by Howard Fast
‘Would I be presuming to ask that myself and my lady be present at the wedding?’
‘Well – yes, oh, yes, absolutely. We’d be honored, Mr Murphy. But it’s just a small Jewish wedding out in Flushing.’
‘There are no small Jewish or small Irish weddings, my lad. It’s the size of the heart that measures it. And it’s time I showed my face in Flushing. When you’re too long away from any part of this populous and wondrous city, you lose touch.’
‘We’ll be happy to have you,’ Max said, charmed, but still wondering why the lunch had been arranged.
‘I been hearing good thing about you. They call you the young tycoon. But I had no idea you were this young.’
‘I’ve had some luck,’ Max agreed.
‘You call it masel, I call it sechel,’ Murphy said, using the Yiddish words for ‘luck’ and ‘brains.’ ‘You got a string of moving picture places all over the city. I trust there’ll be more.’
‘There’ll be more,’ Max agreed, lighting the excellent cigar Murphy had offered him. ‘We have seventeen storefronts, but in the next five years I plan to replace them with real theatres. Our first real theatre, the Bijou, is operating already. We’re renovating two others, one on Fourteenth Street and one on Twenty-third Street, and we bought two lots uptown where someday I’ll build, both in Harlem.’
Murphy suddenly changed the subject, asking Max abruptly, ‘What do you know about Tammany Hall, Max?’
‘Well, you know, it’s like the Democrats with all kinds of influence in the city, but I guess everyone knows that –’
‘Trouble is, nobody knows much of anything. Back in the old days, a hundred years ago, when it began, it was Tammany and only Tammany that stood for the people against the rich and the powerful owners who were ready to wipe out everything the revolution brought us. There’s many a curse thrown at Tammany, but who remembers that after the American Revolution, the rich and the powerful decided that they’d do here what they have done in England, and make themselves a proper aristocracy. They organised a thing called the Society of the Cincinnati, an organisation of the officers of the revolution and of their kids as well. And who was to stand for the people, the foot soldier?
‘That’s how Tammany came about, the common people against the Cincinnati, and since they named their organisation after the fancy aristocrats of old Rome, we decided to name ours after old Chief Tammany of the tribe of Delaware Indians, who was well noted for his wisdom and his love of liberty. We had thirteen trustees to govern our society, one for each of the thirteen original colonies – grand sachems, they were called, after them that ruled the old Indian tribes. And when the dirty schemers tried to undo all the good of the revolution and institute a government based on fear and privilege, who stood beside Jefferson for liberty but Tammany Hall, and you’ll hear many a slur cast against the fine and decent name of Aaron Burr because he killed Hamilton in fair fight, but Tammany never turned its back on Burr, and with him we stood for liberty. Sure, every Protestant minister could make a name for himself with an attack on old Willie Tweed, giving him a character that would fit the worst devils in hell and making great stories of how he robbed the city of hundreds of millions of dollars. All you had to do was say ‘Boss Tweed,’ and the devils were conjured, but you and me, laddie, you as a Jew and myself as a Roman Catholic, we got no illusions about Protestant ministers.
‘Well, there it is, a bit about the old organisation. I thought it might clarify things in our dealings.’
Max listened to this long, rambling story of Tammany Hall with respectful and almost total confusion. Tammany Hall, as everyone knew, ran the city. Tammany Hall owned the police and enforced or failed to enforce the law according to the wishes of whoever led Tammany. In New York, as it was put, one pissed because Tammany raised the toilet seat. Tammany had looted the city, over the past half-century, of enough money to ransom all the kings of Europe, but if one was starving, rest assured that come Thanksgiving or Christmas, Tammany would provide a free dinner; and why not, since Tammany took its tithe from every prostitute, pimp, gambler, and gangster who plied his or her trade in the city. This was common knowledge and Max’s knowledge as well, but the rest of it – the talk about Jefferson and Burr and sachems and the Delaware Indians – made no sense whatsoever to Max. Nevertheless, he thanked Murphy for enlightening him and waited for Murphy’s demands.
‘I have made a few inquiries,’ Murphy said. ‘I hear you have taken care of your mother and your brothers and sisters. That’s a fine, elegant thing to do, Max, and God will reward you. And you’ve got a head on your shoulders. This moving picture thing is only beginning.’
