The Rise of David Levinsky (32 page)

“It’s all play-acting,” I thought. “He just wants me to believe he is trying to do something for me.” But, of course, I was not altogether devoid of hope that I was mistaken and that he was making a sincere effort to raise a loan for me.

Mrs. Margolis went into the kitchen immediately her husband departed. Presently she came back, carrying a glass of tea on a saucer. She placed it before me with an embarrassed side-glance, brought some cookies, and seated herself at the far end of the table. I uttered some complimentary trivialities about the children.

When a man finds himself alone with a woman who is neither his wife nor a close relative, both feel awkward. It is as though they heard a whisper, “There is nobody to watch the two of you.”

Still, confused as I was, I was fully aware of her tempting complexion and found her angry black eyes strangely interesting. Upon the whole, however, I do not think she made any appeal to me save by virtue of the fact that she was a woman and that we were alone. I was tense with the consciousness of that fact, and everything about her disturbed me. She wore a navy-blue summer wrapper and I noticed the way it set off the soft whiteness of her neck. I remarked to myself that she looked younger than her husband, that she must be about twenty-eight or thirty, perhaps. My glances apparently caused her painful embarrassment. Finally she got up again, making a pretense of bustling about the room. It seemed to me that when she was on her feet she looked younger than when she was seated.

I asked the boy his name, and he answered in lugubrious, but distinct, accents :

“Daniel Margolis.”

“He speaks like a grown person,” I said.

“She used to speak like that, too, when she was of his age,” my hostess replied, with a glance in the direction of her daughter.

“Did you?” I said to Lucy.

The little girl grinned coyly.

“Why don’t you answer the gentleman’s question?” her mother rebuked her, in English. “It’s Mr. Levinsky, a friend of papa’s.”

Lucy gave me a long stare and lost all interest in me.

“Don’t you like me at all? Not even a little bit?” I pleaded.

She soon unbent and took to plying me with questions. Where did I live? Was I a “customer peddler” like her papa? How long had I been in America? (A question which a child of the East Side hears as often as it does queries about the weather.)

“Can you spell?”

“No,” I answered.

“Not at all?”

“Not at all!”

“Shame! But my papa can’t spell, neither.”

“Shut up, you bad girl you!” her mother broke in with a laugh. “Vere you lea’n such nasty things? By your mamma? The gentleman will think by your mamma.”

She delivered her a little lecture in English, taking pains to produce the “th” and the American “r,” though her “w’s” were “v’s.”

She urged me not to let the tea get cold. As I took hold of the tall, thin, cylindrical glass I noted that it was scrupulously clean and that its contents had a good clear color. I threw a glance around the room and I saw that it was well kept and tidy.

Mrs. Margolis took a seat again. Lucy, with part of a cooky in her mouth, stepped over to her and seated herself on her lap, throwing her arm around her. She struck me as the very image of her mother. Presently, however, I discovered that she resembled her father quite as closely. It seemed as though the one likeness lay on the surface of her face, while the other loomed up from underneath, as the reflection of a face does from under the surface of water. Lucy soon wearied of her mother and walked over to my side. I put her on my lap. She would not let me pat her, but she did not mind sitting on my knees.

“Are
you
a good speller?” I asked.

“I c’n spell all the words we get at school,” she answered, sagely.

“How do you spell ‘colonel’?”

“We never got it at school. But you can’t spell it, either.”

“How do you know I can’t? Maybe I can. Well, let us take an easier word. How do you spell ‘because’?”

She spelled it correctly, her mother joining in playfully. I gave them other words, addressing myself to both, and they made a race of it, each trying to head off or outshout the other. At first Mrs. Margolis did so with feigned gaiety, but her face soon set into a grave look and glowed with excitement.

At last I asked them to spell “coefficient.”

“We never got it at school,” Lucy demurred.

“I don’t know what it means,” said Mrs. Margolis, with a shrug of her shoulders.

“It means something in mathematics, in high figuring,” I explained in Yiddish.

