The Rise of David Levinsky (33 page)

When I bade them good night Max said, heartily, in English, “Call again, Levinsky.” And he added, in a mixture of English and Yiddish, “Don’t be a stranger, even if you are a manufacturer.”

“Call again,” his wife echoed, affably.

“Call again!” shouted Dannie, in his funereal voice.

I left with the comfortable feeling of having spent an hour or two in a house where I was sincerely welcome.

“It’s a good thing to have real friends,” I soliloquized in a transport of good spirits, on my way to the Elevated station. “Now I sha’n’t feel all alone in the world. There is at least one house where I can call and feel at home.”

I beheld Mrs. Margolis’s face and her slender figure and I was conscious of a remote desire to see her again.

I was in high feather. While the Elevated train was carrying me up-town I visioned an avalanche of new orders for my shop and a spacious factory full of machines and men. I saw myself building up a great business. An ugly thought flashed through my mind: Why be saddled with a partner? Why not get rid of Chaikin? I belittled the part which his samples had played in my successful start, and it seemed to be a cruel injustice to myself to share my fortune with a man who had no more brains than a cat. But I instantly saw the other side of the situation: It was Chaikin’s models that had made the Manheimers what they were, and if I clung to him until he could afford to let me announce him as my partner the very news of it would be a tremendous boost for my factory. And then I had a real qualm of compunction for having entertained that thought even for a single moment. My heart warmed to Chaikin and his family. “I shall be faithful to them,” I vowed inwardly. “They have been so good to me. We must be absolutely devoted to each other. Their house, too, will be like a home to me. Oh, it is so sweet to have friends, real friends.”

It was close upon 10 o’clock when I reached the Chaikins’ flat in Harlem. I had barely closed the door behind me when I whipped out the check, and, dangling it before Mrs. Chaikin, I said, radiantly:

“Good evening. Guess what it is!”

“The check you expected from your uncle or cousin or whatever he is to you. Is it?” she conjectured.

“No. It’s something far better,” I replied. “It’s a check from the Western company, and for the full amount, too.” And, although I was fairly on the road to atheism, I exclaimed, with a thrill of genuine pity, “Oh, God has been good to us, Mrs. Chaikin!”

I let her see the figures, which she could scarcely make out. Then her husband took a look at the check. He did know something about figures, so he read the sum out aloud.

Instead of hailing it with joy, as I had expected her to do, she said to me, glumly:

“And how do we know that you did not receive more?”

“But that was the bill,” her husband put in.

“ I am not asking you, am I?” she disciplined him.

“But it is the amount on the bill,” I said, with a smile.

“And how do we know that it is?” she demanded. “It’s you who write the bills, and it’s you who get the checks. What do we know?”

“Mrs. Chaikin! Mrs. Chaikin!” I remonstrated. “Why should you be so suspicious? Can’t you see that I am the most devoted friend you people ever had? God has blessed us; we are making a success of our business; so we must be devoted to one another, while here you imagine all kinds of nonsense.”

“A woman will be a woman,” Chaikin muttered, with his sheepish smile.

The unfeigned ardor of my plea produced an impression on Mrs. Chaikin. Still, she insisted upon receiving her husband’s share of the profits at once in spot cash. I argued again.

“Why, of course you are going to get your share of the profits,” I said, genially. “Of course you are. Only we must first pay for the goods of those five hundred coats and for some other things. Mustn’t we? Then, too, there is that other order to fill. We need more goods and cash for wages and rent and other expenses.”

“But you said you were going to get it all yourself, and now you want us to pay for it. You think you are smart, don’t you?”

Her husband opened his mouth, but she waved it shut before she had any idea what he wanted to say.

“Anybody could fool
you,”
she said. “‘When a fool goes shopping there is rejoicing among the shopkeepers.”’

With our joint efforts we finally managed to placate her, however, and the next evening our shop was the scene of feverish activity.

