The Rise of David Levinsky (62 page)

Mrs. Tevkin made her appearance—a handsome old woman of striking presence, tall, almost majestic, with a mass of white hair, with the beautiful features of the girl who was the cause of my being there. I thought of Naphtali. I had a desire to discover his address and to write him about my meeting with the hero and heroine of the romance of which he had told me a few months before I left Antomir. “I go to their house. She is still beautiful,” I pictured myself saying to him. Her demeanor and the very intonation of her speech seemed to proclaim the fact that she was the daughter of that illustrious physician of Odessa. It did not take me long to discover, however, that under the surface of her good breeding and refinement was a woman of scant intellect.

Seeing me look at the book-cases, she said:

“These are not all the books we have. There are some in the other rooms, too. Plenty of them. It’s quite a job for an American servant-girl to dust them.”

Anna smiled good-humoredly.

The next utterance of Mrs. Tevkin’s was to the effect that one had to put up with crowded quarters in America—a hint at the better days which the family had seen in Russia.

Anna’s younger sister, Elsie, a school-teacher, came in. She had quicker movements and a sharper look than the stenographer and she bore strong resemblance to her father. Anna was the prettier of the two. We went down into the dining-room, where we found Russian tea, cake, and preserves. Presently we were joined by George, an insurance-collector, who was between Anna and Sasha, and Emil, an artist employed on a Sunday paper, who was between Anna and Elsie. Emil was a handsome fellow with a picturesque face which betrayed his vocation. The crayons and the pen-and-ink drawings that I had seen in the library were his work. He had a pale, high forehead and a thick, upright grove of very soft, brown hair which I pictured as billowing in a breeze like a field of rye. “Just the kind of son for a poet to have,” I thought.

There was another son, Moissey. He was married and I did not see him that evening. His mother was continually referring to him.

“I can see that you miss him,” I said.

“ I should say so,” Anna broke in. “He’s her pet.”

“Don’t mind what she says, Mr. Levinsky,” her mother exhorted me. “She just loves to tease me.”

“Mother is right,” Elsie interposed. “Moissey is not her pet. If somebody is, it’s I, isn’t it, ma?”

Anna smiled good-naturedly.

“Gracie is my pet,” Mrs. Tevkin rejoined.

“Gracie and Moissey, both,” Tevkin amended. “Moissey is her first-born, don’t you know. But the great point is that he has been married only three months, and she has not yet got used to having him live somewhere else. She feels as if somebody had snatched him from her. When a day passes without her seeing him she is uneasy.”

“Not at all,” Mrs. Tevkin demurred. “I am thinking of him just now because—because—well, because we have all been introduced to Mr. Levinsky except him!”

“If two or three of the family were missing it wouldn’t be so marked,” Tevkin supported her, chivalrously. “But only one is missing, only
one.
That somehow makes you think of him. I feel the same way.”

As he spoke it seemed to me that in his home atmosphere he bore himself with more self-confidence and repose than at the café or at his office. His hospitality had made him ill at ease at first, but that had worn off.

“You can depend on father to find some defense for mother,” remarked the picturesque Emil.

At her husband’s suggestion and after some urging the hostess led the way back to the parlor, or library, where she was to play us something. As we were passing out of the dining-room and up the stairs Tevkin seized the opportunity to say to me:

“We live on the communistic principle, as you see. Each of us, except Mrs. Tevkin and the little one, contributes his earnings or part of them to the general treasury, my wife acting as treasurer and manager. Still, in the near future I hope to be able to turn the commune into a family of the good old type. My affairs are making headway, thank God. I sha’n’t need my children’s contributions much longer.”

Mrs. Tevkin played some classical pieces. She had a pleasing tone and apparently felt at home at the keyboard, but it was to my eye rather than to my ear that her playing appealed. A white-haired Jewish woman at a piano was something which, in Antomir, had been associated in my mind with the life of the highest aristocracy exclusively. But then Mrs. Tevkin’s father had been a physician, and Jewish physicians belonged, in the conception of my childhood and youth, to the highest social level. Another mark of her noble birth, according to my Antomir ideas, was the fact that she often addressed her husband and her older children, not in Yiddish or English, but in Russian. Compared to her, Matilda’s mother was a plebeian.

