The Pawnbroker (12 page)

"I found some indecent pictures in your drawer," she said, not adding that she had studied them curiously for almost ten minutes.

"Ah, the solitary vice, very unhealthy," Selig said, belching the essence of smoked fish out with his cigarette smoke. "You're at the age where self-discipline is important, Morton."

"Talk about shame," Morton snarled, "haven't you people got any shame? How can you talk to a person like this? All right, you despise me and I despise you. Yes, let's get it out in the open—
despise!
Well, okay, I don't need you. I'll become an artist and get out on my own. Then you can all go to hell, for all I care!"

"That language in front of your mother and your sister!" Selig half stood in threat. And this, his namesake, his hope of immortality. He was too lazy about discipline. Well, from now on he would take a hand. For an instant he visualized a tall, broad-shouldered Morton with tanned, smooth skin and bright friendly eyes and himself, Selig, introducing this beautiful son to his principal, telling the man that his son had been offered any number of football scholarships but that Morton preferred a particular nonathletic college whose pre-med courses were said to be the best. Selig stayed, half standing, his eyes glazed and forgetful of the purpose of his posture. Gradually, he sank back into his chair as the daydream faded.

"Morton," Joan said, "we don't hate you. What an unhealthy attitude that is! You have many antagonisms against yourself and you try to put them on us. We just want to help you. Our criticism is meant to be constructive."

"That's what a family is for," Selig said.

"Well I certainly hate to see him get like this," Joan said. Then, with a glance at her uncle, the payer-of-fees, "Maybe some professional help would be in order. Mort, would you consider talking to Sid's friend Doctor Klebish? Just informally; the brightest people do it nowadays."

Morton didn't answer, just kept stubbornly eating.

"
Get
like this," Bertha cried scornfully, suddenly flooded with bitter recall. "He was always like this. He sucked my milk till there was blood. At three years old he was still crying for the titty."

"
Really,
Mother!" Joan spoke with delicate distaste. "Now, Mort, you know Mother is just angry—not that I blame her. You get her all upset. Honestly, you don't let anyone relax and be friendly with you. You're so violently antisocial, so..."

"He used to pee in his pants when he was already eleven years old, just to embarrass me," Bertha persisted, half enjoying the dim nausea she felt in this attack on her son. It seemed that if she continued it long enough and intensely enough, she would vomit all the sick anger she felt for him, that she might be soothed and eased and patient enough to love him as she should.

"Nowadays we have guidance people in the schools," Selig said. "Perhaps if the people at the school ... I mean this drawing business is not a solution to all your problems, you know, son. Let's say you are pursuing some modest talent, all well and good, but..."

"You don't know anything about it!" Morton cried hoarsely, his eyes bulging and wild. "You people with your slimy, warped little brains, talking about
foreign films
and
book reviews.
What do you know? Beauty, do you really understand about beauty? No, just prettiness, nice clean little things, fashionable, crappy little nothings. And you have the nerve to tell me..."

"Those pictures in your drawer maybe, that's beauty?" Bertha said.

Morton snarled miserably, like a trapped animal.

Sol just sat drinking his coffee and contemplating the cold, living stone in his vitals, in a hurry for the hour to end, for the day, the week, the month to be gone. He forced himself to anticipate the peace that would follow his strange seasonal discomfort. The voices of his relatives snapped in a closing circle around the ugly weakness of their prey, but he heard them only distantly, like the sound of some far-off hunt. He squinted at the chrome sparkle of the stove, which threw needles of light into his eyes. He might even take a little holiday in October, walk in some New England wood and just breathe without regret or poignance the pleasant cold air so free of unnatural smells. He would take some books along and stay at a quiet inn and walk and eat and read and be quite content within the walls of his senses. He sat in an autumnal reverie, his face slack and idiotic, his body collapsed sideways in the chair.

But suddenly the noise intruded. Morton was standing with his hands up to his ears and screaming one steady tantrum note.

"That's just childish, Morton," his sister said. "You refuse to take criticism like an adult."

"He's a baby, a nasty baby," Bertha shrilled.

"Get a grip on yourself, boy," Selig shouted.

