The Immigrants by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

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    to the seamen and the fishermen, and thereby tripled his business, he was not certain that the idea was not originally his own.
    Now, with the five-year-old Martha clinging to her skirt, she was engaged with her husband in their annual and fruitless attempt to take inventory in the shop, he calling out the items, she writing them down, when Daniel Lavette entered the store. They stopped what they were doing and stared at him.
    “I want four new nets,” Lavette said, “and I want the Massachusetts stuff and not the garbage they make out here. So if you haven’t got them, order them for me.”
    Still they stared at him.
    “What the devil—”
    “That suit doesn’t fit you, Danny,” Levy said.
    “It fits.” He unbuttoned the tight jacket of the blue serge suit he wore and pulled in his stomach. “It fits. I haven’t had it on for a year or so. Maybe I filled out.”
    “The sleeves are two inches short. The pants are short.”
    “Let him be,” Sarah said. “He’s grown.”
    “I haven’t grown. I’m twenty-one years old. You don’t grow at twenty-one.”
    “When did you buy the suit, Danny?”
    “Two years ago.”
    “Well, you’ve grown. I don’t think I ever seen you in a suit before. What’s the occasion?”
    “It doesn’t look right, does it?” he asked Sarah.
    “It’s all right.”
    “Sure, it’s fine. I’m only going to have lunch with Thomas Seldon at the Union Club—that’s all. God damn it to hell, I look like a monkey!”
    “Take off the jacket,” Sarah said gently. “I’ll lengthen the sleeves. It won’t take more than a few min utes, and I’ll press out the creases.”
    “Seldon? You mean the Thomas Seldon?”
     
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    “That’s right.” He was staring at his cuffs.
    “Oh, take it off, Danny,” she said.
    He pulled off the jacket and handed it to her. Levy, riffling through the pages of a catalogue, said, “That Massachusetts netting is up twenty percent. It comes from Fall River. Seldon—come on.”
    “Look, Mark,” Lavette said, bristling, “to me Seldon’s another guy—that’s all.”
    “He only owns the second biggest bank in the city, that’s all.”
    Sarah, small Martha still clinging to her skirt, had taken the jacket inside. Levy motioned for Lavette to follow. “Come on, I’ll feed you a beer.”
    “I don’t want any beer on my breath. In one hour, I’m with the nabobs at the Union Club.”
    They sat around the kitchen table. Sarah cut and stitched with speed and skill. Dan Lavette, grinning like a small boy at Levy’s disbelief, told how it had come about. He had walked into the Seldon National Bank, identified himself, and asked for a loan of thirty thou sand dollars. He didn’t get the loan, at least not yet, but he was introduced to Thomas Seldon himself and in vited to lunch at the Union Club to discuss it further.
    “That’s chutzpa ,” Levy said admiringly, “pure, un adulterated chutzpa .”
    “What’s chutzpa ?”
    “Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance—whatever. Any way, what on earth do you want with thirty thousand dollars?”
    “The Oregon Queen’s for sale.”
    “So?”
    “They’re asking a hundred and fifty thousand. I can get her for a hundred twenty thousand down and ten thousand more to put her in shape.”
    “Danny, the Oregon Queen’s an iron ship. She’s a dead-lost experiment.”
     
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    “Like hell she is. She’s rusty and she never had a fair shake, but her hull is good and her engines are good. There’s money in the lumber trade. This city eats wood like crazy, and there’s no end in sight. I can ship enough timber in one year to pay her off, and from there on it’s pure gravy.”
    “Danny, you got three boats mortgaged to the hilt.”
    “And I’m a fishmonger and my father was a fishmon ger.”
    “What’s wrong with that?”
    “It stinks of fish and it stinks of the Embarcadero. We’re down here and the nabobs are up