by Howard Fast
‘You don’t have heart attacks at twenty-three. But why should you even think that way?’
‘Because it’s going too good. You know, we got an expression for the uptown Jews, we call them allrightniks. For them, everything goes all right. For the Jews like my family, it’s only a steady succession of disasters. So how come everything falls into place for me?’
Bert Bellamy put it a bit differently: ‘What you got to avoid, Max, is the fickle finger of God. It looks for people like you.’
But the credit line from the Chase Bank gave Max the opportunity to do what he had been planning for some time, to buy a house for the Britsky family; and since his wedding was scheduled for June, he decided that he might as well purchase two houses as one. The firm where Freddy Feldman had read law, Straus, Cohen and Meyer, a prominent partnership specialising in real estate, had a client who was constructing a block of twelve brownstones on Sixty-sixth Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. These houses were wooden constructions in a shell of brick and brownstone, the brownstone being reserved for the front, a style becoming increasingly popular. They had central heating, with half the basement floor given over to the furnace and water heater. The other half, to the rear of the house and frequently opening upon a small garden, contained a large kitchen and pantry. The main floor was divided into two rooms, a parlor at the front and a dining room at the rear, the entrance being up an outside stoop to double doors and a narrow hallway. There were three floors over the main floor, the second and third each containing two large bedrooms and one small bedroom, six rooms entirely, while the top floor was divided into four small rooms for servants. Since the builder had over-extended himself, Max was in a position to obtain both houses for a total of twenty-two thousand dollars – a great buy, as Fred Feldman assured him. While Max had some reservations about putting Sally so close to a family which was, to say the least, quite different from her own and which she still had not met as a family, he felt that such closeness might offer some advantages, although at the moment he had not the slightest notion of what those advantages might be.
For himself, the thought of owning such a house filled him with fear and excitement. While it did not compare with the great graystone mansions of the wealthy German-Jewish families, it was nevertheless a dwelling place beyond the wildest dreams of a younger Max, and when he called the whole family together in the kitchen of the cold-water flat on Henry Street to present them with his newest triumph, he expected a response as thrilled and pleased as his own had been.
His three sisters and his two brothers reacted with proper excitement and disbelief. Sarah, however, greeted the news with a dismal stare.
‘Mama, ain’t you at least a little pleased?’ Max begged her. ‘You should see the place, one room as big as this whole stinking apartment, and no bedbugs and no roaches – everything new, a regular city mansion like the fanciest uptown Jews.’
‘I’m not an uptown Jew,’ Sarah said bleakly.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I’m happy enough right here.’
‘Right here is the worst part of this lousy ghetto. It’s a pigsty, a lousy, stinking pigsty.’
‘So that’s what you think of me, I’m living in a pigsty.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with what I think of you. Seven of us, we’re cramped together here like sardines. I hate this place.’
‘I lived my whole life here,’ Sarah said. ‘I got my friends here. I raised my family here.’
‘You’ll like it.’
‘How do you know what I’ll like? Did what I like ever mean anything to you? Another son, he cares about his mother. You I see a few minutes in the morning, and that’s the end of you.’
‘A month from now we’re going to move,’ Max said, ‘and that’s it.’
‘Can you imagine?’ Max said to Sally. ‘I left her there crying her head off. I buy her a mansion, a place she couldn’t even dream of living in, and she sits and cries over it.’
‘I can imagine,’ Sally said. ‘Did you ask her?’
‘What should I ask her? Since I’m a kid, I took care of her. I fed the family. I kept them alive. Do you think I ever got a word of thanks for it?’
‘That’s just it, Max, Can’t you understand? She’s got nothing to give you, and you take away the only role she has, being a mother.’
‘How do I take it away?’
‘Why didn’t you take her to see the place before you bought it?’
‘She wouldn’t know what she was looking at.’