Mrs. Margolis shrugged her shoulders once more.

I asked Lucy to try me in spelling. She did and I acquitted myself so well that she exclaimed:

“Oh, you liar you! Why did you say you didn’t know how to spell?”

Once more her mother took her to task for her manners.

“Is that the vay to talk to a gentleman? Shame! Vere you lea’n up to be such a pig? Not by your mamma!”

 

When Max came back Lucy hastened to inform him that I could spell “awful good.” To which he replied in Yiddish that he knew I was a smart fellow, that I could read and write “everything,” and that I had studied to go to college and “to be a doctor, a lawyer, or anything.”

His wife looked me ever with bashful side-glances. “Really?” she said.

Max told me a lame story about his errand and promised to let me know the “final result.” It was clearer than ever to me that he was making a fool of me.

W
HEN I hear a new melody and it makes an appeal to me its effect usually lasts only as long as I hear it, but it is almost sure to reassert itself later on. I scarcely ever think of it during the first two, three, or four days, but then, all of a sudden, it will pop up in my brain and haunt me a few days in succession, humming itself and nagging me like a living thing. This was precisely what happened to me with regard to Mrs. Margolis. During the first two days after I left her house I never gave her a thought, but on the third her shy side-glances suddenly loomed up in my mind and would not leave it. Just her black, serious eyes and those shy looks of theirs gleaming out of a white, strikingly interesting complexion. Her face in general was a mere blur in my memory.

I was incessantly racking my brain over my affairs. I was so low-spirited and worried that I was unconscious of the food I ate or of the streets through which I passed, yet her manner of darting embarrassed glances out of the corner of her eye and her complexion were never absent from my mind. I felt like seeing her once more. However, the prospect of calling at her house was now anything but alluring. I could almost see the annoyed air with which her husband would receive me.

 

I sought out two usurers and begged each of them to grant me the loan, but they unyieldingly insisted on more substantial security than the bare story or my venture. I made other efforts to raise the money. I approached several people, including the proprietor of the little music-store. All to no purpose.

One afternoon, eight or ten days after my call at the Margolises’, when I came to my “factory” I found under the door a closed envelope bearing the name of that Western firm. It contained a typewritten letter and a check in full payment of my bill. Also a circular explaining that the firm had been reorganized with plenty of capital, and naming as one of its new directors a man who, from the tone of the circular, seemed to be of high standing in the financial world.

My head was in a whirl. The desolate-looking sewing-machines of my deserted shop seemed to have suddenly brightened up. I looked at the check again and again. The figure on it literally staggered me. It seemed to be part of a fairy tale.

I rushed over to Nodelman’s office, but found him gone for the day. The next thing on my program was to carry the glad news to the Chaikins and to discuss plans for the immediate future with my partner. But Chaikin never came home before 7. So I first dropped in on the Margolises to flash my check in Max’s face and, incidentally, to see his wife.

I found him playing with his fat boy.

“Hello, Max! I have good news!” I shouted, excitedly. Which actually meant: “Don’t be uneasy, Max. I am not going to ask you for a loan again.”

When he had examined the check he said, sheepishly:

“Now you are all right. Why, something told me all along that you would get it.”

His wife came in, apparently from the kitchen. She returned my “ Good evening ”with free and easy amiability, without any shyness or side-glances, and disappeared again. I felt annoyed. I was tempted to call after her to come back and let me take a good look at her.

“Say, Levinsky, you must have thought I would not trust you for the four hundred dollars,” Max said. “May I have four hundred days of distress if I have a cent. What few dollars I do have is buried in the business. So help me, God! Let a few of my customers stop paying and I would have to go begging. It’s the real truth I am telling you. Honest.”

“I know, I know,” I said, awkwardly. “Well, it was as if the check had dropped from heaven. Thank God! Now I can begin to do things.”

