Max

by Howard Fast

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sally said, half hysterical.

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘No. Yes, I guess so.’

  ‘Did you and he have a fight?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘That was a stupid thing to do!’ Bert yelled. ‘Max ain’t just Max! He’s part of an act, and what the hell do I do now, go on by myself?’

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Sally flung herself on her bed and gave in to uninhibited weeping. Each Friday night, Sally had dinner with her mother and father in Brooklyn. She was an only child, and her mother and father, Lillian and Arthur Levine, emigrants from Vienna and proprietors of a grocery store, made her the adored center of their universe. A few months after she began to see Max on a steady basis, she told her parents about him. They in turn withheld judgment until Sally was ready to present him to them; however, they could not refrain from suggesting that a penniless vaudeville entertainer who had left school at the age of twelve was hardly a fit match for a young woman from a good and substantial family – they owned their own home in Flatbush – with a normal school education and a firm job in the New York City public school system. Their comments were very mild, no more than a pointing to the obvious, but enough to affect Sally, who made a vow to herself that she would end her relationship with Max. But she did not end it, and in all truth, she had no other suitors, and the few male acquaintances of her family who had suggested dates paled into such insignificance against the drive and energy and excitement of Max that Sally had no difficulty making a choice.

  She continued to see Max, and now, faced with the thought that it was finally over, and that she herself had driven home the wedge that finished it, she was utterly devastated. Now she recalled the positive qualities of Max, his brightness and alertness, his unshakable confidence, his sense of authority – putting aside his ignorance, his vulgarity, and of course his place of origin, the hideous apartment on Henry Street which she had never seen. Once again, he assumed a romantic image, fed and shaped out of Sally’s reading, and finally, in the exhaustion of her tears, she fell asleep – to be awakened by someone knocking at the door. It was Max, and it was almost midnight.

  ‘That bitch downstairs wouldn’t let me in at first. I had to threaten to break down the door.’

  Sally threw her arms around him.

  ‘That don’t mean I’m not mad anymore,’ Max said.

  ‘Bert called.’

  ‘Yeah. I missed the show. I missed both shows – first time it ever happened.’ He dropped into a chair. ‘I didn’t care. I ain’t got you – fuck the whole thing.’

  ‘Max!’ He had never used that word in front of her before.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It just slipped out. It’s bad enough I can’t talk straight English, I got to swear in front of you.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘What am I doing up there on that stage like a monkey, telling stupid dirty jokes and acting like a clown? Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life that way? I want something. I can’t spend the rest of my life in that lousy bedbug-infested hole on Henry Street. I never told you, but once with Ruby and me – we both sleep in the same bed, even now – and that time, about six, seven years ago, the sheets were covered with blood from the damn bedbugs driving us crazy, so we got some kerosene and poured it over the bedsprings and lit it. God Almighty, a wonder we didn’t burn the house down, and maybe we should have, with my mother screaming at us – Oh, hell, what’s the use?’

  ‘How can you say that, what’s the use?’ Sally demanded, alive once again now that Max had returned.

  ‘How? How? I’ll tell you how. Finally, I see a way out. I got an idea that’s going to turn the world over. You know what the idea is? Now listen to me, Sally! You going to listen to me?’

  ‘Of course I’m listening. I’m so glad you’re back. But it’s so late.’

  ‘I don’t care how late it is, because if I don’t talk to somebody about this, I’ll go out of my mind. You remember when we went to Cooper Union to see the pictures of the Fitzsimmons-Corbett fight. Your teacher friends were shocked out of their petticoats, but I got so excited I almost peed in my pants. There I go again. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. But I been thinking about that ever since, and you take all them thousands and thousands of people live here on the East Side, and other places too, and they don’t go to the music halls, because most of them don’t think it’s really decent, and anyway they can’t afford it, and they can’t afford the theatre either, and most of them don’t understand English so good, so even if they went to the theatre it wouldn’t make much sense, even if they could afford it, which they can’t. But here’s pictures. Pictures. And I could open a place and just charge a nickel for grownups and three cents for kids, and I could make out – No, I’d make a fortune.’ His bright blue eyes were sparkling, his lean body vibrant with excitement.

