The Rise of David Levinsky (49 page)

“Ever see such a tasty duck of a girl?”

Miss Kalmanovitch was followed by a bespectacled, anemic boy of thirteen who played something by Wieniav-sky on the violin, and then Miss Kalmanovitch “obliged” us with a recitation from “Macbeth.” There were four other solos on the piano and on the violin by boys and girls, children of the invited guests, the violinists having brought their instruments with them. Not that the concert was part of a preconceived program, although it might have been taken for granted. The mothers of the performers had simply seized the opportunity to display the talents of their offspring before an audience. Only one boy—a curly-headed, long-necked little pianist, introduced as Bennie Saminsky—played with much feeling and taste. All the rest grated on my nerves.

I beguiled the time by observing the women. I noticed, for instance, that Auntie Yetta, whose fingers were a veritable jewelry-store, now and again made a pretense of smoothing her grayish hair for the purpose of exhibiting her flaming rings. Another elderly woman, whose fingers were as heavily laden, kept them prominently interlaced across her breast. From time to time she would flirt her interlocked hands, in feigned absent-mindedness, thus flashing her diamonds upon the people around her. At one moment it became something like a race between her and Auntie Yetta. Nodelman’s cousin caught me watching it, whereupon she winked to me merrily and interlaced her own begemmed fingers, as much as to say, “What do you think of our contest?” and burst into a voiceless laugh.

I tried to listen to the music again. To add to my ordeal, I had to lend an ear to the boastful chatter of the mothers or fathers on the virtuosity of Bennie, Sidney, Beckie, or Sadie. The mother of the curly-headed pianist, the illiterate wife of a baker, first wore out my patience and then enlisted my interest by a torrent of musical terminology which she apparently had picked up from talks with her boy’s piano-teacher. She interspersed her unsophisticated Yiddish with English phrases like “rare technique,” “vonderful touch,” “bee-youtiful tone,” or “poeytic temperament.” She assured me that her son was the youngest boy in the United States to play Brahms and Beethoven successfully. At first I thought that she was prattling these words parrot fashion, but I soon realized that, to a considerable extent, at least, she used them intelligently.

She had set her heart upon making the greatest pianist in the world of Bennie, and by incessantly discussing him with people who were supposed to know something about music she had gradually accumulated a smattering acquaintance with the subject. That she was full of it there could be no doubt. Perhaps she had a native intuition for music. Perhaps, too, it was from her that her son had inherited his feeling for the poetry of sound. She certainly had imagination.

“Some boys play like monkeys,” she said in Yiddish. “They don’t know what they are at. May I know evil if they do. My Bennie is not that sort of a pianist, thank God! He knows what he is talking about—on his piano, I mean. You saw for yourself that he played with head and heart, didn’t you?”

“Indeed, I did,” I said, with ardor. “ I liked his playing very much.”

“Yes, it comes right from his heart,” she pursued. “He has a golden temperament. The piano just talks under his fingers. I mean what I say. People think a piano is just a row of dead pieces of bone or wood. It is not. No, sirrah. It has speech just like a human being, provided you know how to get it out of the keyboard. Bennie does.”

In a certain sense this unlettered woman was being educated by her little boy in the same manner as Dora had been and still was, perhaps, by Lucy.

There were at least three girls in the gathering who were decidedly pretty. One of these was a graduate of Normal College. She was dark-eyed, like Miss Kalmanovitch, but slender and supple and full of life. Everybody called her affectionately by her first name, which was Stella. At the supper-table, in the dining-room, I was placed beside Miss 368 Kalmanovitch, but I gave most of my attention to Stella, who was seated diagonally across the table from us. I felt quite at home now.

“What was your favorite subject at college?” I questioned Stella, facetiously.

“That’s my secret,” she answered.

“I can guess it, though.”

“Try.”

“Dancing.”

“That’s right,” she shouted, amidst an outburst of laughter.

“Well, have you learned it well?” I went on.

“Why don’t you ask me for a waltz and find out for yourself?”

“I wish I could, but unfortunately they did not take up dancing at my college.”

“Did you go to college?” Stella asked, seriously.

