by Howard Fast
Not that Max had ever seriously raised the question of divorce. He was incapable of contemplating a divorce from Sally any more than he could contemplate a divorce from Britsky Productions. Each was a major achievement of his life, each the living proof that the poverty and hopelessness that had surrounded his childhood could be overcome. In all truth, Max would never actually be separated from his childhood; the skinny little kid who had been saddled with the responsibility for the survival of a family of seven human souls lived inside of him as a constant companion; and it was as much this skinny little kid as it was the adult Max who turned to stare at Della.
‘What do you mean, she did the same thing? What do you mean by that? You’d better explain yourself.’
Della stopped knitting and looked at Max in surprise.
‘Just tell me what you mean,’ he said.
‘You’re angry at me.’
‘You made a statement,’ Max said.
‘All I said was for you not to feel guilty, Max. You seem to suffer in so many ways, and I just don’t know why.’
‘Never mind my suffering. You said she did the same thing.’
‘Oh –’
‘Come on!’
‘Well, you told me you found her kissing Gerry passionately. She’s been having an affair with him, Max. It’s been going on for years and years. Everybody knows; I was sure you knew.’
He struggled to breathe, gasping, and then, getting hold of himself, fairly shouted. ‘That’s a damned lie!’
‘Max –’ Della said weakly.
‘A goddamn lie! Everyone knows? Who knows? You just tell me who knows, and how come you know so much?’
Della put down her knitting and spread her arms hopelessly. ‘Max, darling, what can I say?’
‘You said enough. Now I goddamn well want to know who says my wife is fucking Freedman.’
Della shook her head.
‘So what is it then? Some fancy plan to get me to divorce my wife? And don’t talk to me about any even Steven. A man’s got a right to get laid if he wants to. Not a woman! No, sir! Not a woman!’ And he walked out, slamming the door of the apartment behind him.
After that, at the office, Max treated Della with cold formality. It was Mrs O’Donnell now. Sam Snyder invited both of them for dinner. Max made his excuses, but Della came, and after dinner she sat with Alice Snyder and had a good cry.
‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ Della told Alice. ‘I thought he knew. Everybody else knew, so it just makes plain common sense that I should think he knew.’
‘Plain common sense doesn’t count with Max Britsky.’
‘It’s two weeks now, and he treats me like I’m not there. I love him. I really love him.’
‘Then if that’s the case,’ Alice said to her, ‘you’re a real dumb-bell. I don’t like to talk this way, but it’s time someone spoke to you without mincing words. You’re a beautiful young woman, Della –’
‘Hah! That’s to laugh. Young – I’m thirty-four.’
‘It doesn’t show. You should marry some fine young man and have children, a family. You can still do that. Instead, you’ve thrown the last six years away on Max Britsky. He’ll never leave Sally.’
‘Alice,’ Della said through her tears, ‘I’m married. And he’s a no-good drunken bum and walked out on me, and he’s living with some tramp in Yonkers, so I can never get married again.’
‘Oh, I didn’tknow.’
Unexpectedly, a week later, Max asked Della to have dinner with him. She accepted with the same quick delight that had marked her first response to his advances. He took her to Luchow’s on Fourteenth Street, where they dined on bratwurst and lentils and dumplings, washing it all down with sweet dark beer. Della wondered how Max could remain so thin while she gained weight constantly. ‘I’ll soon look like one of those fat old Irish ladies, and then you won’t want to look at me.’
‘You’re beautiful, and you’ll always be beautiful.’
Tears came to Della’s eyes. ‘You were so mad at me. You said such awful things to me. I didn’t think you’d ever want to see me again.’
‘You know how I feel about Sally.’
‘Sure. I know, Max.’
‘So we won’t ever talk about those things again, right?’
‘Right, Max.’
That night, with his head pillowed on her abundant bosom, with the warm smell of her body surrounding him, Max was as much at peace as ever in his life.
The opening of the Britsky Xanadu was a New York City event of great importance, from the architectural as well as from other points of view, rising as the first of those great and improbable temples to the glory of the moving picture that were built between 1912 and 1929. When work began on the actual construction, Max obtained a copy of the Coleridge poem and read it over and over, finally deciding to name the theatre the Britsky Xanadu. Sally was thunderstruck, and told Max flatly that the juxtaposition of the two words was absolutely ridiculous.
‘So I’ll be ridiculous,’ Max said, shrugging.
‘It makes no sense. No one will know how to pronounce the name.’
‘According to Abel, it’s pronounced Zanadu, but suppose they say Exanadu – what difference does it make? Since this Coleridge fellow who wrote the poem has been dead for a long time, he can’t tell anybody how to pronounce it, which I wish was the case with the rest of the English language.’
‘It’s just too bad that I try to improve your speech. I still say it’s ridiculous.’
Max sighed. ‘Then I’ll be ridiculous. It’s not a new position for me, is it? I don’t know why you should resent it.’
‘And just what does that mean?’ Sally snapped.
‘What does it mean? It’s a question of being ridiculous. I’m used to being ridiculous. It seems that everyone in New York knows that Freedman is fucking my wife except me. So I’m ridiculous.’
