LITMIR.BIZ

      12

      New York City, December 1909

      Thick snow had settled above the city grime on Hester Street. During the day, the two had mingled under a million tired feet, and this evening the resulting soup had frozen over once again. Eleana’s boots had been restitched so often there was barely anything left to hold them together. They had sucked in the filthy, icy mire, numbed her feet as she stood on Greene Street – and now, in the steaming warmth of the picture house, they were itching and aching as they thawed. It didn’t matter. Not really. It was such a relief to be inside – somewhere warm and cheerful at last – and with Matz at the piano, smiling at her through the crowd. There was neat gin running warm through Eleana’s veins, and hot potato soup in her belly, and the new movie, Frankenstein, playing on a loop on the screen above her head. Her feet could have detached themselves completely and she might not have complained.

      Maybe ‘picture house’ was too grand a name for the place. It was a five-cent Lower East Side nickelodeon, a dirty little store front, nothing more, and nothing like the big, fancy theatres opening further uptown. There was a screen at one end, a hand-turned projector at the other, and not enough benches for the boisterous audience between the two. It was packed, as it was every night, even now, with the garment strike – and thick with the smells of tobacco and sweat, and hot, unwashed bodies.

      The projection screen was too small, or the film was too large. Something wasn’t right. As always, at the nickelodeon on Hester Street, the top half of the image was bouncing lopsided off the ceiling. But nobody complained. In the normal run of things, such a detail wouldn’t stop the audience from screaming with merry terror: it was Matz Beekman, up to his tricks at the piano keyboard, who was so blithely sabotaging the mood.

      Matz was employed five evenings a week (at seventy-five cents a night) to provide musical accompaniment to whatever film was showing. Tonight he had cast aside the official score, as he did from time to time, and was improvising a comic soundtrack of his own – turning what was meant to be a horror show into a ludicrous romp – and the crowd was loving it. Their bellows of laughter could be heard outside on the frozen street, bursting from the room, beckoning more people to join the hot, boisterous crush. Looking at them all, as Eleana did just then, it would have been hard to guess just what and whom they were up against. The garment workers’ general strike, into its third week now, was more widespread – and more successful – than anyone had expected it would be, including the strike organizers. And now the city authorities were turning savage. In cahoots with the factory owners, they were letting their thugs loose on the picket lines, and for the mass of the Lower East Side, garment-manufacturing centre of the world, life had become not merely a struggle to stay warm and to find enough to eat, but a battle – bloody, violent, lawless. To the hunger and the grind, the anonymity and the squalor, there had been added a tang of actual, mortal fear.

      Eleana turned her mind from it, from all of it. Everything to do with the strike, and everything connected with it. She concentrated instead on the here and now: the nickelodeon on Hester Street. And Matz at his piano. And Frankenstein and his monster, bouncing off the ceiling.

      The film was only sixteen minutes long and Matz knew every frame. He watched movies differently from other people – with the same concentration and passion that he did everything, but with a filmmaker’s instinct, too; though he couldn’t know it yet. It meant he only needed to watch something once, and he could break it down, scene by scene, shot by shot.

      No matter what the film was showing, in just a handful of notes, and simply to keep himself amused, Matz could take possession of it, transform the mood. He could send the audience lurching from horror to tears and then to laughter, and carry every soul in the room with him. It was magical. Matz was magical. Eleana loved him most when he was at the piano, hitting the keys, playing the audience – happy and free. He was a different man from the one who stood on stage at the Union halls and called on his fellow workers to strike, or to keep striking, or to keep up the fighting. She loved him then, too – of course. She loved and admired him in the halls. But she loved and desired him at the piano. He would look up suddenly, in the middle of it all, his audience weeping or laughing at his musical command – he would glance up through the crowd, with that look of ferocious concentration, search out Eleana, catch her eye, and his face would break into a wild grin. Often, more and more often, he would beckon her over, forget the film entirely, and instead start hammering out one of the popular songs, in the hope that she might sing along …

      Give My Regards to Broadway …, Take Me Out to the Ball Game … , Keep on the Sunny Side …

      The crowd never objected. The regulars would holler for her until she came forward to stand beside him.

      She didn’t do much. A song and dance. A little routine. The usual schtick. The sort of acts pretty young girls were running through in cheap bars and crowded nickelodeons all over the city. Except, when it came to it, Eleana was anything but usual. Her dark features were too large to be conventionally pretty, and there was a wildness about her, as if she were permanently searching, in hope and fear – and, above all, in vain – for an exit from whatever situation she was in. She was rough hewn, yet: still only a teenager. But she was beautiful. Matz saw it. The crowd saw it, when she sang. In years to come, the camera would see it. She was as magical as Matz up there, standing by that piano: a born performer. Her rich voice, her expressive face, her timing, her intensity, her humour, her lightness of touch – something and everything about her cast a spell. Matz told her so, endlessly. He knew she was a star, all along. He used to say so. And she must have believed it, just a little, or she wouldn’t have continued to stand up there, night after night. She wouldn’t have followed him to the ends of the earth … And she must have heard the applause, felt the warmth. She loved it back then, in the beginning. It made her feel alive.

      Tonight, after she sang, they would be passing a hat for the strike fund. And when Matz stopped playing for the evening, when she’d done her song and dance, and the customers were heading home, she might pull him into the cupboard behind that beaten-up piano. Or he might pull her, probably: either way. It was where the proprietor, Mr Listig, stored any reels of film overnight. Not such a big cupboard then: no space to lie down. But big enough. At the end of the evening they always helped to put the reels away, and then – what the hell? Mr Lustig pretended not to notice. He didn’t care (so long as the reels weren’t ruined). Seventy-five cents an evening wasn’t much, after all, and Eleana didn’t even get that. She received nothing, except a wave-through at the door. A little bit of privacy at the end of the night wasn’t much, but it was a luxury not many young couples enjoyed back then, not on the Lower East Side. The use of his cupboard was a perk of the job.