‘Would I? Why didn’t you ask me? Don’t I have any say in whether I want to live next door to your family? And how am I to travel every day between Sixty-sixth Street and Clinton Street? I’m afraid to ride on the elevated train every day, and it’s such a long walk to the Elevated, and anyway, I can’t take care of a house of four floors.’
‘Oh, Jesus – oh, Jesus, I’m getting it from everywhere. Try to do something good. Anyway, when we’re married, you don’t go on working.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it ain’t done – O.K., O.K., it isn’t done. How could I look anybody in the eyes? What do I tell them? My wife works. Is that what I tell them? I can’t support my wife. She has to go to work.’
‘Did it ever occur to you that a woman – yes, even a woman whose husband is a rich man – might want to work? Did it ever occur to you that maybe your mother wanted to work? But you took that from her, didn’t you? You had to be everything, even when you were twelve years old. She couldn’t even be a mother.’
‘What in hell are you talking about?’ Max shouted.
He was becoming agitated. Sally took his arm and squeezed it. ‘Max, darling, you think I want to humiliate you, but I don’t. That’s the last thing in the world that I want to do. But I’ve spent most of my life learning to be a teacher. I think I’m a good teacher.’
‘You can teach me. You been teaching me. I want you to have kids, my kids. You can teach them, God Almighty, Sally, all my life I dreamed of having a decent place to live, a place where the hall didn’t stink of piss and where every morning your sheet wasn’t covered with bedbug blood, and now I got it, so don’t make me feel lousy about it.’
‘All right,’ Sally agreed. ‘But now I want you to take me to meet your mother. We’re being married a month from now, and I’ve never spoken to your mother.’
‘Why can’t she come here?’ Sarah demanded. ‘This is my home. She wants to see me, let her come here.’
Only the smallest part of Max’s conversations with his mother passed his lips; the rest was internal, and now he was thinking, if you ever stopped to see what this place looks like and smells like, with seven of us living on top of each other with the filth and the bugs, you might understand why I don’t want her to set foot in this place.
‘I raised my children here,’ Sarah went on.
No, Max said silently, I raised them here. Aloud, he said, ‘I reserved a table at the Café Coronet. It’s the big round table, and we’ll all sit there, and we’ll have a nice dinner, and she’ll be able to meet the family.’
‘I don’t eat in restaurants. They’re pig places.’
‘Café Coronet is a kosher restaurant, Mama,’ Max explained patiently. ‘The chef will make whatever you want to eat. It will be a nice change for you, Mama. And please, I gave Freida the money, so go out with her and buy a new dress.’
‘The way I look, you’re ashamed of me!’
‘I’m not ashamed of you, please, Mama. I only want you to look pretty.’
Sally understood Max’s fear and his determination that she should never set foot in the flat on Henry Street. She had Worked for years in an East Side school, and she knew Henry Street and Madison and Monroe and Allen streets and Ludlow and Orchard and Hester and all the other crowded, filthy, and stinking canyons that went to make up the ghetto. There were times when she understood Max, and her heart went out to him in pride and compassion. Who else could have done as he h
ad done, and at the age of twelve taken this enormous family and nurtured them and fed them and kept them together all these years? And in that sense she was eager to meet his mother, finally, as well as the remaining Britskys still unknown to her. On the other hand, there was a part of Max that repelled her, an animal-like ferocity that would surface so unexpectedly, an almost insane drive, and a kind of savage, prideful ignorance. At such times, she hated and feared him and at other times she pitied him, but she was never sure that she loved him; the prospect of marriage made her even more ambivalent. And this prospect might have shattered her completely had she seen Max with his secretary the day before the scheduled dinner at Café Coronet.
