Max

by Howard Fast

  ‘I’m not lying,’ Max said defensively. ‘Nobody else did it, and they’re still alive, right?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that you were lying. It’s just so incredible, so incredible.’

  That night Bert said to Max, ‘You mean after that you just walked home with her and walked away? Maxie, baby, you got brains – you know where you got brains, in your pants.’

  ‘All right. This is not tail. This is not a piece of ass.’

  ‘They’re all tail, they’re all a piece of ass. You introduce me to that twist, and I guarantee you that in twenty-four hours I’ll have my hand in her bloomers.’

  ‘And I’d kill you, you bastard!’

  ‘Ah, the boy’s serious. You’re in love, buster.’

  But Max’s relationship to love, romantic or otherwise, was cloudy. He was knit to his family, but he had no love for them, and since leaving school he had not read a book, whereby his notions of romantic attachment were unembellished by literature. He read the newspapers only in a desultory fashion since he was uninterested in politics, racing sheets more frequently, Cockfight Specials, which dealt with dogfights as well as cockfights, throwaways on pink paper, and now and then, Dirty Dillies, which was a crude pornographic magazine; but reading played a very minor role in his life, and notions of love as projected in the music halls were hardly inspiring. Still and all, something moved him and compelled him as he had never been moved before, and once again he approached Miss Levine as she was leaving the school.

  If Max’s world was a very narrow one, he nevertheless knew it and explored it, and he accepted enlargement with a totally open mind. Max knew how the floozies dressed, he knew how girls from his own background dressed, and he even knew how uptown ladies dressed; and if Miss Levine dressed somewhat differently from any of those groups, Max could balance the lot and accept her costume and learn something from it. Her ankle-length gray worsted skirt was well cut and appeared to hang and flow gracefully with her movements. She wore a dark blue spring coat and under it a white blouse, the jabot of which was just visible, and she carried both a briefcase and a purse. This time Max ignored the fact that she walked with another teacher. He fell into step alongside of her and said, ‘Please, let me carry your briefcase.’ And then he took it from her before she could properly protest.

  She was taken aback and somewhat flustered as she introduced the other teacher: ‘Miss MacClintock, this is Mr Britsky.’

  Max lifted his hat, nodded, and said, ‘Ma’am. How do you do?’ He had never before in his life greeted anyone in precisely that manner, and he thought he brought it off rather well.

  At the next corner, Miss MacClintock left them to continue across town while they turned uptown; and Miss Levine said, with some asperity, ‘Really, Mr Britsky, this can’t go on. I will not be accosted by you whenever I leave the school.’

  ‘I only done – did it once before. This is only the second time. That’s not whenever you leave the school.’

  ‘Twice is enough. What on earth do you want?’

  ‘I guess I just want to know you, to be your friend.’

  ‘What!’ Her surprise and indignation hit Max like a severe slap in the face. Apparently she realised that she had struck home, because when Max stopped dead in his tracks, she walked only a few steps before she turned around and went back to him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘For what? For nothing. You got this East Side hoodlum annoying you and you tell him to buzz off. That’s all right. It’s a free country.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Sure it is. Don’t you think I know what I am? I’m Britsky, which is nothing to write home about. I got no education and I got no class, and with a puss like mine, I don’t have any looks either.’

  ‘You’re a very nice-looking young man, Mr Britsky, and you’re just making too much of this. I am four years older than you, and I would think you’d be better suited to a young lady of your own age.’

  ‘I know. I get the message.’

  Now Miss Levine smiled slightly and said, ‘You know, I was going to walk away a moment ago and leave you with my briefcase, and I guess that does indicate that I trust you. It’s very kind of you to carry it. Would you like to walk home with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All the way up to Tenth Street? It’s a good-sized walk.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘I asked you because I’d like you to.’

  ‘Right.’

  They walked on for another block in silence, then she said to him. ‘What is your first name, Mr Britsky? You do have a first name?’

  ‘You like to kid me, don’t you? Sure I got a first name. Max.’

  ‘Max?’

  ‘That’s right. And your name’s –?’

