The Immigrants by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

plate and set it in front of Feng Wo. He poured him a mug of coffee, and then sat down to face him as he ate. The beans were like honey in
     
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    H o w a r d F a s t
    Feng Wo’s mouth, and he fought for control, fought to eat slowly and po litely, recalling with each mouthful that his wife and daughter had also not tasted food for two days.
    “So you want to be a bookkeeper,” Lavette said. “Well, screw the lot of them. Why in hell shouldn’t I hire a Chink? Let them burn their asses. But let me tell you this, Mr. Feng—I’m no soft touch. If you can’t do it, I’ll boot you out of here on your yellow backside. I may look young and innocent, but I take no horseshit from anyone. I got three boats and eleven men on my payroll, so this job is no cinch. Now I want you to shape up here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. I’m not going out with the boats, and if you are what you say you are, we’ll spend the day trying to make some sense out of my books.”
    Feng Wo had finished eating. He rose, picking up his hat and his newspaper. “I would try to thank you, Mr. Lavette, but I don’t know what to say. I am so grate ful.”
    He turned and started for the door.
    “Hold on!”
    He paused and slowly faced Lavette, who said to himself, My God, the poor bastard’s terrified . And then aloud, “Don’t you want to know what I pay?”
    “Whatever you pay will be sufficient.”
    “Twelve dollars a week to start. That’s not the best, but it’s not the worst.” He got up, reached into his pocket, and took out a wad of bills, peeling off two fives and two singles. “Here’s a week’s pay in advance. Get your kid some food. But if you don’t show here tomorrow, I’ll peel your yellow skin off, and remember that.”
    At thirty years of age, Mark Levy’s wife, Sarah, still had the appearance of an ingenuous girl of eighteen. She had flaxen hair
     
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    which she wore tied in a tight bun at the back of her head and wide, pale blue eyes set far apart. She defied all the stereotypes of a Jewish woman; she was slender, small-breasted, and long-legged, and she gave the appearance of being perpetually startled. She had been born in the city of Kiev, in Russia, and brought to the East Side of New York City at the age of seven, and she still had a slight foreign accent, which her husband felt enhanced her slow, throaty speech. This, together with a certain vagueness in her manner, gave people the impression that she was a dull and phleg matic person, an impression that was far from the fact; and indeed her husband, who worshipped her, took a pe culiar comfort in the fact that her imagination and pas sion were so well concealed. She was a second cousin once removed or something of that sort—Mark was never entirely clear about their family relationship—and they had come together through an arrangement between his family and her family, done in the old Eu ropean manner, without their ever seeing each other before they were pledged—after which Sarah was shipped across the country, three thousand miles by rail and coach, a girl of seventeen tagged and addressed for all the world like a parcel. For two months before the wed ding, she had lived in his father’s house—which was four rooms behind the chandler shop on the Embarcadero—and during that time, Mark fell totally and ro mantically in love with her. For her part, she accepted him with the same easygoing tolerance with which she accepted all else that befell her.
    Now, married almost thirteen years, with the older Levys dead and buried, she was contentedly mistress of the chandler shop, the four rooms behind it, a son, Ja cob, who was eleven years old, a daughter, Martha, who was five, and a husband who took her advice and asked her advice without ever truly understanding that either was the case. Even when she once casually sug gested that he use copper rivets to reinforce the pockets of the heavy cotton trousers he sold
     
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