The Pawnbroker (11 page)

Three other men, Cecil Mapp among them, sat in another corner laughing over their beer. Actually, Cecil was drinking lemonade, under the influence of his wife, who sat with the other women in the kitchen. Billy White was the only woman among the men, and her laughter kept them all swollenly conscious of their maleness; except for her husband, who dreamed furiously of barbaric splendor and kneaded his huge hands.

"I'm going to take a little business trip out to L.A. in a couple of weeks," Kopey said with a blasé expression on his sleek, yellow face. He studied the big star sapphire on his pinky. "Pro'bly run out to Malibu Beach while I'm out there. That L.A. really jumpin'."

"I'm just dyin' to get out there," Billy said, courting him with a smile. "Catch a look of the movie stars, you know. I got a idea it's real crazy out there, loads of fun and all."

"Oh they
move
out there, no question," Kopey said with a last, bored look at his ring.

Buck cleared his throat, and they turned toward him, surprised at that manifestation of life. Billy frowned in anticipation of stupidity.

"I almos' went there ... once," he said, embarking on the treacherous sea of conversation; it suddenly appeared to him that he had need of greater complexity. "It was like I was in there the army but not befo', not when I was gettin' out like, ony this guy I don' remember which because he wasn't in like me the army, ony he said if..." His eyes cast around for something that would orient him, searched for anything but his wife's face. He felt himself drowning in the sea of words, but he continued to thrash around, making a great show of swimming. "I ... if
I
want to go like in he place, not he—
I
," he emphasized as though some clarity were just out of his reach. His face beaded with sweat, and the sudden silence of everyone else in the room was like a sound. "See I still in but not he, he never in at all so he could go ahead to L.A. but only he wasn't able, so he got to get I...
me
..." It was all so simple in his mind, how a 4F had offered him a chance to go to L.A. to deliver a car because he could get the gas rations on his army papers. How did people get those things across to other people? He stared at all their dumb, pitying faces, and his mouth closed over air. Slowly, he lowered his eyes to his ponderous hands and surrendered.

"I almos' go..."

Billy White flashed her seraglio eyes upward in exasperation, and Kopey commiserated with a good-natured shrug. Then the two of them went on with their devious courtship in talk of the grand and glittering L.A. while Buck returned to his gloomy invocation of legendary riches.

In the kitchen, the other women talked around the table over their glasses of fruit juice. Mrs. Cecil Mapp sat in righteous ease as she castigated the small, wistful sinner who was her husband.

"Church,
him?
Don' make me laugh, sister," she said to Jane Ortiz, the mother of Jesus. "That man so far from God he can't pronounce the word. A fritterin' spineless creature of evil ways. Don' matter to him me and his children wear rags an' tatters. 'What the use anyway,' he say. 'We miserable hopeless people anyway.' Imagine a man like that! So he give up long ago. Now he courts the bottle, completely lost in the ways of intemperance."

"My Jesus have some wild ways, I admit," Jane Ortiz said, plucking at the tablecloth with a musing expression. "But he never lost to God; that much I can say. 'Course we of a different faith than you, Mrs. Mapp; it's a little different all around. But no matter what kind of devilment he get into, he fin' time to get to church now an' again. He took his communion, makes a confession every so often."

"Well sure, that is somethin' to say for him. His heart in the right place at least, no matter what kind of church," Mrs. Mapp said condescendingly, no real friend of Catholics. (Might as well as be weird as those colored who worshiped in a synagogue.) "But of course with us Baptists you can't just leave you sins on no priest, not so easy with us. We got to fight with the Devil all the time."

"Well, Mrs. Mapp, you might not understand how we works in the
Catholic
Church," Jane Ortiz said, quite proud of her affiliation with the un-Negro faith she had married up to. "You see with us..."

 

Downstairs, the Pawnbroker's janitor, John Rider, sat smoking his new chrome-stemmed pipe, distracted from his reading of the Bible by the shrill voices of the women upstairs.

"It is better to dwell in a corner of d'housetop then wid a brawlin' woman in a wide house," he muttered angrily, yet with a proud smugness, as he slammed the window shut.

