The Pawnbroker

by Edward Lewis Wallant

  "I got things on my mind," he said, starting up the steps. "I see you around another time."

  He couldn't see Mabel's pain, wouldn't have seen it even if he had been looking in her direction, even if it had been as bright as day. For she wore her pain, by old habit, inside, under her glossy lewdness. And she walked off, swinging her hips, wondering if perhaps, at that early age, all hope was gone for her.

  Upstairs, his mother had her black straw hat on, ready to go out. Suddenly he didn't want to stay in the house alone.

  "Where you goin', Ma?" he asked, running his eyes over the familiar objects of the room for something to hold him.

  "I thought I'd go over to the church for a while. Some of the ladies meeting over there with the priest." She picked maternally at the seams of his shirt, brushed invisible bits of lint.

  He had to smile a little; she reminded him of one of those clowns in the circus, all dressed in rags yet getting very fussy about one microscopic bit of fluff on their clothes.

  "Maybe I go along with you," he said.

  She peered at him curiously. It occurred to her that she really knew very little of her aristocratic-looking, confident son. In many ways he reminded her of his father, that almost white vagabond who had walked out on her when the boy was only two years old. In her own dark skin and simple ways, she had felt she perhaps hadn't deserved that handsome, facile man. He had been too white! The boy was dark enough to reassure her, but he had the fine Caucasian features, the quick, knowledgeable ways of her husband. She was filled with humble pride at the look of him. And yet he had that restlessness about him, too. Oh, Mother of God, it was no easy thing to be the mother of a son!

  "Yes, come along. It's a long time since you went," she said shyly.

  They walked through the humid streets to the church, side by side yet never quite touching. She wished it were daylight so people could see them together, could be reminded what she was capable of. Once inside, they separated, the mother going into the meeting room just off the nave of the church, tossing him a little wave which he acknowledged with an unsmiling nod.

  He crossed himself as he kneeled, then got to his feet and passed all the saints until he got to the altar where the crucified figure hung patiently in the dimness. He kneeled again at the low rail and rested his chin on his arms to stare at his namesake. The thought crossed his mind that the figure of Christ should have been that of a Negro. He smiled faintly. As though it made any difference. It was a fairy tale; he wondered why he allowed himself obeisance to it. Santa Claus hadn't survived his fourth year. Still, it was quiet here; the candles and the faint smell of incense eased his restlessness. Would he have dared to come if he believed? "Bless me in my plans," he said sardonically. The blood hung in the wooden wounds. And a white Jesus Christ at that! "Oh man, you don't know the half of it," he said silently to the statue above him; "it too complicated for you." And He was a Jew, too, just like the Pawnbroker; there's a laugh for you. He tried to imagine the Pawnbroker in a position like that, nailed up on a cross, the heavy, graceless body broken and naked, the great puffy face bent to one side ... with the glasses on! He began to chuckle, harshly. Wouldn't everybody be shocked to see Sol Nazerman up there, his arm with the blue numbers stretched out to the transfixed hand? Suddenly he was aware of an ugly, echoing sound, and he turned around to see a woman staring at him with a shocked and angry face. He had been laughing aloud. He shrugged a mild apology to the woman, then turned back to the rail and rested his head on his hands. Why the hell had he come here? Why did he stay? Oh, who knows? Just ... Oh shit man, there times when you completely alone by yourself and nothin' in this world make sense. It was quiet here ... he could rest a little, even on his knees, with his head on his hands. That man up on the cross weren't gonna do him no harm, at least that for sure.

  Later, he went by himself to a movie. He sat through the familiar violence of a Western, numb with boredom. But they showed a newsreel of an atom-bomb test, and he sat forward on his seat, his eyes shining morbidly at the immense flood of light and the climbing, spreading growth of thick smoke. "Nothin' bigger than that," he said to himself. "A person like a little bitty ant to that thing!" And he felt a feverish exultation at the thought, as though it vindicated anything he wanted to do.

