The Rise of David Levinsky (63 page)

I
T was December. There was an air of prosperity in

Tevkin’s house, but the girls would not give up their jobs. I was a frequent caller again. I was burning to take Anna, Elsie, and their parents to the theater, but was afraid the two girls would spurn the invitation.

One day I was agreeably surprised by Elsie asking me to buy some tickets for a socialist ball. They were fifty cents apiece.

“How many do you want me to take?” I asked.

“As many as you can afford,” she answered, roguishly.

“Will you sell me twenty-five dollars’ worth?”

“Oh, that would be lovely!” she said, in high glee.

When I handed her the money I was on the brink of asking if it might not be rejected as “tainted,” but suppressed the pleasantry.

For me to attend a socialist ball would have meant to face a crowd of union men. It was out of the question. But the twenty-five dollars somehow brought me nearer to Elsie, and that meant to Anna also. I began to feel more at home in their company. Elsie was as dear as a sister to me. I went so far as to venture to invite them and their parents to the opera, and my invitation was accepted. I was still merely “a friend of fathers,” something like an uncle, but I saw a ray of hope now.

“Suppose a commonplace business man like myself offered you a check for
Minority,”
I once said to Anna.

“A check for
Minority?”
she echoed, with joyful surprise. “Well, it would be accepted with thanks, of course, but you would first have to withdraw the libel ‘the commonplace business man.’ Another condition is that you must promise to read the magazine.”

As I was making out the check I told her that I had read some issues of it and that I “solemnly swore” to read it 478 regularly now. That I had found it an unqualified bore I omitted to announce. Shortly after that opera night Tevkin provided a box at one of the Jewish theaters for a play by Jacob Gordin.

I was quite chummy with the girls. They would jokingly call me “Mr. Capitalist” and, despite their father’s protests, “bleed” me for all sorts of contributions. One of these came near embroiling me with Moissey. It was for a revolutionary leader, a Jew, who had recently escaped from a Siberian prison in a barrel of cabbage and whose arrival in New York (by way of Japan and San Francisco) had been the great sensation of the year among the socialists of the East Side. The new-comer was the founder of a party of terrorists and had organized a plot which had resulted in the killing of an uncle of the Czar and of a prime minister. Now, Moissey, in his rabid, uncompromising way, sympathized with another party of Russian revolutionists, with one that was bitterly opposed to the theories and methods of the terrorists. So when he learned that Anna was collecting funds for the man who had been smuggled out of jail in a barrel, and that I had given her a check for him, he flared up and called her “busybody.”

“You had better mind your own affairs, Moissey,” she retorted, coloring.

She essayed to defend her position, contending that the methods of the Russian Government rendered terrorism not only justifiable, but inevitable.

“The question is not whether it is justifiable, but whether there is any sense to it,” Moissey replied, sneeringly. “Revolutions are not made by plotting or bomb-throwing. They must take the form of an uprising by the masses.”

“As if the Russian terrorists did not have the masses back of them! The peasantry and the educated classes are with them.”

“How do you know they are?” Moissey asked, with a good-natured, but patronizing, smile.

He spoke of the Russian working class as the great element that was destined to work out the political and economic salvation of the country, and at this he tactlessly dwelt on the Russian trade-unions, on what he termed their revolutionary strikes, and upon the aid Russian capitalists gave the Government in its crusade upon the struggle for liberty.

I felt quite awkward. I wondered whether he was not saying these things designedly to punish me for the check I had given Anna for the terrorists. He had always seemed to hold aloof from me, as if he were opposed to the visits of the “money-bag” that I was at his father’s house. At this minute I felt as though his eyes said, “The idea of this fleecer of labor contributing to the struggle for liberty!”

I was burning to tell him that he lacked manners, and to assail trade-unionism, but I restrained myself, of course.

Sometimes the girls and I would discuss the social question or literature, subjects upon which they assured me that I held “naïve” views. But all my efforts to get Anna into a more intimate conversation failed. For all our familiarity, it seemed as if we held our conversations through a thick window-pane. Nevertheless, in a very vague way, and for no particular reason that I was aware of, I thought that I sensed encouragement.

