Max

by Howard Fast

  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.’

  Max paused in the act of smearing his face with pancake makeup and said, ‘What? Are you nuts?’

  ‘Not me, buddy. You’re the guy who’s gone loony over this skirt.’

  ‘Hey – don’t call her that!’

  ‘Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, forgive me!’

  ‘I can’t ask her.’

  ‘Why not? Ain’t she a skirt? O.K., I apologise. She’s a dame, ain’t she?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She’s older than I am.’

  ‘Maxie baby, ease up. I never fucked a lady wasn’t older than me. Otherwise, what have you got? Jailbait.’

  ‘She ain’t that kind of a girl.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to talk about it. Forget it.’

  The first time Max went to the school after his visit on behalf of Ruby, at exactly ten minutes after three P.M., and hid himself inside the hallway of a tenement across the street, he proposed to himself that he did so to make certain that Ruby was attending classes. But if so, why at ten minutes after three, when most of the students had already left the school? Why not at ten minutes before three? The hell with it, he said to himself. I’m here, ain’t I? So I’m late.

  It wasn’t until ten minutes to four that Miss Levine emerged, flanked on either side by a lady teacher, and so flanked proceeded down the street and out of sight. Safely concealed in the darkness of the tenement hallway, Max could watch her through the glass pane in the door that led to the street. The following day, Max admitted to himself that he went there to watch her come out of the school, but that day and the next two days, Miss Levine was securely protected by the two lady teachers who walked on either side of her. Not until the fifth day of watching did Miss Levine emerge from the school alone and unescorted.

  It was not until she was halfway down the school block that Max screwed up his courage sufficiently to follow, taking long steps, half running, and then blurting out, ‘Hello, Miss Levine!’

  But his voice came forth a quavering squeak, and Miss Levine paused to turn and regard him with astonishment. He stood foolishly, smiling.

  ‘Mr Britsky.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Were you coming to the school? It’s much too late, you know. It’s after hours.’

  ‘No … well, yes. I mean, how is the kid acting?’

  ‘The kid?’

  ‘My brother Ruby.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Yes, I think he’s trying.’ She looked at him strangely. ‘Yes, he’s trying. It’s nice to have met you.’ And then she started to walk off.

  Walking alongside of her, Max said, ‘Is it all right if I walk along with you?’

  Again she paused, looking at him thoughtfully.

  ‘I guess it looks to you like I’m acting crazy,’ Max said.

  This time Miss Levine was at a loss for words.

  ‘Yeah, I know, because I guess I am acting crazy, because I couldn’t think of any other way to get to meet you.’

  ‘But you have met me, Mr Britsky, and if you wanted to see me again, all you had to do was to send a note into the class.’

  ‘That ain’t what I mean. I mean that isn’t what I mean, not exactly.’ He noticed the shadow of a smile when he replaced ‘ain’t’ with ‘isn’t,’ and somehow it reassured him. ‘I mean meet you – just meet you – not because some kid I’m connected with acts like a little bum. Do I make any sense?’

  ‘Yes, I think I understand.’

  ‘So can I buy you a cup of coffee? Can we sit down somewhere and talk?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For one thing, I’m on my way home, where I have things to do.’

  ‘Are you married?’ he demanded.

  ‘That’s really none of your business, is it, Mr Britsky?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Well, I would dispute that,’ she said. ‘But if you must know, I am. not married.’ She stared at him again, her dark brown eyes searching his face. ‘Do you always do that, stop people on the street and ask personal questions?’

  ‘You know I don’t. You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, but you invite it, you’re so nervous and frightened.’

  ‘Me?’ Max demanded indignantly. ‘Me frightened?’
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br />   ‘I live on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village,’ Miss Levine said. ‘It’s a long walk, but when the weather is good I do like to walk home.’

  ‘Can I walk with you?’

  ‘Yes, if you wish. If you have the time.’

  They began to walk. For Max, it was a new experience, this sensation of deep satisfaction and great accomplishment flowing out of the simple act of walking alongside a young woman. Yet he realised that a moment or two before, she had been on the point of dismissing him out of hand. He couldn’t help asking her what made her change her mind.

  ‘I told you. You were so frightened.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Max said. ‘I’m not frightened. I’m – I don’t know how to even talk to someone like you.’

  ‘You are talking to me, Mr Britsky.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. You’re not from here, are you?’

  ‘From here?’

  ‘Here – the East Side?’

  ‘No, I was born in Brooklyn. That’s not so far away, but too far for a daily journey, and since I’ve been teaching, I do live here.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. I guess to you I look like some kind of hoodlum.’

  ‘No. Well, I am curious about you. You said you were an entertainer. But you’re very young –’

  ‘Eighteen. That’s not young.’

  ‘But you can’t be out of high school more than a few months.’

  He was silent for a while, then he told her that he had left school at the age of twelve.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To work.’

  ‘I know children work, but you could have gone to school.’

  ‘My father died,’ Max said flatly. ‘He left my mother and six kids. We had no relatives, nobody, nobody who’d lift a finger or care whether we lived or died. Someone had to take care of them.’

  ‘A woman and six children?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Miss Levine paused, slowed her walk, and then stopped to stare at Max as if she were seeing him for the first time. ‘And you did that – at the age of twelve?’