The secretary’s name was Etta Goodman, and Max had hired her a year and a half before the date that had been chosen for his marriage. Miss Goodman was a typewriter, the name used for women with her skill before the more euphemistic term of ‘secretary’ distinguished between the operator and the wonderful new machine that had begun to replace the Palmer method of writing script, taught to millions of children in the schools of the time. Max had purchased the machine. Machines enchanted him, and once he possessed a typewriter (the machine), he had to have a typewriter (the person). Freida recommended Etta Goodman. She had been working at Saxon Fabrics as a bookkeeper for seven dollars a week. Max offered her ten dollars a week the moment she informed him that she had been taking typewriting lessons on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and the speed of his offer was not hindered by her appearance. Etta was five feet two inches in height. She had dark eyes, darker hair, and a shape that reminded Max of a sweet, toothsome, midsummer peach bursting out of its skin. She also thought Max was wonderful, an opinion Freida had primed even prior to Miss Goodman’s meeting with him. Nor was she the kind of woman who whined or complained. Not even on this afternoon before the scheduled dinner at the Café Coronet. Instead, it was with a kind of pathos that she observed that Max had not even bought a couch, and the reason for this observation was that she and Max had just completed an act of sexual intercourse on the floor. Max reminded her that they did it not on the floor but on a thick, all-wool rug.
‘You’re heavy,’ Etta said, pushing her skirt away from her face. Max never asked her to carry disrobing further than her bloomers, even though the door to the outer reception room and the door to Fred Feldman’s office were both locked. But it was only in part a bow to the possibility of interruption; the notion of two naked bodies locked in a transport of passion had occurred to Max as the content of a sexual fantasy, but in his world it was certainly not common practice – or even uncommon practice. Max did remove his own shoes and trousers on such occasions, but he kept his shirt on, which meant that he retained his single-piece underwear, which were known as BVDs.
Now he argued that he only weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds.
‘That’s still heavy. My goodness, Max, you’d lay here on top of me all afternoon if I let you.’
Max eased back on his knees. ‘How’s that, tootsie?’
‘That’s better, but the floor is still the floor, Max. You keep telling me that the rug is extra-thick wool, but that don’t make it not the floor.’
‘You know, that’s my fault, tootsie, because I should have thought to bring a clean sheet in and then we could spread it over the rug –’
‘No!’ Etta exclaimed.
‘No?’
‘No, I don’t want a sheet spread over the rug. I want to do it on a bed. Or even on a sofa. A sofa would be better than this. You know, Max, all the times we done it, we always done it on the floor.’
‘I know,’ Max agreed unhappily.
‘Well?’
‘There’s no use promising something, because this is the last time.’
‘What? What last time?’
‘No more after today,’ Max said.
‘You mean you’re firing me? Why? Don’t I work good? Freddy says I’m as good as the regular bookkeeper.’
‘Calm down. I’m not firing you. Would I fire you? What kind of a louse do you take me for? You ought to apologise.’
‘Well then, why –’ Her eyes were filling with tears of frustration.
‘Because I’m getting married.’
‘Who? That skinny little schoolteacher?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Huh! Huh! That’s some reason for us not to do it anymore.’
Max got up and pulled on his trousers. ‘For me, it’s a reason. I’m not one of those guys who screws around after he’s married.’
‘Max, we never even done it on a bed. Not even once.’ She began to cry. Max had never seen her weep before.
‘Come on, stop that. I made it clear right from the beginning what was the situation between you and me. Anyway, for a kid like you, it’s all a happy hunting ground, ain’t it? Right here in the office, there’s Freddy and Bert, and both of them ain’t married. You know something, Sally would chop my head off, the way I’m talking. Freddy and Bert, not married, that’s what I mean.’
‘Who cares about what Sally thinks? Anyway, Freddy don’t even know which side is up and all he can think of is I could become pregnant, and Bert’s always over at the Bijou, and I can’t go running over to the Bijou just because Bert points a finger.’
It took Max several deep breaths before he was able to say, ‘I just don’t believe this.’
‘Why?’
‘You been fucking both of them! You been fucking Freddy and you been fucking Bert!’
‘Please don’t use that word, Max. It’s a terrible word.’
‘All the time!’
‘I can’t stand that word: It makes me feel crawly all over.’
‘And it don’t mean nothing to you!’ Max shouted.