"Shut up, all of you!" Sol said in a thunderous voice. "Leave him alone!"

"Now, Solly, you must let us work out our parental problems in our own way," Selig said with polite reproof.

"I said be still, be still!" He towered over them with his anger, and they were reminded that he came out of unknown violences. Selig and Joan sat open-mouthed and intimidated.

But Bertha was made of tougher material.

"You are not yet the dictator around here, Solly," she said. "Maybe you think you can throw up to us the little help you have been willing to give us. But'we didn't vote you the head of the house. After all, we give something in return. We have made a home for you, given you a family. What money could buy that?"

Morton forgot to scream. He lowered his hands from his ears and watched his uncle.

Sol turned to his sister with a cold, glistening stare.

"You will be still now," he said. "No more talk at all until I am out of this room. Silence, Bertha, silence. When I am gone from here, you may continue your cannibalism; I do not take sides or interfere with your miserable pleasure. But hear what I say. I do
not
need you for a family—that is
your
myth. If you wish to be able to continue it, be silent!"

Then he turned and went from the room.

Morton followed, a careful distance behind his uncle. Like his father, he was prone to imaginative reconstructions. He looked at Sol's wide, bulky back and had no need to create a new and perfect father; he was willing, in his dream, to settle for that one somber, harsh man, would have taken his chances on all the darknesses in the Pawnbroker that would be forever beyond his knowing. He felt, without evidence, that there were murkinesses those eyes could penetrate and understand.

But Sol was only soliciting silence. He went into the yard with a book of Chekhov's short stories. Settled on the plastic-webbed chair, he began to read. He soaked in a fictitious climate which isolated him from the warm sunlight and the voices of all the neighbors, dulled by the heavy summer foliage. And slowly he worked away from the minor irritant of the recent scene in the house. He read avidly, and although he projected himself to a certain extent to the late nineteenth-century Russian town, he derived pleasure mainly from the lucid familiarity of something he had loved and enjoyed in another time. He appreciated the emotions evoked, but he was not involved emotionally himself because his invulnerability allowed for no exceptions. He was stirred only to a reminiscence of sadness; he was like an archaeologist studying the historic ruins of an interesting civilization. Sometimes he smiled faintly, at other times his eyes narrowed slightly; breezes of life seemed to play over his bland, buried face.

During the morning the members of the family came out into the yard for various reasons; Bertha to dump the garbage, Selig looking for a pair of pruning shears, Joan just wandering aimlessly. Each of them skirted his reposing figure with cautious silence and stayed for the shortest time; they were intimidated by Sol's motionless face, stony in the yellow-green light, and by his eyes, obscured behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

Only Morton stayed for a long time in another chair, a good distance away from his uncle. He read intermittently from Gardner's
Art Through the Ages,
and every so often swung his eyes furtively from some Byzantine saint or Renaissance madonna to the motionless figure.

After a while, Sol, too, found himself swinging in and out of the balm of his reading, although he did not lift his eyes from the printed pages. His mind drifted with the apparent abandon of an oarless boat, bumping on this strand and that. His customers ranged through his thoughts, and he examined them harshly, as though he might find the thing responsible for his increasing unease. With his eyes on "A Day in the Country," he checked off Jesus Ortiz and Buck White, Tangee and the blue-eyed Negro. He considered craftily the harsh, sonic whine of Murillio's voice, the sleazy delicacy of George Smith's importuning debate. And he wondered if any or all of them might have anything to do with the way he felt. The buzzing conjecture began to make his nerves tingle, and a slight dizziness came over him.

"But it's just the time of the year ... an old superstition," he said aloud, gesturing, too, as though in answer to an unseen companion.

"What did you say, Uncle Sol?" Morton asked, as alien with his sallow face in that cheery sunlight as his uncle.

"What ... oh, nothing, nothing. I was reading aloud ... it meant nothing," he said softly.

Then he went back to Chekhov with his memory strangled in the grip of his will. And the soft summer sounds fell over him with the sunlight, as unfelt as the lightest rain of pollen.

