When the Night is New, Marvin Rabinovitch [intellectual books to read .txt] 📗

bothered to give them a second glance. After a while, she began to feel safe in his didactic embrace.

Afterwards they walked slowly back to the Main. He seemed pensive, preoccupied, and barely said a word. Striding beside her with hands in pockets, he maintained a sullen silence, and again she feared having offended him. But what a moody person he was! Perhaps it was best to have discovered this immediately.

He left her a block from home with a mumbled goodbye and little in the way of assurance that they would meet again, not even the minimum that elemental courtesy required. She watched him slouch away, then cross the road against the lights and disappear into the parade of Sunday afternoon strollers.

Well, that was that. She shrugged. The man was no bargain. Handsome? Yes, there was no denying his masculine pulchritude. And vocal chords dipped in honey. But she was looking for something more than a male charmer, a Valentino sheikh with a love call of golden harp strings. But for Adele intellect was paramount and Yashe Heisswasser seemed to have the mind of an overgrown bar mitzvah boy. And what about character, gentlemanliness, culture? The fellow got a failing grade in each subject. He would have to repeat the year, perhaps many times, before she advanced him to the next class.

It was still early. She walked past the Arden and saw that the bill had changed. A double feature was playing, “It happened One Night” with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and “Bringing up Baby” with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. She had time for one movie and luckily it was the start of the Gable-Colbert picture that she walked into.

The interior was sparsely occupied and she settled into a mid-house seat with a sigh of satisfaction. Gable’s smart-guy manliness captivated her instantly, and she fell into the story, sinking without a trace. They were in a bus station. The impudent, merry-eyed stranger chased passed her in pursuit of a fleeing thief.

“That was your valise he stole,” she heard him tell her. Adele pretended nonchalance. Oh well, win some, lose some. She joined him on the bus, unencumbered by baggage. A smirking little trickster tried to get fresh. Gable intervened. Oh, my hero. There was a seat vacant next to his and it didn’t take much arguing to have her join him. She fell asleep, her head lolling on his shoulder.

Well, she was an heiress, of all things, her father a millionaire banker (oh, Pa, forgive me). Off to elope with a secret lover. Gable turned out to be an unemployed reporter with a keen nose for a story and few scruples in intruding on her privacy. The beast, the beautiful beast, with his cocky little mustache and invincible arrogance. The bus broke down. They had to spend the night at a cheap motel, sharing a room. Wryly chivalrous, Gable hung a blanket between the beds. Love bloomed in the dark, on each side of the draped barrier.

“So did you enjoy your day?” Pa asked, nose buried in his Forwards.

“So so,” she said, blinking in the prosaic light of the overhead bulb.

The next day, as she was about to knock off for lunch, who should climb the stairs to the Tartan Garments third-storey loft but Yashe Heisswasser? He was ostensibly looking for Doris but, absent-mindedly as it were, sauntered over to Adele’s sewing machine.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, a little unnerved at her own coolness.

“I would have telephoned,” he said, conspicuously expressionless, “If I had a telephone.”

“It wouldn’t have helped,” she said. “I don’t have a telephone either.”

The ghost of a smile indented faint parentheses at the corners of his mouth. He was really very handsome, almost as much as Gable, though lacking the brilliantined hair. Instead, Yahshe’s hair was wavy. After she got to know him better, Adele learned that he encouraged the waviness by pressing the back of a comb into the troughs.

“There’s a telephone over there,” he said, pointing to the wall unit in the entrance vestibule. Tugging at her sleeve, he added, “Come on, I think somebody’s ringing you up.”

“I don’t hear anything,” she protested, but did not resist his pull.

“Never mind,” he overrode her, “You’ll soon hear.”

She followed him reluctantly to the telephone, uneasy about making a spectacle of herself but determined to forestall him from making a scene. He parked her against the paint-peeling, plaster-cracked wall and off-hooked the earpiece.

“Hello,” he said, expertly twisting the voice pickup until it was an inch from his mouth. “Is Adele Valdman there?”

She felt the earpiece pressed into her hand. He readjusted the speaking tube to her height.

“This is she,” Adele said and could have kicked herself for the tremor in her voice. Why did she always lose control when it counted most.

Yashe, however, seemed not to notice. Reclaiming the earpiece, he said, “Would you like to have lunch with me at noon?”

The black plastic was shiny with the sweat of her perspiring palm. She held it delicately between her thumb and the next two fingers.

“I brought sandwiches from home,” she said.

“That’s okay, you only have to give me half of one. I’m a very light eater.”

She felt like laughing at the insouciant effrontery, but instead answered gravely, “I’m on my last set of buttonholes of the morning. You’ll have to wait a couple of minutes.”

“I’m used to waiting,” he assured her, and hung up.

“That was a short conversation,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t a long distance call.”

He lit a cigarette and jammed it into the side of his mouth, which gave him a dashing appearance. She noticed that it was self-rolled. Probably he had very little money. Perhaps that was why he had left her in the lurch the previous afternoon, embarrassed at his lack of wherewithal for any further treats.

