The Pawnbroker (5 page)

"Oh yes, they are willing to face life," Sol answered, without intonation, as he went on eating, chewing and swallowing, eating with his numbed taste in the midst of all the meaningless talk.

Selig shrugged at Joan and Bertha. "What could you do?" his face said. Friendliness rolled off that man like water off porcelain.

Joan indicated with a wink that she would give it a try. This was almost a regular after-dinner game with them, trying to "draw Sol out," and they considered it a sort of amusing demonstration of their own good will and charity.

"Uncle Sol, I'm going to buy you a decent pair of glasses whether you like it or not. Maybe tortoise shell, those heavy, movie-producer kind."

"Thank you, but my own will do very well," Sol answered without looking up.

"Don't you want to look interesting, maybe like a man of destiny?" Joan said.

He just glanced at her with cold disdain.

"And Ivy League clothes? You have a big frame, you'd look just fabulous, Uncle Sol."

"Sure, Ivy League," Sol said with a thin smile. "Many of my customers wear the little caps with the buckle in the back." And he went on eating, wiping out the remains in his plate with a piece of bread, in a stilted imitation of unsatisfied hunger.

His retort had the power to cast a pall on their game; none of them liked to be reminded of where their money came from.

"Those
Shwartsas,
" Bertha said in disgust. She always avoided telling people about her brother's business, feeling they would visualize some crafty old, hand-rubbing Yid with a big nose.

"Mother," Joan admonished.

"Please, Bertha," Selig said in pedagogical reproof. "You know I don't like to hear you refer to Negroes like that."

"Oh yes, I forgot," Bertha apologized. "
Negroes,
I mean." They were so intelligent and so liberal, her husband and her daughter. It seemed to be the style to be liberal nowadays. She really ought to keep up with things. Sometimes she felt like such a dope.

Suddenly her eye fell on her son, still eating silently and voraciously. She turned a half-guilty cruelty toward him, as though, with some compulsive pecking-order instinct, she knew he was the only victim for her there.

"And you, the big picture drawer, my
artiste.
You have nothing to say for yourself?" She waited a moment, watching how he ignored her, ignored all of them, his skinny, misanthropic face scowling at the food. Sometimes she felt she hated him; he embarrassed her deeply. "Couldn't be that we don't interest you?" There was no response from her son. "Look at you! Like an animal wolfing the food, scowling. I know why you got those pimples, that bad skin. It's your nature—you poison yourself."

"She's right, son," Selig said. "Maybe Mother is a little harsh on you, but the truth is that you just let yourself go. That attitude isn't going to make you an artist. A man needs some self-discipline no matter what his calling is."

"They're right, Mort," Joan said, as though she regretted the necessity of agreeing.

"Sometimes I'm ashamed for the neighbors," Bertha said. "My own son walking around, acting and looking like a bum."

Suddenly Morton jerked his head up and glared savagely around at them, as though just finding himself surrounded by enemies.

"Why the hell don't you all leave me alone?" he snarled, his sallow face desperate and defiant.

"Now, Morton!" Selig sat erect in spite of his delicate back. "That will be just about enough."

"Ah, there's a runt in every litter," Bertha said. "I don't know what I did to deserve..."

"Don't blame yourself, Mom," Joan said. "He's a neurotic. I honestly think it would be a good idea for him to pay a visit to an analyst."

Morton pushed away from the table and stood up, a rigid, aged-looking youth with brooding, dark-circled eyes. As a child he had had tantrums and used to spit at them. He had no friends and stayed away from girls because he felt that if they ever insulted him he might be tempted to kill them. Several years before, his teachers had discovered his talent for drawing and, upon their advice and with his Uncle Sol's financing, he had been allowed to go to an art school, which he was still attending. Without the drawing and the painting, he sometimes thought, he might have considered suicide. He rarely thought about his uncle, only harbored a vague feeling of gratitude, not for his uncle's largesse, which was something they all shared in without gratitude, but rather because Sol was the only one who left him alone.

"All right," he said to them. "I can't take any more of this. You make me feel like vomiting everything I ate. Well, I'm sorry to spoil your fun, but I'm going upstairs. You'll have to find something else to crap on." He swept them with a final look of hatred before turning and leaving the room.

