The Rise of David Levinsky (19 page)

“ ‘S-sh nothing! I’ll call in all the neighbors of the house and tell them the kind of pious man you are. Saying his prayers three times a day, indeed!”

I sneaked out of the house like a thief. I was wretched all day, wondering how I should come to supper in the evening. I wondered whether she was going to deliver me over to the jealous wrath of her husband. I should have willingly forfeited my trunk and settled in another place, but Mrs. Levinsky had an approximate knowledge of the places where I was likely to do business and there was the danger of a scene from her. Maximum Max’s theory did not seem to count for much. But then he had said that one must know “how to go about it.” Perhaps I had been too hasty.

Late in the afternoon of that day Mrs. Levinsky came to see me. Pretending to be passing along on some errand, she paused in front of my cart, accosting me pleasantly.

“I’ll bet you are angry with me,” she said, smiling broadly.

“ I am not angry at all,” I answered, with feigned morose-ness. “But you certainly have a tongue. Whew! And, well, you can’t take a joke.”

“I did not mean to hurt your feelings, Mr. Levinsky. May my luck be as good as is my friendship for you. I certainly wish you no evil. May God give me all the things I wish you. I just want you to behave yourself. That’s all. I am so much older than you, anyhow. Look for somebody of your own age. You are not angry at me, are you?” she added, suavely.

She simply could not afford to lose the rent I paid her.

Since then she held herself at a respectful distance from me.

I called on smiling Mrs. Dienstog, my former landlady, in whose house I was no stranger. I timed this visit at an hour when I knew her to be alone.

In this venture I met with scarcely any resistance at first. She let me hold her hand and caress it and tell her how soft and tender it was.

“Do you think so?” she said, coyly, her eyes clouding with embarrassment. “I don’t think they are soft at all. They would be if I did not have so much washing and scrubbing to do.” Then she added, sadly: “America has made a servant of me. A land of gold, indeed! When I was in my father’s house I did not have to scrub floors.”

I attempted to raise her wrist to my lips, but she checked me. She did not break away from me, however. She held me off, but she did not let go of the index finger of my right hand, which she clutched with all her might, playfully. As we struggled, we both laughed nervously. At last I wrenched my finger from her grip, and before she had time to thwart my purpose she was in my arms. I was aiming a kiss at her lips, but she continued to turn and twist, trying to clap her hand over my mouth as she did so, and my kiss landed on one side of her chin.

“Just one more, dearest,” I raved. “Only one on your sweet little lips, my dove. Only one. Only one.”

She yielded. Our lips joined in a feverish kiss. Then she thrust me away from her and, after a pause, shook her finger at me with a good-natured gesture, as much as to say, “You must not do that, bad boy, you.”

I went away in high feather.

I called on Mrs. Dienstog again the very next morning. She received me well, but the first thing she did after returning my greeting was to throw the door wide open and to offer me a chair in full view of the hallway.

“Oh, shut the door,” I whispered, in disgust. “Don’t be foolish.”

She shook her head.

“Just one kiss,” I begged her. “You are so sweet.”

She held firm.

I came away sorely disappointed, but convinced that her inflexibility was a mere matter of practical common sense.

I kept these experiences and reflections to myself. Nor did an indecent word ever cross my lips. In the street, while attending to my business, I heard uncouth language quite often. The other push-cart men would utter the most revolting improprieties in the hearing of the women peddlers, or even address such talk to them, as a matter of course. Nor was it an uncommon incident for a peddler to fire a volley of obscenities at a departing housewife who had priced something on his cart without buying it. These things scandalized me beyond words. I could never get accustomed to them.

“Look at Levinsky standing there quiet as a kitten,” the other peddlers would twit me. “One would think he is so innocent he doesn’t know how to count two. Shy young fellows are the worst devils in the world.”

They were partly mistaken, during the first few weeks of our acquaintance, at least. For the last thread that bound me to chastity was still unbroken. It was rapidly wearing away, though.

T
HE last thread snapped. It was the beginning of a period of unrestrained misconduct. Intoxicated by the novelty of yielding to Satan, I gave him a free hand and the result was months of debauchery and self-disgust. The underworld women I met, the humdrum filth of their life, and their matter-of-fact, business-like attitude toward it never ceased to shock and repel me. I never left a creature of this kind without abominating her and myself, yet I would soon, sometimes during the very same evening, call on her again or on some other woman of her class.

Many of these women would simulate love, but they failed to deceive me. I knew that they lied and shammed to me just as I did to my customers, and their insincerities were only another source of repugnance to me. But I frequented them in spite of it all, in spite of myself. I spent on them more than I could afford. Sometimes I would borrow money or pawn something for the purpose of calling on them.

The fact that these wretched women were not segregated as they were in my native town probably had something to do with it. Instead of being confined to a fixed out-of-the-way locality, they were allowed to live in the same tenement-houses with respectable people, beckoning to men from the front steps, under open protection from the police. Indeed, the police, as silent partners in the profits of their shame, plainly encouraged this vice traffic. All of which undoubtedly helped to make a profligate of me, but, of course, it would be preposterous to charge it all, or even chiefly, to the police.

My wild oats were flavored with a sense of my failure as a business man, by my homesickness and passion for Matilda. My push-cart bored me. I was hungry for intellectual interest, for novel sensations. I was restless. Sometimes I would stop from business in the middle of the day to plunge into a page of Talmud at some near-by synagogue, and sometimes I would lay down the holy book in the middle of a sentence and betake myself to the residence of some fallen woman

In my loneliness I would look for some human element in my acquaintance with these women. I would ply them with questions about their antecedents, their family connections, as my mother had done the girl from “That” Street.

