The Rise of David Levinsky (48 page)

“According to that rabbi, marriage is not a pleasure, but a miserable necessity,” I urged.

“Well, it isn’t all misery, either. People are fond of saying that the best marriage is a curse. But it’s the other way around. The worst marriage has some blessing in it, Levinsky.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Get married and you will. There is plenty of pleasure in the worst of homes. Take it from me,. Levinsky. When I come home and feel that I have somebody to live for, that it is not the devil I am working for, then—take it from me, Levinsky—I should not give one moment like that for all the other pleasures in the world put together.”

I thought of his wife whom his mother had repeatedly described to me as a “meat-ball face” and a virago, and of his home which I had always pictured as hell. His words touched me.

“It isn’t that I don’t want to take chances, Mr. Nodelman. It’s something else. Were you ever in love, Mr. Nodelman?”

“What? Was I in love? Why?” he demanded, coloring. “What put it in your head to ask me such a funny question?”

“Funny! There’s more pain than fun in it. Well, I have loved, Mr. Nodelman, and that’s why it’s so hard for me to think of marriage as a cold proposition. I don’t think I could marry a girl I did not love.”

I expected an argument against love-marriages, but Nodelman had none to offer. Instead, he had me dilate on the bliss and the agony of loving. He asked me questions and eagerly listened to my answers. I told him of my own two love-affairs, particularly of my relations with Dora. I omitted names and other details that might have pointed, ever so remotely, to Mrs. Margolis’s identity. Nodelman was interested intensely. His interrogations were of the kind that a girl of sixteen who had not yet loved might address to a bosom friend who had. How does it feel to be in doubt whether one’s passion had found an echo? How did I feel when our lips were joined in our first kiss? How did she carry herself the next time I saw her? Was she shy? Did she look happy? Was she afraid of her husband? Was I afraid?

The restaurant had been nearly deserted for about an hour, and we still sat smoking cigars and whispering.

O
NE day, as Nodelman took his seat across the table from me at the restaurant, he said:

“Well, Levinsky, it’s no use, you’ll have to get married now. There will be no wriggling out of it. My wife has set her mind on it.”

“Your wife?” I asked in surprise.

“Yes. I have an order to bring you up to the house, and that’s all there is to it. Don’t blame her, though. The fault is mine. I have told her so much about you she wants to know you.”

“To know me and to marry me off, hey? And yet you claim to be a friend of mine.”

“Well, it’s no use talking. You’ll have to come.”

I received a formal invitation, written in English by Mrs. Nodelman, and on a Friday night in May I was in my friend’s house for supper, as Nodelman called it, or “dinner,” as his wife would have it.

The family occupied one of a small group of lingering, brownstone, private dwellings in a neighborhood swarming with the inmates of new tenement “barracks.”

“Glad to meechye,” Mrs. Nodelman welcomed me. “Meyer should have broughchye up long ago. Why did you keep Mr. Levinsky away, Meyer? Was you afraid you might have reason to be jealous?”

“That’s just it. She hit it right. I told you she was a smart girl, didn’t I, Levinsky?”

“Don’t be uneasy, Meyer. Mr. Levinsky won’t even look at an old woman like me. It’s a pretty girl he’s fishin’ for. Ainchye, Mr. Levinsky?”

She was middle-aged, with small features inconspicuously traced in a bulging mass of full-blooded flesh. This was why her mother-in-law called her “meat-ball face.” She had a hoarse voice, and altogether she might have 361 given me the impression of being drunk had there not been something pleasing in her hoarseness as well as in that droll face of hers. That she was American-born was clear from the way she spoke her unpolished English. Was Nodelman the henpecked husband that his mother advertised him to be? I wondered whether the frequency with which his wife used his first name could be accepted as evidence to the contrary.

They had six children: a youth of nineteen named Maurice who was the image of his father and, having spent two years at college, was with him in the clothing business; a high-school boy who had his mother’s “meat-ball” face and whose name was Sidney—an appellation very popular among our people as “swell American”; and four smaller children, the youngest being a little girl of six.

“What do you think of my stock, Levinsky?” Nodelman asked. “Quite a lot, isn’t it? May no evil eye strike them. What do you think of the baby? Come here, Beatrice! Recite something for uncle!”

