Max Read Free Page A

‘How about the tickets for them showcards in your window? I’ll buy them.’
    Sal had neither the time nor the inclination for the English-speaking theatre. ‘I hear your poor mama pass away.’
    â€˜My papa.’
    â€˜Worse, terrible.’ In Italian, he observed that this place stank, that life was an oversized outhouse, and that the poor ate shit. Max nodded in agreement, his wide blue eyes moist and vulnerable. ‘I give you this,’ Sal said, offering Max a dollar. ‘Helps, maybe.’
    â€˜I don’t want money,’ Max said. ‘Thanks, Sal, but that ain’t what I want. I want the tickets for the showcards.’
    â€˜What for? Your mama’s dead, you go see shows?’
    â€˜My papa. I buy the tickets. Two bits a pair.’
    He left Sal’s with two pairs of tickets, one for a performance of Devil May Care , starring Lucy Demar, and the other for a rerun of The Mikado , by Gilbert and Sullivan, which had a triumphant opening in New York some six years before.
    He explained to Sal what he intended to do with the tickets, feeling that Sal would not screw him. Even then, Max was a fair judge of human nature. Sal promised to save the tickets for him in the future. In some way, Max understood the barrier between these hard-working storekeepers and the uptown world of the theatre, of glowing gaslights, of fine restaurants, of men in dinner clothes and ladies in their evening gowns. The nearest theatre center was on Fourteenth Street, which was either a mile away or a continent away, depending upon who you were, and the newer theatre centers in the Twenties and in the Forties were even more unapproachable. It would never have occurred to Sal Marietta to go to the theatre, even as it would never have occurred to Max.
    Max’s mother, Sarah, had been born in 1856, transported at the age of sixteen to the Lower East Side of New York City. Years later, Max would remember and try to comprehend what life had been for Sarah. She was only thirty-five years old when her husband died, but already worn and defeated, the juice of life squeezed out of her, the fragile bit of youthful beauty she had once possessed gone forever. She was boxed into a room with no exit; she was beyond planning or hoping or dreaming, and the thought that this strange, alien, skinny boy could provide for her and her family was untenable. The ability to love had also been squeezed out of her, replaced by fear and rage and frustration. Left to her own devices, she might well have waited for death or extinction. A woman in her situation in another ethnic group might well have killed herself and her children; Sarah might have allowed life to perform the execution at a slower rate.
    But Max brought in money, and they survived. It was an affront to the normal monstrousness of life, and instead of being grateful, Sarah snapped and whimpered and raged at her son. Strangely enough, Max understood this.
    But his understanding and acceptance of his mother lay buried deep in his unconscious, almost animal-like; as a despised dog clings to loyalty, Max clung to Sarah. He never asked himself whether he loved this shrike of a woman because in some strange way he was wise enough to understand her. He was guilty of denying her the horrible extinction that would revenge her on life and circumstance. He gave her a preposterous gift – continuing existence – and incredibly, yet naturally, this was something she could not forgive him. He denied her the small, terrible logic of her impending fate and doom. Explicitly, neither of them actually comprehended this; but in the process of living, it became central to their relationship to each other. With his brothers and sisters, it was another matter.
    Max never separated himself from the six human beings who depended upon him. Their survival was his survival; their fate would be his fate. It was a fact, not of compassion or duty, but of reality, because he was