As Time Goes By

by Michael Walsh

  Ilsa was crying now, the tears she had so long suppressed flowing freely. “I knew Victor had returned when I saw Rick for the last time. We were in his club, drinking the last of his champagne so the Germans wouldn't get it. I made some excuse to leave and promised to meet him that evening at the Gare de Lyon. I never showed up. Richard boarded the train for Marseille with only a note from me, telling him I could never see him again. I couldn't tell him why. I couldn't tell him anything. It was the hardest decision of my life. But what else could I do? Our work was more important than my feelings. Even my feelings for Richard Blaine. What did the happiness of two people matter when the lives of millions were at stake?”

  A look of ineffable sadness crossed her mother's face. “You are speaking not of your husband,” she observed, “but of his work. They are not the same thing.”

  Ilsa had never made that distinction before. “Yes,” she admitted, “his work. I fell in love with his work long before I met him. When we did meet, I could not believe that a great man like him could possibly love an inexperienced girl like me. He was doing heroic deeds for his country, and what was I doing? Studying languages.”

  Inghild considered her next words carefully. “I have not had the honor of meeting either of these two gentlemen, Ilsa. What is it that you love about each of them?”

  Ilsa told her. That Victor had taught her what love was: love of country, love of principle, love of freedom, love of one's fellow human beings. That everything she ever was or had become had been because of him. That he was an easy man to love, and Ilsa had thought she loved him.

  “What about the other man? Richard Blaine?”

  Ilsa told her mother that Rick was everything Victor was not. That he was cynical where Victor was earnest; misanthropic where Victor was selfless. That he spoke crisply, and when necessary, he acted brutally. That he mocked where Victor praised, scoffed where Victor extolled. That even in his dinner jacket he carried with him an aura of violence. That he was a hard man to love, but that she knew she loved him.

  Rick had also taught her what love was, another kind of love: a carnal, physical, all-embracing love that made her cry out with desire and joy. With Victor she was one of a multitude; with Rick the multitude vanished and she was the only woman in the world.

  “Which man do you love more?”

  Wasn't it obvious? Ilsa threw herself into her mother's arms, sobbing on her breast. Inghild stroked her daughter's hair fondly and whispered to her in the same soothing tones she had used when Ilsa was a child.

  “I love Victor, Mother. Whatever he and his work demand, I am ready to give, including myself. What greater love can a woman have?”

  “And Rick?”

  “I love Rick, too. He makes me feel like a woman. When we are together, his kisses overwhelm my senses, drive all other thoughts from my mind, make me want to be with him forever. What greater love can there be?”

  Inghild clutched her daughter tightly. “I haven't seen you in two years, and I can only begin to imagine what you have been going through. But I know my daughter. I know that she is strong and honest, and that she would never do anything but what was right. Besides, I think you have already made your choice.”

  “I thought I had, too.” Ilsa raised her head, and with her free hand, Inghild brushed away her daughter's tears. “Until Casablanca, when I saw Rick again. Rick was the one who got the letters of transit for me and Victor. He saved our lives.” She told Inghild the story of their three days in Morocco, of meeting Rick again, of his bitterness, of the renewal of their love, and of his sacrifice at the airport.

  “You want me to tell you what you should do,” said Inghild, and Ilsa nodded. “I won't.”

  Ilsa's face fell. “Why not, Mother?” she pleaded.

  “Because I can't. This is your life, Ilsa, not mine. Whatever you decide, my blessing goes with you. All I can say is this: Look in your heart. The answer lies there.”

  It did. To love Rick would be to betray both her marriage vows and the Resistance itself. Rick said he stuck his neck out for nobody. She would show him: she would stick her neck out for everybody—for Victor, for Europe. Even for Rick Blaine, whether he liked it or not.

  CHAPTER SIX

  New York, June 1931

  Yitzik Baline, whom everybody called Rick, met Lois Horowitz on his way downtown to buy a knish for his mother. He met Solomon Horowitz on his way back uptown to deliver Lois to her father.