 

"My Jesus is ambitious," Jane Ortiz said with proud irrelevance.

"You people jus' don' believe in d'existence of Hell is your trouble. You think you get everything off you back in them confessions."

"It happen Jesus Christ hisself was a Catholic," Jane Ortiz threw in as a clincher.

"It happen he was a Jew," Mrs. Mapp answered.

"Why, Mrs. Mapp, what a awful thing to say!"

Kopey had an expression of delighted anguish on his shiny yellow face as he talked to Billy White.

"And you should see them night clubs out there in L.A. There's nothin' here to compare...."

Billy sighed with yearning while her husband knotted his immense hands, trying to wring treasure from them.

 

Jesus sat low in his seat in the dark theater. His knees were crammed up against the seat in front of him, and his eyes were narrow and intense on the movie screen, like slits of fire.

The scene was the patio of a great country house. People in handsomely tailored evening clothes strolled through the parklike grounds, and Japanese lanterns were reflected in a large, free-form swimming pool. An orchestra played sleepily from inside the opened French doors. In the foreground now, a white man murmured languidly against the face of a skinny white woman. The land fell away quietly in a swoop of luxurious privacy; everything was immaculate, rich, and fabulous.

Jesus Ortiz felt a vast shapeless desire, but it was too great and beautiful to attain shape. So he thought about money and the power of
business.

 

Mabel Wheatly writhed fetchingly on the white sheets of the whorehouse as she waited for her third customer of the evening to finish undressing. She murmured lustful catch phrases to him, this fat, balding white man with girlish skin and tiny plump hands. The summer air came hot and smoky in through the cautiously opened window, and the man's hands trembled.

"I'll tell you what I want you to do," he said in a voice savage with shame. "First fie over ... like this. And then keep saying, 'Do it to me, Richy, do it to me,' like that," he said, his shaky hand moist on her bare brown skin.

"Is your name Richy, hon?" she asked with a vampish smile.

"No, no, my name is Don. But you just do what I say and don't ask questions. Do what I say." He fell on her then and began a mad pantomime of mock virility.

"Do it to me, Richy, do it to me, Richy, do it to me..." she intoned in a dead voice, contorting herself according to that particular recipe of passion. But her eyes were up on the ceiling, staring at a desperate dream.

 

Tessie Rubin didn't open the door to the angry knocking of Goberman. She called from behind the closed door in a loud half-whisper she hoped would carry to Goberman and not to her father lying in his raging sleep in the back bedroom.

"What do you mean coming this time of night?"

"Does it make a difference to the slaves in Yemen, the Israelites in the ghettos of Algiers and Alexandria what time it is? Their blood is on you. You must give me money for the Jewish Appeal or your name will go down with Hitler in Hell," Goberman cried in the same wild half-whisper from the hall.

"I'll give, I'll give, you madman," she said. "Only I don't have, now. Come Monday night, come then, I'll take care of you then."

"I'll come then, I'll come like the Angel of Death to the Egyptians. God help you if you don't..."

"Monday, Monday," she wailed against the door.

"Vat is the pounding? Are they here again?" the old man roared from the bedroom. "
Ich shtab svai huntret yourn!
I haf died too many times already."

"It's nothing, Poppa,
gay shluphin;
it is just the man from die electric company," she called in a soothing voice as she leaned against the door. "It will all be taken care of, Sol will take care of it." She covered her face with her hands and pressed as hard as she could.

Goberman's footsteps clacked hollowly over the tile floor of the hall, receded out to the street, and then were gone from her ears but not from her head, never from her head.

 

Miles away, the Pawnbroker sat up rigidly in his bed to escape the long-drawn and endless moaning of his dreams.

His Sundays were parodies of Sabbaths; hours to be got through without the insulation of work. He swung his feet to the floor of his bedroom and stared at the leafy shape of sunlight over them; it was like morning discovering the marble of a statue. Outside, there were the sounds of the Sunday gardeners and children's voices slamming at the quiet. A lawn mower chugged in the warm air a half-block away, and a few birds twittered weakly, obligated to August. He was in a warm, safe place. Why then did he creak under invisible weights? Why did he feel that phantom growth deep inside?