  ‘Sally.’

  ‘So if you called me Max and I called you Sally, the world wouldn’t come to an end, would it?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So would you call me Max and let me call you Sally?’

  They had now reached Houston Street, and they turned west toward Broadway. Once again, Miss Levine paused and faced him. ‘To what end, Mr Britsky?’ she asked him.

  ‘Damnit!’ he blurted out. ‘I want us to be friends! I want to go around with you the way a guy does with a girl. I want to see you again without standing outside that lousy school like some total dumbbell. I want to take you out to dinner.’

  ‘That’s quite impossible,’ Miss Levine said primly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t think we ought to go into that. You’re a very young man. I am much older than you, and I think we would have very little if anything in common.’

  ‘Yeah, if you count the years, you’re four years older, but if you count what it takes to grow up in this rotten city, I’m ten years older than you, and maybe you figure I’m just a hoodlum, so there’s nothing we got in common, because I left school and I don’t speak the way you do, but –’ He was grinning at her now.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But I’ll grow on you, I bet. Look, let me take you out to dinner tonight and I’ll bet you twenty bucks you’ll like me enough to do it again.’

  ‘Oh? All right. Not tonight. Tomorrow night.’

  ‘What? Hey, is that straight goods?’

  ‘Yes, I said you could take me to dinner tomorrow night. But I want you to understand that I do this with some trepidation. We have never been formally introduced.’

  Max was not certain what trepidation meant, nor was he quite clear about the social meaning of a formal introduction. He was certain that she had agreed to a date on the following night. ‘O.K.! Great! Right now I’m introducing myself.’ He bowed, removing his hat. ‘My name is Max Britsky. Right now I am nobody but I intend to become somebody. You can’t go wrong with me, believe me. Max Britsky introduces himself!

  His enthusiasm Was such that Miss Levine broke into laughter.

  ‘Sally?’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You see – Sally. I am calling you Sally. Try Max.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Try calling me Max. Just try it.’

  ‘Max.’

  ‘See, it don’t hurt.’

  ‘It doesn’t – She swallowed it.

  ‘Go on,’ Max said.

  ‘No, I’m being dreadful. I’m correcting your speech.’

  ‘Do it. I got to learn.’

  When they reached Washington Square, they were much more at ease with each other, and Sally pointed to the houses on the north side of the park. ‘When you become that great wealthy millionaire Max Britsky, you can buy me one of those houses.’

  ‘Oh?’ Glancing at her sharply.

  ‘Just as a gift. We’ll still be casual acquaintances, but just the way Diamond Jim throws his jewels around.’ She had changed, thrown off the austere mantle of the teacher.

  ‘Which house?’

  ‘That on
e will do,’ she said lightly, pointing to a lovely red brick mansion.

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  Frustrated, fuming in the tiny bedroom that he shared with Ruby, both of them sleeping together in an ancient three-quarter bed, his two suits hanging from a hook on the wall, his linen stuffed into the drawers of a battered chest, Max tried to construct a bow-tie knot and failed. He rooted in the drawer and came up with a wrinkled four-in-hand. It needed ironing, but Sarah was otherwise engaged. Max listened to his mother scream at his sister Freida. Cramped and crowded into the little cold-water flat, cheek by jowl with an endless and undefeatable army of roaches and bedbugs as well as each other, they lived with tension. They screamed and raged at each other, and now, hearing his mother, Max contemplated bringing Miss Sally Levine into this madhouse. ‘Come right in, Miss Levine, this is my mother and my sisters and my brothers.’ Sarah had just finished denouncing her daughter Freida, fifteen and a half years old, as a tramp and a bum.

  Freida defended herself in the only way she knew, by attempting to outscream her mother. ‘What am I?’ she demanded. ‘Am I some kind of freak? We’re not in Europe! I’m not a prisoner of yours, you should decide who I see and who I marry!’

  ‘God forbid!’ Sarah interjected.

  ‘A boy looks at me, right away I’m a tramp. That’s all you ever got to say to me, I’m a tramp. Beautiful words!’