She sat back down at her machine and pulled her chair close, pedaling the treadle and squinting at her work.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Strangely enough, the question was in Yiddish. Much later it became plain to her that Yiddish was his language of serious matters. Whenever they quarreled, and some of their early exchanges were particularly bitter, the recriminations invariably burst out in Yiddish.

“I’m stitching the buttonhole,” she said, preoccupied.

“I thought a buttonhole you had to cut.”

She laughed, a bit patronizingly. “It’s more complicated than that. See, like an exact science. You have to position the shaper just so. It’s called the ‘buttonhole foot slider’. A window, like, the top edge just touching the pencil mark.”

“Ah,” he said sagely.

“Then you lock the slider. That guides the needle down one edge of the buttonhole.”

She executed a neat zigzag stitch along one side of the pencil mark.

“That’s very professional,” he complimented her. She flushed with pleasure, but said nothing.

“Now the other side,” she said, and demonstrated. Two thready lips enclosed a narrow slot of cloth. Yashe raised his eyebrows in admiration and wonder.

“I see the borders, but where’s the hole?”

“That’s the easiest part,” she told him. “Even you can do it.”

He pretended to stagger from sheer disbelief. “Even I?” he gasped, “Even I?”

“Sure.” She handed him a seam ripper and stretched the fabric along its grain to a state of wrinkle-free tension. “See it has two prongs at the end of the blade, one rounded and one pointy?”

He examined the instrument uncertainly. “Yeah.”

“The round tip goes outside the stitch, the pointy tip on the bottom of the pencil mark inside the stitch. That’s good.”

“And now?”

“Now you just ride the stitch upward like a streetcar track. Don’t worry, there’s a pin at the upper end that’ll stop its travel.”

Still he hesitated, fearing disaster. “I’ll ruin it for you.”

She clucked her tongue impatiently. “Do like I tell you. Pretend you’re slicing meat with an underhand stroke.” But he was paralyzed with indecision, until she had the inspiration to repeat the order in Yiddish. Only then did the material part smoothly under the steel.

He blinked in amazement. “Why, a perfect buttonhole!”

For the lunch break, he took her to a little hole-in-the-wall bowling alley nearby.

“I sometimes set pins here at night, and the boss lets me hang out during the off hours. C’mon, I’ll teach you how to roll duckpins.”

They ate their sandwiches in companionable silence. He gobbled his half so fast, she took pity and gave him its mate. He sent her a muted look of gratitude. Poor boy, he seemed to be on permanent starvation rations.

Inside the brown paper bag was the library book she was currently reading. Usually it was the only sharer of her idle half hour. Intrigued by the rectilinear bulk, Yashe fished it out of the wrapper. Closing one eye contemplatively, he read the title aloud.

“Goodbye Mister Chips. Funny name for a book. What is it, ways of dieting? Chips are fattening, right?”

She repressed a smile and said gently, “It’s the story of an old schoolteacher.”

“I hate schoolteachers,” he burst out fiercely, “And I hate schools. The happiest moment of my life was when I turned sixteen and didn’t have to go anymore.”

He lit a cigarette fiercely, almost seeming to chew off the match head. It flared into life with a raucous hiss, the flame large and hot enough to melt lead.

“Be careful with that trick,” she warned. “Sooner or later you’ll set your mustache on fire.” Feathery little mustache, as soft and delicate as down, almost blond where his locks were dark brown. It wouldn’t take much to burn that tender foliage away.

Did he have a mustache then, Adele wondered in the dark at Tzvi’s, or did it grow in later. A debonnaire mustache like the one sported by the actor who played The Thin Man, William P or L something. Paul? Pearl? Pale?

“So tell me more about your Mister Chips,” he said, somewhat mollified by her concern.

“I’ll lend you the book,” she offered instead.

“I don’t read books,” he said loftily. “Only the funny papers sometimes. Gasoline Alley, ever try that? The Katzenjammer Kids.”

She brightened. “My English teacher said that the comic pages are popular culture. Once she even suggested we write book reports on our favorites.”

“And did you?”

“I tried to, on Apple Mary. But I couldn’t finish, because the story goes on and on and never ends.”

“I would have written on Mandrake the Magician,” he said, dreamily watching the wispy smoke curl up from the glowing end of the diminishing butt. “I wish they would make a movie about him. Or a stage play.”

“What a wonderful idea!” she cried, inspired by his vision. “You certainly have imagination. Miss Grendling used to say that imagination is half the battle in life.”

“You look confused, Adele.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Miss Grendling.” The teacher often came up with these gnomic aphorisms. The poetic temperament, no doubt, though the rigid coiffure of her iron-gray hair and the severe navy business suit that encased her spare form were far from outward signs of the wild, bardic Celt within.

Miss Grendling turned toward the blackboard and in a rat-tat-tat of chalk swiftly indited, “IMAGINATION, THE KEY TO SUCCESS!”

“How can you dream of making something of yourself in the future without imagination?” she asked the class, lean cheeks slightly flushed with