The Rise of David Levinsky (30 page)

“So I do have a ‘credit face’!” I exclaimed to myself, gleefully.

When I found myself in the street again I looked at my reflection in store windows, scanning my “credit face.”

The Chaikins took it for granted that I had paid for the goods on the spot.

Things brightened up at our “factory.” I ordered an additional sewing-machine of the instalment agent and hired two operators—poor fellows who were willing to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day for twelve dollars a week. (The union had again been revived, but it was weak, and my employees did not belong to it.) As for myself, I toiled at my machine literally day and night, snatching two or three hours’ sleep at dawn, with some bundles of cut goods or half-finished cloaks for a bed. Chaikin spent every night, from 7 to 2, with me, cutting the goods and doing the better part of the other work. Mrs. Chaikin, too, lent a hand. Leaving Maxie in the care of her mother, she would spend several hours a day in the factory, finishing the cloaks.

The five hundred cloaks were shipped on time. I was bursting with consciousness of the fact that I was a manufacturer—that a big firm out West (a firm of Gentiles, mind you!) was recognizing my claim to the title. I was American enough to be alive to the special glamour of the words, “out West.”

Goods in our line of business usually sold “for cash,” which meant ten days. Ten days more, then, and I should receive a big check from that firm. That would enable me to start new operations. Accordingly, I went out to look for more orders.

Whether my first success had put new confidence in me, or whether my past experiences had somewhat rounded off my rough edges and enabled me to speak to business people in a more effective manner than I could have done before, the proprietor of a small department store on upper Third Avenue let me show him my samples. My prices made an impression on him. My cloaks were five dollars apiece lower than he was in the habit of paying. He looked askance at me, as though my figures seemed too good to be true, until I found it the best policy to tell him the un-embellished truth.

“The big manufacturers of whom you buy have big office expenses,” I explained. “They make a lot of fuss, and you’ve got to pay for it. My principle is not to make fuss at the retailer’s expense. Our office costs us very, very little. We are plain people. But that isn’t all. Your big manufacturer pays for union labor, so he takes it out of you. Now, we don’t bother about these things. We get the best work done for the lowest wages. The big men in the business wouldn’t even know where hands of this kind could be got. We do.”

I took my departure with an order for three hundred cloaks, expecting to begin work on them as soon as I received that check from out West.” Things seemed to be coming my way.

As I sat in an Elevated train going down-town I figured the profits on the two orders and pictured other orders coming in. I beheld our little factory crowded with machines, I heard their bewitching whir-r, whir-r. Chaikin would have to leave the Manheimers, of course.

 

In the afternoon of the sixth day, when I called at one of the purchasing offices I have mentioned, I received the information that the firm whose check I was awaiting so impatiently had failed!

T
HE failure of the Western firm seemed to nave nipped my commercial career in the bud. The large order I had received from its representative was apparently to be the death as well as the birth of my glory. In my despair, I tried to make a virtue of necessity. I was telling myself that it served me right; that I had had no business to abandon my intellectual pursuits. I was inclined to behold something like the hand of Providence in the bankruptcy of that firm. At the same time I was casting about in my mind for some way of raising new money with which to pay the kindly commission merchant, get a new bill of goods from him, and fill my new order.

When I explained the matter to Mrs. Chaikin she was on the brink of a fainting spell.

“You’re a liar and a thief!” she shrieked. “There never was a Western firm in the world. It’s all a lie. You sold the goods for cash.”

Her husband knew something about firms and credit, so I had no difficulty in substantiating my assertion to him.

“It’s only a matter of days when I shall get the big check that is coming to me,” I assured them. I went on to spin a long yarn, to which she listened with jeers and outbursts of uncomplimentary Yiddish.

One day I mustered courage and called on Mrs. Chaikin. I did so on an afternoon when her husband was sure to be at work, because I had a lurking feeling that, being alone with me, she would be easier to deal with.

When she saw me she gasped. “What, you?” she said. “You have the nerve to come up here?”

“Come, come, Mrs. Chaikin,” I said, earnestly. “Please be seated and let us talk it all over in a business-like manner. With your sense, and especially with your sense for business, you will understand me.”

“Please don’t flatter me,” she demurred, sternly.

But I knew that nothing appealed to her vanity so much as being thought a clever business woman, and I protested:

“Flatter you! In the first place, it is a well-known fact that women have more sense than men. In the second place, it is the talk of every cloak-shop that Mr. Chaikin owes his high position to you as much as to his own ability. Everybody,
everybody
says so.”

I talked of “unforeseen difficulties,” of a “well-known landlord whose big check I was expecting every day; I composed a story about that landlord’s father-in-law; agreed with Mrs. Chaikin that it had been a mistake on my part to trust the buyer of that Western firm the goods without first consulting her; and the upshot was that she made me stay to supper and that pending the arrival of Chaikin I took Maxie to the Park.

The father-in-law of my story was Mr. Even, of course. I had portrayed him vividly as coming to my rescue in my present predicament, so vividly, indeed, that my own fib haunted me the next day. The result was that in the evening I made myself as presentable as I could, and repaired to the synagogue where he spent much of his time reading Talmud.

I had not visited the place since that memorable day, my first day in America. I recognized it at once. I was thrilled. The four-odd years seemed twenty-four.

Mr. Even was not there, but he soon came in. He had aged considerably. He was beginning to look somewhat decrepit. His dignity was tinged with the sadness of old age.

“Good evening, Mr. Even. Do you know me?” I began.

He scanned me closely, but failed to recognize me.

“I am David Levinsky, the ‘green one’ you befriended four and a half years ago. Don’t you remember me, Mr. Even? It was in this very place where I had the good fortune to make your acquaintance. I’m the son of the woman who was killed by Gentiles, in Antomir,” I added, mournfully.