They could see the whole thing from where they stood in the camp square. Sol stood with the others in a long, endless line, halted by their guard, as were the several other work groups. Outside the barbed-wire fence, the dogs snarled in a closing ring around Rubin. The black-uniformed men smoked and joked idly in the noon sunshine; even the dogs seemed in no great hurry as they backed the small crouched figure toward the fence.

A week before, they had taken Rubin's cross-eyed son to the "showers." Last night, Rubin had managed to slip out of the camp, God knew how. But the dogs had found him, and the commandant's edifying "example" was imminent. All night they had given Rubin his head, yet all the while they were slyly working him back toward the camp. Now,
at high noon, he was right outside the high fence for everyone to learn from; the morbid joke was revealed to Rubin at last.

If you kept your eyes off the small hunched figure, you might think a harmless animal hunt was in progress, some sport of so little intrinsic excitement that the guards tried to make it interesting by jokes and side bets.

The dogs bayed in the hot light. The air was emptied of birds and insects by the loud voices of the dogs, and the prisoners stood like shades, arrested on their shuffling journey to Hell. Sol felt dust flowing from him instead of sweat, a dry, powdery secretion which smelled stale and fiery.

One of the guards of Sol's column called over to the men with the dogs, "I hope the electricity is off now, otherwise you'll ruin it.
"

A black-clad man answered that it was. He touched the twisty knot of wire and made a face of mock agony, as though he were being electrocuted. They all laughed at his clowning. That was the extent of the sounds; a few men's laughter and the yapping, the trumpeting of the hounds.

Rubin was only a few feet from the fence when the dogs jumped him. For a minute his figure was obscured by their tumbling, hairy bodies. Their snarls were wetly muffled by what they were doing. Sol looked away, a strange dead feeling spreading through his chest, a feeling like
boredom.
All the men in the column were bony-gray profiles, death masks coated by the faint dustiness of the air. A pigeon appeared on one of the sludge-colored barracks roofs; not quite sure of its roost, it fluttered its wings as it stood, then rose again and disappeared over the monotonous horizon of the camp.

The vile chorus from the beasts' throats rose to an insane pitch. Sol looked back to see Rubin rise up far bigger than he had ever been. For a few seconds the dogs fell back, surprised at the deceptive quarry which had seemed so small. Rubin was screaming, one shining red figure of blood, only his mouth definable in all the torn body, and that so vivid
because it framed the scream. Everything else was dust-white, the dark figures of the guards and the dogs overladen with a cloudy, powdered light. Only Rubin had immense color, was a great crimson font that demeaned the whole day.

Suddenly Rubin turned and flung himself up on the thorny wire fence, where he clung just out of reach of the snapping dogs. One of the guards waved toward the guard tower. There came the rattly crack of electricity. The bloody figure went rigid, pulled away from the horrid life of the wires, and then seized it and pulled it tight in a lover's embrace. Then the body went limp. And the ragged bundle of blood and charred flesh, caught like some wind-tossed rubbish on the wires, was no longer Rubin or anything else.

Sol retched dryly as they ripped the ruined form from the wires. All around him he heard others doing the same, standing straight, with expressionless faces, as though the retching were something animated by their captors, too. And, like all the others, Sol brought forth only dust.

 

He decided not to try for any more sleep. It was just past dawn as he fumbled around quietly, dressing, washing, and shaving. He couldn't have borne the sight or sound of any of the family then, so he walked with elaborate caution, felt for each creak and lowered his weight on each step like someone trying out a newly mended leg. Outside, he drew a deep breath of the dew-sweet air and felt securely hidden in the awakening din of the birds.

His car tires whined over the damp streets. The sunlight searched out the dirty night shadows. He imagined relaxation and blew a faint unknown melody in a hiss just short of a whistle.

Today was the eighteenth of August—a week from Thursday was the twenty-eighth. Merely one of three hundred and sixty-five days. All right, indulge the old superstitions, if you must. So the day rang in his head with a somber resonance. In two weeks it would be over. Nirvana would return, he thought wryly. No doubt his dreams would come less frequently; someday they might cease altogether. The capacity for dreaming was like an ulcer, an ailment common to humans. It could be cured by blandness of diet. In a few weeks he would be impregnable again.