As a rule, my questions bored them and their answers were obvious fabrications, but there were some exceptions.

One of these, a plump, handsome, languid-eyed female named Bertha, occupied two tiny rooms in which she lived with her ten-year-old daughter. One of the two rooms was often full of men, some of them with heavy beards, who would sit there, each awaiting his turn, as patients do in the reception-room of a physician, and whiling their time away by chaffing the little girl upon her mother’s occupation and her own future. Some of the questions and jokes they would address to her were of the most revolting nature, whereupon she would reply, “Oh, go to hell!” or stick out her tongue resentfully.

One day I asked Bertha why she was giving her child this sort of bringing up.

“I once tried to keep her in another place, with a respectable family,” she replied, ruefully. “But she would not stay there. Besides, I missed her so much I could not stand it.”

Another fallen woman who was frank with me proved to be a native of Antomir. When she heard that I was from the same place she flushed with excitement.

“Go away!” she shouted. “You’re fooling me.”

We talked of the streets, lanes, and yards of our birthplace, she hailing every name I uttered with outbursts of wistful enthusiasm.

I wondered whether she knew of my mother’s sensational death, but I never disclosed my identity to her, though she, on her part, told me with impetuous frankness the whole story of her life.

“You are a Talmudist, aren’t you?” she asked.

“How do you know?”

“How do I know! As if it could not be seen by your face.” A little later she said: “I am sorry you came here. Honest. You should have stayed at home and stuck to your holy books. It would have been a thousand times better than coming to America and calling on girls like myself. Honest.”

She was known as Argentine Rachael.

It was from her that I first heard of the relations existing between the underworld and the police of New York. But then my idea of the Russian police had always been associated in my mind with everything cruel and dishonest, so the corruption of the New York police did not seem to be anything unusual.

One day she said to me: “If you want a good street corner for your cart I can fix it for you. I know Cuff-Button Leary.”

“Who is he?”

“Why, have you never heard about him?’

“Is he a big police officer?”

“Bigger. The police are afraid of him.”

“Why?”

“Because he is the boss. He is the district leader. What he says goes.”

She went on to explain that he was the local chieftain of the dominant “politician party,” as she termed it.

“What is a politician party?” I asked.

She tried to define it and, failing in her attempt, she said, with a giggle: “Oh, you are a boob. You certainly are a green one. Why, it’s an organization, a lot of people who stick together, don’t you know.”

She talked on, and the upshot was that I formed a conception of political parties as of a kind of competing business companies whose specialty it was to make millions by ruling some big city, levying tribute on fallen women, thieves, and liquor-dealers, doing favors to friends and meting out punishment to foes. I learned also that District-Leader Leary owed his surname to a celebrated pair of diamond cuff-buttons, said to have cost him fifteen thousand dollars, from which he never was separated, and by the blaze of which he could be recognized at a distance.

“Well, shall I speak to him about you?” she asked.

I gave her an evasive answer.

“Why, don’t you want to have favors from a girl like me?” she laughed.

I colored, whereupon she remarked, reflectively:

“ I don’t blame you, either.”

She never tired talking of our birthplace.

“Aren’t you homesick?” she once demanded.

“Not a bit,” I answered, with bravado.

“Then you have no heart. I have been away five times as long as you, yet I am homesick.”

“Really?”

“Honest.”

She was as repellent to me as the rest of her class. I could never bring myself to accept a cup of tea from her hands. And yet I could not help liking her spirit. She was truthful and affectionate. This and, above all, her yearning for our common birthplace appealed to me strongly. I was very much inclined to think that in spite of the horrible life she led she was a good girl. To hold this sort of opinion about a woman of her kind seemed to be an improper thing to do. I knew that according to the conventional idea concerning women of the street they were all the most hideous creatures in the world in every respect. So I would tell myself that I must consider her, too, one of the most hideous creatures in the world in every respect. But I did not. For I knew that at heart she was better than some of the most respectable people I had met. It was one of the astonishing discrepancies I had discovered in the world. Also, it was one of the things I had found to be totally different from what people usually thought they were. I was gradually realizing that the average man or woman was full of all sorts of false notions.

I
ENROLLED in a public evening school. I threw myself into my new studies with unbounded enthusiasm. After all, it was a matter of book-learning, something in which I felt at home. Some of my classmates had a much better practical acquaintance with English than I, but few of these could boast the mental training that my Talmud education had given me. As a consequence, I found things irksomely slow. Still, the teacher—a young East Side dude, hazel-eyed, apple-faced, and girlish of feature and voice—was a talkative fellow, with oratorical proclivities, and his garrulousness was of great value to me. He was of German descent and, as I subsequently learned from private conversations with him, his mother was American-born, like himself, so English was his mother-tongue in the full sense of the term. He would either address us wholly in that tongue, or intersperse it with interpretations in labored German, which, thanks to my native Yiddish, I had no difficulty in understanding. His name was Bender. At first I did not like him. Yet I would hang on his lips, striving to memorize every English word I could catch and watching intently, not only his enunciation, but also his gestures, manners, and mannerisms, and accepting it all as part and parcel of the American way of speaking

Sign language, which was the chief means of communication in the early days of mankind, still holds its own. It retains sway over nations of the highest culture with tongues of unlimited wealth and variety. And the gestures of the various countries are as different as their spoken languages. The gesticulations and facial expressions with which an American will supplement his English are as distinctively American as those of a Frenchman are distinctively French. One can tell the nationality of a stranger by his gestures as readily as by his language. In a vague, general way I had become aware of this before, probably from contact with some American-born Jews whose gesticulations, when they spoke Yiddish, impressed me as utterly un-Yiddish. And so I studied Bender’s gestures almost as closely as I did his words.