‘You love that word, don’t you?’ She was shouting. ‘You use it over me like a club! Well, it’s true! True! True! Look at yourself! You’re a cheap, vulgar, East Side hoodlum! That’s what you are and that’s what you’ll always be!’
Max couldn’t understand why he felt relieved. He was very calm. A strange woman was shouting at him. ‘Why did you marry this hoodlum?’ he asked almost gently.
She began to cry then. Like a little girl, she whispered, ‘Papa wanted me to, Mama wanted me to.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Then he walked out and left her.
Yet the problem of the name still remained, and Max decided that he would present the question to Clifford Abel and abide by his decision. Increasingly, he had come to depend on Abel in matters of taste. It was part of the rapport and mutual admiration that had grown up between them.
‘Maybe I’m crazy,’ Max said, ‘but I want to call it Xanadu. Certain people say it’s ridiculous.’
Clifford Abel thought it was unusual, but not ridiculous. ‘In fact,’ he said to Max, ‘It has a certain kind of validity. Like Kubla Khan, you decreed it.’
Della wanted to call it the Palladian, having read somewhere that a great theatre by that name had been built in London, and while Max liked the sound of the word, Abel pointed out to him that it had a rather historic connection with the Classical style. The theatre they were building was as distant from the Classical style as architecture could get. Max insisted that somehwere in the lobby should be a prominent line of ornamental writing in large letters: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.’ Abel liked the idea, and Barney Enfield, who was Fred Feldman’s cousin and who had worked for the Tribune and had been hired away by Max, thought it was absolutely fantastic. After Sam Snyder had suggested having their own publicity person to turn their movie actresses into Sarah Bernhardts, or at least the equivalent in terms of fame, Max had sought out Barney Enfield, spoken to him and hired him. Enfield leaped on the comparison between Max and Kubla Khan. It was good publicity, and he felt that the term ‘pleasure dome’ was both artistic and useful.
&nb
sp; On occasion, by no means frequently, Max would spend time with his children. That was where his mental picture of pinnacles had come from. Max was never very easy with his children. Marion was now seven years old and Richard was eight and a half. Their German nanny regarded Max as an uncouth interloper and Max in turn found his children so different and alien that no easy approach was possible. However, alone with them at rare moments, he took to reading to them from their illustrated storybooks. Max had never seen such books, and though he was not a very good reader, he was enchanted by the illustrations. It was the pictures of palaces, lacy fair buildings, many-towered, that took his fancy, and he had brought one of the books to Abel.
Many people sneered at the enthusiasm that were founded in Max’s lack of sophistication and education. Clifford Abel did not. He was intrigued by Max’s bursts of excitement and by the unfettered nature of his ideas; and he explained rather regretfully that a New York City street could not approximate the rocky pinnacles upon which the story illustrations were constructed.
‘But,’ Max insisted, ‘we can have the towers, Cliff. Suppose just in front, two towers coming up on either side of the entrance, and then behind it a dome. I want it to be like something they never saw before in a theatre. Different, the way the movies are different.’
‘I suppose it could be done.’
‘And inside, the feeling you’re inside a dream.’
‘Maybe.’
When Max finally chose the drawing that would become the Britsky Xanadu, Barney Enfield had it printed in the Tribune with a long background story regarding its genesis. He kept the interest going all through the fourteen months of excavating and building, and during those months, there was hardly a day when Max wasn’t on the site, as eager and interested and excited as a kid with a new toy.
The unpleasant interlude between Max and Della O’Donnell had been forgotten by Max and forgiven by Della. She understood Max far better than he understood himself – his fears and doubts and his desperate constructs that were so far from reality. She had never known anyone as tender and loving toward her as Max was, nor had he ever received such unquestioning devotion; yet he was incapable of wholly admitting to himself that for the first and only time in his life, he was truly in love with a woman who loved him. He could accept the fact that Della had become a necessity and that he couldn’t live without her, that the only moments of peace and security and comfort he knew took place in her company; but at the same time he relegated her to a place outside his world. In his world, or rather in the eyes of the world as he fancied it, he was Sally’s faithful husband and Sally was his faithful wife, and the incongruous nature of all this hardly disturbed him.
During the building of his beloved toy, the Britsky Xanadu, it was frequently Della who accompanied him as he prowled among the scaffolding and hoists and workmen. She wore heavy shoes on such occasions and would hike up her skirts to reveal plaid woollen stockings, and with her flaming red hair and abundant bosom, she brought joy to the workingmen on the construction, grinning at their hoots and whistles. After a time, they came to know her. They were a wonderful assortment of people – the masons Italian, the laborers and ironworkers Irish, the plasterers Jewish, and the carpenters Yankees; and when Della missed a few days, they would welcome her with bitter complaints for her absence. Max always watched her with pride and delight. The only women he had ever known who were as outgoing and as uninhibited as Della were the whores of his youth, but with Della it was neither hostility nor enticement, but just the simple warmth of her nature.