I
FILLED my Third Avenue order and went on soliciting other business. The season was waning, but I obtained a number of small orders and laid foundations for future sales. Our capital was growing apace, but we often lacked working cash.

After I paid the debt I owed Meyer Nodelman I obtained other favors from him. He took a sponsorial interest in my business and often offered me the benefit of his commercial experience in the form of maxims.

“Don’t bite off more than you can chew, Levinsky,” he would tell me. “Finding it easy to get people to trust you is not enough. You must also find it easy to pay them.”

Some of his other rules were:

“Be pleasant with the man you deal with, even if he knows you don’t mean it. He likes it, anyway.”

“Take it from me, Levinsky: honesty is the best policy. There is only one line of business in which dishonesty pays: the burglar business, provided the burglar does not get caught. If I thought lying could help my business, I should lie day and night. But I have learned that it hurts far more than it helps. Be sure that the other fellow believes what you say. If you have his confidence you have him by the throat.”

It was not always easy to comply with Meyer’s tenets, however. The inadequacy of my working capital often forced me to have recourse to subterfuges that could not exactly be called honorable. One day, when we had some bills to meet two days before I could expect to obtain the cash, I made out and signed checks, but inclosed each of them in the wrong envelope—this supposed act of inadvertence gaining me the needed two days of grace. On another occasion I sent out a number of checks without my signature, which presumably I had forgotten to affix. There were instances when I was so hard pressed for funds that the fate of our factory hinged on seventy-five or a hundred dollars. In one of these crises I bought two gold watches on the instalment plan, for the express and sole purpose of pawning them for fifty dollars. I bought the watches of two men who did not know each other, and returned them as soon as I could spare the cash to redeem them, forfeiting the several weekly payments which I had made on the pretended purchases. There were instances, too, when I had to borrow of my employees a few dollars with which to buy cotton. Needless to say that all this happened in the early stages of my experience as a manufacturer. I have long since been above and beyond such methods. Indeed, business honor and business dignity are often a luxury in which only those in the front ranks of success can indulge. But then there are features of the game in which the small man is apt to be more honorable and less cruel than the financial magnate.

I was continually consulting Max on my affairs. Not that I needed his advice or expected to act upon it. These confidential talks seemed to promote our intimacy and to enhance the security of the welcome I found in his house. A great immigrant city like New York or. Chicago is full of men and women who are alone amid a welter of human life. For these nothing has a greater glamour than a family in whose house they might be made to feel at home. I was one of these desolate souls. I still missed my mother. The anniversary of her death was still a feast of longing agony and spiritual bliss to me. I scarcely ever visited the synagogue of the Sons of Antomir these days, but on that great day I was sure to be there. Forgetful of my atheism, I would place a huge candle for her soul, attend all the three services, without omitting a line, and recite the prayer for the dead with sobs in my heart. I had craved some family who would show me warm friendship. The Margolises were such a family (Meyer Nodelman never invited me to his house). They were a godsend to me.

Max was essentially a hospitable man, and really fond of me. As for his wife, who received me with the same hearty welcome as he, her liking for me was primarily based, as she once put it herself in the presence of her husband, upon my intellectual qualifications.

“It’s good to have educated people come to the house,” she remarked. “ It’s good for the children and for everybody else.”

“I knew she would like you,” Max said to me. “She would give her head for education. Only better look out, you two. See that you don’t fall in love with each other. Ha, ha!”

Sometimes there were other visitors in the house—some of Max’s friends, his and her fellow-townspeople, her relatives, or some neighbor. Dora’s great friend was a stout woman with flaxen hair and fishy eyes, named Sadie, or Mrs. Shornik, whose little girl, Beckie, was a classmate of Lucy’s, the acquaintance and devoted intimacy of the two mothers having originated in the intimacy of the two school-girls. Sadie lived several blocks from the Margolises, but she absolutely never let a day pass without calling on her, if it were only for just time enough to kiss her. She was infatuated with Dora, and Beckie was infatuated with Lucy.