  ‘Oh, Max, how could you? I don’t want to throw cold water on your schemes, but you dream –’

  ‘No! No, I don’t! In the whole world, I had a hundred and ninety-five dollars and sixty cents. That’s what I had in my savings account at the Bowery Bank. I drew out a hundred and fifty dollars. Over on West Broadway, there’s a findings store run by a guy, his name is Schimmelmeyer. He’s going out of business. So I went to his landlord, who is a Kraut named Schmidt, and I make a deal to rent Schimmelmeyer’s store, with a lease for seven years. That’s how sure I am. Seven years, and I give Schmidt a hundred and thirty-four dollars for the first month’s rent, and so he can’t slide out of the deal – that’s how sure I am of what I’m doing. And what am I doing? Now listen. I put two hundred folding chairs into Schimmelmeyer’s store. Plenty of room. I made a deal with a guy, name of Sam Snyder, works for Edison out in New Jersey. Edison pays him peanuts. I agreed to pay him fifty dollars a week, twenty dollars more than he gets from Edison, also five percent of my profits. He don’t think I’m crazy. He’s a projectionist. He knows where we can get a projector, where we can pay it out for ten dollars a week, and also he has lined up six different pieces of film, moving pictures – one is of monkeys, very cute, and another is of this guy who tries to jump off a barn and fly with a set of crazy wings, and another shows a magician with tricks – that’s the longest one, six minutes. But altogether, we got twenty minutes of moving pictures. Now you mean to tell me anywhere there’s a grownup won’t pay a nickel to see it, and suppose you got five kids. You pay fifteen cents and a nickel for yourself. And it’s nice and clean. The rabbis and the priests won’t scream it’s filthy and stay away. You know how much I’ll take in – just in that one store on West Broadway? Ask me. Ask me.’

  ‘All right, Max. I’ll ask you.’

  ‘I’m not guessing. I swear to God, I’m not guessing. I worked it out carefully, every detail, estimating how many will see the show twice, and if I open twelve o’clock noon and close eleven o’clock nighttime, I got to take in two hundred dollars a day weekdays and maybe four hundred a day Saturday and Sunday, and that’s not crazy but real. So why don’t I do it? Because they’ve thrown me out of every bank south of Fourteenth Street. One thousand dollars. You want to borrow money, Maxie, my boy, give us collateral. You know what collateral is?’

  Sally nodded.

  ‘It ain’t enough they want nine percent interest like the bloodsuckers they are, but collateral. Would I come to you if I had collateral? That’s what I ask them. Ah, what’s the use?’ He shook his head hopelessly.

  ‘You’re giving up?’

  ‘What can I do, Sally? I tried. I want to marry you.’

  ‘You never asked me. How do you know I’d marry you?’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? You’re the only girl I ever wanted to marry.’

  ‘Max, Max, you’re twenty years old.’

  He leaped to his feet, waving his arms. ‘The hell with that! So I’m twenty years old! You want me to sit
down in a closet and wait until I’m fifty? I was never a kid. I was twenty years old when I was twelve years old.’ Suddenly he dropped his arms to his sides and stood staring at her hopelessly, for all the world like a small boy about to burst into tears.

  ‘Max,’ she said gently.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Max, I have been saving money since I started to work. I have almost fourteen hundred dollars, which includes a gift of three hundred dollars from my Aunt Lucy, but it’s mine for whatever I want, and if you need a thousand dollars and you believe so strongly in this moving picture thing, then I can lend it to you.’

  ‘What?’ Max asked stupidly.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I can lend you a thousand dollars.’

  ‘You never told me you had all that money,’ he said indignantly.

  ‘You never asked me.’

  ‘You think I’m going to take your money? You think I’m a pimp?’

