Free The Dream Merchants by Harold Robbins Page A

want to go where I can hear people speaking Yiddish and I want to stand with my children in front of the matzoh bakery on Rivington Street and smell the matzos warm from the oven like my father and I used to do. And suddenly the feeling is strong in me that the time has come to go back home. Please, Peter, go down and look. If it’s not good, don’t do nothing about it, but go and look.”
    It was a long speech for her; in that way she was a great deal like her father, and Peter was impressed. He pulled her head down on his shoulder. There were soft wet spots on her cheek where it lay against his neck. With his free hand he stroked her hair. When at last he spoke, his voice was very soft and he spoke in Yiddish. “All right, so I’ll go and look.”
    She turned her face toward him. “Tomorrow?”
    “Tomorrow,” he answered, and then suddenly turned to English. “But I’m not making no promises!”
    Esther lay awake for a long time listening to Peter’s slow breathing as he slept. It was funny sometimes how hard you had to work to convince a man that it was right for him to do the thing he really wanted to do.

8
    They reached Borden’s studio at three o’clock the next afternoon. Expertly Johnny led him through the studio to where Joe was working. Joe waved his hand when he saw them. “Grab yourself a seat and watch,” he shouted to them above the noise of the studio. “I’ll be with you in a little while.”
    It was almost an hour before Joe came over. Meanwhile Peter had looked around the studio. Even his inexperienced eye could recognize the aura of intense activity going on around him. There were three crews working on different platforms. Johnny explained to him they were called stages. The people themselves had an air about them that indicated a pride, a sureness, an awareness that their work was the most important thing in the world.
    Peter watched Joe. Joe was rehearsing a group of actors in a scene he was about to photograph. Again and again he made them go through the motions of the scene until they did just what he wanted them to do. It reminded Peter of when he was a boy and used to bring his father lunch in the music hall in Munich. His father played second violin in the orchestra there. The orchestra had been rehearsing as Peter had come into the hall, the maestro would be shouting, and then suddenly all would be silence as they would play the number for the last time before the evening concert. When the number was finished, the maestro would nod his head if he was satisfied and say to them: “Now, my children, you are ready to play for the King if he should come.”
    That was what Joe was doing. He was making them play a scene over and over, and when he had it just right, he would capture it on film. For here the camera was king. A vague tightness came into Peter’s chest as he watched. This was something he could understand. His father had made him practice violin day in and day out, for his father wanted him some day to play beside him in the orchestra. Peter knew how much it had cost his father to send his son to America when the Kaiser began to conscript all young men and boys into his army. Time flew by quickly for him. The hour that Joe had taken with the scene seemed but a few minutes to Peter, so completely had he been absorbed.
    “So you finally came down?” Joe smiled.
    Peter was cautious. “Things were quiet. I had nothing better to do,” he explained.
    “Well, what do you think of it?” Joe asked, waving his hand at the studio around him.
    Peter was still cautious. “It’s all right. Very interesting.”
    Joe turned to Johnny. “I think I saw the boss come in while I was working. Why don’t you take Peter over to meet him? I got another scene to shoot before I can call it a day.”
    “All right,” Johnny answered.
    Peter followed him back to the office. The office was a large room with a few men and girls sitting at desks and working. At the back of the office there was