The Pawnbroker (4 page)

He faced the depraved and the deprived, the small villains, the smaller victims. And his battlements were his hard assaying eyes, his cool voice that offered the very least. Through the hours, others besides Jesus Ortiz found time to wonder at the peculiar ragged numbers etched like false veins under the skin of his arm, or to speculate on the graven cast of his fleshy, spectacled face. But the Pawnbroker kept his secret, for while some of them might surmise some of the facts of his history, none of them could know its real truth. And as he plied his trade, each of them took away only a feeling of something quite huge and terrible.

At six forty-five in the evening the phone rang, and Sol answered, knowing who it was.

"Murillio?" he said with only the slightest intonation of question.

"You got to spend five thousand bucks, Nazerman." The voice in the receiver had the depthless timbre of a recording. "A contractor comes over tomorrow. He gives you an estimate of five thousand for general repairs. Give him a certified check on the store account."

"I see. What is his name?"

"Savarese."

"Yes, very well."

"How is business, Nazerman? Are we making money?" A dry chuckle had the same recorded quality as the spoken word.

"As always, we spend more than we make."

"Very good, Uncle. Pretty soon Uncle Sam will have to pay
us
money. Subsidize
us,
hah? Can't expect taxes from a losing business, can they? Hey, that's a good idea, subsidize. Sponsor us. Like they use to do in Italy durin' the Renaissance. The Medici, you know. They was patrons to the artists, Michelangelo, da Vinci. Hey, how about that. Why not us, too! The hell, Uncle, we're artists, too, ain't we?
Gyp artists!
" The dehumanized, mirthless chuckle sounded again. "Okay, okay, partner, I'll talk to you in a day or so. You take care of that little matter then. And keep your nose clean, hah?"

He looked up from the phone to see Ortiz studying the engraved plaque under Daniel Webster's bust. The store was dim even with the fights on, so it seemed the quality of fight was at fault, not the intensity. Outside, the evening sun made the street shimmer in a golden bath through which the passers-by moved like dark swimmers in no hurry to get anywhere. He breathed, with his assistant, the dust of the much-handled merchandise, the imaginable odors of sweat and pride and weeping; and it was an indefinable yet powerful atmosphere, which gave them an intimacy neither desired.

"All this junk," Ortiz said musingly. "Still an' all, it's business. A solid thing, oh a real solid thing—business. You got records an' books an' papers, everythin' down in black an' white. Take like you people, how it carry you along no matter what."

"What people?" Sol asked, numbly admiring the almost poreless skin over his assistant's delicate features.

"Jews, all the Jews."

"Yes, yes, certainly, you have it all figured out," Sol said dryly, as he drew his eyes from the young man's face to fish for more substantial catches among the brass tubas, the cameras and radios and silver trays.

"Niggers suffer like animals. They ain't caught on. Oh yeah, Jews suffer. But they do it big, they shake up the worl' with they sufferin'."

"You tell them, Ortiz, go spread the word. You have it all figured out, a regular professor is what you are."

"I know, don't worry, I know," Ortiz said smugly. "I know the way things is."

"You know nothing, absolutely nothing."

"That's all right, jus' don't worry about what
I
know."

"Nothing, nothing, nothing."

"You go around with that poker face, think you the only one what know. Don't fool yourself. I got eyes and ears, I figure, I know."

"Nothing," the Pawnbroker hollowed out of himself in a sigh.

"An' what I don't know, I find out."

Sol turned cold, denying eyes on his assistant. "You're a pisher, that's all you are," he said. "It's after seven; why don't you go home now?"

"All right, sure,
boss,
" he said sourly. He put Daniel Webster down regretfully, a calm anger on his dark, ivory face. "Good night,
boss,
a very good night to you."

"
Gay in draird!
"

Ortiz bowed himself out with a mocking smile, his shiny black hair bobbing over his forehead with each bow.

"Good night, good night, good night..."