  But when he stepped out of the theater, the air was filled with rain. It came down so hard that there seemed to be a sheet of water about a foot over the pavement, suspended there like a great piece of material, because the drops bounced that high before settling down to flood the gutters. The fiery exultation drained out of him then, and he walked home, all hunched over, nailed heavily to the earth by the torrential downpour.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Sol left the small lamp on the dresser lit as he closed his eyes for sleep. With the steady thrumming of the rain on the roof and the thunder receding to a safe distance, becoming more and more infrequent, and with the dim light of the night light making his eyelids a comforting earth brown, he felt an ancient incarnation of his childhood. They had stayed with some relatives in Prostki, near Sniardwy Lake, and he had been afraid of the unfamiliar surroundings (as though darkness, which is only a void, is different in one time or place from what it is in another), so his mother had put a kerosene lamp in one corner of the strange bedroom and had gone out with a gentle, chiding laugh for his fears, and he had lain with that same brown glow on his lids, listening to the rain in the willows.

  He walked up the gentle slope with the jar of milk and the bottle of white wine cold and wet from the brook where he had cooled them. Butterflies anticipated his route, swirling up from the high grass in palpitating clouds of color; there was the hot, peaceful din of insects all around, a drowsy twittering of sun-weakened birds. The smell of the ground made him breathe heavily, as from an intoxicant, humid and sweet. He held the wine bottle to his head and sighed at the coldness. And then he was on the summit of the insignificant hillock. Down in the hollow, between him and the woods, his family lolled among the clover and the dandelions. His father sat against a stone in his inappropriate black suit and Yalmalka, lost in his study of a book. The children, who were trying to strip the meadow of wild flowers, paid him no attention as they crawled purposefully on their knees, the baby, Naomi, holding only a few tattered flowers, while David held his riches of yellow and pink in a thick clump. Ruth and his mother turned to him, and Ruth raised her hand in greeting. "Here, Sol dear," she called. Then she smiled, her teeth showing white in her dark face. She tilted her head as he approached, her smile reminding him of some private joke between them. Her hair was a black shine of curls, and as he got closer, he saw she had put some dandelions in it, little yellow suns in the night of her hair. He held the two bottles up triumphantly. "Beverages for all," he cried out laughingly. The children looked up, then began hurrying through the grass toward him, David with his huge clump of flowers, Naomi stumbling on her baby legs, the flowers cast down and forgotten. His father looked up and smiled absently, a little embarrassed at his idyllic setting, a white-faced, withdrawn man whose natural habitat was the easily regulated climate of the printed page. Ruth got up to take the milk and the wine from him. All of them approached him with their eager smiles; his mother, his father, Ruth, the children. The humming of the bees and the flies drove happiness ever deeper into him. Their faces all came closer; he would have liked to gather them all into him, to drink them, to breathe them. And then they stopped, every blade of grass froze, each of them was arrested in motion: David balanced impossibly on one short, sturdy leg, Ruth maintained her pose of reaching. All was silence; it was like a movie which has suddenly stopped while its projecting illumination continued. And he was paralyzed, too, forever out of reach of the dear faces, frozen a few feet short of all he had loved. And then it all began dimming; each face receded, the sunny afternoon turned to eternal twilight, dusk, evening, darkness.

  And the rain drummed outside his lighted room as though on his coffin. He opened his mouth on the bitter taste of agony and he wondered
if the heedless calm he felt was a foretaste of death, really didn't think he cared one way or another. "Let it come already; enough of this... too much of this." He lay listening to the rain again, but this time there was no reminiscence in the sound; he kept his eyes wide open and the scale of notes the dripping made was an American dirge rather than a lullaby.

  drring

  drring

  drrong

  Mabel held the red negligee around her as she stared at the dark gleam of the street. She could hear the receding footsteps of her last client down the hallway, the laugh of one of the girls downstairs, and the music of the radio from the "Reception Room." She had a vision of herself in a long white bride's gown and Jesus beside her in striped pants and a tail coat. An organ played, and there was the murmur of admiring people as she moved vaginally down the aisle, suffocated by the smell of a thousand flowers. Suddenly she smiled a hard, destructive smile. Oh honey, you really flippin', yes you is. You can't even remember bein' a virgin; you was laid before you born. She conjured up his delicate, handsome face over the rainy night scene, made a background of her mother's dimly recalled Alabama yard with its magnolia tree and its merrily boiling washtubs. Then she tried to hold on to that vision as she turned around with a mechanically lewd smile for the stranger who approached the door of her tiny, perfume-drenched room, with its basin in the corner, its Hell-fire red sheets and pillowcase on the bed.

