The Pawnbroker (17 page)

 

In the store, Sol looked up from the throbbing, invisible rise of dirt around him. His skin felt dry and aged, his eyes burned from the poor sleep of his nights. And he beheld Marilyn Birchfield standing before him like a substantial vision of cleanliness. She had an unwrinkled paper bag in her hand and she was smiling.

"If you remember, we have a date for lunch by the river," she said.

Sol looked at her dazedly. He was astounded by her smile and her brightness and for a moment he wondered what she had to do with him.

But then Ortiz walked in and he was able to convert that daze of weariness to a sudden, sardonic humor.

"I'll be back soon," he said to the puzzled face of his assistant. "I am going on a picnic."

And he walked out of the store with the woman. He left a bewilderment behind him where Jesus Ortiz now held a brief reign.

They sat on the low wooden beam that made a sort of curbing at the edge of the river. A few feet below was the greenish-brown water, from which the sun managed to bring shimmering sequins: out of all the muck an illusion of brightness. Sol swung his gaze along the chaos of the opposite bank. Directly across from where they sat was a coalyard with a chute that led down to the water. Boys were leaping off into the greasy river and then climbing back up to jump again. It was amazing how fresh the water looked when they splashed it up into the sunlight. There were brick buildings and corrugated metal roofs. A great, heavily laden barge moved ponderously toward them. He continued his perusal of the familiar place as though something about it might have altered in the few hours since he had last been there. The same wide derelict expanse bordering the river, a piece of desert-like sand in a huge triangle, a space of no apparent use, which had not even collected the usual junk and refuse that most emptinesses invited in that part of the city. And the usual vista of the nearer dirt-caked tenements with the unreal, towering mirages of the great office buildings far downtown.

And then—her! A bright, full-faced woman, smiling at him and talking, still remarkably fresh and clean-looking, even with the faint shine of perspiration above her lip. What was he doing there with her, this voluble American woman with her girlish face and full, womanly body?

"...because, frankly, Mr. Nazerman, this city is still rather strange to me," she said.

He tried to focus on the context of their relationship, there in the hot sun, beside the flow of polluted water. The immense, stony growth of the city was all around, and he sat in a body he had long ago outlived, while a foreign woman spoke to him in a language he had thought he understood.

"...then I said to myself, Marilyn, old girl, come off it. They're all people. Only they have a variety of problems I'd never come up against. And suddenly it was all much simpler for me. This place began to seem less a foreign country than a part of my own home town I'd never noticed before." She smiled her wholesome smile. "There I go talking too much again. Perhaps that's the weakness of lonely people. Either people clam up on me and I feel compelled to break through to them, or else they act friendly and I feel I owe them a lot of talk. I admit I risk my dignity sometimes, often I feel I'm an out-and-out pest. But when I get through to someone, when I do make a friend ... well, the risks seem negligible."

"I do not wish to inflict a failure on you, Miss Birchfield, but I must be frank also. To be honest, I do not welcome your prying, your
interest.
In most times I probably would have been quite positive and brutal about discouraging you. Only lately I have been ... not quite myself." He chuckled harshly. "Not quite myself," he repeated, deriving a perverse pleasure from the irony. Then his face clouded and he seemed to have difficulty seeing through the heavy lenses.

"I have not been well these last few weeks. Poor sleep ... It makes me somewhat dull," he said. "Normally, I keep to myself. I do not usually let people unnerve me. It is strange, this feeling, I don't know. Perhaps I should see a doctor and be done with it. Doctors, oh yes, they have great tricks these days, they effect amazing changes. Oh, I have figured some of the reasons for the way I feel. I have many pressures on me, financial pressures. And then, my business exposes me to the poorer elements, dirty ignorant people. It is a business that has some precarious aspects. And yet I have borne up quite well with it for a number of years now. It will all pass. I am perhaps somewhat tired, tense. My age increases too; I will be forty-six in the fall."

She widened her eyes involuntarily. He looked much older. He was only ten years older than she; it jarred her idea of their relationship. Partly, she guessed, he looked so much older because of his poor color, the inexplicable thicknesses of his face. Actually, it was hardly lined and his hair was dark and free of gray. Yet there was great age in the very way he held himself, in the
mass
of his face, which made the bone structure unguessable.