“I don’t look like one who did, I suppose. Well, I should like to say I did, but I haven’t the heart to tell you a lie.”

“Never mind,” Nodelman broke in. “He’s an educated fellar, all the same. He’s awful educated. That’s what makes him such a smart business man. By the way, Levinsky, how is the merchandise?”

“This is no place to talk shop,” I replied, deprecatingly. “Especially when there are so many pretty ladies around.”

“That’s right!” several of the women chimed in in chorus.

Mrs. Nodelman, the hostess, who stood in the doorway, beckoned to her husband, and he jumped up from the table. As he passed by my seat I seized him by an arm and whispered into his ear:

“The merchandise is too heavy. I want lighter goods.” With this I released him and he disappeared with Mrs. Nodelman.

A few minutes later he came back.

“Be a good boy. Show Ray a little more attention,” he whispered into my ear. “Do it for my sake. Will you?”

“All right.”

I became aware of Mrs. Kalmanovitch’s fire-flashing eyes, and my efforts to entertain her daughter were a poor performance.

The Kalmanovitch family left immediately after supper, scarcely making their farewells. Portentous sounds came from the hallway. We could hear Mrs. Kalmanovitch’s angry voice. A nervous hush fell over the parlor. Auntie Yetta gave us all an eloquent wink.

“There’s a woman with a tongue for you,” she said in an undertone. “Pitch and sulphur. When she opens her mouth people had better sound the fire-alarm.” After a pause she added: “Do you know why her teeth are so bad? Her mouth is so full of poison, it has eaten them up.”

Presently the younger Mrs. Nodelman made her appearance. Her ruddy “meat-ball” face was fairly ablaze with excitement. Her husband followed with a guilty air.

“What’s the matter with you folks?” the hostess said. “Why ainchye doin’ somethin’?”

“What shall we do?” the baker’s wife answered in Yiddish. “We have eaten a nice supper and we have heard music and now we are enjoying ourselves quietly, like the gentlemen and the ladies we are. What more do you want?”

“Come, folks, let’s have a dance. Bennie will play us a waltz. Quick, Bennie darling! Girls, get a move on you!”

I called the hostess aside. “May I ask you a question, Mrs. Nodelman?” I said, in the manner of a boy addressing his teacher.

“What is it?” she asked, awkwardly.

“No, I won’t ask any questions. I see you are angry at me.”

“I ain’t angry at all,” she returned, making an effort to look me straight in the face.

“Sure?”

“Sure,” with a laugh. “What is it you want to ask me about?”

And again assuming the tone of a penitent pupil, I said, “May I ask Stella to dance with me?”

“But you don’t dance.”

“Let her teach me, then.”

“Let her, if she wants to. I ain’t her mother, am I?”

“But you have no objection, have you?”

“Where do I come in? On my part, you c’n dance with every girl in the house.”

“Oh, you don’t like me this evening, Mrs. Nodelman. You
are
angry witn me. Else you wouldn’t talk the way you do.”

She burst into a laugh, and said, “You’re a hell of a fellow, you are.”

“I know I misbehaved myself, but I couldn’t help it. Miss Kalmanovitch is too fat, you know, and her hands perspire so.”

“She’s a charmin’ girl,” she returned, with a hearty laugh. “I wish her mother was half so good.”

“Was she angry, her mother?”

“Was she! She put all the blame on me. I invited her daughter on purpose to make fun of her, she says. My, how she carried on!”

“I’m really sorry, but it’s a matter of taste, you know.”

“I know it is. I don’t blame you at all.”

“So you and I are friends again, aren’t we?”

She laughed.

“Well, then, you have no objection to my being sweet on Stella, have you?”

“You are a hell of a fellow. That’s just what you are. But I might as well tell you it’s no use trying to get Stella. She’s already engaged.”

“Is she really?”

“Honest.”

“Well, I don’t care. I’ll take her away from her fellow. That’s all there is to it.”

“You can’t do it,” she said, gaily. “She is dead stuck on her intended. They’ll be married in June.”

I went home a lovesick man, but the following evening I went to Boston for a day, and my feeling did not survive the trip.