  "Oh my, sweety," she gasped in pneumatic passion. "You a terrible fierce lover," she assured the sweating, middle-aged man who struggled all by himself on top of her. And all the time she listened to the sound of the rain and watched furtively the occasional silent flickers of celestial light.

  George Smith cringed at the lightning from where he stood under the awning, sick and spitefully predatory. He wished for a small, tender girl to appear so he could hurl himself on her as on a terribly beautiful stake. How would he like to talk about the Marquis De Sade, that Pawnbroker? Oh, there's a lot of things I could tell him about the "Flowers of Evil" and "The Season in Hell." But there really was no one to talk to, was there? You are alone, George Smith, so find your own road to Hell. No Heaven, but perhaps there is a Hell. It would be a relief; he would find company there, too. Oh, the exquisite terror of a small, soft body. Like the release of a fall after a long time of balancing. Such a small thing he had tried to pin hope on; one weary, harsh, impatient white man. What was that! Footsteps, light, frail. A child out at this hour? His heartbeat filled his whole body. He peered carefully out into the rain-clouded street. He hoped the end was near.

  The rain spattered in little gusts on the window while behind him the marvelous voice transcended the ancient record, conquered even time. Murillio stood looking out at the blurry flowers of light below him as he swished the liquor around in his glass and the ice cubes plinked cosily.

  "Una furtiva lagrima..."

  He hummed along with the cello-like voice and the dim, lost orchestral accompaniment, which sounded like one feeble harmonica. Idly, he exulted in the fact of his high, rich tower, the sumptuousness of everything that touched him. It had been so long since he had had time to gloat. Besides, he usually never even thought about his success because he had always known it would happen this way, barring some accident. But there were times like now, when he enjoyed dipping into his treasure chest, savoring what he had by contrasting it unsentimentally with what he had had in the beginning. His father and mother, two people bent earthward by their work on the two acres of stony soil outside Palermo; himself, young and ragged and sullen under the yoke of poverty, maddened by the mistrals blowing up out of Africa. He wondered if either of his parents might still be alive. He had never felt obliged to get in touch with them in all the years; they had given him nothing except life, and that without premeditation. He had never had any need to placate his spirit, to propitiate his conscience. What was a conscience? There was no such organ, and if there was such a thing as a soul or a God, well that was just too bad. He would never twist himself into shapes he didn't fit. Life was a battle, and he was a battler. He enjoyed beauty, to a certain point. At least for him, beauty ran to the edge of a sheer cliff; beyond that edge was a peculiar emptiness, which sometimes echoed with dim and lovely voices. Perhaps he occasionally felt a little wistful that there were those things beyond his appreciation; it was no more than an infrequent puff of air, a frail scent—he could live without it.

  Only now the thought of the Pawnbroker intruded on his idyl. That situation was no good, no good at all. He starts up trouble, makes some kind of stink, and before you know it, I got the Revenue Department on me, investigating committees. Well, no sense making a big thing out of that Yid. He would get one more warning and then ... Too bad. I got an idea he's got a brain in his head. It might have been a pleasure to talk things over with a guy with brains. Too bad, he's just falling apart. Ah, besides, what the hell would we have talked about; politics, the opera, history? I bet he knows a little something about them things, too. Eh, you can't have everything, intellectual talkin' and efficiency both. Too bad, too bad. He began humming again as he sipped at the drink, and the rain tried to interfere, with its spitefully uneven rhythm.

  "Cielo e mar," he sang softly with the dead man.

  He shook his head scornfully at the thought of the poor Sicilian earth; he remembered how it looked, beaten by the rain.

