The Rise of David Levinsky (47 page)

He told me of a case in which one of the oldest and most successful physicians on the East Side had made a false diagnosis, and where he, Mindels, had made the correct one and saved the patient’s life.

“The family wouldn’t hear of another doctor now. They would give their lives for me,” he said, with a simper.

I took him up to my factory and showed him about. He was lavish in his expressions of surprise at the magnitude of my concern, and when I asked him to have dinner with me that evening he seemed to be more than pleased. Apart from other feelings, he was probably glad to renew acquaintance with a man who could afford to pay a decent doctor’s bill, and through whom he might get in touch with other desirable patrons.

Presently he wrinkled his forehead, as though he had suddenly remembered something.

“Oh! Let me see!” he said. “Couldn’t we postpone it? I have a confinement this evening. I expect to be called at any moment.”

We changed the date, and he departed. I was left somewhat excited by the reminiscences that the meeting had evoked in me. I fell to pacing the floor of my office, ruminating upon the change which the past few years had wrought in his life and in mine. His boastful garrulity was something new in him. Was it the struggle for existence which was forcing it upon him? I wondered whether that confinement story was not a fib invented to flaunt his professional success. Thereupon I gave myself credit for my knowledge of human nature. “That’s one of the secrets of my success,” I thought. I complimented myself upon the possession of all sorts of talents, but my keenest ambition was to be recognized as an unerring judge of men.

The amusing part of it was that in 1894, for example, I found that in 1893 my judgment of men and things had been immature and puerile. I was convinced that now at last my insight was a thoroughly reliable instrument, only a year later to look back upon my opinions of 1894 with contempt. I was everlastingly revising my views of people, including my own self.

BOOK XI

MATRIMONY

O
NE afternoon in January or February I was on a

Lexington Avenue car going up-town. At Sixty-seventh Street the car was invaded by a vivacious crowd of young girls, each with a stack of books under one of her arms. It was evident that they were returning home from Normal College, which was on that corner. Some of them preferred to stand, holding on to straps, so as to face and converse with their seated chums.

I was watching them as they chattered, laughed, or whispered, bubbling over with the joy of being young and with the consciousness of their budding womanhood, when my attention was attracted to one of their number—a tall, lanky, long-necked lass of fifteen or sixteen. She was hanging on to a strap directly across the car from me. I could not see her face, but the shape of her head and a certain jerk of it, when she laughed, looked strikingly familiar to me. Presently she chanced to turn half-way around, and I recognized her. It was Lucy. I had not seen her for six years. She was completely changed and yet the same. Not yet fully formed, elongated, attenuated, angular, ridiculously too tall for her looks, and not quite so pretty as she had been at nine or ten, but overflowing with color, with light, with blossoming life, she thrilled me almost to tears. I was aching to call out her name, to hear myself say “Lucy” as I had once been wont to do, but I was not sure that it would be advisable to let her father hear of my lingering interest in his family. While I was thus debating with myself whether I should accost her, her glance fell on me. She transferred it to one of the windows, and the next moment she fell to eying me furtively.

“She has recognized me, but she won’t come over to me,” I thought. “She seems to be aware of her father’s jealousy.” It was a painful moment.

Presently her fresh, youthful face brightened up. She bent over to two of her girl friends and whispered something to them, and then these threw glances at me. After some more whispering Lucy faced about boldly and stepped over to me.

“I beg your pardon. Aren’t you Mr. Levinsky?” she asked, with sweet, girlish shyness.

“Of course I am, Lucy! Lucy dear, how are you? Quite a young lady!”

“ I was wondering,” she went on without answering. “At first I did not know. You did seem familiar to me, but I could not locate your face. But then, all at once, don’t you know, I said to myself, ‘Why, it’s Mr. Levinsky.’ Oh, I’m so glad to see you.”

She was all flushed and beaming with the surprise of the meeting, with consciousness of the eyes of her classmates who were watching her, and with something else which seemed to say: “I am Lucy, but not the little girl you used to play with. I am a young woman.”

