The Rise of David Levinsky (18 page)

“What do you want those things for?” Mrs. Levinsky once said to me, pointing at my nascent whiskers. “Oh, go take a shave and don’t be a fool. It will make you ever so much better-looking. May my luck be as handsome as your face will then be.”

“Never!” I retorted, testily, yet blushing.

She gave a sarcastic snort. “They all speak like that at the beginning,” she said. “The girls will make you shave if nobody else does.”

“What girls?” I asked, with a scowl, but blushing once again.

“What do I know what girls?” she laughed. “That’s your own lookout, not mine.”

I did not like her. She was provokingly crafty and cold, and she had a mean smile and a dishonest voice that often irritated me. She was ruddy-faced and bursting with health, taller than Mrs. Dienstog, yet too short for her great breadth of shoulder and the enormous bulk of her bust. I thought she looked absurdly dumpy. What I particularly hated in her was her laughter, which sounded for all the world like the gobble of a turkey.

She was constantly importuning me to get her another lodger who would share her kitchen lounge with me.

“Rent is so high, I am losing money on you. May I have a year of darkness if I am not,” she would din in my ears.

She was intolerable to me, but I liked her cooking and I hated to be moving again, so I remained several months in her house.

It was not long before her prediction as to the fate of my beard came true. I took a shave. What actually decided me to commit so heinous a sin was a remark dropped by one of the peddlers that my down-covered face made me look like a “green one.” It was the most cruel thing he could have told me. I took a look at myself as soon as I could get near a mirror, and the next day I received my first shave. “What would Reb Sender say?” I thought. When I came home that evening I was extremely ill at ease. Mrs. Levinsky noticed the change at once, but she also noticed my embarrassment, so she said nothing, but she was continually darting furtive glances at me, and when our eyes met she seemed to be on the verge of bursting into one of her turkey laughs. I could have murdered her.

BOOK VI

A GREENHORN NO LONGER

I
BOUGHT my goods in several places and made the acquaintance of many peddlers. One of these attracted my attention by his popularity among the other men and by his peculiar talks of women. His name was Max Margolis. We used to speak of him as Big Max to distinguish him from a Little Max, till one day a peddler who was a good chess-player and was then studying algebra changed the two names to “Maximum Max” and “Minimum Max,” which the other peddlers pronounced “Maxie Max” and “Minnie Max.”

Some of the other fellows, too, were addicted to obscene story-telling, but these mostly made (or pretended to make) a joke of it. The man who had changed Max’s sobriquet, for instance, never tired of composing smutty puns, while another man, who had a married daughter, was continually hinting, with merry bravado, at his illicit successes with Gentile women. Maximum Max, on the other hand, would treat his lascivious topics with peculiar earnestness, and even with something like sadness, as though he dwelt on them in spite of himself, under the stress of an obsession.

Otherwise he was a jovial fellow.

He was a tall, large-boned man, loosely built. His lips were always moist and when closed they were never in tight contact. He had the reputation of a liar, and, as is often the case with those who suffer from that weakness, people liked him. Nor, indeed, were his fibs, as a rule, made out of whole cloth. They usually had a basis of truth. When he told a story and he felt that it was producing no effect he would “play it up,” as newspapermen would put it, often quite grotesquely. Altogether he was so inclined to overemphasize and embellish his facts that it was not always easy to say where truth ended and fiction began. Somehow it seemed to me as though the moistness and looseness of his lips had something to do with his mendacity.

He was an ignorant man, barely able to write down an address.

Max was an instalment peddler, his chief business being with frequenters of dance-halls, to whom he sold clothing, dress-goods, jewelry, and—when there was a marriage among them—furniture. Many a young housewife who had met her “predestined one” in one of these halls wore a marriage ring, and had her front room furnished with a “parlor set,” bought of Max Margolis. He was as popular among the dancers as he was among the men he met at the stores. He was married, Max, yet it was as much by his interest in the dancers as by his business interest that he was drawn to the dance-halls. He took a fancy to me and he often made me listen to his discourses on women.