The only other person in the family who played the piano with facility and confidence was Emil.

I had never been in a house of this kind in my life. I was fascinated beyond expression.

Anna’s constraint soon wore off and she treated me with charming hospitality. So did Elsie. There was absolutely no difference in their manner toward me. Elsie gave me the attention which a girl usually accords to a close friend of her father’s, and this was also the sort of attention I received from her older sister. It was as if the Catskill episode had never taken place and she were now seeing me for the first time.

 

I met Moissey and his wife at my next visit. He was a man of thirty-two or more, tall, wiry, nervous, with large, protruding, dark eyes. He was “a dentist by profession and a Russian social democrat by religion,” as his father introduced him to me.

“Karl Marx is his god and Plecnanoff, the Russian socialist leader, is his Moses,” the old man added.

Moissey’s wife looked strikingly Semitic. She seemed to have just stepped out of the Old Testament. She had been only about a year in the country, and the only language she could speak was Russian, which she enunciated without a trace of a Jewish accent or intonation. She scarcely understood Yiddish. All this was uncannily at variance with her Biblical face. It seemed incredable that her speech and outward appearance should belong to the same person. To add to the discrepancy, she was smoking cigarette after cigarette, a performance certainly not in keeping with one’s notion of a Jewish woman of the old type.

The oldest two sons, Moissey and Sasha, spoke English with a Russian accent from which the English of all the other children was absolutely free. Mrs. Tevkin’s Russian sounded more Russian than her husband’s. Emil, Elsie, and Gracie did not speak Russian at all.

Barring Mrs. Tevkin, each adult in the family worshiped at the shrine of some “ism.” Anna professed Israel Zangwill’s modified Zionism or Territorialism. This, however, was merely a platonic interest with her. It took up little or none of her time. Her real passion was
Minority,
a struggling little magazine of “modernistic literature and thought.” It was published by a group of radicals of which she was a member. Elsie, on the other hand, who was a socialist, was an ardent member of the Socialist party and of the Socialist Press Club. Politically the two sisters were supposed to be irreconcilable opponents, yet Anna often worked in the interests of Elsie’s party. Indeed, the more I knew them the clearer it became to me that the older sister was under the influence of the younger.

The two girls and their brothers had many visitors—socialist and anarchist writers, poets, critics, artists. These were of both sexes and some of them were Gentiles. Two of the most frequent callers were Miss Siegel and the sallow-faced, homely man who had danced with Anna at the Rigi Kulm pavilion. He was an instructor in an art school. From his talks with Emil and Anna I learned of a whole world whose existence I had never even suspected—the world of East Side art students, of the gifted boys among them, some of whom had gone to study in Paris, of their struggles, prospects, jealousies.

I was introduced to several of these people, but I never came into sympathetic touch with them. I was ever conscious, never my real self in their midst. Perhaps it was because they did not like me; perhaps it was because I failed to appreciate a certain something that was the key-note to their mental attitude. However that may have been, I always felt wretched in their company, and my attempts at saying something out of the common usually missed fire.

Was Anna interested in any of the young men who came to the house? I was inclined to think that she was not, but I was not sure.

Among Elsie’s closest friends or “comrades” was an American millionaire—a member of one of the best-known families in New York—and his wife, who was a Jewess, of whom I had read in the papers. I never saw them at the Tevkins’, but I knew that they occasionally called on the school-teacher and that she saw a good deal of them at their house and at various meetings, a fact the discovery of which produced a disheartening impression on me. It was as though the sole advantage I enjoyed over Anna—the possession of money—suddenly had been wiped out.

I sometimes wondered whether at the bottom of her heart Elsie did not feel elated by her close relations with that couple. That she herself was a stranger to all money interests there could be no doubt, however. And this was true of Anna and the other children.