Tevkin never again approached me with his real-estate ventures, but the very air of his house these days was full of such ventures. I met other real-estate men at his home. Their talk was tempting, my enormous income notwithstanding. Huge fortunes seemed to be growing like mushrooms all over the five Ghettos of New York and Brooklyn. I saw men who three years ago had not been worth a cent and who were now buying and selling blocks of property. How much they were actually worth was a question which in the excitement of the “boom” did not seem to matter. It is never a rare incident among our people for a man with a nebulous fortune of a few hundred dollars to plunge into a commercial undertaking involving many thousands; but during that period this was an every-day affair. At first I treated it like something that was going on in another country. But I had a good deal of uninvested money and my resistance was slackening.

At last I succumbed.

One of the men I met at Tevkin’s was Volodsky, the old-time street peddler, the man of the beautiful teeth whose push-cart had adjoined mine in those gloomy days when I tried to sell goods in the streets, and who had told me of the dower-money which his sister had lent him for his journey 480 to America. I had not seen him since then—an interval of over twenty years—and we recognized each other with some difficulty.

The real-estate boom had found him eking out a wretched livelihood by selling goods on the instalment plan. Most of his business had been in the Italian quarter and he had learned to speak Italian far more fluently than he had English. A short time before I stumbled upon him at the Tevkins’ he had built an enormous block of high, brick apartment-houses in Harlem. He had gone into the undertaking with only five thousand dollars of his own, and before the houses were half completed he had sold them all, pocketing an enormous profit. When we were peddlers together he had been considered a failure and a fool. He now struck me as a clever fellow, full of dash.

Nor did Volodsky represent the only metamorphosis of this kind that I came across. It was as though there were something in the atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane milksops into men of brains and pluck. Volodsky succeeded in luring me into a network of speculations.

Tevkin had an interest in some of these operations, and, as they were mostly concerned with property in Harlem or in the Bronx, his house became my real-estate headquarters. There were two classes of callers at his home now: the socialists and the literary men or artists who visited Tevkin’s children and the “real-estate crowd” who came to see Tevkin himself. It came to be tacitly understood that the library was to be left to the former, while the dining-room, in the basement, was used as Tevkin’s office. Being “a friend of the family,” I had the freedom of both.

“You’re making a big mistake, Levinsky,” Nodelman once said to me, with a gesture of deep concern. “What is biting you? Aren’t you making money fast enough? Mark my word, if you try to swallow too fast you’ll choke. Any doctor will tell you that.”

I urged him to join me, but he would not hear of it. Instead, he exhorted me to sell out my holdings and give all my attention to my cloak business.

“Take pity on your hard-earned pennies, Levinsky,” he would say. “Else you’ll wake up some day like the fellow who has dreamed he has found a treasure. He’s 481 holding on to the treasure tight, and when he opens his eyes he finds it’s nothing but a handful of wind.”

“I’ll tell you what, Levinsky,” he began on one occasion. “You ought to see some of those magician fellows.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Did you ever see them at their game? They’ll put an egg into a hat; say, ‘One, two, thiee,’ and pull out a chicken. And then they say, ‘One, two, three,’ again and there’s neither a chicken nor an egg. That’s the way all this real-estate racket will end. Mark my word, Levinsky.”

Bender nagged and pleaded with me without let-up. If I had had the remotest doubt of his devotion to me it would have been dispelled now. I was at my great mahogany desk every morning, as usual, but I seldom stayed more than two hours, and even during those two hours my mind was divided between cloaks and real estate or between cloaks and Anna. Bender was practically in full charge of the business. Instead, however, of welcoming the power it gave him, he made unrelenting efforts to restore things to their former state. He was constantly haranguing me on the risks I was incurring, beseeching me to drop my new ventures, and threatening to leave me unless I did so. Once, as he was thus expostulating with me, he broke down.

“I appeal to you as your friend, as your old-time teacher,” he said, and burst into tears.

If it had not been for him I should have neglected my cloak business beyond repair. He handled me as a gambler’s wife does her husband. He would seek me out in front of some unfinished building, at Tevkin’s, or at some “boom” café, and make me sign some checks, consult me on something or other, or wheedle me into accompanying him to my factory for an hour or two. But the next day he would have to go hunting for me again.