‘I have to agree with you,’ Max said.
‘And as you spread out, every cheap hoodlum is going to try to horn in on you, not to mention them that call themselves legitimate businessmen and are just waiting to cut the throat of a young Jewish lad with more brains than they got.’
Max nodded and waited.
‘You need Tammany,’ Murphy said. ‘You need me.’
‘What will it cost me?’ Max asked slowly.
‘Twenty percent of the profit.’
‘That’s too much.’
‘A year with our cooperation and your profits will double.’
‘It’s too much,’ Max said stubbornly.
‘You name it.’
‘Five percent,’ Max said.
‘You’re pulling my leg,’ Murphy said without anger. ‘But I got to respect you. You’re a tough cookie, Mr Britsky. We have just taken over Cappy’s Music Hall, up on West Twenty-third Street. Cappy drank and gambled himself into bankruptcy, and we possessed the place for back taxes. You could take title for a hundred dollars and pay the thirty-two hundred in back taxes over the next ten years, and the property’s worth a hundred and fifty thousand if it’s worth a penny. All very quiet but legal, and that is only an indication, laddie, only an indication of what it will mean to have a friend in the hall. Sixteen percent.’
‘Seven,’ Max said.
A half-hour later they shook hands, and Murphy owned eleven percent of Max’s operation, with the agreement that Max would take over Cappy’s Music Hall and that Murphy would bend the zoning laws to Max’s advantage and to the disadvantage of his competitors.
‘This is nothing you will regret,’ Murphy said.
‘It will be just a small Jewish wedding in Brooklyn,’ Max said.
‘I would not miss it for the world.’
‘There’s a Captain Clancy over on Houston Street and Alderman Sweeney. I thought I’d invite them. You wouldn’t mind sharing a table with them?’
‘Delighted,’ Murphy said.
Arthur and Lillian Levine had been born in Europe, in Austria. Arthur had been brought to America as a child in 1867. Lillian’s parents had come to America three years later, bringing her with them. Since both families had come from the Carpathian Highlands to Vienna a generation before their move to America, they could not properly claim to belong to the genus of German Jew, who belonged to a wave of emigration out of Germany and into America between 1820 and 1860; but then, neither could they identify completely with the great mass of Eastern European Jews who began to pour into New York in the 1870s. They were isolated in a middle ground between the wealthy and respectable German Jews, the ‘uptown Jews,’ and the bitterly poor ‘ghetto Jews’ of the Lower East Side, and this isolation caused them to cling to a sort of lower-middle-class propriety as a shipwrecked man might cling to a tiny life raft.
Their respectability had practically replaced their religion. They had established themselves in the fringe German-Jewish community in Flatbush, and sometimes in their dreams they saw Sally married into one of the great German-Jewish financial empires or at least to a German or Viennese doctor or dentist. Max Britsky they had never anticipated, and as the wedding day approached and as Max stubbornly refused to bring them together with his mother, their trepidation increased. It became even greater when Sally informed them that they could not h
ave the wedding ceremony in the Reform temple they belonged to, to be followed by a small party in their home. Max’s mother would not set foot in a Reform temple, which she considered to be the abode of the devil himself.
Max did the best he could under these circumstances. He had come to realise that just as his status in the world was changing, so were his domestic needs changing. Suddenly, Sally was a great asset; she had the qualities he was beginning to encounter in certain business associates: restraint, manners, the ability to speak the language properly, and just enough good looks without the opulent sexuality of women he was instinctively drawn to. In other words, in his enlarging lexicon, Sally was a lady, and he was determined that nothing should occur to make her withdraw from the wedding. He bought her a large diamond engagement ring and a gold wedding ring set with tiny rubies, and gave her carte blanche in the furnishing of the brownstone house. He also purchased a double Victoria carriage and engaged Shecky Blum to drive it and take care of the horse, renting horse and groom space in the Sixty-seventh Street stables, west of the elevated structure.