“And I was wondering who that tall, charming young lady was,” I said. “Lord! how you have grown, Lucy!”

“Yes, I’m already taller than mother and father,” she answered.

“Than both together?”

“No, not as bad as all that,” she giggled.

For children of our immigrants to outgrow their parents, not only intellectually, but physically as well, is a common phenomenon. Perhaps it is due to their being fed far better than their parents were in their childhood and youth.

I asked Lucy to take a seat by my side and she did, cheerfully. (“Maybe she does not know anything,” I wondered.)

“How is Danny?” I asked. “Still fat?”

“No, not very,” she laughed. “He goes to school. I have a little sister, too,” she added, blushing the least bit.

I winced. It was as though I had heard something revoltingly unseemly. Then a thought , crossed my mind, and, seized with an odd feeling of curiosity, I asked:

“How old is she?”

“Oh, a little less than a year,” Lucy replied. “She’s awful cute,” she laughed.

“And how is papa?” I inquired, to turn the conversation.

“He’s all right, thank you,” she answered, gravely. “Only he lost a lot of money on account of the hard times. Many of his customers were out of work. Business is picking up, though.”

“And how is Becky? Are you still great friends?”

“Why, she ought to be here!” she replied, gazing around the car. “Must be in the next car.”

“In another car!” I exclaimed, in mock amazement. “Not by your side?”

Lucy laughed. “We are in the same class,” she said.

“And, of course, the families still live in the same house?”

She nodded affirmatively, adding that they lived at One Hundred and Second Street near Madison Avenue, about a block and a half from the Park.

“Come up some time, won’t you?” she gurgled, with childish amiability, yet with apparent awkwardness.

I wondered whether she was aware of her father’s jealousy.

“If she were she certainly would not invite me to the house,” I reflected.

I made no answer to her invitation.

“Won’t you come up?” she insisted.

I thought: “She doesn’t seem to know anything about it. She has only heard that I had a quarrel with her mother.” I shook my head, smiling affectionately.

“Why, are you still angry at mother?” she pursued, shaking her head, deprecatingly, as who should say, “You’re a bad boy.”

I thought, “Of course she doesn’t know.” I smiled again. Then I said:

“You’re a sweet girl, all the same. And a big one, too.”

“Thank you. Do come. Will you?”

I shook my head.

“Will you never come?” she asked, playfully. “Never? Never?”

“I have told you you’re a charming girl, haven’t I? What more do you want?”

The American children of the Ghetto are American not only in their language, tastes, and ambitions, but in outward appearance as well. Their bearing, gestures, the play of their features, and something in the very expression of their Semitic faces proclaim the land of their birth. All this was true of Lucy. She was fascinatingly American, and I told her so.

“You’re not simply a charming girl. You’re a charming American girl,” I said.

I wondered whether Dora had been keeping up her studies, and by questioning Lucy about the books under her arm I contrived to elicit the information that her mother had read not only such works as the
Vicar of Wakefield,
Washington Irving’s
Sketch
Book, and Lamb’s
Shakespeare Stories,
which had been part of Lucy’s course during her first year at college, but that she had also read some of the works of Cooper, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and all sorts of cheaper novels.

“Mother is a great reader,” Lucy said. “She reads more than I do. Why, she reads newspapers and magazines—everything she can lay her hands on! Father calls her Professor.”

She also told me that her mother had read a good deal of poetry, that she knew the “Ancient Mariner” and “The Raven” by heart.

“She’s always at me because I don’t care for poetry as much as she does,” she laughed.

“Well, you’re not taller than your mother in this respect, are you?”

“N-no,” she assented, with an appreciative giggle.

She left the car on the corner of One Hundred and Second Street. I was in a queer state of excitement.

It flashed upon my mind that the section of Central Park in the vicinity of One Hundred and Second Street teemed with women and baby-carriages, and that it was but natural to suppose that Dora would be out every day wheeling her baby in that locality, and reading a book, perhaps. I visioned myself meeting her there some afternoon and telling her of my undying love. I even worked out the details of the plan, but I felt that I should never carry it out.

