Button Man

by Andrew Gross

  The tough’s large companion sauntered over from the card game. “That’s a pretty nice coat you got there, fella.”

  “It’s not the coat, but what’s inside it that I’m interested in, Jacob. Friday’s payday, isn’t it?” the tough in the suit said to Morris in Yiddish. “You got a job, kid? I see you got a nice bag of vegetables there you’re taking home to Momma.”

  “I work.” Morris folded the paper bag closed. “And what’s in the bag ain’t your business,” he answered.

  Delancey, with its crowds, was only around fifty yards ahead.Getting past these thugs, especially the ox, would be a challenge. But in the end, Morris reasoned there was enough money on the fruit boxes that the two thugs would have to remain with their card game.

  Still, the bruiser sauntered out, also blocking Morris’s way.

  “Why don’t you let me see what’s in that bag, kid?” The tough in the homburg and coat grinned. He had a flat nose like it had been broken more than once in a fight and a chummy smile, though the invitation was anything but friendly.

  First the bag, Morris knew, then his pockets. And after the three-card monte fiasco, he wasn’t about to come home empty-handed again, no matter what he had to do.

  “Take a hike.” Morris tried to walk on past.

  “Take a hike! Hear that, Jacob? What does it make you think when a little pisher like this tells you to take a hike?”

  “It makes me think we hold the brat upside down by the ankles and see what falls out,” his large partner said.

  “It makes me think we might have been willing to let him pass,” the one in the suit said, “but now, things have definitely changed. What do you say you try your luck at the game, kid? You got some money on you, right? Three bucks gets you a seat. Maybe you win big and take a wad home for Momma. Maybe you leave it here. What do you say?”

  “I say I don’t like the odds,” Morris said, again trying to take a step around him.

  But the tough scampered ahead of him and blocked his way again. “Our little friend here is quite the handicapper, Jacob. You’re right on the odds, kid. But still, better odds than, say, fighting me. I told you, it’ll cost you a buck to pass.”

  The guy wasn’t so big, but he still had a wide, cocky smirk on his face and a willing gleam in his eye, and Morris knew this likely wouldn’t be the first time he’d used his fists. But he was determined to keep his money. He rolled up the bag of vegetables and looked back at him. “All right, you want to fight so bad, I’ll fight you.”

  “You will, will you?” The tough grinned and glanced at his friend with an amused chortle. “Hear that, Jacob, our friend here says he’ll fight me to get by.” He met Morris’s gaze, a little shorter than he was, but cocky as a peacock. He rolled up his sleeves, as if preparing.

  “You, maybe,” the larger friend said with a dull shrug. “But I bet not me.”

  The tough’s cohort was larger than any of them, plus four or five years older. He would surely be the biggest person Morris had ever scuffled with. But Morris looked at him, dead on. “If I have to, I’ll fight you too.”

  The one in the suit laughed. “Ha, Jacob, I love this kid. But he clearly doesn’t have much between the ears. Still, a whole lot of moxie, I’ll hand you that, pal.” The tough put his cigarette down on one of the box crates and removed his hat and coat. “So, listen, I make a rule for you. You take me, you get to pass free. I take you, we’ll see what’s in your pockets. Truth is,” he handed his oversized friend his coat, “since I got back from reform school, I haven’t had a good row. Isn’t that right, Jacob?”

  “Let me have a shot at him,” his companion said. “We’ll find out what he’s got on him.”

  “Take it easy, my large friend,” the tough said. “And as you know, Jacob, I prefer to settle my own scores. Won’t take but a second. Ready…?” The tough loosened his tie. He stepped in front of Morris, cracking the knuckles on both hands. He was smaller than Morris in frame, but clearly older, and had already been sent upstate, which meant he knew what he was doing. And he seemed to relish the fight. He put up his fists. His nod said he meant business. “But you ought to know, kid, when I do fight, I fight to win.”

  Morris felt his heart begin to pick up with concern. He didn’t like where this was heading, probably a busted nose at the least. Or worse, the loss of a whole week’s pay. He began to think that maybe paying the buck was the wiser choice after all. But there didn’t seem any way out of it now. He put down his bag and took off his coat as well.

  “Come on, kid.” The tough winked, bobbing behind his fists. “Let’s see what you got.”