  ‘You act like a tramp, you dress like a tramp, you’re a tramp!’ Sarah stated. ‘You hang out with bums at a candy store! Who else does it but a tramp? Tell me. Just tell me.’

  ‘All right! From now on I go to cotillions. At the Waldorf, naturally. You will please arrange my debut! Or should I sit here with you every night and bite my nails?’

  Unable to endure it any longer, Max stamped into the kitchen and shouted, ‘Will you two stop that! Every time I come in here, you’re screaming at each other.’

  ‘You two! You two!’ Sarah exploded. ‘Suddenly, I’m not your mother! I’m something called you two! I’m nothing! I’m dirt!’ She grabbed a dishtowel and tried to wipe off the bit of rouge that Freida had applied. Freida fought back. Max pulled the two of them apart.

  ‘You’re demented, both of you. Crazy.’

  Sarah began to weep. ‘I’m crazy,’ she sobbed. ‘I got a son, he’s a bum who runs around with whores and actors, and I got a daughter, she’s a tramp, but I should be happy. So I’m not happy, I’m crazy.’

  Max put his arms around her. ‘Mama, I don’t mean you’re crazy. It’s just you’re making me crazy.’ He waved Freida away, and she slipped out. ‘No, I don’t mean that, only you shouldn’t upset yourself over nothing.’

  ‘Nothing, what’s nothing? What’s the clean shirt for?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘Every night you go out –’

  ‘Mama, I work at the music halt. You know that.’

  ‘Five o’clock? And you need a clean shirt to work at the music hall? My food ain’t good enough? You got to eat the poison from the Chinks and the Italians?’

  ‘It’s not poison, Mama.’

  Suddenly Sarah discovered that Freida was gone. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘So she went out, Mama. She’ll be back in an hour,’ thinking to himself, Poor kid. It’s a lunatic asylum.

  Freida, on the other hand, renewed herself each time she escaped from the flat on Henry Street. Whatever romantic fantasies she cherished, the only reality she knew was the street outside and its population. The candy store was on the corner of Pike Street, and it was run by Mr Rabinowitz. The times were innocent of dope, and if one wanted to ease out of the torments of the world, one could buy Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound quite legally, laced though it was with opium, not to mention a dozen other products dispensed from drugstore shelves and equally modified with opium. But the kids, born of the new immigrants who had pushed across the Atlantic to populate New York City’s East Side, were not given to dope or whiskey. In their eager adolescence, they stepped into the twentieth century with nothing more deadly than sweets, leaving aside their gang wars and petty thievery. Mr Rabinowitz had a counter stocked with over one hundred varieties of penny candy, nothing more than a penny, and for a nickel you could eat yourself sick with licorice, candy sticks, mints, creams, buttons, gumdrops, hard candy, soft candy, twists, streamers, jawbreakers, gunshots, sponges, hard toffee, soft toffee, and dozens of other varieties whose names are lost in the mists of time. In the warm months of summer, Mr Rabinowitz would always have an enormous cake of ice in his store, and for two cents, he would scrape a large lump of crushed ice onto a paper plate and then flavor it with one or two of a shelf of colorful flavors, shaking the flavoring out of the same type of bottle barbers used to dispense hair tonic. The rest of Mr Rabinowitz’s shop was taken up with newspapers, magazines, cigars, and the pads, pencils, and crayons school kids required. Mr Rabinowitz and his wife, small, gray-haired, gray-faced people, accepted their store’s role as a hangout for the kids. There was no other. It was the norm. If the store became too crowded with kids horsing around, pushing, shouting, stealing, Mrs Rabinowitz would take a broom to them and chase them out onto the sidewalk.

  But it was mere formality. They were on the sidewalk now when Freida joined them, Rocky, Joe, Shutzie, Stumphead, Izzy. Lizzie was there. She was always there and appeared to have no other home. She was called Lizzie-snatch, and she was easy, even to the point of inviting gangshags, which meant having intercourse with all the boys, one after the other. Miriam, like Freida, fought the boys off, or pretended to or attempted to, and there were two or three other girls, Josie and Becky and Clara; but aside from Lizzie, it was mostly necking and horsing around, and when they got bored horsing around in and out of the candy store, they drifted over to South Street and the river and the docks and the fishing boats, but always in a group. They were Jewish kids, and when they moved they had to be wary of Irish territory and Italian territory and in particular of the cops, who would beat up on them just for the sake of beating up on them.