"However, I am here now and perhaps it will do me no harm to sit quite idly in the sun for a short time."

"And eat these sandwiches I bought," she reminded him with a humorous raising of her eyebrows.

"And eat the sandwiches
you
bought, but which
I
paid for last week."

She laughed delightedly at that, her head back, her strong-muscled neck taut in the brilliant day. Then, still smiling, she asked him if he would like a corned-beef sandwich.

"For some reason, I cannot eat meat. It goes against me. Perhaps I did without it too long. Usually I lunch on cheese sandwiches."

She held up a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich triumphantly. "You see, I have an instinct for your likes. Cheese for you, I'll have the meat."

He smiled as he reached for the sandwich.

She sat back with an affectation of amazement.

"I saw it!" she said.

"You saw what?" he asked, the smile slowly fading.

"You were off your guard for a moment, and I saw it. You have a
charming
smile, Mr. Nazerman. I'm beginning to think you're hiding a human being under your cold manner."

"Do not bank on it, Miss Birchfield," he said, beginning to eat.

"I don't understand. Why are you so afraid of being thought human?"

He just held up his hand.

"Do not get out of your depth, please. So you are a sociologist, a modern, logical person. Of course I am human; I have no choice about that. But I am a private individual, also, and I prefer to remain so. This is pleasant," he said, taking a little deeper breath of the tarry, heated air. "I feel it rests me a little. Do not spoil it with silly analysis." His face became grave for a moment. "Besides, you might find things you could not bear at all. Let it be simple. Say I am a rather cold person, that I have had a difficult life and prefer the peace of being left alone."

She nodded respectfully. Then she squinted a little curiously at him. "Tell me this," she said, "do you have any contact with the people you deal with every day in your store? Do they make any impression on you?" She ate slowly with her attention on his face.

"Frequently they disgust me. Nothing more."

"I see," she said thoughtfully. "Now this question may be a little offensive. Please put it down to my insatiable curiosity, and excuse it. I've always had the impression that pawnbroking was a somewhat unsavory business, that poor people are taken advantage of. Am I completely wrong?"

"Of course not," Sol said easily, gazing at the river. "First of all, because poor people are always taken advantage of, and there could be no business in our society without that being so. Yes, pawnbroking thrives on people's woes. But what of that? Undertaking thrives on people's deaths but it is not responsible for their dying. What is the difference at which point in the chain of lives a man sets himself up in business? For me, this particular trade was ideal. I am not required to solicit or cater to people, as in many forms of business. I do not have to sell. Besides, there is considerable profit in pawnbroking. I want a certain income to afford the privacy and independence I require."

"But tell me this: as a human being, don't you, like everyone else, sometimes feel a need to justify what you do? What I'm trying to say is that I feel there has to be some real importance to our work, at least occasionally. Otherwise we are like mice on a treadmill with no feeling of beginning or ending." She had stopped eating and now watched his idle study of the river.

Slowly the hard, habitual smile spread over his mouth, and his eyes glinted almost cruelly from the depths of the thick glasses.

"As a
human being
again?" he said sardonically. "
Justify,
you say. All right, I will justify. I will make it logical and laudable, for everything can be explained and defended from a certain point of view, absolutely everything. Say I am like their priest. Yes, do not be shocked, I
am.
They get as much from me as they do from their churches. They bring me their troubles in the shapes of old table radios and watches and stolen typewriters and gold-plated crucifixes and half-paid-for cameras. And I, I give them absolution in hard cash. Now what do you think of that! Oh yes, they know I only give them a small fraction of what the thing is worth. But what they get is still a prize to them. They know how difficult it is to get
anything
from me. If I were to soften up, I would devaluate their little triumphs. They would be shocked and confused; I would be like a priest giving in to temptation. Oh, their pleasure is short-lived; the little I give them must be spent in no time at all. But they walk out of my store smiling and reprieved." Suddenly, his eyes were faintly clouded. It was as though he had just discovered an amazing particle of truth in his harsh joke, and he turned to her with a hint of perplexity in his hard smile. "Tell me, Miss Birchfield, tell me this: who can give them any more than a reprieve?"