  ‘Max, Max, what’s come over you? I don’t think you’re a pimp. I would never, never in a hundred years think anything so terrible about you. When you walked out of here before, I was so unhappy I could have died.’

  ‘You mean you missed me?’

  ‘Of course I missed you. I guess you’ve become a part of my life.’

  ‘You mean you love me?’

  ‘I think so. I guess so. Yes.’

  He went to her and took her in his arms. It was the first time he had ever embraced her in this manner, folding her into his arms and body, kissing her fully, not the little pecks they had exchanged before, but a deep, lush kiss, their mouths open, their breath interchanged; and once caught in the clutch of that kind of passion, he couldn’t stop. Max was not tall, but he was wiry and strong, and he picked her up in his arms, carried her to the bed, and then he was stretched beside her, pawing at her clothes, touching her breasts for the first time, managing to get her blouse open while she begged him, ‘No, Max, we have to wait. We have to. We can’t do it. It would spoil everything.’

  He realised that, and he was able to ask himself what in hell he thought he was doing. Sally was sweet and pure and chaste; wasn’t that why he loved her? She wasn’t a tramp from the street; she wasn’t like his sister Freida, who would let any jughead knock her up; she was the woman who would be his wife. He stopped trying to undress her. He touched her breasts again, but gently and with forbearance. He kissed her. They lay there, kissing, petting, touching each other, his excitement and tension mounting until finally he had an ejaculation in his trousers. Sally knew what had happened, and she smiled sympathetically. Strangely, his love for her had not diminished, and he felt none of the disgust with himself he had always experienced when he had sex with one or another of the whores. It was a novel discovery.

  ‘We’ll be partners,’ he said to Sally later, when he was about to leave. ‘It’s not just some money that you’re lending me. We’re in this together. We’ll be in everything together.’

  ‘And what do I do?’ Bert asked him. ‘Do I drop dead or do I cut my throat? Or do I go up to the roof and jump off?’

  ‘Come in with me,’ Max begged him. ‘To hell with all that shit about working for me. You don’t have to work for me. We been partners for a long time and we can be partners again. I don’t want any money from you, Bert. But I need you. You got the kind of class I’ll never have. You’re a real American, not some kike kid from Henry Street, and if we stick together, we can really set the world on fire.’

  ‘Sure, with my looks and your brains,’ Bert said bitterly.

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant. You know that wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I’m offering you half, half of everything.’

  ‘Half of nothing is nothing. You want to be so goddamn generous and be my buddy, so stay with the act a couple of months. We’ll find a replacement and break him in.’

  ‘Bert, I can’t. I’m running all day long. I got a million things to do. I have to track down every piece of moving picture film that exists, damn near, and find out when more will be made, and it takes me two days to find someone’ll sell me two hundred folding chairs – which don’t exist for sale, only for rent, so I got to get them made.’

  ‘Can it. My heart is bleeding for you.’

  ‘Bert, I’m leaving the act. That’s it.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Bert said bitterly. ‘Walk out. Leave me. The hell with me! The hell with everything! You’re a buddy, Max, the real thing!’

  Meanwhile, Sally was also engaged in a fruitless argument. She had gone home to Brooklyn for Friday night dinner with her parents. The Levines lived on a pleasant tree-lined street in Flatbush in a small yellow frame house with a porch around three sides. While Max had never been to Sally’s home and Sally had never been to the flat on Henry Street, she had heard enough about it from Max to have a good notion of what it was like, and she couldn’t help contrasting it with the clean and bright respectability of her parents’ home. They had come to America a generation before the great tide of Eastern European Jewish immigration, and while a sunny, pretty, almost suburban neighborhood like Flatbush was a world apart from the raucous, teeming, filthy, and noisy East Side ghetto, it was nevertheless sufficiently connected by tribal ties to make Sally shudder on occasion and whisper to herself, ‘There, but by the grace of my mother and father.’ Thoughts of this sort undermined her courage. It was not until dinner was finished and they were sitting at the table in a pleasant aftermath of chicken and fish surfeit that Sally unloaded her news – that she was now engaged to one Max Britsky and that she had lent him a thousand dollars for him to go into a business that did not actually exist but which he was going to bring into existence and which would be known as the moving picture business. There it was, the cat out of the bag and standing on four long legs in front of them. She waited. Her mother waited. Both looked at Arthur Levine, and Arthur Levine tried to compose himself.