Sally, overwhelmed by this cornucopia, talked her parents into renting Marcus’s Lecture and Catering Hall on St Mark’s Place for the wedding. It was not a very large or opulent wedding. The tables at Marcus’s held ten people, and each family filled three tables. On Max’s side, his family, with Sally and Ruby’s girl friend, filled one table; another table seated the people in Max’s organization, those he felt should be invited to his wedding. The third table was his Tammany table, as he thought of it, seating Murphy, Clancy, and Sweeney, each with his respective wife, Bert Bellamy and the girl he chose for the occasion, and Sam Snyder and his wife. His wife’s name was Alice; a plump, pink-cheeked woman with a mass of pale brown hair piled high on her head and a ready, easy smile. It was the first time Max had met her, and he was taken aback by the uninhibited manner in which she embraced him and kissed him and assured him that she knew all about him, but would find it hard to forgive him if he did not bring his new wife to dinner very soon. The Snyders now had four children, and a fifth was on its way.
‘And then, God willing, she’ll stop,’ Sam Snyder said.
‘Listen to him.’ Alice laughed. ‘Just listen to him.’
This assortment of non-Jewish types was regarded with suspicion and hauteur by Sarah, who lorded it over the occasion in an enormous pink silk dress, sewn all over with white imitation pearls.
The thirty people from the Levine side were so many faces to Max, even after he was introduced to them. Nothing, he decided. Schmucks. And as so often happened on such occasions, the two groups kept coldly apart. ‘They should be grateful,’ Sarah said, ‘a boy like Max, who’s a millionaire, marrying into a family that’s got nothing to show for it.’
Max was far from being a millionaire, in spite of Sarah’s new-found financial admiration for her son. In fact, his cash reserve, which he had learned to refer to as ‘a state of liquidity,’ had practically vanished, the last bite being taken by a dozen cases of champagne, his gift to the wedding. But, as he assured Sally, his incoming cash – another expression he had adopted – was as uninterrupted as the Hudson River.
Marcus’s hall had an upstairs and a downstairs, an arrangement which the Levine side of the family accepted with resigned distaste. The rabbi was Orthodox, provided by Max to please his mother. The sixty guests sat on folding chairs with an aisle separating Levine and Britsky. The bride and groom – Sally lovely in white organdy and lace, Max in a tuxedo, this one purchased – standing under a canopy, the rabbi intoning, ‘Ha’ray att M’ku’ deshet lee’ b’ ta’ ba’ at zu k’ dat moshe v’ ysrael,’ and Max wondering how, in his search for proper moving picture places, he could have missed Marcus’s place, and calculating precisely how much he would offer Marcus. A few minutes later, Sally was his wife; he had crushed a glass underfoot, according to the Jewish custom, and he had placed a ring on her finger; then he had kissed the bride. As everyone crowded around to join in the congratulations, Max tried to create in his mind an erotic picture of taking his virgin bride to bed that night. But he had never gone to bed with a virgin, and the prospect was somehow more dismaying than erotic.
The wedding ceremony had taken place upstairs. The tables were set downstairs, a half-circle around a dance floor and a four-piece jazz band. As Max led Sally downstairs, they looked at each other with the sudden alarm of two. people who, having known each other a long time, unexpectedly find themselves strangers.
Boss Murphy, chief of Tammany Hall, prince and feudal lord of the city of New York, sipped champagne and watched Max and Sally dance a waltz, alone on the floor for this first dance, and he said to Alderman Sweeney, ‘There, Timothy, is one of the most remarkable men in this city.’
‘The skinny little Jew?’
‘That skinny little Jew, Timothy, has more brains and guts in his little finger than you got in all three hundred pounds of you.’
‘You’re joshing me.’
Murphy smiled and patted Sweeney’s huge hand. ‘Indeed I am, Timothy. Indeed I am.’
At the Britsky table, watching her son dance, Sarah said to Freida, ‘Who has such a beautiful son like I have? Didn’t I say so, from the day he was born?’ Then, dropping her voice to a whisper, ‘The girl Ruby brought, she’s Jewish?’
‘I don’t know, Mama.’
‘She don’t look Jewish. He should just marry one of them, I’ll jump out of the window.’
The girl Ruby brought was Kathy Sullivan, whose father was a gripper man on the Broadway cablecar line. She watched Max and Sally dance, thinking to herself that she had become involved with the wrong Britsky. She was a pretty girl with jet black hair, bright blue eyes, and a rosebud complexion. She caught Max’s eye as he danced and smiled at him, and he acknowledged the smile and returned it.
‘How old is your brother?’ she asked Ruby.
‘Twenty-three.’