“They just couldn’t live without one another,” Max said, after introducing me to Sadie and explaining the situation.

“Suppose Lucy and Beckie had not happened to be in the same school,” I jested, addressing myself to the two women. “What would you have done then?”

“This shows that we have a good God in heaven,” Sadie returned, radiantly. “He put the children in the same school so that we might meet.”

‘“A providential match,’ ” I observed.

“May it last for many, many years,” Sadie returned, devoutly.

“Say, women!” Max shouted, “you have been more than five minutes without kissing. What’s the matter with you?”

At this, Sadie, with mock defiance, walked up to Mrs. Margolis, threw her arms around her, and gave her a luscious smack on the lips.

“Bravo! And now you, kids!” Max commanded.

With a merry chuckle the two little girls flew into each other’s arms and kissed. Lucy had dark hair like Dora‘s, and Beckie flaxen hair like Sadie’s, so when their heads were close together they were an amusing reduced copy of their mothers as these had looked embracing and kissing a minute before.

 

 

Max often dropped in to see me at my factory, and when I was not busy we would talk of my cloaks, of his instalment business, or of women. Women were his great topic of conversation, as usual. But then these talks of his no longer found a ready listener in me. Now, that I knew his wife, they jarred on me. A decided change had come over me in this respect. I remember it vividly. It was as if his lewd discourses desecrated her name and thereby offended me. It may be interesting to note, however, that he never took up this kind of topics when we were in his house, not even when his wife was out.

Sometimes I would have supper at his house. More often, however—usually on Monday, when Max seldom went to the dance-halls—I would come after supper and spend the rest of the evening there. Sometimes the Shorniks would drop in—Sadie, her husband, and Beckie. Ben Shornik and Max would play a game of pinochle, while I, who never cared for cards, would chat with the women or entertain them by entertaining the children. Ben—as I came into the habit of calling him—was a spare little man with an extremely high forehead. He was an insurance-collector and only one degree less illiterate than Max; but because he had the “forehead of a learned man,” and because it was his business to go from house to house with a long, thick book under his arm, he affected longish hair, flowing black neckties, and a certain pomposity of manner. One of his ways of being tremendously American was to snap his fingers ferociously and to say, “I don’t care a continental!” or, “One, two, three, and there you are!” The latter exclamation he would be continually murmuring to himself when he was absorbed in pinochle.

O
NE evening, when the Shorniks and I were at Max’s house, and Max and Ben were having their game of pinochle, the conversation between the women and myself turned upon Dora’s efforts to obtain education through her little daughter. Encouraged by Sadie and myself, Dora let herself loose and told us much of Lucy’s history, or, rather, of her own history as Lucy’s mother. In her crude, lumbering way and with flushed cheeks she talked with profound frankness and quaint introspective insight, in the manner of one touching upon things that are enshrined in innermost recesses of one’s soul.

She depicted the thrills of joyous surprise with which she had watched Lucy, in her infancy, master the beginnings of speech. Sometimes her delight would be accompanied by something akin to fright. There had been moments when it all seemed unreal and weird.

“The little thing seemed to be a stranger to me,” she said. “Or else, she did not seem to be a human being at all.”

The next moment she would recognize her, as it were, and then she would kiss and yearn over her in a mad rush of passion.

The day when she took Lucy to school—about two years before—was one of the greatest days in Dora’s life. She would then watch her learn to associate written signs with spoken words as she had once watched her learn to speak. But that was not all. She became jealous of the child. She herself had never been taught to read even Hebrew or Yiddish, much less a Gentile language, while here, lo and behold! her little girl possessed a Gentile book and was learning to read it. She was getting education, her child, just like the daughter of the landlord of the house in Russia in which Dora had grown up.

“C-a-t—cat,” Lucy would spell out. “R-a-t—rat. M-a-t—mat.”

And poor Dora would watch the performance with mixed joy and envy and exclamations like: “What do you think of that snip of a thing! Did you ever?”