  It was not easy. In a time of large families, they had only one child, whom they adored. She had never been abused, spanked, punished. She was a good girl, as they so often said, and they were very proud of her. But Max Britsky –

  ‘I don’t want to try to upset any apple carts,’ Arthur Levine began, ‘and your mama and me, we respect a choice you make. But have you thought about it enough? A vaudeville performer, a man from a family you say yourself he never wants you to meet with a twelve-year-old’s education. Sally, Sally, think of yourself. You’re a beautiful, talented young lady. Sam Goldman’s boy, he would get down on his knees to make you a proposal of marriage, and Sam’s got his own cloak-and-suit business. Or Jack Kanter, or Richard Cohen – boys who could offer you something. Mrs Cohen tells Mama all her son wants is a chance to take you out and keep company a little, and he passed the bar. Kanter’s a doctor, already a resident. Why should you throw yourself away?’

  ‘I’m not throwing myself away, Papa. You don’t know Max. It wasn’t his fault that he had to leave school when he was twelve. It wasn’t because he’s stupid. He’s one of the brightest boys I ever met. In fact, it was a very noble act. I told you how he took care of his mother and his brothers and sisters –’

  ‘You told us,’ Lillian Levine said shortly. ‘He’s also four years younger than you. What kind of a match is that?’

  ‘You know how hard you worked and saved to put away that money,’ Sally’s father said. ‘And you give it to him like that. What should I say, Sally? What should I say?’

  ‘You never brought him here. Tell me, Sally, what kind of a boy keeps company and he don’t meet the father and mother?’

  Sally’s eyes misted over. She was at the point of tears, and her father, unable to bear the sight of his daughter weeping said, ‘Enough. We got no right to talk until we meet him, so you must bring him here. Then we’ll see.’

  In the end, Adolf Schmidt decided not to go to court to void Max as his tenant. After all, he explained to his wife, a seven-year lease was not something you found every day of the week, and the
rent was better than the rent Schimmelmeyer paid. In his own mind, Schmidt had faced the possibility that he might even have to lower the rent. The store was too large, and at the time in the development of New York City, a large store was more difficult to rent than a small one, the age of oversized markets being in the future. Overcome with curiosity, Schmidt watched glumly as Max took over the findings store and created what appeared to Schmidt as chaos. The display cases and counters were taken out and loaded onto a huge dray in spite of Schmidt’s wails of protest.

  ‘In seven years I’ll replace them,’ Max told him. He had sold the lot for twenty dollars. Then the inside walls were painted a soft gray, the floor dark gray. That was Sally’s suggestion. In spite of herself, in spite of her parents’ foreboding, she was becoming intrigued with Max’s project. If nothing else, she was completely in awe of his energy. He did everything, watched everything, supervised everything. He had to invent a projection booth in which to place the magic lantern device that would throw the moving pictures onto a screen. He sat in her room until two in the morning while Sally made sketch after sketch, until at last they put together a blueprint of what he wanted. When he found that the folding chairs were too light and would be thrown out of line, he devised a method of fastening ten chairs together. He took a train one night for Rochester, New York, disdaining the extra cost of a Pullman berth, and blustered his way into a meeting with George Eastman, who at first reacted with contempt to this skinny, pushy Jew with his ghetto speech. But there was something about Max, an energy, an intensity, that made Eastman listen instead of throwing him out. Max was neither awed nor abashed in the presence of the great inventor and industrialist, and Eastman in turn glimpsed the vastness of Max’s dreams. He took time to show Max the newest developments in roll film, and he showed Max a screen, silvered instead of white, that he had been experimenting with.