Nothing lost, she thought. There were many, many years ahead.
Benny was not totally without talent. In the eighth grade at school, one of his teachers had discovered in Benny a gift for drawing, and suddenly Benny found himself able to do something people admired. Now he was drawing Boss Murphy’s face on the tablecloth when Sarah reached over and slapped his face. ‘What are you, a hoodlum, making pictures on the tablecloth?’
Alderman Sweeney stared unenthusiastically at a plate of stuffed derma and stuffed cabbage that had been placed in front of him.
‘What is it?’ his wife wondered.
‘Kishke,’ Bert Bellamy told her. She was a very attractive, red-haired woman, almost two hundred pounds lighter than her husband and at least fifteen years younger. Seated next to Bert, she had assured him with a gentle pressure of her knee that she was not averse to a further acquaintance if it could be managed. ‘That’s what they call it. It’s really very good, beef intestines stuffed with a mixture of flour and fat, much better than it sounds. And the cabbage is stuffed with meat and raisins – very good.’
‘How do you know so much about Jewish food?’
‘Ah, Max and me, we been together since we were kids.’
‘And how old are you at this minute?’
‘About as old as you, Mrs Sweeney.’
‘Go on with you! I’m old enough to be your mother,’ smiling at him and increasing the pressure of her knee.
The Levines took a dim view of the Britsky tables. They watched Bert dance with the flamboyantly red-headed Mrs Sweeney, and they watched Max’s sister Freida dance with Boss Murphy, whom they did not recognise. Told that he was the Boss Murphy, they were not impressed. They were readers of Harper’s magazine and looked upon Tammany as a consortium of thieves and murderers. The strange combination of vulgarity and miscegenation at the Britsky tables puzzled and disturbed them. Introduced to the enormous bulk of Alderman Sweeney, who regarded whatever moved and breathed as both a voter and a constituent, they were at a loss at how to receive his warmth and praise of their daughter, coming from one whom
their favorite newspaper regarded as a thief and swindler without peer. They were equally at a loss as they watched Kathy Sullivan, high on champagne, embrace Max and kiss him somewhat more fervently than the occasion demanded.
‘I don’t like them,’ Lillian Levine whispered to her husband. ‘That Sarah Britsky is one of the most dreadful women I have ever met, and look at the people they invited – Boss Murphy, Alderman Sweeney, and that man, Clancy, we were introduced to. He’s a policeman, isn’t he, and he doesn’t even look human. What has happened to my poor daughter?’
Her husband comforted her as best he could. Max tried to get Mrs Levine to dance with him, but she protested that she was too old to dance. Then Sarah Britsky tried to get both of the Levines to join in an old-fashioned folk dance that was practically de rigueur at a Jewish wedding. Mrs Levine fled into the bathroom, where she burst into tears, but her husband joined in the dance and so did the Irish contingent, who found the dance almost identical to an old Irish folk dance. Sally left Max whirling with the dancers and followed her mother into the bathroom.
‘I’m heartbroken,’ Mrs Levine said through her tears. ‘What kind of people are they?’
‘Don’t cry, Mama,’ Sally begged her. ‘They’re plain people. It’s a wonder that Max and his brothers grew up at all. That’s the miracle of it. His mother is terrible, but I suppose her life has been terrible.’
‘And you’re going to live in a house next to that woman.’
‘I’ll manage, Mama. Please, don’t cry about it.
At home that evening, Max and Sally sat in the bedroom of their brownstone, their bags packed and ready for their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. Exhausted, filled with an uneasy mixture of champagne, wine, and rye whiskey, more than a little drunk, smelling of booze and cigar smoke, Max stared at Sally and tried to contemplate an action as new to him as it would be to Sally, the deflowering of a virgin lady.
And facing him, sitting on the edge of the bed that she had chosen with such delight in its four posts and flounced top, Sally’s wan face stared out of a pile of crumpled organdy. What am I doing here? she asked herself, and, How can I face this? I’m supposed to have sexual intercourse now with this man who is my husband. How did it happen? I think I will die if he tries to make love to me, but why do I feel this way? There were times when I almost loved him, but then it wasn’t for the rest of my life. Now it is for the rest of my life, and what will we talk about, what will we say to each other? And what do I do now? Do I undress? Why doesn’t he do something, anything, instead of sitting there like that?