  He was riding the Second Avenue el down from his mother's apartment on East 116th Street, having walked over to visit her from his dump up in Washington Heights. He liked walking around New York and didn't mind the hike. Besides, he didn't own a car. He couldn't afford a car. He didn't mind visiting his mother from time to time either, even if that meant having to sit in her dining room and listen to her kvell about his good looks and yiddische kopf and kvetch about his lack of a job.

  Strictly speaking, she was incorrect, for he had a job— or, rather, he had several. It was just that none of them was either very respectable or very good. Most of his time was spent trying to figure out how a guy as smart as him could be so poor.

  Some small-time crap games here, a little bootlegging there, even running a team of newspaper shtarkers in Harlem and not Hearst's Journal. The shtarkers were a fixture of the newspaper business in those days. Their function was to encourage newsstand vendors to carry their paper instead of its rivals, and their means of persuasion were generally baseball bats and suspicious fires. He wasn't proud about this line of work, but it paid reasonably well—even after kicking back part of his money to the cops so they might continue to look the other way until they got a better offer—well enough to keep him from looking like a bum, even if he often felt like one.

  What he really wanted to do was run a speakeasy. Everything about nightlife attracted him, starting with the hours; he was a night owl living in an early bird world. Although he didn't play an instrument, an ear for music ran in the family, as his mother never tired of reminding him. The clink of glasses, the sound of fresh liquor being poured from a bottle, the satisfying whoosh of a beer keg being tapped— these were his instruments.

  And the money! At his age, other fellows who ran speaks were riding around town in Duesenbergs, with a doll on each arm. Him, he was lucky to scare up car fare. He wanted to blame it on the Depression but knew he couldn't. He couldn't blame it on anybody but himself.

  His destination, Ruby's Appetizing and Delicatessen, sat on the corner of Hester and Allen Streets in their old neighborhood, handy to the local el stop. This was his weekly mitzvah, going downtown to buy his mother a knish when there were perfectly fine knishes up and down Second Avenue. Miriam insisted that the best knishes—and the best latkes and the best gefilte fish and the best everything— were still to be found on the Lower East Side.

  He liked to think of himself as a tough guy, and here he was, riding the el to buy an old lady a knish.

  The Lower East Side was where he spent most of his childhood. The “old neighborhood,” the old folks called it, using the same tone—nostalgia mixed with audible relief at not having to live there anymore—that they used when they talked about the old country. Which, for the Balines, as for most of the other Jewish families in East Harlem, was Russia, the Ukraine, or Poland. Ninety thousand Jews lived in East Harlem and eighty thousand more in Harlem proper, which made the area north of Central Park the second-largest Jewish neighborhood in the country, after the old neighborhood.

  New York had plenty of German Jews, the Deutscher Yehudim, but many of them were established, rapidly assimilating snobs who took one look at their embarrassingly unwashed brethren pouring in from Eastern Europe and promptly changed their names. Take that fancy pants August Belmont, the big macher at the Metropolitan Opera: he had been born Schönberg. Rick swore to himself that he would never change his name. “Yitzik” to “Rick,” maybe; but Baline he was born and Baline he would stay.

  That was his mother's influence. His father might have
had an influence, too, but Rick had never known his father; Morris Baline had died before Rick was born. Miriam wanted better for her boy, but she also wanted him to remember where he had come from. She kept up with the news in the Yiddish-language Daily Vorwärts, one of the city's biggest and most important newspapers, and she never lost the opportunity to remind him about the importance of social justice. Miriam was an expert on social justice, since, coming from the old country, she had experienced even though she spoke almost no English, read not a word of it, and, at her age, didn't intend to start.