The youngest married man usually appealed to me as being old enough to be my father, and as Maximum Max was not only married, but eleven years my senior, there seemed to be a great chasm between us. That he should hold this kind of conversations with an unmarried youngster like myself struck me as something unnatural, doubly indecent. As I listened I would feel awkward, but would listen, nevertheless.

One day he looked me over, much as an expert in horse-flesh would a colt, and said, with the utmost seriousness:

“Do you know, Levinsky, you have an awfully fine figure. You are a good-looking chap all around, for that matter. A fellow like you ought to make a hit with women. Why don’t you learn to dance?”

The compliment made me wince and blush. Perhaps, if he had put it in the form of a jest I should even have liked it. As it was, I felt like one stripped in public. Still, I recalled with pleasure that Matilda had said similar things about my figure.

“Why don’t you learn to dance, Levinsky?” he repeated.

I laughed, waving the suggestion aside as a joke.

On another occasion he said, “Every woman can be won, absolutely every one, provided a fellow knows how to go about it.”

As he proceeded to develop his theory he described various types of women and the various methods to be used with them.

“Of course, the man must not be repulsive to her,” he said.

That evening, when Mrs. Levinsky’s husband, their three children, and myself sat around the table and she was serving us our supper she appeared in a new light to me. She was nearly twice my age and I hated her not only for her meanness and low cunning, but also for her massive, broad-shouldered figure and for her turkey laugh, but she was a full-blooded, healthy female, after all. So, as I looked at her bustling between the table and the stove, Max’s rule came back to me. I could almost hear his voice, “Every woman can be won, absolutely every one.” Mrs. Levinsky’s oldest child was a young man of nearly my age, yet I looked her over lustfully and when I found that her florid skin was almost spotless, her lips fresh, and her black hair without a hint of gray, I was glad. Presently, while removing my plate, she threw the trembling bulk of her great, firm bust under my very eyes. I felt disturbed. “Some morning when we are alone,” I said to myself, “I shall kiss those red lips of hers.”

From that moment on she was my quarry.

As her husband worked in a sweatshop, while I peddled, he usually got up at least an hour before me. And it was considered perfectly natural that Mrs. Levinsky should be hovering about the kitchen while I was sleeping or lying awake on the kitchen lounge. Also, that after her husband left for the day I should go around half-naked, washing and dressing myself, in the same crowded little room in which she was then doing her work, as scantily clad as I was and with the sleeves of her flimsy blouse rolled up to her armpits. I had never noticed these things before, but on the morning following the above supper I did. As I opened my eyes and saw her bare, fleshy arms held out toward the little kerosene-stove I thought of my resolve to kiss her.

She was humming something in a very low voice. To let her know that I was awake I stretched myself and yawned audibly. Her voice rose. It was a song from a well-known Jewish play she was singing.

“Good morning, Mrs. Levinsky,” I greeted her, in a familiar tone which she now heard for the first time from me. “You seem to be in good spirits this morning.”

She was evidently taken aback. I was the last man in the world she would have expected to address a remark of this kind to her.

“How can you see it?” she asked, with a side-glance at me.

“Have I no ears? Don’t I hear your beautiful singing?”

“Beautiful singing!” she said, without looking at me.

After a considerable pause I said, awkwardly, “You know, Mrs. Levinsky, I dreamed of you last night!”

“Did you?”

“Aren’t you interested to know something more about it?”

“No.”

“I dreamed of telling you that you are a good-looking lady,” I pursued, with fast-beating heart.

“What has got into that fellow?” she asked of the kerosene-stove. “He is a greenhorn no longer, as true as I am alive.”

“You won’t deny you are good-looking, will you?”

“What is that to you?” And again addressing herself to the kerosene-stove: “What do you think of that fellow? A pious Talmudist indeed! Strike me blind if I ever saw one like that.” And she uttered a gobble-like chuckle.