  Morris put his fists up too and said, “I ain’t no kid.”

  “That so? All right then, here’s your chance to prove it.”

  The guy lunged, then jabbed at Morris, probing his defenses. Morris thought that if all else failed he could simply charge the guy and bowl him over. Then keep on running. A bag of onions and turnips wasn’t worth losing a week’s pay over. But the idea of running didn’t sit well with him. He’d heard stories of what went on in these upstate schools. The guy had likely been in scraps more often than Morris had been in temple. But here they were, circling, dodging, the tough with a determined grin on him. No backing down now.

  One of the card players spun around. “Listen, you shit heels, I didn’t put my money down to watch you duke it out with some twelve-year-old with nothing at stake. Deal the cards. I don’t have all day.”

  The tough circled, dodging behind his fists. “Relax, this won’t take but a minute.”

  He lunged again and Morris sidestepped him and spun him across his lower leg to the ground. The guy jumped back to his feet, chastened and a bit surprised. He gave a glance to his behemoth friend, then back to Morris. “Not your first tussle, huh, pal?”

  Morris said, “Look, I just want to get by. That’s all.”

  “Too late for that, I’m afraid.” The tough brushed the dust off his pants. “Okay, let’s go.”

  He lunged again, leading with a right this time. Morris took a hard shot to the face. He felt blood ooze out his nose. He wrapped his opponent in a clench and they struggled, the guy grabbing and twisting and trying to elbow Morris below the belt. Morris edged his weight against him and wrestled him back to the ground.

  Red-faced, the guy hopped back up onto his feet. This time, any trace of levity had disappeared from his eyes.

  “You want me to cut in, say when,” his companion chuckled, an edge of mockery in his offer.

  “No, I got it, Jacob. I got it just fine.” The tough reached inside his pocket and came back out with something gleaming. A knife. “Maybe I didn’t get my point across, kid.” His smile had changed, ire flashing in it now. “You want to take me on, we play for keeps.” He lowered into a crouch, thrusting his blade toward Morris’s face. Morris took a step backward, his heart accelerating with real worry now. He’d been in plenty of scraps but never had a knife drawn on him before.

  “C’mon,” the tough said, beckoning Morris on. “You want a fight so bad, I’m here to give you one.” He circled with a malevolent smirk on his face. A smirk that said he was prepared to do anything. “How about I cut that Russian nose of yours down to size, just to show you.”

  The tough’s partner had circled behind Morris, removing any escape. If there had to be blood, then there would be blood, Morris accepted. He was in this far. He wasn’t giving up his hard-earned money now.

  The tough jabbed the blade. Morris dodged backward and put up his hand. The knife nicked him, slicing a red line of blood on his wrist.

  The tough grinned. “Fun’s over, huh? C’mon, let’s go.”

  Then the card player turned around and chuffed again, “I said deal, smart guy! Or I’ll take my winnings and leave. I didn’t come here to get the cops called on us.”

  “Hey,” another of the players grumbled, “you leave now, you leave with my money. You’ll have to go through me. I thought this game had rules.”

  The tough
looked at them and stopped. “Gentlemen, gentlemen. It’s just a little free entertainment, that’s all.” He gave Morris a wink and brushed himself off. “On second thought, Jacob, I think the numbers say this time we let the kid go. We’ll catch up to him another day.” He folded the knife back into his pocket and picked up his hat, with a smile that read, There’s unfinished business between us. “It’s your lucky day, kid. But I give you credit, you’re no momma’s boy as much as I thought. It occurs to me we can use a tough little macher like yourself. What do you say? Plenty of opportunity out here. Want to put a little gelt in your pocket?”

  “I already have a job,” Morris said.

  “He already has a job. Hear that, Jacob, he doesn’t want to pal around with the likes of us. Suit yourself then.” The tough bent down and picked up what remained of his cigarette off the fruit box. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

  “Morris Raab.” Morris adjusted his sweater. “Yours?”

  “Mine…?” The street tough put his hat back on. “Louis Buchalter, that’s my name. And you remember it, kid, if you’re smart. Not many people get to turn Louis Buchalter down. You’re already ahead of the game.” He looked at him and adjusted the tilt of his hat to just the right angle. “So, Morris…”

  Morris bent down and reached for his bag of vegetables. “Yeah?”

