Max

by Howard Fast

  A soft snore answered her question.

  ‘Max!’

  No response.

  She felt impelled to wake him. Suddenly she felt forsaken. ‘Max!’ she shouted.

  No response. She felt her eyes fill with tears. Then she wiped the tears away and went over to Max. ‘Get up,’ she said firmly. She put her arms around him, pulled him erect, and half dragged him to the bed. He was not heavy and not much taller than she, and that helped. She pulled off his shoes and then his shirt and his trousers. The sight of his skinny form lying there in his one-piece BVDs set her to laughing. She pulled off his socks, still giggling, standing over the bed in her wedding gown.

  She shook him. ‘Max, Max! This is your wedding night.’

  A few mumbled words answered her, but his eyes remained closed.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed next to him, staring, at him. He was really quite handsome, she told herself, and he didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. That at least was positive. She made an image in her mind of going to bed with Alderman Sweeney, imagining that huge bulk unclothed, and the thought sent her into another fit of giggling. But now what was she to do? She studied Max again, and then with a boldness she had never dreamed herself to be capable of, she placed a hand over that portion of Max’s underwear that covered his sexual organs. She felt the outline of his penis and his testicles, and she felt the increasing excitement within her, and she watched his body respond, mumbled sounds coming through his drunken stupor. Under her hand, his penis began to swell, and suddenly she pulled her hand away. Then, again, she began to giggle. She had drunk three glasses of champagne during the evening, sufficient to hand her the excuse that she was drunk, not like Max, but nevertheless a little drunk.

  ‘That’s it. I am drunk.’

  The self-deception was necessary. She slipped out of the wedding gown after struggling for a few minutes with its fastenings, and then out of the chemise and the wholly unnecessary corset and the oversized bloomers. ‘Everything, because I am drunk.’ She had never experienced this kind of heated desire before. Finally, she stood naked, her slender body lovely in the shaded light of the single lamp, her nipples firm on her small breasts, and she said sharply, ‘Max, wake up!’

  He opened his eyes this time and stared at her, and then she put out the light and slipped into bed next to him. He was asleep again. She began to fondle his penis, her excitement increasing as it grew erect, and then, still half asleep, he reached out and put his arms around her.

  [ S I X ]

  The offices in the Hobart Building had been enlarged, improved, and redecorated. There were three girls who did nothing but work at typewriters, and these young ladies were still called typewriters. There were two bookkeepers who worked under Jake Stein, whose office door now bore the title comptroller, and there was a new receptionist to take the place of Etta Goodman, who was now Max’s administrative assistant. The new receptionist was a pretty red-headed young woman, whose name was Della O’Don-nell, who was somewhat distantly related to Boss Murphy. Jake Stein insisted that Murphy had asked Max to hire her in order to have a spy boring from within; but Max felt that the amount of boring Della O’Donnell could do was insignificant and that if it were true, Murphy was entitled to have someone inside to report on his share of the business.

  For one thing, Max was intrigued with Della O’Donnell. She had the same qualities that Alice Snyder possessed, an easygoing, unflappable good nature and a plump, round warmth that made him wonder how it would feel, to be married to such a woman; but the thought of her as Boss Murphy’s spy was ridiculous. Yet it was indicative of the workings of Jake Stein’s mind. Feldman, who disliked Jake Stein, had mentioned to Max that they might replace him. ‘He’s good,’ Max protested, to which Feldman replied, ‘Too good.’ Max told Feldman that he would think about it, but the more he thought about it, the less possible it became for him to fire someone who had a wife and children, who was brilliant at his work, and who gave no evidence of being the crook that Feldman felt him to be.