  It was the el and its younger sibling, the subway, that had made it possible for the immigrants jammed into Manhattan's most crowded precincts to escape the Lower East Side. Miriam Baline worried about losing her fatherless boy to the streets, and the streets of the Lower East Side were worse than any—prime recruiting territory for some of the toughest gangs in the city. Like mothers all over New York, she prayed that her son would not fall into gangland's clutches, not take up with a group of like-minded youngsters who would rather knock over a pushcart peddler or rob a stuss game than put in an honest day's work, not gawk at the gangsters like Dopey Benny and Gyp the Blood in their fancy suits and their shiny shoes, with a girl on their arm, a gun in their pocket, and a look on their face that dared you to crack wise about it.

  Like many mothers all over New York, though, Miriam had been doomed to disappointment. Her son was heading south, not north.

  The long ride downtown gave him ample time for reflection on his depressing trajectory. He had been born, he decided, under an unlucky star. He was too young to have been able to fight in the Great War; too poor to have gone to anywhere except City College, where he had been an indifferent student and finally had dropped out; too disinterested in knowledge for its own sake to pay very close attention to his lessons; and too easily distracted by girls to do much of anything. He had no motivation and, aside from a growing fondness for the bottle, no interests. Except for the speed of the elevated train, he was going nowhere slowly. He needed a cause.

  It was hot that summer, the way it was always hot in New York, only hotter. All the men wore suits and ties, and underneath them the sweat ran down their arms like tiny rivers. Rick often wondered whether it would puddle high enough in your shoes to splash onto the floor and embarrass you in front of the ladies. With everyone packed into the el, cheek to jowl with their equally sweaty neighbors at rush hour, it was never a pleasant ride, but it was cheap and a lot faster than walking. With luck, Rick could get downtown and back again in less than an hour with a cloth sack filled with goodies from old man Ruby's display cases.

  On this particular afternoon, however, the el was nearly empty. As he looked down into the city, Rick thought the only New Yorkers who were not stoop sitting or fire escape napping or standing with their heads in the icebox were himself and the sole other occupant of the car, an exceptionally pretty young woman who was sitting across from him.

  To say she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen would be an understatement. Her hair was jet black, her skin translucent white. Her figure was only partly concealed by her clothing, and the part that wasn't concealed had had his full attention for several stops. Although her skirts were long, her ankles were revealed, and as any young man would, Rick had instantly done the sum, extrapolating from the width of her ankle to the precise angle of the curve of her calf, to the length of her thigh, and so on right up to the top of her head. Before he even got there, he knew he liked what he saw.

  The girl, who appeared to be about eighteen, kept her hands folded in her lap, as she was probably taught by her mother, and her eyes on the floor, as no doubt she had already learned from experience. No matter how well brought up, however, any woman could succumb to the heat when it was hot enough or when she wanted to. Rick was hardly surprised when the young lady suddenly slumped to the floor with the daintiest of sighs: a puff of breath, and then she keeled over like one of the tugboats in the harbor that had just been holed below the waterline by a rock.

  Rick's stop was coming right up, but he forgot all about it as he leaped to her assistance. The el rattled past another ten blocks or so of third-floor windows before she opened her eyes, which were the purest blue Rick Baline had ever seen. Slowly he helped her to her feet, but she was still a little woozy from the inhalation of so much of Manhattan's dubious air, so he sat her down again, this time beside him. “Are you okay, miss?” he asked.

  For a long moment she didn't answer. Then she turned her head to the right and looked him in the face. “Thanks, mister,” she said. “That sure was swell of you, helpin’ me up like that.”

  She had a shy, almost apologetic little smile that seemed out of place on such a gorgeous face. He was trying to think of something to say when she grasped him by the arm and tugged hard.

  “We've missed it! We've missed it!” she said with agitation.

  “Missed what?” asked Rick.

  “My stop,” she said. “It was for my father.” As if that explained everything.

  “What is?” said Rick, mystified, not for the first time, by the female mind.

  “The gefilte fish,” she said. “At Ruby's.” She smiled. “It's the best.”

  Here he had thought she was an Irish girl from Morris-ania. “Don't worry,” he said soothingly. “We'll go right back. The conductor's a personal friend of mine.”