Elsie and Moissey were the strongest individualities in the family. Theirs were truly religious natures, and socialism was their religion in the purest sense of the term. Elsie scarcely had any other great interest in life. Her socialism amused me, but her devotion to it inspired me with reverence. As for Moissey, good literature, as the term is understood in Russia, was nearly as much of a passion with him as Marxian socialism. His fervent talks of what he considered good fiction and his ferocious assaults upon what he termed “candy stories” were very impressive, though I did not always understand what he was talking about. Sometimes he would pick a quarrel with Anna over
Minority
and her literary hobbies generally. Once he brought her to tears by his attacks. I could not see why people should quarrel over mere stories. I thought Moissey crazy, but I must confess that his views on literature were not without influence upon my tastes. I did not do much reading in these days, so I may not have become aware of it at once. But at a later period, when I did do much reading, Moissey’s opinions came back to me and I seemed to find myself in accord with them.

To return to my visits at the Tevkins’. I told myself again and again that their world was not mine, that there was no hope for me, and that there was nothing for it but to discontinue my calls, but I had not the strength to do so. I never went away from this house otherwise than dejected and forlorn.

Tevkin was charming in the fervent, yet tactful, hospitality with which he endeavored to assuage the bitterness of my visits. He seemed to say, “ I see everything, my dear friend, and my heart goes out to you, but how can I help you?”

His wife tried to be diplomatic.

“American young people imagine they own the earth,” she once said to me, with a knowing glint in her beautiful eyes. “Some day they’ll find out their mistake.”

The hot months set in. The family nominally moved to Rockaway Beach for the season and my visits were suspended. Nominally, because Elsie and the boys and old Tevkin himself slept in the Harlem house more often than in their summer home. Elsie was wrapped up in the socialist campaign, which kept her busy every night from the middle of July to Election Day. She practically had no vacation. Anna made arrangements to spend her brief vacation with some of her literary friends who had a camp in Maine, but while she was in the city she came home to her mother and Gracie almost every evening. As for her father, whom I saw several times during that summer, he often sat up far into the night in Malbin’s or some other restaurant, talking “parcels.” He had become so absorbed in his real-estate speculations that he was rarely seen at Yampolsky’s café these days. One evening, when he was dining with me at the private hotel in which I lived, and we were discussing his ventures, he said:

“Do you know, my friend, I have made more than twelve thousand dollars?”

He tried to say it in a matter-of-fact, business-like way, but his face melted into an expression of joy before he finished the sentence.

“I tell it to you because I know that you are a real friend and that you will be sincerely glad to hear it,” he went on.

“I certainly am. I’m awfully glad,” I rejoined, fervently.

“I expect to make more. No more chipping in by the children! Anna shall give up her typewriting and Elsie her teaching. Yes, things are coming my way at last.”

“Still, if I were you, I should go slow. The real-estate market is an uncertain thing, after all.”

“Of course it is,” he answered, mechanically.

Since I bought that Brooklyn parcel and refused to go into further real-estate operations he had never approached me with business schemes again. There was not the slightest alloy of self-interest in his friendship, and he was careful 476 not to have it appear that there was. He never initiated me into the details of his speculations, lest I should offer him a loan. He was quite squeamish about it.

One day I offered him a hundred-dollar check for
The Pen,
the Hebrew weekly with which he was connected and upon which I knew him to spend more than he could afford.

“I don’t want it,” he said, reddening and shaking his head.

“Why?” I asked, also reddening.

I was sorely hurt and he noticed it.

“I know that you do it whole-heartedly,” he hastened to explain, “but I don’t want to feel that you do it for my sake.”

“But I don’t do it for your sake. I just want to help the paper. Can’t I—”

He interrupted me with assurances of his regard for me and for my motives, and accepted the check.

Was he dreaming of Anna ultimately agreeing to marry me—and my money? He certainly considered me a most desirable match. But I felt sure that he was fond of me on my personal account and that he would have liked to have me for his son-in-law even if my income had not exceeded three or four thousand dollars a year. He did not share the radical views of his children. He was much nearer to my point of view than they.