  The question of Etta Goodman was more bothersome. Her work as administrative assistant was for the most part a combination of the emotional and the physical, although no longer exercised on the floor. In redecorating his office, Max had included a large sofa. The purchase of the sofa and what went with it were a result of Max’s sexual relationship to Sally – a weak flame to begin with, which became a flicker and then flickered out. While it flickered, it had produced two children, and after that it more or less ceased; whereupon the affair or exercise, as Max often thought of it, with Etta Goodman was renewed. Max and Etta had been functioning on the sofa when Della buzzed him and informed him, via the newly installed intercom, that two gentlemen wanted to see him. Their names were Frank Stanford and Jack Calvin. While the names were vaguely familiar, Max could not recall them. Since they had no appointment, he told Della that either they could wait or they could state their business and ask for an appointment on another day. Della replied that their business was film production, and Max said that if they wished to see him, they should wait.

  Etta watched Max adjust his trousers and button his shirt. ‘You don’t even seem to enjoy it anymore,’ she said to him.

  ‘I got other things on my mind.’

  ‘Sure. Like you said after you married Sally –’

  ‘Stop right there,’ Max said. ‘Sally’s my wife. That’s different. There are women who enjoy this, and then there are women who got different sensibilities, like Sally –’

  ‘Meaning like me, because all I’m good for is to get fucked.’

  ‘I don’t like that word,’ Max said, ‘and most of all not used by a woman, and anyway, I don’t know what’s the matter with you these days, the way you’re losing weight.’

  ‘I like myself that way. So what now? You want to fire me? You want to get rid of me?’

  ‘Will you stop that! Who wants to get rid of you? Every time I say something, you start crying I want to get rid of you. Go pull yourself together.’

  ‘How would you like it,’ Etta wailed, ‘to be kept on hooks all the time, and I never know what you think of me.’

  ‘You don’t mean hooks. You mean tenterhooks, which Sally says is something they use to stretch cloth –’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what Sally says! I’m sick and tired of what Sally says!’

  ‘Come on, come on,’ Max said gently, putting his arms around her.

  ‘I’m a person, same as Sally.’

  ‘Sure, of course you are.’

  He steered her out of his office through the door that led to Fred Feldman’s office. Feldman was not in his office. ‘Sit down,’ Max said. ‘Rest a little. Dry your tears. Then you can go home if you want to.’

  ‘I want to be what I’m supposed to be, an administrative assistant.’

  ‘I know, and we’ll get to that. I promise you.’

  He returned to his office, asked himself what he was supposed to do with her. He was fond of her. She was not clever – indeed, rather stupid – but that only served to increase his guilt. He couldn’t throw anyone out. He was supposed to be hard and tough-minded, according to his reputation in the city’s financial circles, but he had just agreed to put his brother Benny on his payroll, and he knew damned well that Benny was a little bum and would never be anything better. His mother received four hundred dollars a week to run the brownstone house, where she lived with Freida and Benny, and she was always crying that it wasn’t enough. Fred Feldman had said to him, ‘I hate to say this, Max, but someone has to. Jake Stein says Ruby’s got his hand in the till. It costs us at least a hundred a week.’ Max shrugged it off. ‘The hell with it. We can afford it. You want to get technical, Jake’s as crooked as Ruby.’ He was trapped, and poor Etta Goodman was simply another bar on the trap. He had no idea where the trap had come from and how he had gotten into it, but there he was; and now he sat down at his desk, staring at the opposite wall, wondering why he cheated on Sally and tried to understand why being a millio
naire at age twenty-seven didn’t seem to mean a damn thing. Then the intercom reminded him that Mr Stanford and Mr Calvin were still waiting to see him.

  ‘About what?’ he demanded of Della.

  She took a moment and then told him that they wanted to talk about films. The names stirred his memory again. ‘All right, send them in,’ he said to Della.

  They were tall, middle-aged men in blue serge and white shirts. Stanford had a long, narrow head, blue eyes, and close-cropped gray hair. Calvin was heavier and round-faced. Stanford took a gold watch out of his vest pocket, contemplated it for a long moment, and then said to Max, ‘You’ve kept us waiting for twenty-eight minutes, Mr Britsky. That’s either bad judgment or bad business or plain bad manners.’