  Upstairs, above Sol's room, Morton sat drawing at his table. He was drawing his Uncle Sol from a tiny snapshot. The paper was a blue-gray charcoal paper, and he filled in heavy darks around the large, puffy head of the Pawnbroker so that it seemed to lean out of the flat dimension of the surface. He made the round, old-fashioned spectacles reflect the light so that only a suggestion of the eyes could be seen. But in the cast of the head, the line of mouth, the weary shine of high light, he imbued the subject with a look of gentleness and infinite patience. It was his, Morton Kantor's picture; he could have it the way he wanted it.

  His sallow, unhealthy face was streaked with charcoal, and his shirt was stained with sweat. Finally he reached a point where his charcoal stick wandered uncertainly over the paper without making contact, and he realized he must be finished. He took the jar of fixative and blew through the atomizer to spray the portrait. Then he tacked it up on the opened closet door.

  He realized how hot he was and saw that the window was closed. He opened it and stood for a minute looking out at the invisible, heavily dripping darkness, the occasional shine of black leaves from unidentifiable light sources. The air felt cool and soothing on him. For a moment he contemplated the new collection of pornographic pictures he had bought with the remainder of his tuition money. Then he thought he felt too tired even for that. He wondered what his uncle would say if he knew what some of his money went for. Well, he thinks I'm milking him anyhow, he thought with painful bitterness. So I am. He lay back on his bed and lit a cigarette, drew in the smoke with all his might and slowly exhaled it as he looked at the brooding, gentle figure on the blue-gray paper. Suddenly Morton began to cry. It lasted only a few minutes, and then he went back to his cigarette. But through his opened window, above the sound of the rain, he thought he heard, from the floor below, an echo of his crying.

  Jesus Ortiz suddenly sat up out of sleep with a freezing sensation all over his body. What the hell am I thinkin'? I suppose to be smart? They just gonna go in that store, take his money, and walk out with him standin' there, wavin' good-by, sayin', "Come again, have some more money for you." What was I thinkin' about? And them three niggers never even think to ask how we get out of there quiet. No getaway car. Oh, but that Robinson maybe figure he fix it with his piece. Oh no. What come over me? What I want to do, commit suicide or something? Well ... maybe we just tie him up, gag him, and push him in the back room. Then I close up the store and ... yeah, that's it, no need to worry. But how the hell could I go ahead and not think about them things till now. Man ... He wiped at the sweat of his near-miss. Then he got up and went to the window to smoke a cigarette
and watch the rain trying to wash the old filth from the streets. He felt calm again, quite able to ignore the icy dart of disaster he only half sensed deep inside.

  Either in the hallucinatory foyer before sleep or already in dreams, he glimpsed again, briefly, the figure of a heavy man, awkwardly transfixed on a cross, a man with blue, cryptic numbers on his arm.

  TWENTY-SIX

  There was a shine to even the grimy landscape of the city, and the air was possessed of the clarity that frequently follows heavy rain. Nothing looked any newer or less ruined by age and filth, and yet there was a quality of richness, as with old bronzes in sunlight. Sol gazed at the familiar store fronts, the ugly façades, and suddenly, quite strangely, he felt a nostalgia for them, as though they had been the scenes of precious life for him.

  A covey of women mounted the steps to the railroad platform, servants for the wealthy of Westchester and Fairfield. His sister, Bertha, had been lobbying for a Shwartsa to help her with her housework, and as he thought of that and watched the Negro women going up the steps, he imagined his sister at a slave auction, walking among the dark women, pinching, checking the condition of their teeth.

  He was visited once more by that sharp and bewildering poignance, and he peered intensely at the dirt-wedged bricks of buildings, the grime insinuated like the grain in wood in every painted surface, the filth-encrusted sidewalks and gutters, wondering what there was in this pesthole of a city, among these blighted, ugly people, that made him suddenly yearn and remember the mood of sadness. And he felt a rare calm that lasted only as long as it would have taken a huge, slow-moving pendulum to make its arc.