Read Online Max by Howard Fast - Free Book Online

that Freida had applied. Freida fought back. Max pulled the two of them apart.
    â€˜You’re demented, both of you. Crazy.’
    Sarah began to weep. ‘I’m crazy,’ she sobbed. ‘I got a son, he’s a bum who runs around with whores and actors, and I got a daughter, she’s a tramp, but I should be happy. So I’m not happy, I’m crazy.’
    Max put his arms around her. ‘Mama, I don’t mean you’re crazy. It’s just you’re making me crazy.’ He waved Freida away, and she slipped out. ‘No, I don’t mean that, only you shouldn’t upset yourself over nothing.’
    â€˜Nothing, what’s nothing? What’s the clean shirt for?’ she demanded.
    â€˜I’m going out.’
    â€˜Every night you go out –’
    â€˜Mama, I work at the music halt. You know that.’
    â€˜Five o’clock? And you need a clean shirt to work at the music hall? My food ain’t good enough? You got to eat the poison from the Chinks and the Italians?’
    â€˜It’s not poison, Mama.’
    Suddenly Sarah discovered that Freida was gone. ‘Where is she?’
    â€˜So she went out, Mama. She’ll be back in an hour,’ thinking to himself, Poor kid. It’s a lunatic asylum.
    Freida, on the other hand, renewed herself each time she escaped from the flat on Henry Street. Whatever romantic fantasies she cherished, the only reality she knew was the street outside and its population. The candy store was on the corner of Pike Street, and it was run by Mr Rabinowitz. The times were innocent of dope, and if one wanted to ease out of the torments of the world, one could buy Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound quite legally, laced though it was with opium, not to mention a dozen other products dispensed from drugstore shelves and equally modified with opium. But the kids, born of the new immigrants who had pushed across the Atlantic to populate New York City’s East Side, were not given to dope or whiskey. In their eager adolescence, they stepped into the twentieth century with nothing more deadly than sweets, leaving aside their gang wars and petty thievery. Mr Rabinowitz had a counter stocked with over one hundred varieties of penny candy, nothing more than a penny, and for a nickel you could eat yourself sick with licorice, candy sticks, mints, creams, buttons, gumdrops, hard candy, soft candy, twists, streamers, jawbreakers, gunshots, sponges, hard toffee, soft toffee, and dozens of other varieties whose names are lost in the mists of time. In the warm months of summer, Mr Rabinowitz would always have an enormous cake of ice in his store, and for two cents, he would scrape a large lump of crushed ice onto a paper plate and then flavor it with one or two of a shelf of colorful flavors, shaking the flavoring out of the same type of bottle barbers used to dispense hair tonic. The rest of Mr Rabinowitz’s shop was taken up with newspapers, magazines, cigars, and the pads, pencils, and crayons school kids required. Mr Rabinowitz and his wife, small, gray-haired, gray-faced people, accepted their store’s role as a hangout for the kids. There was no other. It was the norm. If the store became too crowded with kids horsing around, pushing, shouting, stealing, Mrs Rabinowitz would take a broom to them and chase them out onto the sidewalk.
    But it was mere formality. They were on the sidewalk now when Freida joined them, Rocky, Joe, Shutzie, Stumphead, Izzy. Lizzie was there. She was always there and appeared to have no other home. She was called Lizzie-snatch, and she was easy, even to the point of inviting gangshags, which meant having intercourse with all the boys, one after the other. Miriam, like Freida, fought the boys off, or pretended to or attempted to, and there were two or three other girls, Josie and Becky and Clara; but aside from Lizzie, it was mostly necking and horsing around, and when they got bored horsing