I had invested considerable money in my new affairs, and releasing it at short notice would not have been an easy matter. But the great point was that I was literally intoxicated by my new interests, and the fact that they were intimately associated with the atmosphere of Anna’s home had much—perhaps everything—to do with it.

I loved her to insanity. She was the supreme desire of my being. I knew that she was weaker in character and mind than Elsie, for example, but that seemed to be a point 482 in her favor rather than against her. “She is a good girl,” I would muse, “mild, kindly, girlish. As for her ‘radical’ notions, they really don’t matter much. I could easily knock them out of her. I should be happy with her. Oh, how happy!”

And, in spite of the fact that I thought her weak, the sight of her would fill me with awe.

One’s first love is said to be the most passionate love of which one is capable. I do not think it is. I think my feeling for Anna was stronger, deeper, more tender, and more overpowering than either of my previous two infatuations. But then, of course, there is no way of measuring and comparing things of this kind. Anna was the first virgin I had ever loved. Was that responsible for the particular depth of my feeling?

“Oh, I must have her or I’ll fall to pieces,” I would say to myself, yearning and groaning and whining like a lunatic.

My gambling mania was really the aberration of a love-maddened brain. How could Bender or Nodelman understand it?

I found myself in the midst of other lunatics, of men who had simply been knocked out of balance by the suddenness of their gains. My money had come slowly and through work and worry. Theirs had dropped from the sky. So they could scarcely believe their senses that it was not all a dream. They were hysterical with gleeful amazement; they were in a delirium of ecstasy over themselves; and at the same time they looked as though they were tempted to feel their own faces and hands to make sure that they were real.

One evening I saw a man whose family was still living on fifteen dollars a week lose more than six hundred dollars in poker and then take a group of congenial spirits out for a spree that cost him a few hundred dollars more. One man in this party, who was said to be worth three-quarters of a million, had only recently worked as a common bricklayer. He is fixed in my memory by his struggles to live up to his new position, more especially by the efforts he would make to break himself of certain habits of speech. He always seemed to be on his guard lest some coarse word or phrase should escape him, and when a foul expression 483 eluded his vigilance he would give a start, as if he had broken something. There was often a wistful look in his eye, as if he wondered whether his wealth and new mode of living were not merely a cruel practical joke. Or was he yearning for the simpler and more natural life which he had led until two years ago? We had many an expensive meal together, and often, as he ate, he would say:

“Oh, it’s all nonsense, Mr. Levinsky. All this fussy stuff does not come up to one spoon of my wife’s cabbage soup.”

Once he said: “Do you really like champagne? I don’t. You may say I am a common, ignorant fellow, but to me it doesn’t come up to the bread cider mother used to make. Honest.” And he gave a chuckle.

I knew a man who bought a thousand-dollar fur coat and a full-dress suit before he had learned to use a handkerchief. He always had one in his pocket, but he would handle it gingerly, as if he had not the heart to soil it, and then he would carefully fold it again. The effect money had on this man was of quite another nature than it was in the case of the bricklayer. It had made him boisterously arrogant, blusteringly disdainful of his intellectual superiors, and brazenly foul-mouthed. It was as though he was shouting: “I don’t have to fear or respect anybody now! I have got a lot of money. I can do as I damn please.” More than one pure man became dissolute in the riot of easily gotten wealth. A real-estate speculator once hinted to me, in a fit of drunken confidence, that his wife, hitherto a good woman and a simple home body, had gone astray through the new vistas of life that had suddenly been flung open to her. One fellow who was naturally truthful was rapidly becoming a liar through the practice of exaggerating his profits and expenditures. There was an abundance of side-splitting comedy in the things I saw about me, but there was no dearth of pathos, either. One day, as I entered a certain high-class restaurant on Broadway, I saw at one of the tables a man who looked strikingly familiar to me, but whom I was at first unable to locate. Presently I recognized him. Three or four years before he had peddled apples among the employees of my cloak-shop. He had then been literally in tatters. That was why I was now slow to connect his former image with his present surround- 484 ings. I had heard of his windfall. He had had a job as watchman at houses in process of construction. While there he had noticed things, overheard conversations, put two and two together, and finally made fifty thousand dollars in a few months as a real-estate broker.