  The tough reared back and took a swing, catching Morris flush in the jaw. He felt a tooth fly out of his mouth and he stumbled backward a step and went down to one knee, his lip bloody.

  “Okay, Morris Raab … We’ll be seeing you around then,” he said in Yiddish. “Enjoy those onions.…”

  Morris stood up, rubbing his jaw. He spit out a mouthful of blood. “Be seeing you too.”

  But it was years before Morris did see him again. By then, Morris was grown.

  And Louis Buchalter was no longer just running card games in some back alley.

  Chapter Six

  At Majestic, Morris did keep his eyes open, just as Mr. Kaufman had urged.

  He generally got to work every morning at seven, a half hour ahead of the other workers. Often he had the bolts of fabric he knew Mr. Seligman had planned for cutting that day already pulled and on the table by the time the old cutter came in. As he went about his job—sweeping up the remnants on the floor around the cutting table, tacking down the multiple plies of fabric to keep them set, assorting the cut pieces in bins and carrying them over to the sewing stations, Morris carefully watched Mr. Seligman shear around the marker’s outline, adhering to every groove and notch with a surgeon’s skill, often on fabric piled six to eight ply.

  Morris also studied Mr. Beck, the marker maker—a stooped, white-haired Hungarian who always wore a vest and tie, spoke little English, but could size up how to lay out a complex pattern in the most efficient way, fitting the pieces together like an intricate puzzle—sometimes as many as twenty separate pieces per pattern—to achieve the best “yield,” the most efficient utilization of fabric.

  Every day, Morris would observe as the marker, Mr. Beck, performed what seemed to Morris dizzying calculations in his head or sketched out the proposed layout on the marker’s edges to limit the wastage. Morris would lean over and ask him why he had laid out a pattern in a particular way—against the grain or on the bias—when at first it appeared as if that way would in fact consume more goods. The marker would simply wipe his glasses and reach behind his ear for the pencil he perpetually kept there. He would show Morris that the answer lay not in minimizing the yield for a single garment, but in the “repeat”—multiple garments interlocked together—and he would sketch it out by drawing three garments, not just the one, to prove his point. “The hre-peet, son,” Mr. Beck would mutter in his heavy Hungarian accent, rubbing his thumbs and index fingers together. “Dats ver the money is.”

  * * *

  Just before Morris turned sixteen (and after Mr. Kaufman had welcomed him back from his three-week enlistment in the army), the old marker maker, who’d worked at Majestic for twenty years, came in and announced it was time for him to step down. He’d been having dizzy spells and could no longer make it to work so easily. His doctors thought it might be a tumor. He’d have to call it quits at the end of the month.

  The news threw Mr. and Mrs. Kaufman into a state of dismay. Mr. Beck was as valuable to the firm as anyone in the company, they always insisted. Maybe more.

  “These kinds of people just don’t come in off the street and introduce themselves,” Mr. Kaufman opined. “I’ll put an ad in the trade papers. We’ll put out feelers and try to lure someone in from another company. In any case, it’ll cost us a lot more money.”

  Mrs. Kaufman said, “I heard J and L Needlework is closing their doors. Maybe they have someone?”

  “They do, but he’s a hack. Arnold Lochman couldn’t engineer a dress that would fit his own mother.”

  “Maybe Mr. Beck might know someone then,” Mrs. Kaufman proposed. “These people often know of others in the same work.”

  Mr. Kaufman nodded, but without much enthusiasm. “There’s always a chance.”

  That afternoon, Morris knocked on the Kaufmans’ office door.

  “What do you need, son?” Mr. Kaufman groused impatiently, glasses on, scanning the Help Wanted ads in Women’s Wear Daily. “This really isn’t the time.”

  Mrs. Kaufman was at her desk. “Yes, Morris, what is it?”

  Morris stepped in. He squeezed his cap and cleared his throat. “I can do the job.”

  “Whose job?” Mr. Kaufman looked up. “As I say, this really isn’t the time to—”

  “Mr. Beck’s job,” Morris said. He took another step. “I can do it.”

  Mr. Kaufman put down his newspaper. “Did I hear you right? You’re not even sixteen, boy. We’re talking about a man who’s learned what he does for over fifty years. Now leave us be, we have important work to do.” He shooed Morris away.

