Max by Howard Fast

you.’
    â€˜You are talking to me, Mr Britsky.’
    â€˜Yeah, sure. You’re not from here, are you?’
    â€˜From here?’
    â€˜Here – the East Side?’
    â€˜No, I was born in Brooklyn. That’s not so far away, but too far for a daily journey, and since I’ve been teaching, I do live here.’
    â€˜Yeah, sure. I guess to you I look like some kind of hoodlum.’
    â€˜No. Well, I am curious about you. You said you were an entertainer. But you’re very young –’
    â€˜Eighteen. That’s not young.’
    â€˜But you can’t be out of high school more than a few months.’
    He was silent for a while, then he told her that he had left school at the age of twelve.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜To work.’
    â€˜I know children work, but you could have gone to school.’
    â€˜My father died,’ Max said flatly. ‘He left my mother and six kids. We had no relatives, nobody, nobody who’d lift a finger or care whether we lived or died. Someone had to take care of them.’
    â€˜A woman and six children?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Miss Levine paused, slowed her walk, and then stopped to stare at Max as if she were seeing him for the first time. ‘And you did that – at the age of twelve?’
    â€˜I’m not lying,’ Max said defensively. ‘Nobody else did it, and they’re still alive, right?’
    â€˜I didn’t mean to suggest that you were lying. It’s just so incredible, so incredible.’
    That night Bert said to Max, ‘You mean after that you just walked home with her and walked away? Maxie, baby, you got brains – you know where you got brains, in your pants.’
    â€˜All right. This is not tail. This is not a piece of ass.’
    â€˜They’re all tail, they’re all a piece of ass. You introduce me to that twist, and I guarantee you that in twenty-four hours I’ll have my hand in her bloomers.’
    â€˜And I’d kill you, you bastard!’
    â€˜Ah, the boy’s serious. You’re in love, buster.’
    But Max’s relationship to love, romantic or otherwise, was cloudy. He was knit to his family, but he had no love for them, and since leaving school he had not read a book, whereby his notions of romantic attachment were unembellished by literature. He read the newspapers only in a desultory fashion since he was uninterested in politics, racing sheets more frequently, Cockfight Specials , which dealt with dogfights as well as cockfights, throwaways on pink paper, and now and then, Dirty Dillies , which was a crude pornographic magazine; but reading played a very minor role in his life, and notions of love as projected in the music halls were hardly inspiring. Still and all, something moved him and compelled him as he had never been moved before, and once again he approached Miss Levine as she was leaving the school.
    If Max’s world was a very narrow one, he nevertheless knew it and explored it, and he accepted enlargement with a totally open mind. Max knew how the floozies dressed, he knew how girls from his own background dressed, and he even knew how uptown ladies dressed; and if Miss Levine dressed somewhat differently from any of those groups, Max could balance the lot and accept her costume and learn something from it. Her ankle-length gray worsted skirt was well cut and appeared to hang and flow gracefully with her movements. She wore a dark blue spring coat and under it a white blouse, the jabot of which was just visible, and she carried both a briefcase and a purse. This time Max ignored the fact that she walked with another teacher. He fell into step alongside of her and said, ‘Please, let me carry your briefcase.’ And then he took it from her before she could properly protest.
    She was taken aback and somewhat flustered as she introduced the other teacher: ‘Miss MacClintock, this is Mr Britsky.’
    Max lifted his hat, nodded,