by Howard Fast
‘Dear Max, you are the sweetest, most wonderful person.’
‘I don’t want to be wonderful. I just want to be your husband.’
‘We’ll talk about it sometime.’
‘Now is sometime.’
‘Max,’ Sally said gently, ‘this is a lovely evening. I guess it’s one of the nicest evenings of my life. Please don’t let’s spoil it with an argument.’
‘You say yes, there’s no argument.’
‘Not tonight. Please, Max.’
Hurt, baffled, he went through the rest of the evening with hardly a word. At the door to her room, Sally said, ‘Please, Max, don’t be angry. Will you kiss me good night?’
‘For what?’ he demanded.
‘Max –’
‘Good night!’ he snorted, turned on his heel, and went down the steps.
[ F I V E ]
Sally began to cry.
‘Crying doesn’t help,’ her father said. ‘What are we doing here? Are we your enemies? Or are we two people who love you better than anybody else in the whole world?’
‘More than that,’ her mother said. ‘Absolutely, darling, more than that.’
‘But I just don’t know that I’m in love with him,’ Sally whispered. ‘I don’t even know that I like him very much.’
‘Love. Again comes love.’
‘Sally darling, sweetheart,’ Mrs Levine said, ‘in the old country marriages were made with the parents, not with the children. Who talked about love? But I’ll tell you something, more of those marriages turned out to be good marriages than your love marriages here in America.’
‘Five years you been keeping company with him,’ Mr Levine said, ‘and now suddenly you decide you don’t love him.’
‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ Sally said tearfully. ‘Max is such fun to be with – I mean, mostly – but I was never sure that I loved him. And sometimes I hated him, he’s so crude and vulgar.’
‘You gave him a thousand dollars and you weren’t sure that you loved him?’
‘It was a loan. He paid me back.’
‘Sally,’ Mrs Levine said, ‘do you know how old you are?’
‘I know,’ Sally said miserably.
‘Twenty-seven –’
‘I’m not twenty-seven yet.’
‘Two months and you’ll be twenty-seven years old,’ her father told her. ‘You know what a girl of twenty-seven is? I got to be very frank with you, my dear child. A girl of twenty-seven years is an old maid already, and God help me that this should happen to a child of mine.’
At this, Sally’s weeping became uncontrollable. Her mother ran to her and embraced her. ‘Look what you’re doing to the child,’ she said to her husband.
‘She’s not a child anymore,’ Mr Levine said bleakly.
‘You have no heart.’
‘I got a heart,’ Mr Levine said. ‘Lillian, you’d be surprised how much heart I got, you should see how much there is to be broken, a child of mine should be an old maid.’
‘Even if I wanted to,’ Sally sobbed, ‘I don’t know whether he would marry me. I haven’t seen him for almost a month.’
‘You don’t know!’ Mr Levine exclaimed. ‘Only the finest kind of a nice Jewish girl in the world – Tell me –’ He began to shout.
‘Don’t shout, please,’ Mrs Levine begged him.
‘All right.’ His voice dropped to a hoarse persuasive whisper. ‘Just tell me where he finds another girl like you, from a good family who will come into all her mother and father’s property, with a job as a schoolteacher?’
‘She’d be married if it wasn’t for the teaching,’ Mrs Levine said, unable to contain herself.
‘I can’t make him marry me.’
‘You could call him on the telephone. You could tell him you want to talk.’
‘And ask him to marry me? Papa!’
‘No, not right away. You start to keep company a little but you got to encourage him. He’ll ask, believe me, because already I know he’s eating out his heart for you.’
‘I don’t know that. Why should he be eating his heart out for me? I’m not nice to him. I correct his speech. I tell him how vulgar he is –’
‘Why?’
‘Because he is, Papa! Believe me. You tell me to believe you, please believe me. If he asks me to marry him and I say yes, then it means I give up all hope. I will die. Yes, if that’s what you want me to do, I will die.’
