Max (19 page)

Then the camera swung back to the woman, who still stood in front of the car. She clasped her hands and swayed from side to side, which was obviously intended to indicate an emotional response of some sort, but it was never defined as a response to anything in particular except the fact that her escort was off chasing kids. After the camera had recorded her emotions at some length, it swung back to the driver, who was now returning. Then it swung full around to a policeman, approaching from the other direction. He stopped by the woman, and they carried on a conversation with a great deal of pointing and hand-waving. Then the driver joined the group, and the gesturing went on. Finally the policeman spread his arms and shook his head, as if to indicate that there was nothing more that he could do. Then the lady decided to faint, and the two men knelt over her to revive her. When she was finally revived, she and the driver went off in one direction, the policeman in another direction, leaving the automobile parked by the curb.

Now the camera was inside a room, two painted flats forming a corner. A man sat at a table, eating soup. The two kids stood by the table, talking and gesturing. At first the man paid no attention. Then he responded, rising, picking up a small valise, and following the kids. Then the camera was back at the parked car. It simply fixed on the car for about sixty seconds until the man and the boys appeared. Then the man opened his valise and took out a set of burglar tools.

Sam Snyder called out from the projection booth, ‘Max, the damn fools who made the picture either didn't know you don't steal a car with burglar tools or they did it for effect. Most of those Olds automobiles don't even have an ignition key. You would just get into it and drive away if you know how to drive one.'

‘Hell, it don't matter!' Max shouted back.

The theft completed, all three, thief and the two kids, climbed into the car and drove off. At this point the driver appeared, waving his arms, yelling silently, and then running after the car. Then the lady appeared and fainted again. Fainting appeared to be her best point, and even Sally responded to the second faint by bursting into laughter. Then the policeman appeared, with more arm-waving and soundless shouting. Then the policeman ran off after the vanished car. Then the man revived the woman. Then they embraced, apparently to his relief. Then they waited in front of the camera, and then finally the car appeared, the policeman driving, the car thief beside him, hands shackled. Then a great arm-waving of joy and congratulations from the car owner.

After the film had been shown, all seven of the viewers gathered at the Café Coronet on Second Avenue. The Coronet was the regular after-theatre meeting place for Yiddish-speaking actors, writers, and various and sundry theatre people and intellectuals. Regarding himself as very much a man of the theatre, Max had taken to frequenting the place. He enjoyed the atmosphere, which, he had been told, was very much that of a European café he liked the high-pitched sound of discussion and argument, and he was pleased, having so little education of his own, at being present in a place where intellect was held in high esteem. From his earliest childhood, Yiddish had been a second language for him, and it was the ordinary means of communication between him and his mother; but he had always regarded it with contempt and distaste as less a language than a mark of oppression and misery. But at Café Coronet, Yiddish was the first language at most tables, and here suddenly Max nad the marvelous and worldly feeling of having a second language at his command.

Tonight, Eli, the owner, seated them at a round table large enough to contain them comfortably, congratulated Max on the imminent opening of the Bijou, and welcomed Sally, whom he had not seen for some months. In the discussion of the film they had just seen, Sally had been noticeably silent. Max watched her, waiting. After they had given their orders for food, Max said to her, ‘You didn't like it. I can see that.'

‘No, it's not that I didn't like it –'

‘Why don't you come right out with an opinion for once and say it stinks?'

‘It doesn't stink, so why don't you give her a chance to say what she thinks,' Sam Snyder suggested.

‘Max, you're too nervous about this,' Freddy Feldman said. ‘What we say about the moving picture isn't going to change the audience response.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘I think,' Sally said, ‘that you'll get a good audience response no matter what I think or what anyone else thinks, and I think that's what Freddy means. No matter what anyone says, it's an advance over the tiny films you've been showing.'

‘And this
Great train Robbery
that they're making will be even better,' Snyder said.

‘Then if that's the case,' Max said to Sally, ‘what are you so sour about?'

‘I'm not sour. I've been thinking about it. That's permitted, isn't it?'

‘All right. What's wrong with it?'

‘If you're going to get angry at me again –'

‘Come on, Sally,' Snyder said. ‘Max is nervous. That's understandable. We got a lot of money invested in the Bijou.'

‘What I'm saying has nothing to do with how it will go at the Bijou, but my feeling is that what we saw tonight is not the product of any real intelligence or talent.' And turning to Snyder, ‘I don't mean the camera operator, Sam, or the other technicians. They seem to know what they're doing. I mean the man who conceived it. He doesn't appear to have the slightest notion of what he was doing. Was he trying to tell a story or present a drama? Had he ever seen a theatrical play or had he ever read a book? And who told the actors how to act? They behaved like demented people, waving their arms and making those incredible faces.' Her voice died away. ‘Well, I didn't mean to be so critical, but you asked me what I felt.'

‘Sally,' Snyder said, ‘you asked me who conceived this moving picture, and I have to tell you that maybe nobody did. I've seen the way they work up there in Rochester and out at Edison's place and down in Philadelphia too. They don't even write anything down. Someone says, I got an idea, and mostly they don't even use actors, so how can you expect them to act?'

‘You mean they don't even try to make a story out of it?' Feldman asked.

‘Sure, I've heard talk about that, and there's some fellow says he's going to do Shakespeare's plays on film, but then there are other guys who say that it's absolutely out of the question, because how can you really tell a story without any words –'

‘Which brings up a point,' Max interrupted. ‘We had no piano tonight.'

‘That's absolutely right,' Lubel said. ‘Absolutely.'

‘I should have never run it without the piano.'

‘Absolutely,' Lubel said. ‘In those long spaces where you just sit and wait for something to happen – well, you come in there with a theme from the
William Tell Overture
or even with a few bars from
Anitra's Dance
and you get rid of that nervousness when nothing happens, so you can't really judge it without someone putting in a little piano music.'

‘The trouble is,' Snyder said, ‘that nobody really knows what to do with the moving pictures.'

‘I can tell you what to do with them,' Max said. ‘You show them and you sell tickets.'

‘But with
The Great Train Robbery
, I think they're trying to tell a better story. The way they're talking now, they say you got to look for things where it just moves and nobody says anything. That's probably the reason why they made
The Automobile Thief.
'

Sally was right about the audience response. The Bijou had a triumphal opening, and no one objected to the construction of the film they saw. Indeed, the
Herald
, taking note of the opening – they had no such thing as a film critic – remarked that
The Automobile Thief
appeared to be a great advance in the making of moving pictures.

No matter how much money the nickelodeons brought in, Max was so committed to expanding his empire that he was always short of cash; and this time, with Fred Feldman's guidance, he was able to negotiate a line of credit for fifty thousand dollars at no less an institution than the Chase Bank, into whose imposing offices at 177 Broadway Max walked, not with the air of a supplicant but with the easy confidence of a conqueror. As he told Sally afterward, ‘It was a big moment, but I wouldn't have been surprised if I had a heart attack right there on the spot.'

‘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.'