Max by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

bastard.’
    â€˜Max, I didn’t –’
    â€˜Shut up! Put it on the table, or I’ll give you a mouthful of teeth for dinner!’
    â€˜Max, please,’ Sarah begged him, but facing his brother’s rage, Ruby emptied his pocket and threw a quarter and five pennies on the table.
    â€˜Now get to hell inside and do your homework,’ Max said.
    â€˜I ain’t got homework.’
    â€˜You’re damn right. And you know why – because you played hooky today. And how many other times? Now you listen to me. You miss another day of school or make another wisenheimer crack to your teacher, and I will personally beat the living crap out of you. Now get to hell in there and do your homework, and if you ain’t got any, invent it!’
    For the following three days, Max thought of little else than Miss Levine. He held fantasy conversations with her in which he mysteriously emerged as a student at either Harvard or Yale, both of them places about which he knew only the names and certain fuzzy connotations. Or he became a tycoon, a builder of railroads and factories, wealthy beyond measure, driving her through the city in a marvelous open two-horse carriage. Max and his partner, Bert Bellamy, had once tried bridling, as it was called, at Delmonico’s restaurant at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street. The bridler was a kid who grabbed the bridle when the carriages lined up outside of Delmonico’s waiting to discharge their dinner guests, his pretense being that he kept the horse from rearing, and sometimes there was a half-dollar tip. But the competition was fierce and the doormen were brutal. When they caught a kid, they beat him unmercifully, and after Bert had been trapped and beaten, he and Max gave it up. But Max remembered the carriages, the men in their evening clothes, the women bejeweled in pearls and diamonds and overdressed in their expensive and incredibly ornate gowns of silk and moiré and taffeta and lace. To Max, they were neither overdressed nor vulgar, only enviable, and he saw himself and Miss Levine descending from one of those carriages. Yet his fantasies foundered upon the fact that he did not know her first name.
    What had he done with her letter? Her name had been written there, yet he had read it in such a flush of irritation that he had not even noticed her first name. He searched everywhere in the apartment for the letter, to the tune of, ‘Max, what are you looking for?’ from the others in the family. But the letter was gone. He even contemplated asking Ruby what Miss Levine’s first name was, but thrust the notion aside. When he told Bert about his dilemma, Bert said impatiently, ‘Schmuck, go ask her.’
    Max paused in the act of smearing his face with pancake makeup and said, ‘What? Are you nuts?’
    â€˜Not me, buddy. You’re the guy who’s gone loony over this skirt.’
    â€˜Hey – don’t call her that!’
    â€˜Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, forgive me!’
    â€˜I can’t ask her.’
    â€˜Why not? Ain’t she a skirt? O.K., I apologise. She’s a dame, ain’t she?’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    â€˜So?’
    â€˜She’s older than I am.’
    â€˜Maxie baby, ease up. I never fucked a lady wasn’t older than me. Otherwise, what have you got? Jailbait.’
    â€˜She ain’t that kind of a girl.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    â€˜Look, I don’t want to talk about it. Forget it.’
    The first time Max went to the school after his visit on behalf of Ruby, at exactly ten minutes after three P.M. , and hid himself inside the hallway of a tenement across the street, he proposed to himself that he did so to make certain that Ruby was attending classes. But if so, why at ten minutes after three, when most of the students had already left the school? Why not at ten minutes before three? The hell with it, he said to himself. I’m here, ain’t I? So I’m late.
    It