The command had barely left his mouth when Beatrice sprang to her feet and burst out mumbling something in a kindergarten singsong. This lasted some minutes. Then she courtesied, shook her skirts, and slipped back into her seat.

“She is only six and she is already more educated than her father,” Nodelman said. “And Sidney he’s studyin’ French at high school. Sidney, talk some French to Mr. Levinsky. He’ll understand you. Come on, show Mr. Levinsky you ain’t going to be as ignorant as your pa.”

The scene was largely a stereotyped copy of the one I had witnessed upon my first call at the Margolises’.

Sidney scowled.

“Come on, Sidney, be a good boy,” Nodelman urged, taking him by the sleeve.

“Let me alone,” Sidney snarled, breaking away and striking the air a fierce backward blow with his elbow.

“What do you want of him?” Mrs. Nodelman said to her husband, frigidly.

My friend desisted, sheepishly.

“He does seem to be afraid of his American household,” I said to myself.

After the meal, when we were all in the parlor again, Nodelman said to his wife, winking at me:

‘Poor fellow, his patience has all given out. He wants to know about the girl you’ve got for him. He has no strength any longer. Can’t you see it, Bella? Look at him! Look at him! Another minute and he’ll faint.”

“What girl? Oh, I see! Why, there is more than one!” Mrs. Nodelman returned, confusedly. “I didn’t mean anybody in particular. There are plenty of young ladies.”

“That’s the trouble. There are plenty, and no one in particular,” I said.

“Don’t cry,” Nodelman said. “Just be a good boy and Mrs. Nodelman will get you a peach of a young lady. Won’t you, Bella?”

“I guess so,” she answered, with a smile.

“Don’t you understand?” he proceeded to explain. “She first wants to know the kind of customer you are. Then she’ll know what kind of merchandise to look for. Isn’t that it, Bella?”

She made no answer.

“I hope Mrs. Nodelman will find me a pretty decent sort of customer,” I put in.

“You’re all right,” she said, demurely. “I’m afraid it won’t be an easy job to get a young lady to suit a customer like you.”

“Try your best, will you?” I said.

“I certainly will.”

She was less talkative now, and certainly less at her ease than she had been before the topic was broached, which impressed me rather favorably. Altogether she was far from the virago or “witch” her mother-in-law had described her to be. As to her attitude toward her husband, I subsequently came to the conclusion that it was a blend of affection and contempt. Nodelman was henpecked, but not badly so.

I called on them three or four times more during that spring. Somehow the question of my marriage was never mentioned on these occasions, and then Mrs. Nodelman and the children, all except Maurice, went to the seashore for the summer.

“
Y
OU’LL examine the merchandise, and if you don’t like it nobody is going to make you buy it,” said Nodelman to me one day in January of the following winter. By “merchandise” he meant a Miss Kalmanovitch, the daughter of a wealthy furniture-dealer, to whom I was to be introduced at the Nodelman residence four days later. “She is a peach of a girl, beautiful as the sun, and no runt, either; a lovely girl.”

“Good looks aren’t everything. Beauty is skin deep, and handsome is as handsome does,” I paraded my English.

“Oh, she is a good girl every way: a fine housekeeper, good-natured, and educated. Gee! how educated she is! Why, she has a pile of books in her room, Bella says, a pile that high.” He raised his hand above his head. “She is dead stuck on her, Bella is.”

Owing to an illness in the Kalmanovitch family, the projected meeting could not take place, but Nodelman’s birthday was to be celebrated in March, so the gathering was to serve as a match-making agency as well as a social function.

The great event came to pass on a Sunday evening. The prospect of facing a girl who offered herself as a candidate for becoming my wife put me all in a flutter. It took me a long time to dress and I made my appearance at the Nodelmans’ rather late in the evening. Mrs. Nodelman, who met me in the hall, offered me a tempestuous welcome.

“Here he is! Better late than never,” she shrieked, hoarsely, as I entered the hall at the head of the high stoop. “I was gettin’ uneasy. Honest I was.” And dropping her voice: “Miss Kalmanovitch came on time. She’s a good girl. Always.” And she gave me a knowing look that brought the color to my face and a coy smile into hers.

