those carriages. Yet his fantasies foundered upon the fact that he did not know her first name.

What had he done with her letter? Her name had been written there, yet he had read it in such a flush of irritation that he had not even noticed her first name. He searched everywhere in the apartment for the letter, to the tune of, ‘Max, what are you looking for?' from the others in the family. But the letter was gone. He even contemplated asking Ruby what Miss Levine's first name was, but thrust the notion aside. When he told Bert about his dilemma, Bert said impatiently, ‘Schmuck, go ask her.'