  “You said to keep my eyes open and I have.” Morris squeezed his cap. “I’ve been watching him steady for three years.”

  Mr. Kaufman removed his glasses. “Mr. Beck was a master tailor in Budapest. You’re still just a boy. And a brash one, at that. Now go on home. You’re lucky I don’t fire you for a remark like that. For insubordination. Come see me in the morning and we’ll see if you still even have a job in this firm.”

  “Just ask him.” Morris shrugged, and went to the door.

  “Ask who…?” Mr. Kaufman knitted his brow in anger.

  “Mr. Beck,” Morris said, and left.

  “Manny, don’t you think you were a little hard on the boy?” Mrs. Kaufman wheeled around at her desk. “He’s a smart lad. He picks things up. Maybe we should do like he said.”

  “He’s a boy, Rose!” her husband bellowed, turning red in the face. “This is a job that takes years and years to understand and perfect. It’s not a game in the penny arcade.”

  “Still, maybe we should just ask him. What is there to lose?”

  “Ask who, Rose? You’re surely not suggesting I go down and ask Mr. Beck?”

  “Yes, Manny, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” his wife said.

  So they went downstairs and caught the old marker maker as he was buttoning up his vest to leave for the day.

  Mr. Kaufman said, “I don’t want to insult you, Mr. Beck, but Morris Raab came upstairs and insinuated he can handle your job. I told him it takes a lifetime to learn such skills, that it’s impertinent to even suggest he could do it, but somehow he said to ask you. So I’m asking. Respectfully, you understand.”

  The marker maker set his watch and dropped it into his vest pocket. “I told him to go up and ask.”

  “You…?” Mr. Kaufman stared widely. “He’s not even sixteen. You think he can perform a job that requires such an intricate knowledge of construction?”

  The marker maker shrugged. “I’ve taught him a bit. The rest he just picked up. The lad’s got quite a smart kop on him, you know.” Mr. Beck pointed to his head. He closed his bag and too
k his cane to leave. “If you’ve come for my opinion, I think you ought to give him a chance to show what he can do.”

  So in the morning they brought Morris in and watched him lay out the pattern pieces for the style they were about to cut that day. It was a large shirtwaist blouse, made of actual silk, not cotton lawn, with a lot of blousson in the waist and sleeves like the French were wearing these days, which consumed a lot of goods. Expensive goods. There were fifteen different pattern pieces.

  “Okay.” Mr. Kaufman nodded for him to begin. “I’m waiting.”

  Cautiously, Morris studied the pattern pieces and arranged them carefully on the table. The style had a fancy peplum waist, a collar print that needed to be matched, and blousy sleeves, which, since the goods were narrow, around fifty inches, had to be tucked in tight to the selvage.

  “Can I have your pencil?” Morris asked Mr. Beck.

  “Of course.” The old marker pulled it out from behind his ear.

  Morris made a quick sketch of how the pieces fit on the side of the paper.

  “C’mon, boy, you’re not applying to Rembrandt for the position.” Mr. Kaufman tapped the table impatiently.

  Morris began to lay out the pieces.

  “Wait, why put the peplum there?” Mr. Kaufman interrupted him. “If you tuck it in here,” he shifted the pattern piece completely around, “we can save a few inches. See?”

  Morris looked at what he’d done. “You’re not cutting only one of this style, are you?” he asked.

  “One? Of course not? Two hundred is more like it,” Mr. Kaufman replied.

  “And the goods, they’re narrow, right, Mrs. K?”

  “They are.” Mrs. Kaufman took a measuring tape and spread it across the table. “Fifty-two inches.”

  “And pricey too, I bet?”

  “Very pricey.” Mrs. Kaufman nodded. “It’s silk. Over two dollars fifty per yard.”

  “Two dollars fifty, huh … So you see, if you lay it crosswise, like this…” Morris took the peplum piece and returned it to its original position, “I figure you can save about six inches. In the repeat. Six inches, times two hundred pieces…? That’s close to forty yards, isn’t it, Mrs. K? At two dollars fifty a yard…?” He looked at Mr. Kaufman. “That’s over a hundred bucks, by my count. Just on this one cut.”