The Pawnbroker (6 page)

Half the clocks read ten when the woman came in. He looked up, and his impassiveness showed a few cracks. She didn't look like his kind of customer. Still, you got all kinds; he had had them in here with mink coats on, too. She had shiny sandy hair, an immaculate full face, the clear, forward blue eyes of a woman at home in her own country; an
American
face.

"Madam?" he queried with stony courtesy. She had nothing with her to pawn. Perhaps she had seen something in the window she wished to buy. Someplace, buried in the New York ordinances, there was something forbidding you to sell retail in a store where things were taken for pawn; no one observed it. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"How do you do. My name is Marilyn Birchfield." She seemed to flaunt her health in her even smile, and held her hand out like a man. "I'm introducing myself around among the merchants. In a sense, I'm a new neighbor."

Sol touched her hand uneasily; he could never get used to the aggressive confidence of some American women. What were they trying to prove, that they were as good as men? Well, that was no great accomplishment. "You are in business around here?" he asked.

"You might say that." She was a heavy-set woman, in her early thirties, he guessed, yet she moved her rather thick body with an adolescent awkwardness, a sort of touching, coltish animation quite different from the movements of a stout matron. "Actually, I'm with the new Youth Center down the block. I thought I'd just make myself known to the local merchants and perhaps get some kind of help, support, you might say, in certain activities. Some of the merchants have become sponsors of the children's teams, contributed both money and time to the Center."

"I see," he said, not seeing at all, fascinated, rather, by the fantastic shine and color of her. Where did they get skin like that, so pink and gold, so
healthy?
You couldn't imagine anyone who looked like that ever dying.

"I'll tell you, quite frankly, your business provokes my curiosity more than any of the others. Actually, I don't know a thing about pawnbroking. I'm sure there must be several pawnshops in my own home town, but until I came to New York I never even noticed them. It's just that I'm so interested in my children's environment, and the pawnbroker is apparently an integral part of their landscape and ... Oh, here I go again, talking like a house on fire as usual. I suppose I shouldn't have burst in on you like this."

He nodded, slightly stunned by her.

"To get down to it, Mister..."

"Wha ... Oh, Nazerman, Sol Nazerman."

"Mr. Nazerman," she said, with a wide smile. "What I would like is your permission to put you down as a tentative sponsor. Later on we can decide just what you would be willing and able to give or do. Oh, you might see your way clear to backing one of the teams, supplying uniforms and the like. Or perhaps you would be interested in devoting your time, perhaps an evening a week at the Center, directing some activity. Have you had any experience with basketball, or possibly one of the crafts?"

For a moment he was only able to shake his head in confusion. She was such a medley of sunlight and tawny pink skin. But then he was reminded of himself again.

"Look here, Miss..."

"Birchfield," she supplied. "Now you don't have to make up your mind right away. Perhaps you'd like to think about it. I just thought I'd introduce myself around, like a neighbor." She smiled into his surliness; it was part of her self-discipline. "That's always the hardest part for me. I find myself getting very tense when I have to solicit people. Oh, I would have made a miserable saleswoman."

"I wouldn't say that," he said sourly.

"But then, we all have to do things alien to our nature sometimes," she went on. "Anyhow, I think it's important for me to know all about the climate my children live in."

"Wait a minute, Miss Birchfield, hold on. This is a lot of talk. Forgive me if I try to simplify it according to my experience. If you are looking for some kind of handout, all well and good. I am solicited every day in the week; I am used to it. Tell me how much and I will answer you straight out. Otherwise, all the other, I have no time or inclination for it."

Her smile faded. She looked oddly like a child in spite of her full, matronly body and the little lines around her eyes; as an old woman, she would have that look, he guessed, an expression of credulity and unmanageable innocence.

"I don't think of these contributions as
handouts,
Mr. Nazerman. I'm sorry you do. I think what people can do for these children is, in a sense, for themselves, too—an investment in their own future."

"I am not concerned with the future."

She looked at him questioningly. "I don't understand...."

"There is no sense talking about it. Let us deal on my terms, if you please. You are soliciting me. You have a job with the city, you work with the children, collect money for them, whatever. Fine, you do your job, let me tend to mine. I am willing to, how they say, 'kick in.' I am used to it, as I have said. Just tell me how much."

Her mouth tightened a little and there was a barely perceptible whitening under her scrubbed, bright skin. A Yankee, brave and stubborn and stupid, he thought with a scorn that held a bare trace of admiration.

"Let me say this then, Mr. Nazerman; I'll take any amount you're willing to give, regardless of the spirit in which it is given. I'm quite willing to sacrifice my personal feelings, because I know the money will be well spent." She took out a little pad of receipts with the imprint of the Youth Center on top, made a great show of impersonal efficiency about taking out a ball-point pen and ejecting the little nib. But then her demeanor failed her. "I'm still new at this. Perhaps you can tell me if I will meet such heedlessness often. You, for example, do you think the worst of everyone?"

"See here, Miss Birchfield," Sol said heatedly, "I resent having to explain to you. I do not wish to get involved in a philosophic argument first thing in the morning. But I will be as gracious as I can. I will explain. They are always coming around to me, collecting; phony nuns, people jingling cans with a slot on top and holding the can around so I can't see who they are supposed to be collecting for, blind men with twenty-twenty eyes, deaf ones who could hear the tumblers in my safe when I dial the combination. This is my experience, and much more. So, on this basis, I say, why not you?" Her face was beginning to irritate him; he had outgrown that kind of face.

"All right, why not me?" she agreed, with that peculiar stubbornness. "If you will give me something, then..." She held her hand out, her face flushed with embarrassment. And when he silently put a five-dollar bill in her hand, his eyes challenging, as though looking to see what change would be wrought by the touch of the money, she smiled rigidly. "There, you see I have no pride, Mr. Nazerman. And since you have been so co-operative, I will be back again and again." The smile twitched off, then came on again, for courtesy was an instinct with her.

"I will look forward," he said as she wrote out the amount on the little receipt and handed it to him. She gave him no answer, but walked her schoolgirl heaviness out of the store, leaving behind only a thin scent of sweetness that seemed to irritate his nostrils.

She had added to the peculiarity of the day. Something dug into him just under the skin, not steadily, not even with real pain. Rather, it was like some small sliver of rusty recall, a thing that made itself felt only in occasional moments, as though brought on by movements for which he could find no pattern or consistency and so could not avoid.

Customers began coming in, not as many as the day before, but enough to keep him occupied and many of these seemed anonymous to him, cast as he was in the strange daze.

Tangee came in alone. He had an electric drill to pawn. "Make me a offer, Uncle," he said, flashing an absent grin as he ran his eyes greedily over the store. He wore a shiny black silk suit and a harlequin-patterned tie of black and red which seemed to glow electrically. "No reasonable offer refuse..." Tangee's face was toward Sol but his eyes were a few inches to the left of Sol's head. It gave the Pawnbroker an odd sensation, a feeling that someone was behind him.

He turned, embarrassed for his instinct. He almost cried out; Jesus was close enough to him to touch.

"What are you pussyfooting around here for?" he shouted in the irritation of shock. But his assistant stared past Sol, too, as though affected by the same cast of eye as Tangee. He was looking directly into the eyes of Tangee, and in the seconds before Ortiz found a smile and moved it to the Pawnbroker's face, Sol had the feeling that he was invisible to the two of them.

"I was on my way to the cellar, figured to get at it now," Ortiz said. "I got it going pretty good upstairs, pick up where I left off any time." He darted a swift, expressionless glance at Tangee again, said, "What do you say, man; how they going?" and then slipped into the back room and down to the cellar.

Sol turned back to his customer. "Three dollars," he said as he pulled the drill toward him. His face was taut and harried looking, and Tangee smiled at the sight of him.

"Ain't you even gonna try it, see it works?" he asked with heavy-lidded amusement.

"Oh, I trust you implicitly," Sol answered. "You want the three dollars, take it. Otherwise do not waste my time, I have things to do." He found he had to hold his arm rigid against a sudden trembling.

"Okay, man, calm down. Three dollars fine.
Relax
Uncle, take it slow." He shifted his shoulders under the extravagant padding, cast another chillingly covetous look at the tawdry treasures all around, and then swaggered out.

Sol heard him call cheerily to the old man, John Rider, out on the sidewalk with the boxes of wastepaper he was bringing up from the outside cellar entrance.

"Take care, dad, don't strain your nuts now, hear?"

And the thin, preacher-voice of the old man answered, "Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep an' a idle soul shall suffah hungah."

In the rich, heedless laughter of Tangee, the Pawnbroker shivered and felt old and put upon. And, aged that much more, he looked up at his next assailant.

George Smith had the face of an old Venetian doge, the features drawn with a silvery-fine pencil, the excesses reproduced in the shallowest, most subtle of creases. Only his eyes mirrored the wrestling starvation. He carried a rather dented, battery-powered hurricane lamp which Sol recognized as having been in for pawn several times before.

Sol offered him a dollar and waited with the patience that was a habit between them for George to ponder the offer with elaborate thoughtfulness; it was the preface to the conversation he intended. George Smith would have paid the Pawnbroker outright for a half-hour's talk except that it would have violated that frail diplomacy he practiced, and which the Pawnbroker countenanced for some unknown reason.

"A dollar, well ... I don't know," he said in his diffident, gentle voice. His growth had been twisty and far darker than his skin color, and his surface was a strenuously polished, brittle thing. In here, he buffed that surface to a bright gleam, which blinded even himself to the mutation he was. "It's really worth considerably more," he said, checking the Pawnbroker's face cautiously against the rules of the game.

"Well, George, I don't know..."

"I
would
like at least three dollars for it," George said, trying not to demonstrate too much enjoyment while he looked around at the stock, as though he found himself in some great, rich citadel. At one time he had attended a Negro college in the South, but too many twistings and turnings had been engraved in him and he had been expelled from there after a discreetly hushed outrage. Now he worked in the post office, read many fine books in his room at night, and abandoned himself to fantastic dream-ravishing of young boys and girls. Thank the books and the towering aspiration of his intellect for the fact that, so far, his rapes were confined to his dreams. Thank the weekly visits to the Pawnbroker for the nourishing of his wistful discipline. Sol had appeared to him one day three years before, when he had been wandering in a maddened daze of lust, had answered him in that heady language he had formerly encountered only in the books, had thus lent a reality to words he had been losing contact with. Every few days he brought a token article for pawn, and Sol Nazerman had been unable to deny him that, had, in spite of a deep exasperation, played the strange, sad game with the frail Negro, as though it were some unwelcome yet necessary tribute he paid.

"I might go to two dollars, tops," he said tiredly.

"Well..." George allowed a decent interval and then gave a smile of casual reminiscence. "Say there, Sol, just in passing," he said with offhand ease, "I just happened to be reading that 'Genesis of Science'—Herbert Spencer. You probably know it."

"I read it in the German when I was in Paris, while I was waiting for a visa," Sol said thoughtfully, leaning hard upon his hands for patience. "A good book, as I remember it."

"I'll say
good,
" George emphasized with too much enthusiasm. "I particularly got a kick out of what he says when he points out that science arose from art. He says, 'It is impossible to say when art ends and science begins.' Now to me that is a very refreshing thing to come from a man whom a lot of modern thinkers find old-fashioned." His thin-skinned, self-scored face pressed close to the barred cage. "That supports what we were talking about last time. You remember how you said the scientists try to make themselves so aloof, so far above the so-called
soft-headed
artists?"

"Spencer did not come up with anything really new. Thinking people knew of that a good six centuries before Christ," Sol said, tinkering with the hurricane lamp, the symbol of the transaction that made their exchange tolerable. The lamp only glowed dimly each time he switched it on. "You may know that Pythagoras was a great lover of music. In fact, he made the discovery that the pitch of sound depends on the length of the vibrating string."