I saw encouragement in her manner. I went on to talk of her songs and the Jewish theater, a topic for which I knew her to have a singular weakness. The upshot was that I soon had her telling me of a play she had recently seen. As she spoke, it was inevitable that she should come up close to the lounge. As she did so, her fingers touched my quilt, her bare, sturdy arms paralyzing my attention. The temptation to grasp them was tightening its grip on me. I decided to begin by taking hold of her hand. I warned myself that it must be done gently, with romance in my touch. “I shall just caress her hand,” I decided, not hearing a word of what she was saying.

I brought my hand close to hers. My heart beat violently. I was just about to touch her fingers, but I let the opportunity pass. I turned the conversation on her husband, on his devotion to her, on their wedding. She mocked my questions, but answered them all the same.

“He must have been awfully in love with you,” I said.

“What business is that of yours? Where did you learn to ask such questions? At the synagogue? Of course he loved me! What would you have? That he should have hated me? Why did he marry me, then? Of course he was in love with me! Else I would not have married him, would I? Are you satisfied now?” She boasted of the rich and well-connected suitors she had rejected.

I felt that I had side-tracked my flirtation. Touching her hand would have been out of place now.

A few minutes later, when I was saying my morning prayers, I carefully kept my eyes away from her lest I should meet her sneering glance.

When I had finished my devotions and had put my phylacteries into their little bag I sat down to breakfast. “I don’t like this woman at all,” I said to myself, looking at her. “In fact, I abhor her. Why, then, am I so crazy to carry on with her?” It was the same question that I had once asked myself concerning my contradictory feelings for Red Esther, but my knowledge of life had grown considerably since then.

In those days I had made the discovery that there were “kisses prompted by affection and kisses prompted by Satan.” I now added that even love of the flesh might be of two distinct kinds : “There is love of body and soul, and there is a kind of love that is of the body only,” I theorized. “There is love and there is lust.”

I thought of my feeling for Matilda. That certainly was love.

Various details of my relations with Matilda came back to me during these days.

One afternoon, as I was brooding over these recollections, while passively awaiting customers at my cart, I conjured up that night scene when she sat on the great green sofa and I went into ecstasies speaking of my prospective studies for admission to a Russian university. I recalled how she had been irritated with me for talking too loud and how, calling me “Talmud student,” or ninny, she had abruptly left the room. I had thought of the scene a hundred times before, but now a new interpretation of it flashed through my mind. It all seemed so obvious. I certainly had been a ninny, an idiot. I burst into a sarcastic titter at Matilda’s expense and my own.

“Of course I was a ninny,” I scoffed at myself again and again.

I saw Matilda from a new angle. It was as if she had suddenly slipped off her pedestal. Instead of lamenting my fallen idol, however, I gloated over her fall. And, instead of growing cold to her, I felt that she was nearer to me than ever, nearer and dearer.

O
NE morning, after breakfast, when I was about to leave the house and Mrs. Levinsky was detaining me, trying to exact a promise that I should get somebody to share the lounge with me, I said:

“I’ll see about it. I must be going. Good-by!” At this I took her hand, ostensibly in farewell.

“Good-by,” she said, coloring and trying to free herself.

“Good-by,” I repeated, shaking her hand gently and smiling upon her.

She wrenched out her hand. I took hold of her chin, but she shook it free.

“Don’t,” she said, shyly, turning away.

“What’s the matter?” I said, gaily.

She faced about again. “I’ll tell you what the matter is,” she said. “If you do that again you will have to move. If you think I am one of those landladies—you know the kind I mean—you are mistaken.”

She uttered it in calm, rather amicable accents. So I replied:

“Why, why, of course I don’t! Indeed you are the most respectable and the most sweet-looking woman in the world!”

I stepped up close to ner and reached out my hand to seize hold of her bare arm.

“None of that, mister!” she flared up, drawing back. “Keep your hands where they belong. If you try that again I’ll break every bone in your body. May both my hands be paralyzed if I don’t!”

“ ‘S-sh,” I implored. Which only added fuel to her rage.