"Now I ask you," Bertha said to her brother, calling on the silent witness to her tribulation. "Can you blame me?"

Sol got up then, too, his head full of pain, the food leaden in his stomach. "Do not bother me with your squabbles, Bertha," he said. "Eat each other up, for all I care, but do not bother me! I will go upstairs now. I will shower and turn on my fan and then read until I sleep. My door will be closed. For my part, you can do what you want; do you understand?"

With that, he left the room, appreciating at least the silence he could impose on them when he displayed anger;
that
he had been able to buy from them.

In the private bathroom adjoining his bedroom, he stood under the cool shower with his eyes closed. The sound of the water drove their voices from his ears. He filled the glass-doored shower stall. The water, running over the puffy, inarticulate structure of his face, seemed to be dissolving his features. It ran over the bulky, subtly deformed body, the body he never looked at, with its peculiar unevennesses, its inexplicable collapses and thickenings. There was a piece of his pelvic bone missing, two of his ribs were gone, and his collarbone slanted in weird misdirection. Seeing him, one might wonder what kind of bizarre accident had malformed him so shrewdly, with such perverse design. But when he dried and covered himself with a robe, it became apparent that, by some coincidence (or queer design), each distortion had been compensated for by another, and nothing untoward showed in his clothed body except perhaps the careful awkwardness of his walk, in which he observed his delicate balance with each step.

For a long time he lay on his bed reading, beside the open window. The fan swung cool drafts on him; little billows of summer scent fell over his face, smells of flowers and cut grass. From the surrounding yards came voices, the clinking of glasses, the hiss of hoses and sprinklers. From above came the restless movements of his nephew, drawing or painting or just pacing out his sick and furious misery. It was all nothing to Sol Nazerman. He was reading
The Memoirs of Henri Brulard
in French and he made his brain dwell on the intricacies of a distant past.

When the light had been gone from his window for a long time and the crickets were as loud as the random sounds of the few people still outside in their yards, he laid the book down on the night table and turned off the light. Then he convinced himself that he was sleepy; it worked and very quickly, too, and he slept.

 

His face was pressed against the wood. His eyes were in the open part between the slats of the cattle car. The plains of Poland moved by monotonously, almost repetitively, as though the train were still and the same landscape were being displayed over and over again. His son David squealed with a rodent sound of helplessness somewhere down near Sol's leg. "I'm slipping in it, Daddy, in the dirty stuff. I can't stay up." But what could he do about it? He was pressed
into that one position by two hundred other bodies. So he studied the tidal landscape. Yes, it was the same view over and over. There, that house, low and black, with a broken stone chimney, he had seen that at least a dozen times. They were just standing still and, by some odd circumstance, the earth was being unrolled for their view. "Do something for him," his wife, Ruth, cried harshly beside him. She had little Naomi up against her chest, held there without her arms, for the crush of bodies held them all as in ice. "Sol, don't let him fall down in that! All our filth is down there. It would be terrible for him to lie in it!" Just moving his nose down an inch toward the carpeting of feces nauseated Sol. The child would turn his insides out. He tried to move a little more than his fingers, felt the soft, damp hair of David's head as it slid slowly downward. "I can't," he complained peevishly. "What do you expect of me? I cannot move a muscle." In the dim, slatted light he
saw
his wife's grim face. She seemed to hate him for all this. "But I can't, I can't. I can do nothing." His voice sounded flat and unconcerned and he tried to put more passion into it. "I am helpless, do you hear?" She continued looking at him with burning eyes and motionless features, like one of those startlingly lifelike wax figures. "I can do nothing." His voice-still came out in the same dispassionate, soulless way. There came the sound of the boy at his feet making savage, empty retches, vomiting and slipping around in the bottomless filth. The roar of the train, the endless wailing of all the crushed people, and his wife's burning glass eyes in a waxen face. "Nothing, nothing, nothing," Sol shrieked in the awful din.

 

The Pawnbroker moaned in his sleep without waking. No one stirred in the house; they were used to his noisy sleep.

The morning was gray and cool, and the air, even along the Harlem River, lay still and dense; nothing broke clear of the edge-softening light. Sol looked at the numerous bridges, flat against their increasing distances, and their various textures of steel and brick and concrete were as insubstantial as drawings on tinted paper. He sighed heavily.