The excavating had begun during the summer of 1912, and by the following January, the shell of the structure had been completed and an army of craftsmen were at work on the interior. They were designing the interior walls, not the actual walls of the theatre but a sort of reverse cornice cut out of thin wood and mounted high on the theatre walls but about six inches away from the supporting walls, the wood cut to give the illusion of parapets. Behind these thin walls, a sky would be painted with rheostat lights to complete the illusion. Abel had worked this out to satisfy Max’s wish that the people in the theatre should feel that they actually were in a palace, and having mounted the first section of this wall, he wanted Max to see it. As excited as a kid – since Abel at first had doubted that this could be done – Max stopped by Della’s desk and said, ‘Come on, baby. We’re going to step into a Jewish palace on Seventh Avenue.’
Della shook her head. ‘I’d love to, Max. But I have a rotten headache. I think I’ll go home.’
‘I got my car downstairs. We’ll drive you home first. Unless –’ He touched her brow. ‘No, I thought maybe I’d talk you into it. But you’re hot. I think you got a fever.’
‘No, no, I’m all right. You really want me to go with you?’
‘Only if you feel all right.’
‘I’ll go. If I faint, you’ll take me home, won’t you,. Max?’
‘Absolutely.’
She didn’t complain of her headache again. On the way out, they picked up Sam Snyder. Clifford Abel was waiting for them at the theatre. The ceiling had been given a prime coat of sky blue, and at Abel’s urging, the electricians had installed a single bank of lights, enough to illuminate about ten feet of the false wall. Abel sat them on crates so that they could look up, and then slowly he raised the power of the rheostat. The illusion was excellent, a true sense of the sun rising behind the crenelated wall, and Della clapped her hands in delight.
‘Max, it’s wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!’
Not for a moment did it occur to Della that Clifford Abel had anything to do with the effect. As far as she was cortcerned, it was Max who did things, who made the world turn, who sheltered her and protected her.
‘It is quite wonderful,’ Abel agreed. ‘Odd thing is, no one ever thought of it before; that is, turning the inside into the outside. It’s a marvelous illusion.’
‘And you’re a genius,’ Max said generously.
‘Oh, no, no. It was your idea, Max. Although I must say that the stars in the sky are my notion. There are eight hundred tiny sockets set into the ceiling. When it’s all complete and the ceiling is a much deeper shade of blue, then as you turn the sunset rheostat down, you can also control the starlight with a second rheostat. I didn’t just set in the sockets at random. We followed a midsummer star map, midsummer being the time most people look at the sky. Just consider it, Miss O’Donnell,’ he said to Della, ‘here you are, sitting in the theatre and waiting for the moving picture to begin –’
‘The organ’s playing,’ Max interrupted. ‘The fifth biggest pipe organ in New York.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Abel agreed, ‘the organ playing, and now the light in the theatre begins to fade. You look up, and suddenly you’re not in a theatre anymore but in a walled palace, and beyond the walls you see the last rays of the setting sun. There, look,’ pointing to the ceiling as he turned down the rheostat. ‘And across the ceiling, when we get the lights in, the summer night sky appears, just faint bits of light at first, but then twinkling brighter in all the major constellations, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the North Star –’
Della’s eyes were wet. ‘It will be the most beautiful place on earth.’
‘I hope so,’ Max said.
Driving back to Twenty-third Street, Della curled up against Max. When he touched her face, her cheeks were as hot as fire and wet with tears, and when Max wanted to know why she was crying, Della said, ‘It was so beautiful, Max. It was just so absolutely beautiful, except that Sally was there, and she didn’t want me to see it.’
‘Sally. No, she wasn’t there.’
‘Up behind the wall. She was looking over the wall.’
Max carried her up the stairs to her flat. He didn’t know where his strength came from, but he managed, just as he managed to undress her and put her to bed with a quilt and a heavy blanket over her. He thanked God that he had insisted, the year before, that she have a telephone installed, and when he left her to call the doctor, she
was huddled under the covers, shivering.
Dr Traub was a small, fat man who mumbled. He examined Della and mumbled that it was pneumonia. Then he mumbled that she ought to go to the hospital.
‘I want the best, the best there is,’ Max said.
Dr Traub was already on the telephone; when he finished, he told Max that he had ordered the ambulance.
‘The best hospital –’
‘All right, Mr Britsky. Don’t be nervous. I’m sending her to Mt Sinai. That’s my hospital. It’s as good as any hospital.’
‘Look,’ Max said, ‘money is no object. You can hire the best doctors in the world. I want her cured.’
‘Money won’t help. She has pneumonia. We’ll do the best we can. Tell me, Mr Britsky, this is a relative? She don’t look Jewish.’
‘This is my secretary and business associate.’
Dr Traub nodded and said no more. Since he was the Britsky family doctor, there was no need for him to pursue his inquiries. ‘When the ambulance comes,’ he said, ‘we’ll wrap her in a blanket. You can bring it back. You’re going to the hospital?’
Max nodded.
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘On a Hundredth Street and Fifth?’
‘That’s right.’
After the ambulance arrived and Della had been carried away. Max went downstairs to where his car was waiting. Shecky Blum had made the transition from carriage to limousine seven years ago, and by now he felt comfortable and superior in the driver’s seat of Max’s new Buick. When he reached Mt Sinai Hospital, he asked Max, ‘What do I do now?’