  ‘Bad manners,’ Calvin said, looking around him.

  ‘Do I know you gentlemen?’ Max asked them, containing his anger. ‘You had no appointment.’

  ‘Not bad manners, bad judgment,’ Stanford said. ‘We had an appointment. We made it with your administrative assistant, a Miss Goodman.’

  ‘You did?’ Max spread his hands. ‘She never told me. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘Sit down, please,’ Max said. ‘Can I offer you something, a drink?’

  They sat down, declining his offer, both of them watching him thoughtfully. Calvin reminded him that years ago, both of them had done business with Sam Snyder. ‘We had just started making moving pictures,’ Calvin said.

  ‘Yes, of course. I remember.’

  ‘We don’t deal directly with Sam anymore, but at this point, we make or control ninety percent of the moving picture material in the country.’

  ‘We only make part of it,’ Stanford explained. ‘But our distribution organization controls better than ninety percent. In your case, Mr Britsky, you rent your whole product from us.’

  ‘I didn’t realise that,’ Max said. ‘Sam and Jake Stein, my comptroller, take care of the rentals. Look, I want to apologise for having kept you waiting.’

  ‘Nothing to it. Now understand this, Mr Britsky, we’re a bit annoyed at having been kept waiting, but that has nothing to do with our proposition. We represent National Distributors. We own patents on two types of camera.’

  ‘I thought Edison –’

  ‘Yes, but we think we can make our patents stand up. Anyway, that is beside the fact of our product. Now in your case, you operate fourteen nickelodeons and seven regular theatres. You also have three new theatres under construction, and you have nine conversions of lecture halls and catering halls. That makes you the largest theatre operator in the moving picture business. Your cash flow is between thirty-five and fifty-five thousand a week.’

  ‘What have you got – spies planted here?’

  ‘It’s an outside calculation, Mr Britsky. But we appear to have hit close to the mark.’

  ‘All right. Suppose you have. Where does this lead us? What are you here for?’

  ‘To talk business.’

  ‘If you’re going to talk about rentals and the price we pay you, I’d like to have Sam Snyder and Jake Stein in here, and my lawyer, Fred Feldman.’

  ‘Not necessary,’ Calvin said. ‘Not yet, Max.’ He paused to calculate the effect of the first name, the tightening of Max’s lips. ‘Max, you’ve made yourself into a millionaire with our blood, or quart of blood.’

  ‘What in hell are you talking about?’

  ‘The moving pictures.’

  ‘I pay for them.’

  ‘Not enough. Not nearly enough, Max.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to raise your price.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Stanford said. ‘We haven’t said anything about raising our price. We’re not raising our price. We want something else, and we feel that we’re entitled to it.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We want a fifty percent interest in your business – half of everything you take out of the theatres and half of the ownership. We’ll set up the mechanism that will turn the Britsky theatres into a publicly owned enterprise, and you’ll turn over fifty percent of the stock to National Distributors.’

  Max smiled. ‘It’s a stupid joke.’

  ‘We’re dead serious.’

  ‘It’s still a stupid joke.’

  ‘Bad manners,’ Calvin said.

  ‘Don’t try to shrug this off,’ Stanford said. ‘We’re dead serious. If we walk out of here without a deal, we’ll yank every motion picture out of your theatres in three days. Your houses will be dead.’

  Max made no response. He sat facing them, and they sat facing him, and when the silence had stretched as tight as a rubber band, Calvin said to him, ‘Take a few days and think it over.’

  ‘What do I think about?’ Max asked him. ‘How I broke my ass for seven years to build up this circuit and then handed it over to you? You know something – my houses are half empty these days, and you know why? Because your moving pictures stink! Because people are bored to shit watching a horse run around a track or a locomotive rush toward them or a little girl bouncing a ball or some clown driving a cart into a river. You don’t have the brains to open a theatre and you don’t have the brains to make a decent moving picture. So I’ll tell you what you can do. You can both go straight to hell! You want my theatres, you can have them over my dead body.’