  This was Freida’s escape, her land of romance, her relief from the closeness and stink of the flat on Henry Street, her reward, as she felt it, for enduring life. By her lights, there was no other escape. Yet there were moments, when they all went over to the East River and sneaked out to the end of a wharf and sat there and saw the stars in the sky and the shimmering reflected city lights on the water and the river-boats passing by, when Freida tasted a moment of another reality. But it never lasted.

  Long after this, recalling her first date with Max Britsky, Sally told an interviewer, ‘It was the manner of the man. He had a grand manner, if you can think of an eighteen-year-old kid whose world was confined to the ghetto of the Lower East Side as having a grand manner. Not manners. I don’t mean manners –] he had no manners; he was crude – I mean the manner, the bearing. Max never felt inferior. Perhaps that was his secret. Where did we go? Who can remember! I think it was an Italian restaurant …’

  It was Mama Maria’s restaurant, over on Elizabeth Street, which was on the edge of the newly burgeoning Italian ghetto. Dinner was thirty cents, table d’hôte, and included antipasto, pasta, a main dish of veal or chicken, dessert, and coffee. The bottle of red wine which Max grandly ordered was twenty-five cents.

  The price was of no consequence; it was the gesture and manner that counted. This was a new and different and intriguing Max Britsky, and in the light of the candle that stood in the center of the checked red and white tablecloth, he was quite handsome, his lean face with its pointed chin and hawklike nose and bright blue eyes reminding Sally of illustrations she had seen of buccaneers and Spanish conquistadors. That image combined with his intensity and confidence gave her a feeling of excitement she had never experienced with any other man. It was exciting and frightening all at once. The small, skinny, and very young man had turned into a person of power and persuasion, and she, on the other hand, responded to this as a very different Miss Levine.

  She had aband
oned the white blouse and the drab skirt of the schoolteacher and now she wore a pretty blue dress of crêpe de Chine, and while no makeup was noticeable on her face, Max suspected that there was a flush of rouge across her cheeks. She thought the little Italian restaurant was ‘delightful’ and the food ‘quite delicious.’ ‘But I don’t have so many dates with young men, Mr Britsky,’ she added, her open honesty very charming, ‘that I would dare pose as a connoisseur. Perhaps someday, when you have achieved your Mount Olympus, you’ll let me see some of those places like Delmonico’s and the Albemarle and the Brunswick.’

  Max was sensitive enough to realise that she was doing her best to impress him. Though he was uncertain of the precise meaning of connoisseur and totally blank concerning her reference to Mount Olympus, he nevertheless felt that he was sitting opposite a very innocent and unsophisticated young woman. It gave him the courage to insist that she call him Max.

  ‘No more of this Mr Britsky,’ he reminded her. ‘You’re Sally and I’m Max. And don’t think this is a line I pull with every girl, because the truth is you’re the first girl I ever had this kind of a date with.’

  She stared at her plate for a long moment, and then asked him what he meant by this kind of a date.

  ‘Well …’ His voice trailed off. He decided that you didn’t tell Sally Levine what you meant by this kind of a date. He switched the conversation to the subject of his job, and he discovered that Sally had never been to a music hall.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why,’ she said. ‘Of course you do. Young ladies don’t go to such places.’

  Max didn’t contest this statement by mentioning the number of girls he saw in the theatre each night. Much of his interest in Sally Levine derived from his concept of her as a person from another world, and if in her world young women did not go to music halls, Max was delighted to accept that. Still and all, he worked in a music hall.

  ‘Just once,’ he said. ‘I mean, you might just want to come out of curiosity. I don’t think there’s anything there that would offend you.’

  ‘Perhaps some other time.’

  ‘But I got you a ticket for tonight. It’s the best seat in the house.’