For a few minutes he studied the motionless curtains tapestried with sunlight. He began to recognize the edge of something soothingly rational.

"A week from Thursday is the twenty-eighth of August," he said aloud. Every year around the anniversary of his family's death he experienced that now vague sense of oppression. It was only natural; in fact in its mildness it was almost unnatural. He did not grieve or mourn them, because he had been cauterized of all abstract things. Reality consisted of the world within one's sight and smell and hearing. He commemorated nothing; it was the secret of his survival. But August was his bad month, the period of his own mistral, a time when he felt healed scars as a veteran might recall his wounds in damp weather. No more than that; August would come and go, and he would continue to exist. Bleakly comforted at having found a name for his ache, he got up and began to dress.

He put on a pair of fawn-colored summer slacks and an olive sport shirt his niece, Joan, had bought him the Christmas before, which made his complexion take on the yellowish translucence of old marble. In the bathroom, he ran the electric razor over the sparse stubble of his beard, his eyes indifferent to the rest of his pallid face. Then he brushed his teeth, which were his own except for two steel ones a little to the side of his mouth. Amazing that he hadn't lost them all. He spread his lips to observe his teeth and then continued the expression in a mirthless smile at that odd persistence; the teeth continued to manufacture calcium, as hair and fingernails continued to grow in the grave.

With his unique spectacles on, Sol went downstairs to where the odor of fresh coffee and rolls and smoked fish filled the rooms pleasantly. Bertha was in the kitchen, the rest of the family reading the different sections of the
Times.

"Good morning, Uncle Sol. You slept late," Joan said brightly. In her yellow bathrobe, her skin tanned to a lovely maple, she was a bright spot in the sunny room. "And so formal. I wish you would let me buy you a dressing gown."

"Good morning,
Solly,
" Selig said with conspiratorial heartiness, reminding his brother-in-law of his lingering gratitude with raised eyebrows.

"Good morning," Sol said, walking over to the living-room window to gaze blankly at the shaded street.

Morton glanced up from his perusal of the advertised bosoms in the theater section. For a moment he looked at his uncle. Oddly, he felt himself loosen in the presence of the big, shapeless figure, felt certain cords of anguish go limp and become bearable in his uncle's stillness.

Bertha's voice broke into the rustling quiet of the room.

"Come eat," she called from the kitchen.

They went in and sat around the sumptuous spread of rolls, bagels, cheeses, sturgeon, smoked whitefish and lox, huge tomatoes and chunks of sweet tub butter; and what was real between them was the mutual hunger, the greed that fit up their faces with an ersatz amiability. Bertha poured coffee into each of their cups. Sol's was an oversized novelty inscribed "Grandpa," which Joan had bought the year before on the vacation she and her parents had taken at Sol's expense. It was part of the half-conscious campaign she and her mother waged to make Sol a family "character"; that at least could explain his indefinable personality, could ultimately, they hoped, reduce him to something they could work with and control.

For a while, they talked in little side courses about friends and news events and book reviews. Bertha dug with gleeful savagery at the small failure of one of her friends' children. But when Selig and Joan finished eating and sat back with cigarettes and a second cup of coffee, Joan suddenly noticed her brother's skinny hands.

"Your nails are filthy," she said comfortably, exhaling a twin stream of smoke from her nose. The observation was made without malice, for she was a healthy, unfrustrated girl. "You keep them too long."

Selig cast his face into a father's sternness. "I don't want to see you coming to the table like that," he said.

Morton ate more quickly, as though he expected his plate to be taken away before he was through eating.

"You don't answer people when they talk to you?" his mother said.

"Leave me alone," Morton said, continuing to eat.

Bertha stared at him viciously for a minute, searching for ammunition, feeding her bitter disappointment in him. She had a certain capacity for love, but it was not large. Her life in America had been bright and clean and pretty; she had become accustomed to clean prettiness. She had come to America thirty years before and had gotten the educated, "American-looking" Selig to fall in love with her wholesome good looks. Their first child had been a beautiful credit to her. And then Morton! She might have been able to shape a pitying affection for her son, but from early childhood he had been as sour and unreceptive to her condescending attention as he was now.