There seemed to be few people on the streets as he unlocked the store, and those few moved slower, too, as though their vitality were reduced by the unreality of the light. For a moment he believed some weird blight had carried off the millions, and he made unnecessary noise with the iron screens and slapped at the counters as he passed them. He flicked on the fluorescents, and as he watched them shudder into light he was startled by the voice.

"An' d'Lawd say, 'Let dere be Light.'" John Rider chuckled from the doorway, a more or less perpendicular figure in faded railroad denims and a high-crowned, long-beaked engineer's cap. "Good mornin', Sol. Hah, you shoulda seen you jump. Bad nerves, all you young fellas got bad nerves."

Sol's heart slowed from its brief tattoo; he managed a faint bend to his lips. "John," he said. No significance there; the old man came every other morning to sweep out or wash the floors or windows. Stop looking for omens.

"You late, Sol. I been waitin' across d'street a half hour now. Oversleep, hah? Ah, you youngsters, hell-raisin' all night, I know, I know. Den ya cain't shake youself out of bed in d'mornin'. Pay no heed to d'Book, that's d'trouble. Dere a time to sow an' a time to reap ... a time to wuk an' a time..."

"Don't bother to wash the floor today, John. Just sweep out a little." Oh yes, I have been hell-raising all night, that is the truth.

"
Guten Morgen,
Sol. Hey, how's this for prompt? Not even eight thirty," Ortiz said, cat-walking in and then spinning around to stare back at the street. "Man, it's a funny day outside," he said with a sudden change of tone. "I got a feelin' we gonna be very quiet today; I got a feelin' a lot of people crawl off an' die someplace during the night."

Sol looked up at him. He felt the strange sensation of having his thoughts pried into.

But the ivory-dark face was bland and innocent, admitted to no trespassing. "Well, it give me a chance to catch up some more on them suits. I was talking to that George Smith, you know, that kook comes in here to talk to you sometimes. Got the hots for young girls, that guy, but he intelligent, too. I think he been to college one time. Well, anyway, he give me a idea over in the restaurant this morning. I tellin' him what I doing with the suits and all and he say I should
cross-index!
" He leaned over the counter, his eyes shining and provocative. And then, in spite of Sol's unmoved expression, he supplied his own motivation. "I make a list of the suits accordin' to size first. Then I make another list of all the suits accordin' to condition, and then I make a third list of all the suits accordin' to the type suit it is; like summer, or serge or gabardine. And on each list I refer to where it is on the other lists and like that. Pretty soon I can put my finger on a suit, just the one I want, quick as a flash." He stood grinning before Sol's little cage, triumphant and pleased with himself, his teeth whitely perfect in the smooth tawny face, his own medal of accomplishment, perfect and delicate, like something carved by a dreamer.

"All right," the Pawnbroker said, his voice rough and old. "If it's quiet, you can fool with that. Just don't make too big a project. There are other things besides that, you know." He was huge and ugly, and he wished his ugliness to pierce the smallest of dreams. And there
were
other things besides that lovely ordering and tabulating, that creating; there were grubbier, more joyless things, which his business depended on. "I want you to go over the junk in the cellar, too; see what we have for auction next month. There's all kinds of filth down there. I want you to get to that when you finish with your playing upstairs."

For a moment Ortiz's face hardened. But his plans had deep roots, could survive mere words. "Oh, that cross-index going to increase efficiency. You gonna thank me. You get busy, don't hesitate to call on your-friend-and-mine, Jesus Ortiz. I'm available." He smiled again, and Sol couldn't look at his smile.

"In d'sweet bye an bye," John Rider crooned, following the dirt out to the sidewalk behind his wide push-broom, "We will meet on dat beautiful shore."

Sol had an idea it
would
be quiet that day. Clairvoyance? Well, not to dignify it with scientific jargon, but there were things you anticipated with illogical confidence. Never important things, useful things, just little moods and colors. You walked down a certain road and as you approached a farmhouse you
knew
there would be a smooth-skinned beech tree heavy with leaves. Things like that, never things that saved you any pain. Ah, he didn't know whether he preferred it quiet or busy. His customers oppressed him, but then, he oppressed himself, too. "The menopause," he said, shaking his head with sour humor.