‘You won’t die,’ Mr Levine said impatiently. ‘What kind of talk is that, you’ll die? Why should you die? For years you kept company with him. You told me you enjoyed his company.’
‘That doesn’t mean I want to be married to him.’
‘No? You know what I think, I think you’re spoiled. And I’ll tell you this, you want to break my heart, your mama’s heart? Good. Become a dried-up old maid. No children and no grandchildren –’
Sally’s voice failed. She sobbed like a hurt child.
‘Leave her alone!’ Mrs Levine cried. ‘For God’s sake, leave her alone! She’ll do what we tell her. She’s a good girl.’
Max’s office was in the Hobart Building, on the south side of Fourteenth Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues. It was one of the new office buildings designed by that daring young architect, Bradford Lee Gilbert, and built on what he called the steel cage principle. It was ten stories high, and it was serviced by a bank of hydraulic elevators, each of which rode a steel shaft sunk as deep into the ground as the height of the building. The elevators were one of the reasons Max rented offices there. He had read a brochure on the working of the hydraulics, and he became so fascinated that nothing would do but he must have a place in the building. His offices were on the eighth floor. Bert Bellamy rode the elevator to the eighth floor, got off, turned left down the corridor, and found himself facing a large glass door, upon which was lettered in gold leaf: BRITSKY THEATRE CIRCUIT.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Bert said. ‘I will just be goddamned all the way to hell and down the road.’
The building had impressed him. The elevators had impressed him, but most of all the gold-leaf lettering had impressed him. There was something about gold-leaf lettering that nothing else matched.
Bert and Max had parted without rancor. For a year after that, they saw each other occasionally, and then two years went by without any contact between them. Then, three days ago, Bert had a message waiting for him in his dressing room. It was a Western Union telegram, asking him to come to Max Britsky’s offices in the Hobart Building. Not office but the plural, offices. Understandably, Max could have an office. Offices betokened something else.
Inside, Bert found himself facing a plump, pretty young woman with large brown eyes, a massive pile of brown hair, and too much lip rouge. She sat at a reception desk, upon which was one of the new Underwood typewriters that were the talk of the business community. In fact, only the week before, Bert had worked out a new shtick based on the complexity of a typewriter. Along with the young lady and the desk, there were two chairs in the reception room, a coffee table with several copies of the Saturday Evening Post, and on the floor a straw rug. In one corner of the room, there was a potted plant.
The young lady behind the desk observed Bert shrewdly, gave him one of her nicer smiles, and guessed that he was Mr Bellamy.
‘Right.’
‘And Mr Britsky is expecting you, so just go in through that door.’ The door said: Private. Bert hesitated. ‘Go on, go on.’
Bert went through. It was a corner room with two windows, a desk, behind which Max sat, two upholstered leather chairs, a rug on the floor, and on the walls, posters with scenes from moving pictures. Max, as skinny and youthful as ever, leaped to his feet when he saw Bert, came around the desk, and shook hands heartily. Bert stared at him speechless, then around the room.
‘Feast your eyes,’ Max said.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Sometimes, neither do I,’ Max said.
A door at one side of the room opened,
and a short, stout, round-faced young man appeared and said, ‘Mr Britsky, I got all the stuff on the public nuisance question – whenever you want to look at it.’
‘Later, Freddy, later. This is my old buddy, Bert Bellamy.’ And to Bert, ‘I want you to meet Freddy Feldman. Freddy is my lawyer.’
Freddy and Bert shook hands, and then Freddy excused himself and left the room. Bert simply stared at Max and then burst out, ‘What in hell do you mean, your lawyer?’
‘He works for me, completely. That’s his office, next to mine.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since he finished reading law in Meyer Sonberg’s law office. Freddy’s from the block, from Henry Street. We grew up together, only Freddy’s smart, and he stayed in school while I was bumming around with you at the penny arcade. Maybe you don’t think I need a lawyer?’
‘I never thought about it.’