  That made her laugh. “My name's Lois,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Mine's Yitzik,” he said, “but my friends call me Rick.” He gave her what he thought might be a flirtatious wink. “You can call me Rick.”

  “That's swell,” said Lois. “Only my father says I’m not allowed to have boyfriends until he says so.”

  They got off at the next stop and walked back to Ruby's. “What do you do, Rick?” asked Lois.

  “This and that,” he replied evasively.

  “Oh, unemployed, huh?” said Lois, and his heart fell. He didn't want her to think he was the bum he thought he was. “Nothing wrong with that. Lots of fellas are. Maybe you ought to come home with me and meet Daddy. He gives away jobs like they was candy.” “Yeah, sure,” said Rick. In his mind's eye he envisioned a wild-haired Einstein, like the teachers at City College, or a sweatshop drudge with a bullwhip and a chip on his shoulder. “What's his name?”

  “Solomon Horowitz,” she said. “Ever heard of him?”

  Rick stopped talking, and then he stopped walking. Heard of him? Solomon Horowitz, the Mad Russian. Solomon Horowitz, the rackets king of upper Manhattan and the Bronx. From the uptown numbers games in Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood to loan-sharking in River-dale, from arson-for-hire in East Tremont, right down to a couple of neighborhood crap games in Marble Hill, Solly had the territory covered. Heard of him? Hell, Rick wanted to be him someday.

  Lois brought him home to meet her parents and to deliver the gelfite fish, more or less in that order. Rick felt a stab of disappointment when she stopped in front of a new law tenement on 127th Street just west of Lenox Avenue and said, “Well, here we are. The Horowitz family mansion!” She laughed derisively. “You were expecting maybe the Vanderbilt estate?”

  Some of the apartment houses on the West Side had names. This one didn't. The anonymous building was no better or worse than any of its neighbors, and it certainly put on no airs. There was a violin shop on the ground floor and four levels of flats above it. Next door was a kosher wine shop—still legal, despite Prohibition. Around the corner was a movie theater and a grocery store.

  “It's nice,” said Rick. That was not entirely a lie; it was nicer than his place.

  They stood on the sidewalk for a moment together, sharing the same thoughts. The daughter of Solomon Horowitz deserves better than this, thought Rick, surprised; the daughter of Solomon Horowitz is going to get better than this, thought Lois, determined.

  They walked up two flights of stairs to the third floor. Rick later learned that Solomon Horowitz had an aversion to living either on a low
floor, where someone unwelcome could climb through his window, or on the top floor, where someone equally unwelcome might descend from the roof. In business he liked to play things right down the middle, and that was the way he lived as well.

  Lois rapped on a door near the head of the stairs. “It's me!” she said. “I’m home.”

  Rick could sense that he was being observed from the peephole, just for a moment, and then the door was opened and Lois stepped across the threshold. “This is Mr. Baline,” she said. “I fainted on the el. He helped me up. Be nice to him.”

  The next thing he knew he was face-to-face with Solomon Horowitz, the Beer Baron of the Bronx.

  A short, stout man with the iron grip of a steelworker looked at him as if he were eyeballing a dray horse. Horowitz was about five feet five inches tall and must have weighed close to two hundred pounds, very little of it fat. He wore a rumpled blue serge suit, a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and a loud floral tie. His shoes were off, and as Rick couldn't help noticing, his socks had been darned once or twice. To look at him, you'd never know he was one of the most successful gangsters in New York.

  “A man who does mine a good turn has done me a good turn,” he said. “And him I reward. You married?”

  “No.”

  “Like music?”

  “If it's good.”

  “Drink?”

  “As much as the next guy.”

  “You a lush?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Got a head for business?”

  “Depends on what it is.”

  “Can you handle yourself in a fight?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ever use a gun?”

  “No, but I’m willing to learn.”

  “Are you a coward or a fegeleh?”

  “No.”

  “You want to shtup my daughter?”

  “Daddy!” cried Lois.