I still loved Dora, but that was the Dora of six years before, an image of an enshrined past. She was a dear, sad memory scarcely anything more, and it seemed as though to disturb that sadness were sacrilege.

“I shall probably run up against her some day,” I said to myself, dolefully.

And an echo seemed to add, “You are all alone in the

I
WAS a lonely man.

I was pulsating with activity and with a sense of triumph. I was receiving multitudes of new impressions and enjoying life in a multitude of ways, with no dearth of woman and song in the program. But at the bottom of my consciousness I was always lonely.

There were moments when my desolation would assert itself rather violently. This happened nearly every time I returned to New York from the road. As the train entered the great city my sense of home-coming would emphasize a feeling that the furnished two-room apartment on Lexington Avenue which was waiting to receive me was not a home.

Meyer Nodelman, whom I often met in a Broadway restaurant at the lunch hour these days, would chaff or lecture me earnestly upon my unmarried state.

“You don’t know who you’re working for,” he would say, his sad, Oriental face taking on an affectionate expression. “Life is short at best, but when a fellow has nobody to bear his name after he is gone it is shorter still. Get married, my boy. Get married.”

He took a lively interest in the growth of my business. He rejoiced in it as though he ascribed my successes to the loans he had given me when I struggled for a foothold. He often alluded to those favors, but he was a devoted friend, all the same. Moreover, he was a most attractive man to talk to, especially when the conversation dealt with one’s intimate life. With all his illiteracy and crudity of language he had rare insight into the human heart and was full of subtle sympathy. He was the only person in America with whom I often indulged in a heart-to-heart confab. He was keenly aware of my loneliness. It seemed as though it disturbed him.

“You are not a happy man, Levinsky,” he once said to me. “ You feel more alone than any bachelor I ever knew. You’re an orphan, poor thing. You have a fine business and plenty of money and all sorts of nice times, but you are an orphan, just the same. You’re still a child. You need a mother. Well, but what’s the use? Your own mother—peace upon her—cannot be brought to life until the coming of the Messiah, so do the next best thing, Levinsky. Get married and you will have a mother—for your children. It isn’t the same kind, but you won’t feel lonesome any longer.”

I laughed.

“Laugh away, Levinsky. But you can’t help it. And the smart books you read won’t help you, either. You’ve got to get married whether you want it or not. This is a bill that must be paid.”

I had lunch with him a day or two after my meeting with Lucy. The sight of his affectionate, melancholy face and the warmth of his greeting somehow made me think of the sentimental mood in which I had been left by that encounter.

“I do feel lonesome,” I said, with a smile, in the course of our chat. “I met a girl the other day—”

“Did you?” he said, expectantly.

“Oh, she is a mere child, not the kind of girl you mean, Mr. Nodelman. I once boarded in her mother’s house. She was a mere child then. She is still a child, but she goes to college now, and she is taller than her mother. When I saw her I felt old.”

“Is that anything to be sad about? Pshaw! Get married, and you’ll have a daughter of your own, and when she grows up you won’t be sorry. Take it from me, Levinsky. There can be no greater pleasure than to watch your kids grow.” And he added, in a lower tone, “I do advise you to get married.”

“Perhaps I ought to,” I said, listlessly. “But then it takes two to make a bargain.”

“Oh, there are lots of good girls, and you can have the best piece of goods there is.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be hard to find a good girl, perhaps. The question is whether she’ll be good after the honeymoon is over.”

“You don’t want a bond and mortgage to guarantee that you’ll be happy, do you? A fellow must be ready to take a chance.”

There is an old story of a rabbi who, upon being asked by a bachelor whether he should marry, said: “If you do you will regret it, my son; but then if you remain single you are sure to regret it just as much; perhaps more. So get married like everybody else and regret it like everybody else.” Nodelman now quoted that rabbi. I had heard the anecdote more than once before, but it seemed as though its meaning had now revealed itself to me for the first time.