Sol hissed at the empty store. What is it, what is it? He was shaken with a minute trembling, like an aspen in an almost invisible breeze. A fever, could I have perhaps a fever? Oy, the season; every year it gets like this. Some people have hay fever, I have my
anniversary!
What, it's about two weeks away, the twenty-eighth. I'll get through it like always. Maybe I'll go to Tessie tonight? No, too tired. I'll go home and read in my bed. Oh yes, I have a
wonderful
two weeks ahead of me. Oh what nonsense, what nonsense this all is!

After a while he began readying the store for the night. He closed the safe and twirled the dial a few times. He turned on the one light in the little glassed-in office and flicked off the fluorescents one by one. Then he put up the heavy screens over the windows and switched on the two burglar alarms. Finally, with a brief look around at all the conglomerated stock, lying submerged in the dimness he had brought about, like some ancient remains half buried in the muck of an ocean bottom, he closed the door and locked it.

His mouth widened in a grimace that a passing man took for a smile and returned. He closed his eyes for a moment and leaned against the coarse metal screen that covered the window. The warm evening air played over his blinded face and the mingled homely smells of a poor neighborhood assaulted his nose. He stood there as though dead while the world continued its Babel-like conversation in car motors and boat whistles from the river, in distant shouts, in laughter, in the frayed yet gaudy music from some jukebox. Finally he touched the bridge of his glasses in a habit of adjustment and began walking toward the river, to his car, and ultimately to his cool, immaculate bed.

But there were obstacles between him and his bed.

He parked the dusty Plymouth in the driveway and walked past the stone barbecue, across the flagstone patio with its expensive, yellow-painted garden furniture and the round table with the flowery umbrella in the middle. And suddenly, as he approached the back door of the house, he was burdened with his weight. For a moment he worried about the state of his health, tinkered carefully, but with eyes averted, with that inner mechanism which maintained his equilibrium. Until he opened the screened door and smiled wryly at the creak of it. Maybe it is my menopause, he thought, my change of life come early.

His sister rushed at him as he entered the kitchen.

"Ah, look at him, all worn out. Sol,
totinka.
Sit, sit. Bertha will get you a nice cool lemonade;" she said with stagy affection, her gray eyes reckoning slyly as always. "You should conserve, not work so hard, Solly." A heavily built woman in her early fifties, she dressed too youthfully, and her hair was hairdresser-aged, the ends tipped with silver. "Sit. Let Bertha make you comfy with some lemonade." She prodded him toward a kitchen chair with patting motions of her soft hands.

"I do not want lemonade, Bertha. Stop pushing me to sit! I am dirty—let me wash my hands. Do not concern yourself so much with my comfort all of a sudden," he said. He saw, in his sister's generosity, those sticky fingers that came away with more than they gave. "What do you want?" he asked coldly.

"Oh, Solly," she scolded. Then she shrugged as though resigned to his lack of understanding. "Well, you know how bad the television has been working. So I figured if you start spending money repairing, it doesn't pay." She looked at him timidly for a moment. "I put down a little deposit on a new R.C.A. But I can get it back. If you object, I can get the deposit back. I just thought that..."

"All right, all right. Buy it," he said indifferently. "If the others are ready, let us have dinner. Otherwise give me a bite of food now. I'm tired. I would like to go to bed soon."

"Certainly, I'll call them right away," she said. "Selig is resting. His back is bothering him again. Ah, he's so. delicate, my husband." Bertha spoke with a little smile of pride. "Thank God he has a brain, that he's a schoolteacher. He's so delicate, really," she sighed, pretending wistfulness.

"He has a good appetite with his delicacy," Sol said with the same unrevealing blandness of tone and expression.

For a moment Bertha's face revealed her. Her eyes grew hard and her lips drew back slightly; she knew very well the shape and sound of a taunt. But she also knew which side all their bread was buttered on as well as who bought the bread. So, while her dislike of her brother grew a shade bigger, she smiled even more dotingly under her hostile eyes and ventured another intimate touch of his arm.

"Have I got a delicious piece of brisket for you, Solly; nice black roasted like Momma used to make," she said warmly. "So go, you go wash up and I'll call them all."