‘It does so too, it does. I like you better than either of them, Max. You know that.’
‘No more Max. From now on, you call me Mr Britsky.’
‘You’re getting married, that’s all right. But my having a little fun with Freddy and Bert, that’s so terrible –’
‘Fucking ain’t a little fun.’
‘It is so.’
‘That’s your trouble. You’re debased.’
‘I am not. Are you firing me now?’
‘No, but our intimacy is over,’ Max said stiffly. ‘From now on, you call me Mr Britsky and I call you Miss Goodman.’
‘Oh.’ She got to her feet and stared at him for a long moment. Then she shrugged. ‘All right, Mr Britsky. Are you going to invite me to the wedding?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Why? Just because you’re mad at me?’
‘I suggest, Miss Goodman,’ Max said stiffly, ‘that you return to your duties in the reception room.’
At the Café Coronet the following evening, Sarah put a forkful of gefilte fish in her mouth, chewed it thoughtfully, and then swallowed it. Her face remained impassive.
‘Your mother makes gefilte fish?’ she said to Sally.
‘Oh, yes, Mrs Britsky, sometimes.’
‘What does it mean, sometimes? She don’t make it every Friday night?’
‘Perhaps she does. I’m not home every Friday night.’
‘No? Why not?’
‘Mama, Sally lives in New York,’ Max explained. ‘It’s a long trip out to Brooklyn.’
‘She has a tongue. So let her answer for herself. If you love a mother or a father, you make a long trip. You don’t make excuses. My own husband, he passed away, may he rest in peace, leaving me to bring up six children.’ Sarah took another bite of the fish and chewed it appraisingly. ‘Your mother puts sugar in her gefilte fish?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘She uses carp or she don’t?’
‘I just don’t know,’ Sally said uneasily. ‘I never asked her.’
‘And she never showed you?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
They were all staring at their plates miserably, and Max closed his eyes and fought against the surge of rage that took over his mind; and in his mi
nd and only in his mind, he said to his mother, You fat, stupid lazy bitch, for over five years now you haven’t cooked even a kettle of water for tea. You let Freida and Sheila and Esther do the cooking and the cleaning, and that’s why we lived in a pigsty, because they were only kids and didn’t know how to clean, and you lived on our work and our sweat. But even as a thought it was shattering, and while one part of his mind formed it, another part rejected it with horror, and still another part told him to speak it, and then, following that line of fantasy, he saw his mother shrieking at him, commanding the attention of everyone in the restaurant, shriveling the souls of everyone at the table, and as he told Sally later, ‘What good would it have done?’
It was a pleasant evening, at least as far as the weather was concerned, and Max and Sally walked across town to her room.
‘What good would it have done?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sally whispered. The tears started then.
‘Please don’t cry,’ Max said. ‘I love you. I don’t know how to say it any better than that. I’m not much, but I love you, and I don’t know why you decided to marry me.’
‘Because you’re one of the best persons I ever knew!’
She almost shouted the words, and Max laughed hollowly. ‘You should know what kind of a great person I am! You think a great person sits there at the table and lets his girl be insulted? I’m some great person.’
‘I saw those kids,’ Sally said. ‘I’m not crying for what your mother said to me. I’m just crying for the whole thing because I don’t understand it. Those children are lovely – and they’re yours, and they only exist because of you.’
‘They’re not so great. The girls are all right, especially Esther; she’s only fifteen but she’s going to be a beauty all right, but Benny’s a little bum, and Ruby’s an oversized schlemiel and a goniff.’ He paused as Sally looked at him questioningly. ‘Thief, a cheap crook. It sounds nasty when I say it, but you might as well know what you’re falling into. I got two brothers, Benny and Ruby, and they’d both steal the fillings from my teeth if they could reach inside my mouth. All right, so I’m blowing it out of size, but I want you to know I didn’t do so great, and anyway the hell with all that. I’m not putting you into a house next to my mother. I’ll sell the house and we’ll find another one.’