T
HAT journey to Boston is fixed in my memory by an incident which is one of my landmarks in the history of my financial evolution and, indeed, in the history of the American cloak industry. It occurred in the afternoon of the Monday which I spent in that city, less than two days after that birthday party at the Nodelmans’. I was lounging in an easy-chair in the lobby of my hotel, when I beheld Loeb, the “star” salesman of what had been the “star” firm in the cloak-and-suit business. I had not seen him for some time, but I knew that his employers were on their last legs and that he had a hard struggle trying to make a living. Nor was that firm the only one of the old-established cloak-and-suit concerns that found itself in this state at the period in question—that is, at the time of the economic crisis and the burst of good times that had succeeded it. Far from filling their coffers from the golden flood of those few years, they were drowned in it almost to a man. The trade was now in the hands of men from the ranks of their former employees, tailors or cloak operators of Russian or Galician origin, some of whom were Talmudic scholars like myself. It was the passing of the German Jew from the American cloak industry.

We did profit by the abundance of the period. Moreover, there were many among us to whom the crisis of 1893 had proved a blessing. To begin with, some of our tailors, being unable to obtain employment in that year, had been driven to make up a garment or two and to offer it for sale in the street, huckster fashion—a venture which in many instances formed a stepping-stone to a cloak-factory. Others of our workmen had achieved the same evolution by employing their days of enforced idleness in taking lessons in cloak-designing, and then setting up a small shop of their own.

Newfangled manufacturers of this kind were now springing up like mushrooms. Joe, my old-time instructor in cloak-making, was one of the latest additions to their number. They worked—often assisted by their wives and children—in all sorts of capacities and at all hours. They lived on bread and salmon and were content with almost a nominal margin of profit. There were instances when the clippings from the cutting-table constituted all the profit the business yielded them. Pitted against “manufacturers” of this class or against a fellow like myself were the old-established firms, with their dignified office methods and high profit-rates, firms whose fortunes had been sorely tried, to boot, by their bitter struggle with the union.

Loeb swaggered up to me with quizzical joviality as usual. But the smug luster of his face was faded and his kindly black eyes had an unsteady glance in them that belied his vivacity. I could see at once that he felt nothing but hate for me.

“Hello, Get-Rich-Quick Levinsky!” he greeted me. “Haven’t seen you for an age.”

“How are you, Loeb?” I asked, genially, my heart full of mixed triumph and compassion.

We had not been talking five minutes before he grew sardonic and venomous. As Division Street—a few blocks on the lower East Side—was the center of the new type of cloak-manufacturing, he referred to us by the name of that street. My business was on Broadway, yet I was included in the term, “Division Street manufacturer.”

“What is Division Street going to do next?” he asked. “Sell a fifteen-dollar suit for fifteen cents?”

I smiled.

“That’s a great place, that is. There are two big business streets in New York—Wall Street and Division.” He broke into a laugh at his own joke and I charitably joined in. I endeavored to take his thrusts good-naturedly and for many minutes I succeeded, but at one point when he referred to us as “manufacturers,” with a sneering implication of quotation marks over the word, I flared up.

“You don’t seem to like the Division Street manufacturers, do you?” I said. “I suppose you have a reason for it.”

“I have a reason? Of course I have,” he retorted. “So has every other decent man in the business.”

“It depends on what you call decent. Every misfit claims to be more decent than the fellow who gets the business.”

He grew pale. It almost looked as though we were coming to blows. After a pause he said, with an effect of holding himself in leash:

“Business! Do you call that business? I call it peanuts.”

“Well, the peanuts are rapidly growing in size while the oranges and the apples are shrinking and rotting. The fittest survives.” (“A lot he knows about the theory of the survival of the fittest!” I jeered in my heart. “He hasn’t even heard the name of Herbert Spencer.”)

“Peanuts are peanuts, that’s all there’s to it,” he returned.

“Then why are you excited? How can we hurt you if we are only peanuts?”

He made no answer.

“We don’t steal the trade we’re getting, do we? If the American people prefer to buy our product they probably like it.”