“Oh yes, indeed!” he said, with a wistful smile, somewhat abashed. He took snuff, looked me over once more, and, as if his memory had been brightened by the snuff, he burst out: “Lord of the World! You are that young man! Why, I confess I scarcely recognize you. Of course I remember it all. Why, of course I remember you. Well, well! How have you been getting along in America?”

“Can’t complain. Not at all. You remember that evening? After you provided me with a complete outfit, like a father fixing up his son for his wedding-day, and you gave me five dollars into the bargain, you told me not to call on you again until I was well established in life. Do you remember that?”

“Of course I do,” he answered, with a beaming glance at two old Talmudists who sat at their books close by.

“Well, here I am. I am running a cloak-factory.”

He began to question me about my affairs with sad curiosity. I said that business was “good, too good, in fact,” so that it required somewhat more capital than I possessed.

I soon realized, however, that he did not care for me now. My Americanized self did not make the favorable impression that I had made four and a half years before, when he gave me my first American hair-cut.

I inquired after his daughter and his son-in-law, but my hint that the latter might perhaps be willing to indorse a note for me evoked an impatient grunt.

“My son-in-law ! Why, you don’t even know him!” he retorted, with a suspicious look at me.

I turned it off with a joke and asked about the henpecked man. Mr. Even had not seen him for four years. The other Talmudists present had never even known him. A man with extremely long black side-locks who spoke with a Galician accent became interested. After Mr. Even went to his wonted seat at the east wall, where he took up a book, this man said to me, with a sigh:

“Oh, it is not the old home. Over there people go to the same synagogue all their lives, while here one is constantly on the move. They call it a city. Pshaw! It is a market-place, a bazar, an inn, not a city! People are together for a day and then, behold! they have flown apart. Where to? Nobody knows. I don’t know what has become of you and you don’t know what has become of me.”

“That’s why there is no real friendship here,” I chimed in, heartily. “That’s why one feels so friendless, so lonely.”

 

My shop, of course, shut down, and I roamed about the streets a good deal. I was restless. I continually felt nonplussed, ashamed to look myself in the face, as it were. One forenoon I found myself walking in the direction of Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue. The college building was now a source of consolation. Indeed, what was money beside the halo of higher education? I paused in front of the building. There were several students on the campus, all Jewish boys. I accosted one of them. I spoke to him enviously, and left the place thrilling with a determination to drop all thought of business, to take the entrance examination, and be a college student at last. I was almost grateful to that Western firm for going into bankruptcy.

And yet, even while I was tingling with this feeling, a voice exclaimed in my heart, “Ah, if that Western firm had not failed!”

The debt I owed the American commission merchant agonized me without let-up. I couldn’t help thinking of my “credit face.” To disappoint him, of all men, seemed to be the most brutal thing I had ever done. I imagined myself obtaining just enough money to pay him; but, as I did so, I could not resist the temptation of extending the sum so as to go on manufacturing cloaks. I was incessantly cudgeling my brains for some “angel ”who would come to my financial rescue.

 

The spell of my college aspirations was broken once for all. My Temple was destroyed. Nothing was left of it but vague yearnings and something like a feeling of compunction which will assert itself, sometimes, to this day.

The Talmud tells us how the destruction of Jerusalem and the great Temple was caused by a hen and a rooster. The destruction of my American Temple was caused by a bottle of milk.

The physical edifice still stands, though the college has long since moved to a much larger and more imposing building or group of buildings. I find the humble old structure on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street the more dignified and the more fascinating of the two. To me it is a sacred spot. It is the sepulcher of my dearest ambitions, a monument to my noblest enthusiasm in America.

BOOK IX

DORA

“
H
OW about it?” Mrs. Chaikin said to me, ominously. “About what? What do you mean, Mrs. Chaikin?”

“Oh, you know what I mean. It is no use playing the fool and trying to make a fool of me.”

The conversation was held in our deserted shop on an afternoon. The three sewing-machines, the cutting-table, and the pressing-table looked desolate. She spoke in an undertone, almost in a whisper, lest the secret of her husband’s relations with me should leak out and reach his employers. She had been guarding that secret all along, but now, that our undertaking had apparently collapsed, she was particularly uneasy about it.

“I don’t believe that store in the West has failed at all. In fact, I know it has not. Somebody told me all about it.”

This was her method of cross-examining me. I read her a clipping containing the news of the bankruptcy, but as she could not read it herself, she only sneered. I reasoned with her, I pleaded, I swore; but she kept sneering or nodding her head mournfully.

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you,” she finally said, shutting her eyes with a gesture of despair and exhaustion. “Do I believe a dog when it barks? Neither do I believe you. I curse the day when I first met you. It was the black year that brought you to us.” She fell to wringing her hands and moaning: “Woe is me! Woe is me!”

Finally she tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs.

In my despair I longed for somebody to whom I could unbosom myself. I thought of Meyer Nodelman. A self-made man and one who had begun manufacturing almost penniless like myself, he seemed to be just the man I needed. A thought glimmered through my mind, “And who knows but he may come to my rescue?”

I was going to call at his warehouse, but upon second thought I realized that the seat of his cold self-interest would scarcely be a favorable setting for the interview and that I must try to entrap him in the humanizing atmosphere of his mother’s home for the purpose.

The next time I saw him at his mother’s I took him up to my little attic and laid my tribulations before him. I told him the whole story, almost without embellishments, omitting nothing but Chaikin’s name.

“Is it all true?” he interrupted me at one point.

I swore that it was, and went on. At the end I offered to prove it all to his satisfaction.

“You don’t need to prove it to
me,”
he replied. “What do I care?” Then, suddenly, casting off his reserve, he blurted out: “Look here, young fellow! If you think I am going to lend you money you are only wasting time, for I am not.”