‘Think about it, old buddy. I got seventeen movie houses. You think I can keep track of what’s going on? No way, never. So I got Freddy and I got Jake Stein, my bookkeeper, and Freddy watches Jake, he shouldn’t steal me blind, and also he keeps me out of jail because there’s maybe fifty laws you’re always breaking one time or another when you run public places, which is what I run.’
‘It’s a damn miracle,’ Bert said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know how you did it, but you did it. I’m the schmuck, Max. Don’t ever forget that. You asked me, and I said no, bug off.’
‘We’re buddies,’ Max said. ‘We started out together when we were just kids –’
‘I’m not looking for sympathy!’ Bert interrupted angrily. ‘I said I’m a schmuck, you don’t have to tell me, and I’m not looking for a handout.’
‘Who said you were?’
‘You know I been fired.’
‘I heard.’
‘All right, I won’t starve. The Bijou ain’t the only music hall. I got an appointment next week with Carruthers, who’s number one with the Keith bunch.’
‘He’s a horse’s ass. Screw all that! You know why the Bijou closed down?’
‘It was sold, wasn’t it?’
‘It sure as hell was – and to me, old buddy, to yours truly, Max Britsky. I bought it.’
‘You? And you fired us?’
‘Calm down. Nobody’s fired. The acts are laid off. Guttman’s out of it, and I got to find a new manager. Now I’ll tell you something, Bert, the day of the music hall is over, finished. There’s going to be something new, a moving picture theatre with gigs in between the moving pictures, and the first one in New York City is the Bijou. I’m cleaning it up, fixing those lousy old seats, and building a projection booth. I got my eye on two other theatres, one in Brooklyn and another on Second Avenue – real theatres, not converted retail stores – but that has to wait because already I’m going crazy trying to do eleven things at once. And I ain’t standing still. I don’t go into the Bijou with them lousy little scraps of film I been showing in the stores. Edison is working on films that tell a story. Nothing I seen yet, but it promises to be terrific, and just one of these films will make a program. So what do you think of all that? Tell me.’
‘What should I think of it? You want me to lick your ass because you got a goddamn money machine and I ain’t got a pot to pee in?’
‘You’re awful mad.’
‘You fired me out of my job! You want me to kiss you?’
‘No, the hell with that.’ Max sat down behind his desk. ‘Stop yelling at me and listen.’
‘All right. I’m listening.’
‘Sit down!’
Bert dropped onto one of the chairs. ‘I’m sitting, I’m listening.’ But inside he was burning up, not thinking of Max, his friend from his childhood, his partner in shticks, his companion and confidant, but for the first time, forming in his thoughts, bitterly: This goddamn little Hebe, where the hell does he come off? What am I – his boy, his Sing Hop Toy to kick my ass and then throw me bones?
Max saw it in Bert’s face, the twitch of his lips, and said, ‘All right. So you hate me. Can you forget you hate me for five minutes and listen?’
‘I said I’m listening.’
‘All right. Before the end of this year, I’ll have three theatres, not stores but real theatres, and believe me, the Bijou ain’t the best of the three. That’s only the beginning. I’m offering you a job – run the Bijou, and then, as I add more theatres, you run them too. That means you got to hire the acts, make your pay scales, program the gigs, keep your ticket sellers honest – you got to do the whole shtick. I’m up to my neck opening places and trying to run the chain I got and keep the money straight and find films. Sam Snyder takes care of the store shows and the programming, but he’s up to his neck too. That’s all there is right now, running an enterprise that takes in cash money of at least ten thousand dollars a week, and this is only the beginning, Bert, you hear me, only the beginning.
‘The Bijou ain’t going to be no cheap nickelodeon. Admission twenty-five cents, fifteen cents for kids. With the gigs and the film, we run a fifty-minute show, eleven to eleven, and we have an intermission to clean the house. I’m going to paint the outside white and gold and give the whole thing class, and someday we’re going to have a hundred places like the Bijou and better all over America. And who’s running all this – me, Sammy Snyder, and Freddy Feldman. I need you. I’ll pay you twice what you made at the Bijou and raise you ten percent every time we add a real theatre to the chain. Moving pictures – it’s going to be the biggest thing in the world, believe me. So what do you say?’