  Calvin spoke first. ‘You’re a snotty little Jew bastard, Britsky. You’ve just dug your own grave. We’ll pick up your whole damn circuit in the bankruptcy proceedings.’

  Stanford tossed a card on Max’s desk. ‘If you change your mind, call us.’

  In the course of three and a half years as the wife of Max Britsky and mistress of the house on Sixty-sixth Street, Sally had changed. She had given birth to two children: Richard, who was born in 1903, and Marion, born a year and seven months later. She had also furnished the brown-stone according to her own taste, which meant a stonewall defense against the taste of Sarah Britsky and Sarah’s three daughters, Esther, Sheila, and Freida. In the course of the three and a half years, both Esther and Sheila had married, each to a young man who subsequently became an employee of Max; and Freida, after a period of anger, bitterness, hostility, and jealousy – all directed toward Sally -gave up the struggle and became Sally’s friend and confidante, whereupon both of them combined defenses against Sarah’s apparent desire to destroy them. Neither Sally nor Freida could understand the source of Sarah’s venom, an apparently unremitting revenge against life itself, and after three visits to the house next door, Sally never set foot inside again. Even Max saw the difference between the simple furnishings that Sally had selected and the collection of Victorian grotesques that Sarah and her daughters crammed into their home. The two servants Sarah had employed lived in terror of their mistress. Freida could only say to Sally in explanation, ‘She’s crazy, but she’s always been a little crazy.’

  Freida also said to Sally, once the hostility and jealousy had been overcome, ‘I know you want to sell the place and move away. But if you do, I’ll die. You don’t have to go in there. You don’t have to talk to her. Max understands. He comes to see her and she abuses him. I don’t know why he stands it.’

  Nor did Sally. In fact, as time went on, she felt she knew less and less about Max. After Marion was bom, Sally and Max had not resumed a sex life, which had been intermittent at best. Sally pleaded continuing pains and gynecologic problems – all actually non-existent – and Max accepted her excuses without questioning. Their sex life had never been very satisfactory, and Max’s sexual comprehension was still conditioned by the street lore of his childhood, which held that sex was something the man enjoyed and the woman endured – with the exception of certain women, such as Etta Goodman. Indeed, Sally’s indifference to sexual enjoyment gave her a certain kind of purity and class in Max’s eyes. He liked the notion that his wife was above such things, whereas Sally only knew that her initial fear and repulsion in terms of Max had been overcome in many ways but still persisted where intimacy was suggested. His advances on
ly tensed and tightened her and caused her to take psychological refuge in a rejection of her own feeling and sensation.

  There was no one she could turn to for guidance or advice. Her own notions of sex were confused at best, and her inclination to dwell in a romantic world of fantasy only compounded this confusion. Her mother had never discussed such things with her; indeed, it was unthinkable, nor was sex ever a subject of conversation among the lady schoolteachers who had been her only associates for so many years. The only female friend she had now was Freida, but she could hardly discuss her sexual relationship with Max with his sister. Thus she accepted the situation as so many other women of her time accepted it, nor did she feel that she was doomed to unhappiness. She still regarded Max as a man who was both unique and astonishing; she did have a beautiful home, one beyond any expectations she might have entertained; and she had two lovely children. She also had a housekeeper who lived in and a cleaning woman who came in three times a week. She had been provided with a nurse for the children, which gave her all the time to herself that she required. In addition, Freida was there almost every day, utterly devoted to Sally’s children, and ready to take care of them if Sally desired a few hours to herself.

  On Max’s part, his respect for Sally had not lessened. He could not become accustomed to the fact that a woman like Sally had married him, Max Britsky. She was his possession, but a very precious and high-class possession. When on this day, the day he had encountered Stanford and Calvin, he called Sally and told her that there would be a meeting at their house that evening, he also made certain that she would be there.