Her husband appeared a minute later. After greeting me warmly he whispered into my ear:

“Nobody knows anything about it, not even the young lady. Only her mother does.”

But I soon discovered that he was mistaken. My appearance produced a sensation, and the telltale glances of the women from me to a large girl with black eyes who stood at the mantelpiece not only showed plainly that they knew all about “it,” but also indicated who of the young women present was Miss Kalmanovitch.

The spacious parlor was literally jammed. The hostess led the way through the throng, introducing me to the guests as we proceeded. There were Nodelman’s father and mother among them, the gigantic old tailor grinning childishly by the side of his wife, who looked glum.

“That one, with the dark eyes, by the mantelpiece,” Meyer Nodelman whispered to me, eagerly.

The girl pointed out was large and plump, with full ivory-hued cheeks, and a dimple in her fleshy chin. Her black eyes were large and round. That the object of my coming, and of her own, was no secret to her was quite evident. She was blushing to the roots of her glossy black hair, and in her apparent struggle with her constraint she put her stout, long arm around the waist of a girl who stood by her side against the mantelpiece.

Upon the whole, Miss Kalmanovitch impressed me more than favorably; but a minute later, when I was introduced to her and saw her double chin and shook her gently by a hand that was fat and damp with perspiration, I all but shuddered. I felt as though she exuded oil. I was introduced to her mother, a spare, hatchet-face little woman with bad teeth, who looked me over in a most business-like way, and to her father, a gray man with a goatee.

Miss Kalmanovitch and I soon found ourselves seated side by side. Conscious of being the target of many eyes, I was as disconcerted as I had been twelve years before, when Matilda played her first practical joke upon my side-locks. My would-be fiancée was the first to recover her ease. She asked me if I was related to a white-goods man named Levinsky, and when I said no she passed to other topics. She led the conversation, and I scarcely followed her. At one moment, for example, as I looked her in the 365 face, endeavoring to listen to what she was saying about the Purim ball she had attended, I remarked to myself that the name Kalmanovitch somehow seemed to go well with her face and figure, and that she was too self-possessed for a “bridal candidate.”

Presently we heard Mrs. Nodelman’s hoarse voice:

“Now Miss Kalmanovitch will oblige us with some music. Won’t you, please, Miss Kalmanovitch?”

A swarthy, middle-aged woman, with features that somewhat resembled those of the host, whose cousin she was, and with huge golden teeth that glistened good-naturedly, took Miss Kalmanovitch by the arm, saying in a mannish voice:

“Come on, Ray! Show them what you can do!”

My companion rose and, throwing gay glances at some of the other girls, she walked over to the piano and seated herself. Then, with some more smiles at the girls, she cold-bloodedly attacked the keyboard.

“A nauctourrn by Chopin,” her mother explained to me in an audible whisper across the room.

Miss Kalmanovitch was banging away with an effect of showing how quickly she could get through the nocturne. I am not musical in the accepted meaning of the term, and in those days I was even less so than I am now, perhaps, but I was always fond of music, and had a discriminating feeling for it. At all events, I knew enough to realize that my would-be financée was playing execrably. But her mother, her father, the hostess, and the swarthy woman with the golden teeth, were shooting glances at me that seemed to say: “What do you think of that? Did you ever see such fast playing?” and there was nothing for it but to simulate admiration.

The woman with the great golden teeth, Meyer Nodelman’s cousin, was even more strenuous in her efforts to arouse my exultation than Ray’s mother. She was the wife of a prosperous teamster whose moving-vans were seen all over the East Side. Gaunt, flat-chested, with a solemn masculine face, she was known for her jolly disposition and good-natured sarcasm. There was something suggestive of Meyer Nodelman in her manner of speaking as well as in her looks. She was childless and took an insatiable interest in the love-affairs and matrimonial politics of 366 young people. Her name was Mrs. Kalch, but everybody called her Auntie Yetta.

When Ray finished playing Auntie Yetta led the applause, for all the world like a ward heeler. When the acclaim had died down she rushed at Ray, pressed her ample bosom to her own flat one, kissed her a sounding smack on the lips, and exclaimed, with a wink to me: