by Steve Stern
From virgin whiskers I might scratch my pimply cheeks till they festered, but my concentration remained unimpaired. Neither shmeikeling shopkeepers nor clattering streetcars, not church bells or factory whistles or steamboat calliopes, or the cries of newsboys announcing no end in sight of hard times—nothing could turn my head away from the stories that had turned my head.
Once, however, my father had caught me off guard with a chance remark. A real card who read the funny papers if he read anything at all, he managed to strike a nerve.
“Haven’t you heard, boychikel? Books’ll make you blind.”
This sounded vaguely insinuating, as if when he said “books” he really meant something else, “books” being a code word for the unspeakable. Then I told myself: Hold your horses. What did I have to feel guilty about? Nothing at all. So why was I suddenly blushing as if I’d been caught at some shameful practice? All of a sudden I was embarrassed to find myself, at the relatively advanced age of fifteen, still hostage to boys’ adventures when I should have already outgrown these silly tales of voyaging princes in disguise. It was maybe time I should begin to put away childish things in favor of more high-minded pursuits.
From the red sandstone library on Front Street I started lugging home thick volumes with no illustrations. The drier the topic, the finer the print, the yellower the page, the more sophisticated I felt. I tried books on a wide range of subjects to broaden my interests—from marketing strategy to parliamentary procedure, insect lore, oral hygiene, and agricultural reform. Books with titles like Systems of Statistical Mechanics, The Future of the Federal Whatsis, and Principia Youtellme.
My idea was that a saturation diet of deadly boredom would accelerate the process of maturing. It would make me the serious person that I had taken it into my head I wanted to be. But anxious as I was for results, I lacked the heart for this particular method. A club from whose membership I would’ve been restricted even if I was old enough to join, the books conspired to snub me, their big words obstinately refusing to turn into heroes or foreign parts.
As a compromise between my accustomed frivolous fare and self-inflicted tedium, I took up reading poetry. I read it aloud like a haftorah offering, safe in the assumption that it wouldn’t make sense to me anyway. But while I was in no immediate danger of acquiring a taste for the stuff, its substance wasn’t entirely lost on me.
I noticed, for instance, that poets went in for a wide variety of concerns. You had your hearts and flowers, your silvery beams and assorted la-di-da, but there were other things as well: the odd voyage of a ghost ship into waters that spilled off the map, treachery and mortal combat and desperate characters with too much full moon in the blood, gypsy daredevils and sorcerers who resided in caves of ice or languished in towers with mile-thick walls. And then there was this business of what poets called their muse.
As best I could make out, a muse was a species of phantom lady who inspired you to feats beyond your ordinary means. Under her auspices a nebbish might prevail against overwhelming odds in pitched battle. An illiterate could compose three-handkerchief dramas, a bumpkin with no sense of direction travel to hell and back to fetch her souvenirs. While I wasn’t exactly certain I would know a muse if I saw one, I began to think that, weak-chinned and four-eyed though I was, I might like one of my own. And as long as I was in the business of wishing, I might as well cite her specifications to order.
She would be ample of breast and hip, my muse, bare of shoulder, platinum-haired, azure-eyed, and ruby-lipped, wearing a diaphanous gown with (God help me) nothing on underneath. In the small hours she would glide into my alcove, whispering with cinnamon breath, suffering me to touch the hem of her garment, which had risen on the wind above her knees. Then I would be transported instantly to someplace out of one of my books.
Sometimes I half suspected that the ticket was to get off your tush and actively seek your muse. But where would you look in such a jerkwater town as Memphis, such a far cry from its namesake on the Nile? It was a dingy city without a trace of class, with never the hint of a hanging garden or a necropolis, a city where no self-respecting muse would hang her hat. There was just nothing here to excite the curiosity, and since my regimen of boredom had more or less backfired, I was beginning to feel a little restless.
It was around this time that my father invited me to come and work in his shop, an invitation hardly even deserving of an answer, since in those days Papa himself took every opportunity to play hooky from Kaplan’s Loans.
“Thanks anyway,” I had muttered without bothering to look up from my book. Fallen back on old habits, I was belly-down on my hide-a-bed, reading the rattling tale of an ace cricketeer who is also a crack second-story man. But as Papa continued to stand over me, I experienced another twinge of the shame he’d caused me to feel a few weeks before.
Ordinarily Papa would have shrugged and walked away. That would have been in keeping with the unwritten pact between us, whereby we observed a mutual lack of interest in each other’s affairs. He never interfered in what he referred to as wasting my formative years in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, and by the same token I never accused him of squandering the family resources on his crackpot careers. But on this particularly mild March afternoon, my father stood fast, so that in the end I had no choice but to look up at him.
He was peering at me over the rims of his glasses, his usually bemused smile inverted. His feelings, it appeared, had been hurt. This was not an entirely new development, given how temperamental he’d been since coming to Memphis. In fact, for all of his sanguine talk talk talk, it was clear that he was still unresigned to his latest occupation. I suppose it wasn’t so surprising, considering the way that the pawnshop had flushed him out, forcing his reluctant public exposure. As a consequence, trying to wean himself from the apartment while at the same time unable to keep to his shop, Sol Kaplan was neither here nor there.
“So, Mr. Diligent,” he persisted now that he had my attention. He was keeping up a front of being sociable, rocking back and forth on his heels. “What do you do with your afternoons? Still with the reading?”
I had to fight the urge to deny what was perfectly self-evident. “How did you guess?”
Papa stopped his rocking and stiffened, lifting a trigger finger on the verge of warning me not to get fresh. Then, perhaps remembering what a dud he was for scolding, he relaxed, or rather deflated, into a crestfallen sigh. “Harry,” he nearly implored me, “come down to Beale Street, why don’t you. You’ll learn the business, you’ll be a mensch. Ain’t it time you took a gander at real life?”
Under my breath I said to him, “Give a listen to the voice of experience here.” I hadn’t actually meant for him to hear me, but I could tell by the way he hung his head that he had. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, I’d spoken out of turn, while on the other hand I couldn’t help thinking, Some macher, some big man of commerce. One of his boondoggles finally boots him outside the family circle, and what does he do? He tries to drag the family along with him.
He had already made his appeal to Mama, who had lately begun putting on airs—she’d declared that a pawnshop was no place for a lady. He’d even tried drafting Grandpa Isador out of retirement, an old man who’d beaten himself batty over a cobbler’s last for half a century. (Grandma Zippe had naturally been regarded as a lost cause.) And now, as a last resort he’d set his sights on yours truly.
Well, it wouldn’t work. Nobody was going to tear me away from what, in a desperate effort to lend dignity to misspent time, I’d begun to call my studies. My extracurricular field of endeavor. Nevertheless, I’ll admit that it gave me a royal case of heartburn to see my dewy-eyed papa looking so all alone.
Two
Once he’d succeeded in suckering me into his employ, my father was at a loss to tell me exactly what I should do. Except for the times when he had me assist him in his ongoing inventory, I was left pretty much to my own devices. This confirmed my suspicion that I’d been imported from North Main Street for no b
etter reason than to keep him company.
Every once in a while, between customers, he might take me aside to explain some of the finer points of the business. Then he would make a show of grooming me to take over someday, assuring me that if I played my cards right, this whole heap of rubbish could be mine. But despite his whispered disclosures concerning foolproof methods of separating base metal from gold, of measuring the grade of a precious gem by the degree of its luster and so forth, Papa never offered me a single practical demonstration. Words he must have picked up from his colleagues along the street—like “touchstone,” “nitric acid,” “avoirdupois”—he pronounced the way someone else might say “hocus-pocus” or “Shema Yisrael.” He cracked his knuckles like a concert pianist before pressing the keys of his Gilded Age cash register, and stroked the bill of his leather eyeshade like an admiral on a bridge. But it was ten-to-one that he was making it all up as he went along.
It was all an act to prove the shopworthiness of his new public personality—that’s how I saw it. It was a performance that, for the purposes of authentication, required an audience. And since his customers had to be counted as more or less a part of the act, this was where I came in. So you had to hand it to him, my stagy papa—he could certainly talk a good pawnshop. Nor did I ever see him as fragile at Kaplan’s as he’d appeared that afternoon when he recruited me from North Main. But who did he really think he was kidding? When it came to real life, Kaplan’s Loans had more in common with make-believe.
Sometimes, if I got fidgety enough, I might be moved to take a little initiative. I might wave a feather duster over the greentinged glass of a display case or the battered bell of a trombone. This earned me the attention of my papa’s puller Oboy, who once or twice had left his post in front of the shop to instruct me in the use of dry mop and broom. Clearly not delighted with my presence on the premises, the runty little shvartzer tolerated me with a stiff impatience. It was apparently more than his job was worth to have to put up with the unskilled likes of such as me.
A legacy (as Uncle Morris put it) from the previous owner, the pint-sized Oboy sat astride a tall, three-legged stool on the sidewalk outside Kaplan’s Loans. His pinched face, hatched with deep wrinkles like ancient characters on muddy parchment, was perpetually deadpan in the shadow of his nautical cap. The other pullers on Beale Street were smooth-talking jokers in eye-catching outfits who would accost a potential customer just short of assault. They would detain him on the pretext of, say, scrounging a dip of snuff, then hustle him into the shop for some bargain reserved for his exclusive patronage. But not Oboy, who kept mostly mum.
If he spoke to me at all, it was in brief, gnomic utterances, nuggets such as: “It ain’t a flo wax mo better’n elbow grease.” This kind of advice he croaked in a froggy voice whose tone I didn’t think he should have taken with the boss’s son. So maybe he resented the way I’d begun to usurp some of his duties—not that I could even have told you what his duties were, since they were every bit as vague as my own. Resentful or not, you’d have thought from the way he behaved that I was distracting the puller from more pressing concerns.
He sat on his stool like a watcher in a crow’s nest instead of a professional shmoozer there to entice the passers-by. In his lumpish rigidity he put me in mind of a stone monkey in front of the ruined temple described in The Lost Jewels of Opar. He was more like the guardian of the shop than its employee.
And I was the license that Papa’d required to abandon himself entirely to the ritual of running his pawnshop. To the bizarre items of merchandise that had begun to fill his shelves, my father now gave his undivided attention. The only reason I didn’t feel more out of place was that my afternoons in Kaplan’s weren’t so dissimilar from afternoons in my alcove above North Main. Nestled under a musty rack of topcoats that hung in the plate-glass window, I would bury my nose in a book. Virtually concealed from the rest of the shop, I made myself at home, though the noisy procession of customers, which seemed to increase by the day, put even my powers of concentration to the test.
En route to some volcano island on board a shanghaied junk, for instance, I might be rudely recalled to Beale Street by the chimes over the door. I might get sidetracked by some colored tailor in fire-engine-red suspenders, boasting the magical properties of a broken sewing machine. Or some blowsy, russet-faced auntie, hitching up several layers of skirts to detach a homemade wooden leg, explaining as she clunked it over the counter, “I be’s tired but it still want to dance.”
So maybe I liked the business of furtively parting the coat-sleeves, like leaves in a hunter’s blind, to spy on a gambler twirling a key chain. Observing without being observed, I would watch as the gambler grinned hugely so that my father could appraise the diamond set in his gold-capped tooth.
“An unusual cast for a solitaire,” said Papa, making professional noises that who could believe. “Seriously flawed in the center, but the crown facet—oy, what a fire!”
Later on I might watch him give the nod to a hearing trumpet posing as the speaker on a gramophone. He’d make a “hmmm” like a sage physician as he assessed an asthmatic squeezebox, a telescope with a missing lens, a set of worm-eaten Indian clubs, or a pin-bristling voodoo figurine. If ever Papa objected to an item’s quality or questioned its authenticity, it was only for the sake of form. Take the case of the crooked old party with the patent-leather face who came in proclaiming, “This am the riginal same coat whooch I wo when the marsah have made I’n the wife to jump over the broom.”
“Uncle Joshua!” Papa clucked his tongue as he fingered the tatty material. “What you’re hocking is you’re hoken a tchynik.” But he took the coat anyway, in appreciation of its sentimental, if not historical, value, while the old man stood blinking as if the Yiddish for bunkum was a gentle rain in his face.
From the amount of worthless merchandise that he so indiscriminately took in, you’d have thought Sol Kaplan was running a junk shop instead of a loan. He was becoming the curator of a seedy dime museum, of a sort that even P. T. Barnum wouldn’t have been caught dead in. On the other hand, I’d begun to think I wasn’t the only member of the family who was a pushover for a good story.
Because Kaplan’s Loans was turning into a regular clearinghouse for tall tales, its proprietor swapping cold cash for the moonshine that his clientele carried in. The rusty weapons and nameless musical instruments, the two-headed sheep embryos in pickle brine, the Rube Goldberg inventions, the homespun clothes, the encyclopedias eighty years out-of-date—they were merely thrown in for good measure. They were mementos of the exotic places the stories came from, places that lay, by my reckoning, somewhere to the east of Third Street in a district that had begun to arouse my interest, though I didn’t let on. While my father continued to pretend that he was a serious pawnbroker, I kept on pretending to read.
The rains came to Beale Street at approximately three in the afternoon on a Saturday toward the end of March, after an unseasonably muggy couple of days. I recall that I was busy for a change, assisting Papa in the never-ending inventory of his stock. This was how he occupied himself in the interludes between customers: he checked and rechecked the merchandise that he already had almost by heart, cross-referencing recent acquisitions against the ever more elaborate entries in his multiplying account books. From the high solemnity with which he called the roll of his purchases, he might have imagined himself a recording angel. He was judging what did and did not belong (what didn’t belong?) to his kingdom come of vintage junk.
As usual he was taking his time, incapable of citing a flatiron or a butter knife without relating all he knew of its intimate history. It fell to me to hold the ledgers, entering any new additions and correcting him on the rare occasions when his memory was imprecise.
“Item,” he would pronounce, a forefinger lifted as if to test the wind, “one pair of trousers, gray worsted with shiny seat, custom-made by Mose the tailor for the world’s first colored millionaire. This is the one that helped finance Mr
. Crump’s campaign before Mr. Crump had him run out of town.” Or, “Item, one shotgun with sawed-off barrel, once owned by Jake ‘the Milk Snake’ Miller, a protégé of Machine Gun Kelly, Memphis’s own native son. His poor mama that don’t look so good was in just this morning with this item, one silk camellia in cracked bell jar, once worn behind the ear of…”
A new entry, this one required my taking dictation, something to do with a lady singer in some legendary somebody’s legendary band. “Do I have to write all of it down?” I asked, though of course I knew better than to ask. But hadn’t I humored him enough for one day?
Papa peered at me sharply, allowing his glasses to fall from his forehead and travel down his rostrum nose. This meant that he was shocked by my lack of manners, that I should have interrupted him at his holy office. It was about as far as he ever went in the way of expressing displeasure.
I sighed wearily and rolled my eyes toward the window, where Horatio Hornblower was gathering dust on the sill under the rack of coats. That’s when I saw how the world beyond the window, as if to second Sol Kaplan’s annoyance, had turned to darkest midnight in the middle of the afternoon. The sidewalks stood eerily vacant of weekend strollers, the dead-silent streets keeping the secret of where they had gone. The bass throb of my heart began a countdown that reverberated in my ears. Then it came, like a sound you might hear when an ocean liner collides with an iceberg. It was the sound of the sky cracking open.