"I don't know," she answered. "I really don't know. Perhaps I
am
out of my depth. My view of life has been pretty naive. But I'm getting older; certain horrors have gotten through to me." Dreamily, she gazed at the half-naked bodies of the boys across the river as they splashed into the water and then climbed back up the coal chute like gleaming, newly caught fish. "I was a fat and amiable kid; everyone seemed to like me. The boys thought I was a great sport. I remember some of them used to tell me solemnly that they thought of me as a sister." She laughed, quite without sadness. "Well, in that odd category I went to a lot of parties and had loads of friends. It really wasn't too bad. Oh, I had wistful moments when I imagined myself sylphlike and exotic. But my childhood wasn't traumatic, rather happy, as a matter of fact. Only one day I discovered the most excruciating malady in myself—
loneliness.
I fought it, despised it. Just self-pity, I told myself; come off it, kiddo, look around at the people who are really in trouble. But you know, when I did look around, it occurred to me that most people suffered from the same thing. And pitying myself, I began to pity them, too. Now I'm sure as heck not asking for your sympathy. I suppose my teeny sorrows must seem frivolous to you, maybe even offensive. But everybody suffers on his own. All I'm trying to say is that I made a discovery, at least for me. I figured that nobody was responsible for my sadness, so there was nobody to be bitter against." She sighed and made a wry expression, almost a smile. "Loneliness is probably the normal state of affairs for people. And any happiness you're able to get ... well, it's contained, sort of ... oh, you might say happiness is contained in the
context
of sadness."

Now she turned to look directly at him, her light-blue eyes almost masculine in their frankness and vigor. Her features were too strong for prettiness, and she owed her attractive appearance to her expression, which was at once compassionate and humorous, innocent and sensible.

"I know there's misery and cruelty and injustice in the world, Mr. Nazerman. I'm not quite such a dewy-eyed fool as you may think. But I have hope for everyone. Even for myself." She let her hand shape a gesture that asked for his patience—a slight curving of the fingers she held aloft, a holding of attention and a sign of beckoning. "Sometimes it's hard for me to maintain dignity. I'm a spinster—not the most attractive role to play. In my worst times I feel involved in a tasteless joke." She mitigated her statement with a smile, hopelessly sunny under all the regret, as though she knew better than to aspire to tragedy. "But mostly I have few complaints. My work gives me a great deal of pleasure; it seems important and worth doing. And most of all,
I'm not bitter.
" She faced him resolutely, her face sternly Yankee, her eyes expressing the Protestant belief in self-control. "I have some idea of what you've been through, Mr. Nazerman. I would expect a great deal of sadness and grief to be in you. But why are you
bitter?
By now you should have discovered that it's a poor shield."

Sol studied a pair of gulls gliding vigilantly over the dark water, dipping now and then as though they thought they had discovered life in that unrevealing flow, only to rise up with hardly a movement of their wings when they discovered their mistake.

"My dear Miss Birchfield, how touchingly naive you still are," he said finally, shifting on the wooden curb of the river, his face shining with sweat, his glasses picking up flashes of sunlight and flinging them at her like tiny darts. "You discovered loneliness, you found that fife was unjust and cruel. What an astounding accomplishment! And with commendable humility you say that I might despise your suffering, that it might seem less dramatic than my own. Very well—but let me try to make some sense to you." He leaned intimately toward her. "There is this, my dear
sociologist.
People who have 'suffered' in your little world may or may not become bitter, depending, perhaps, on the state of their digestive system or whether they were weaned too early in infancy. But wait, this you have not considered. There is a world so different in scale that its emotions bear no resemblance to yours; it has emotions so different in degree that they have become a different
species!
" He tilted his face up toward the sky in the pose of a sunworshiper, but his eyes were malevolently open. "I am not bitter, Miss Birchfield;
I am past that by a million years!
" After a minute he closed his eyes, less, it seemed, from the brightness of the sun than from a sudden access of irritability. "Bitter," he said scornfully. "Why should you say that? Do you hear me curse people? Have I delivered a diatribe on the evils of fascism, the infamies of Hitler? Do not be silly. I am a man with no anger and no desire for vengeance. I concentrate on what makes sense to me, that is all. I want nothing at all but peace and quiet."