Her smile didn't fade when he left the room; it flicked off electrically. "And tell my big
artist
upstairs that supper is ready," she called after him. She couldn't say what she would have liked to her brother; he had them bound in a chain of money. But her son, Morton, was vulnerable to her irritation. In some ways, her son and her brother were two of a kind, both sullen, unattractive creatures who dampened her "Happy American Family" setting. Oh, she supposed it wasn't Sol's fault that he had gone through what he had. But it
had
been a prison, and the degradation and filth had rubbed off on him. God knew what had so soiled Morton!

When they all sat down to dinner, Bertha unhappily compared Morton and Sol with her husband and her daughter. Joan was talking to her father, and the two of them were smiling in a glow of intellectual rapport. You wouldn't even guess they were Jews, Bertha thought proudly. Joan had thick, straight brown hair and even features. Her clear, shining skin was a testimonial to her mother's care and feeding, her easy smile an open proof of family love. And Selig—rosy and fair, with the same straight brown hair his daughter had. What a contrast between his clean, pink face and Sol's leaden grayness! And the dignity and cleverness with which he spoke. Why, he hardly moved his hands at all, and his voice was crisp with a delightfully Midwestern accent; so
American!

But her faint smile slipped away when she turned back to her son. Morton ate with his thin face close to his plate, shoveling in the food with quick darts of his fork like a Chinese plying chopsticks. His dark, unattractive face resembled those of the young ghetto scholars she remembered from her childhood, morose, intense, despising appearance. It depressed her just to look at him, made her feel a melancholy guilt which invariably turned to anger. He was not there enjoying the family meal, but, like his uncle, only hurrying toward his own solitude.

Sol ate slowly and deliberately. Eating was something he had to do, and the tastes made no difference to him. Despite Bertha's cajoling promise about the brisket, he ate only the vegetables, as always. He never ate meat, because it sickened him; it just never seemed important to remind his sister of that distaste.

"...and Sid is taking me to that new Japanese film, Daddy."

Joan liked the aspect of the typically American family, which Bertha tried to develop, in spite of the intellectual pretensions that sometimes obligated her to scorn Americanism. Somewhat more generous and good-natured than her mother, she was even able to include her Uncle Sol in that rosy-tinted picture. She referred to Sol as being an old-fashioned bachelor, a very learned European ex-professor, and intimated to outsiders that his taciturnity was only a guise for a shyly affectionate nature.

"The thing is," Selig said, "Hollywood is just interested in making money." His fresh, youthful face was good-natured but not very mobile or expressive, as though too much animation might belie his alleged delicacy. Now he sighed in wan regret. "No, to Hollywood, culture is just a dirty word. Callow, that's the word for American culture. They have so much to learn from the Europeans."

"That's what Sid was saying, Dad, exactly that. He said that we live in a cultural vacuum here."

"Hey, that's good—cultural vacuum. Perfect. He sounds like a bright young man, your Sid." He smiled affectionately at his daughter and patted her arm.

"He
is
a nice boy," Bertha interrupted. "But is he serious? I mean I don't want you to get too ... intimate," she said, casting her eyes down in an attitude of daintiness. She knew what she meant, too, how hot in the pants you could get at that age—how well she remembered! She glanced at Selig with a little throb of reminiscence. But then, when she looked at Sol next to him, she felt an inward shudder of disgust like the hidden, other side of her feelings about her husband, and for a moment she imagined her brother naked and wondered how a woman ever could have loved him. "I mean," she went on, "it can be a problem with young people. You get all emotional like, you know. Maybe you lose your head a little...

"Oh, Mother, you sound so old-fashioned," Joan said.

"She's right, Bertha," Selig said with a little chuckle. "You don't understand youth today. They're sensible enough but they have different standards."

The voices filled the room, rang on the cut-glass bowl of salad, the sideboard of good mahogany, with its bronze mortar and pestle, its framed picture of the long-forgotten Nazermans, father and mother of Sol and Bertha. Morton kept his eyes on the food like some searcher for gold, and Sol chewed slowly beside him, his eyes flat behind the black-rimmed steel-sided glasses.

Selig and Joan went back to talking about movies, and Selig observed that another trouble with Hollywood was that they were unwilling to face life. Suddenly noticing his silent brother-in-law, Selig smiled sympathetically and decided to include him in the conversation.

"Does that make sense to you, Solly, that the Europeans are more willing to face life?"