‘What’s to say? I’m dizzy.’
‘Sure, join the club. We’re all dizzy. It’s no lead pipe cinch. We work eighteen hours a day, but someday – Well, what do you say?’
‘Max, stand up.’ Max stood up, and Bert went around the desk and embraced him, not freed of his anger but diluting it with guilt.
‘The hell with that,’ Max said. ‘You want to be loving, go out and get yourself laid. I’ll see you at the Bijou, nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
After Bert left, Max went into Feldman’s office and said, ‘Well, Freddy, what do you think of him?’
‘Just caught a glimpse of him.’
‘Give me your impression.’
‘Good-looking man. He’s not Jewish, is he?’
‘I’ll tell you something, Freddy. North of Rivington Street, the world stops being Jewish. That’s always a surprise to me when I think about it, but it’s a fact.’
‘It certainly is, Mr Britsky.’
‘Something else, Freddy.’
‘Yes.’
‘When Bert comes to work for me –’
‘You hired him?’
‘Absolutely. Bert is almost as smart as I am. We started together when we were kids. I owe Bert something, and when I owe I pay. That’s a principle of mine. Maybe you didn’t think I got principles, Freddy, and while I confess I ain’t overloaded, I got two or three. Anyway, what I started to say is that when Bert comes to work here, he will call me Max and I’ll call him Bert. So maybe enough Mr Britsky, and from now on you call me Max.’
‘Yes, certainly, Mr Britsky.’
‘Max.’
‘Max.’
Sally was a welter of mixed feelings – confusion, fear, excitement, distaste for herself – all of it combined with a strange kind of anticipation. Her father and mother were correct in one thing: every boy she had known or been introduced to in the Flatbush community was now married, and she herself was no longer considered eligible for marriage in the terms structured by the tight Jewish community in which she lived. Twenty-six or twenty-seven, it mattered little; she was already a spinster, one of a whole class of unmarried schoolteachers. She spoke like them, reproduced their mannerisms, and, indeed, had taken on their approach to many things; and in that part of her being, she had always rejected the notion of marrying Max. She had also rejected Max again and again, a rejection which he at first refused to accept. On the other hand, she had never met anyone whom she cou
ld successfully compare to Max. Max was exciting; any evening with him promised a surprise. Max was always bursting with himself; and compared to Max, every other man she knew was dull and dreary and only half alive.
Whereby the rejections by Sally and the refusal to accept rejection on the part of Max had become a pattern in their relationship – until finally Max tired of it. Two years before, she appeared to be on the brink of a willingness to accept Max and become his wife, then she moved back from the brink, slowly yet firmly. And now she had not seen or heard from Max for over a month when she took the bit in her teeth, called him, and invited him to her room for a ‘chafing dish’ dinner. The chafing dish fad was sweeping New York at that time. Thousands of young men and women flooded into the city from every state in the Union, and most of them could only find living space in furnished room houses that had no kitchen facilities. The invention of a baked crockery dish held in a metal frame over an alcohol burner was welcomed, and the newspapers were full of recipes to be done in a chafing dish. Sally had decided upon a Welsh rabbit and with it, a bottle of excellent French wine. She had also purchased a small ice-block, which she chipped into pieces to fill the wine cooler. This with candles, a lace tablecloth that her mother had given her, and French pastry to finish the meal was the basis of Sally’s plan for entrapment.
And thereby her mixed feelings of fear, excitement, and anticipation. Somehow, this evening, she would maneuver Max into asking her to be his wife, and this time she would seal a bargain. Her parents were right; she had to be married. She was not a white Protestant schoolteacher, like her colleagues; unmarried, she had no place in her world, and if she were to be married, why not Max? Already, he was reasonably rich, he was exciting, he was bright, and he was quite good-looking. What more did she expect? Her romantic dreams? She was too old for romantic dreams.