I went over the main facts of my venture, this time with a touch of bluster. And he listened with far readier attention and more genuine interest than he had done on the previous occasion. We discussed my plans and my prospects. At one point, when I referred to the Western check, he asked to see it again, just for curiosity’s sake, and as I watched him look it over I could almost see the change that it was producing in his attitude toward me. I do not know to what extent he had previously believed my story, if at all. One thing was clear: the magic check now made it all real to him. As he handed me back the strip of paper he gave me a look that seemed to say: “So you are a manufacturer, you whom I have always known as a miserable ragamuffin.”

Mrs. Margolis reappeared. Her husband told her of my great check and she returned some trivialities. As we thus chatted, I made a mental note of the fascinating feminine texture of her flesh.

He made me stay to supper. It was a cheery repast. As though to make amends for his failure to respond when I knocked at his door, Max overwhelmed me with attention.

We were eating cold sorrel soup, prepared in the old Ghetto way, with cream, bits of boiled egg, cucumber, and scallions.

“How do you like it?” he asked.

“Delicious! And the genuine article, too.”

“‘The genuine article’!” he mocked me. “What’s the use praising it when you eat it like a bird? What’s the matter with you? Are you bashful? Fire away, old man!” Then to his wife: “Why do you keep quiet, Dvorah? Why don’t you tell him to eat like a man and not like a bird?”

“Maybe he doesn’t care for my cooking,” she jested, demurely.

“Why, why,” I replied. “The sorrel soup is fit for a king.”

“You mean for a president,” Max corrected me. “We are in America, not in Europe.”

“How do you know the President of the United States would care for a plate of cold sorrel soup?”

“And how do you know a king would?”

“If
you
care for it, I am satisfied,” the hostess said to me.

“I certainly do. I haven’t eaten anything like it since I left home,” I replied.

“Feed him well, Dvorah. Now is your chance. He will soon be a millionaire, don’t you know. Then he won’t bother about calling on poor people like us.”

“But I have said the sorrel soup is fit for a king, and a king has many millions,” I rejoined. “I shall always be glad to come, provided Lucy and Dannie have no objection.”

“You remember their names, don’t you?” Mrs. Margolis said, beamingly. “You certainly have a good memory.”

“Who else should have one?” her husband chimed in. “ I have told you he was going to study to be a doctor or a lawyer. Lucy, did you hear what uncle said? If you let him in he will come to see us even when he is worth a million. What do you say? Will you let him in?”

Lucy grinned childishly.

Max did most of the talking. He entertained me with stories of some curious weddings which he said had recently been celebrated in his dance-halls, and, as usual, it was not easy to draw a line of demarkation between fact and fiction. Of one bridegroom, who had agreed to the marriage under threats of violence from the girl’s father, he said:

“You should have seen the fellow! He looked like a man going to the electric chair. They were afraid he might bolt, so the bride’s father and brother, big, strapping fellows both, stuck to him like two detectives. ‘You had better not make monkey business,’ they said to him. ‘If you don’t want a wedding, you’ll have a funeral.’ That’s exactly what they said to him. I was standing close to them and I heard it with my own ears. May I not live till to-morrow if I did not.”

Mrs. Margolis looked down shamefacedly. She certainly was not unaware of her husband’s failing, and she obviously took anything but pride in it. As I glanced at her face at this moment it struck me as a singularly truthful face. “Those eyes of hers do not express anger, but integrity,” I said to myself. And the more I looked at her, watched her gestures, and listened to her voice, the stronger grew my impression that she was a serious-minded, ingenuous woman, incapable of playing a part. Her mannerisms were mostly her version of manners, and those that were not were frankly affected, as it were.

The meal over and the dishes washed, Mrs. Margolis caused Lucy to bring her school reader and began to read it aloud, Lucy or I correcting her pronunciation where it was faulty. She was frankly parading her intellectual achievements before me, and I could see that she took them quite seriously. She was very sensitive about the mistakes she made. She accepted our corrections, Lucy’s and mine, with great earnestness, often with a gesture of annoyance and mortification at the failure of her memory.