From far off, a siren approached. A woman's voice sounded hysterically in the street. Hands touched his arm. He shook them off. Something was breaking out of him. His body felt full of the flow of some great wound. A rush and a torment burned him. He felt naked and flayed and he hung over the dying youth like a frayed canopy. A million pains raked his body, doubled him over so his face came down closer to the face beneath him. He wanted to say something but didn't know what it was. "Ortiz, Ortiz, Ortiz," he said. Everything he thought he had conquered rose up from its sham death and fell upon him. Ghosts mingled with the busy policemen in the store, and the voices were increased a thousandfold. "Ortiz, Ortiz," he pleaded. The dark eyes grew larger and more awful. "What will I do?" he moaned. "Ortiz!"
Someone pulled him forcibly away, and he tottered over to the loft steps, where he sat with his head in his hands. The siren sounded its expiring alarm right outside, and then the white-clad interns crowded into the narrow space behind the counter. A woman brought her screaming into the store.
"Jesus, Jesus, is it my Jesus?" the mother cried.
"I'm sorry, lady," someone said.
"Is he dead?"
Perhaps a silent nod.
"Ahhhhh, Mother of God, Lord help me...."
And then the dry retching sound of weeping, growing louder and louder and louder, filling the Pawnbroker's ears, flooding him, drowning him, dragging him back to that sea of tears he had thought to have escaped. And he sat hunched against that abrasive roar, his body becoming worn down under the flood of it, washed down to the one polished stone of grief, of grief.
All his anesthetic numbness left him. He became terrified of the touch of air on the raw wounds. What was this great, agonizing sensitivity and what was it for? Good God, what was all this? Love? Could this be love? He began to laugh hysterically, and the voices in the store stopped. The mother cursed him from where she knelt over her dead son.
"He laugh, you hear, he laugh!" she cried wrathfully.
"Now, now, lady, he's probably in a state of shock," one of the policemen said soothingly.
"But he laugh. How could he laugh now?"
Oh no, not love! For whom? All these dark, dirty creatures? They turn my stomach, they sicken me. Oh, this din, this pain and thrashing.
The time passed in some strange, forgettable way. People questioned him. There was a coming and a going. They got him into the little glass-enclosed office and someone gave him some strong whisky to drink. All around him was a dazzle of faces and textures and voices. He nodded and spoke, negated and agreed, and had no idea of what he was saying. All around was the crush of warm bodies, the terrible stifling pungence of human smells. He had a glimpse of the white-covered body going out on a stretcher. Sometimes he thought he recognized a familiar voice and strained to see through the enveloping confusion some long-lost face. Once, he heard a woman's voice complain sorrowfully, "But I his girl, I got a right!" The phone rang many times. Someone asked him if he wanted to talk to someone. He didn't remember answering. For an instant he saw the immaculate face of Marilyn Birchfield and he said as in a dream, "No, no, I am too dirty; you must go away from me." And then she was gone, banished by his voice, and for a moment he thought he recognized the delicate shape of regret, until that, too, disappeared. His head rang like struck metal and his body was fantastically aged.
A man, possibly a doctor, forced him to drink something out of a little paper cup. It made him sleepy, and the doctor, a weary, sour-faced man, told him to come over to his office, where he had a couch Sol could sleep on for a while.
"A little rest would do you some good," he said.
Sol nodded in the buzz of voices around him but he held his hand up.
"I must make a telephone call first," he said. Suddenly he had found himself thinking in a muddled way about the store and Jesus Ortiz and his nephew, Morton, and he realized he had to straighten that out before he could sleep.
"I'll wait for you," the doctor said. "That sedative will make you very groggy. It will be better for me to go with you. Go on, make your call."
Leaning on the counter, Sol shuffled over to the phone. One of the policemen stepped out of his way and watched him curiously as he slowly dialed the Mount Vernon number. He felt drunk, and his body tingled with a need for sleep. In all the chaos of his stunned brain only this one chore took on any legible shape, and even it was rootless and indecipherable in relation to whatever it was he was going through.
"Morton, I want to speak to Morton," he said as soon as he heard the phone picked up at the other end.
"Sol?" his sister said. "Is that you? You sound funny. What's wrong?"
"Morton," he insisted. It was as though only that word kept the drowsiness at bay.
"What, what is it?"
"Give me Morton," he said thickly.
He heard the phone clunk down, and he rubbed his face to fight the sandy feeling of fatigue.
"What do you want?" Morton asked sulkily.
"Listen to me carefully, Morton, I don't want to repeat. Do not interrupt until I am through. I am very tired and I must lie down soon. There is a big mix-up here; it is bedlam. A terrible thing has happened. They tried to hold me up. There are police and everything. My boy, my assistant, has been killed ... he is dead."
"What do you mean? How do... killed? Who, I mean ›
"My assistant, Jesus Ortiz, the Shwartsa, has been killed. I am alone with this store. I cannot be alone with this place. I must say it simply. I want you to come here and work. You may continue to go to school; we will make arrangements somehow. But I need you to help me, I have no one."
"But how can I ... I don't understand. You want me to come to the store every day? Where will I do my work? My mother..." Morton's voice was querulous and confused. Too much was being poured on his own misery, and he couldn't tell whether it was alleviation or aggravation.
"I need you, Morton," Sol said dully.
There was almost a minute's silence. Sol strained to keep his head erect. The doctor was a blur to his left, and only the center of his vision made a clear image of the tuba hanging from the ceding. Finally there was the small phlegmy sound of Morton feeling for his voice.
"All right, Uncle Sol, all right. Tomorrow I'll come in to you in the store. I'll try.... You'll have to teach me."
And then Sol had only the vague memory of walking out of the store with the doctor's hand firm on his arm. He stepped outside and he was blind to the late sunlight, confused as to direction and sound. He was only aware of the movement of people and the bubbling din of their voices and he felt like a tiny ball spinning in a great, round wire cage.
He slept quite comfortably on the antiseptic quiet of the doctor's couch. For a while he was conscious of nothing except the vague sounds of his own breathing, which intruded on his sleep. And when he began to dream, he found the dream to be oddly without the usual horror and yet possessed of the greatest sadness he had ever experienced.
He walked over a strangely desolate and overgrown meadow with Tessie and Morton. They were silent and seemed indifferent to him, yet they kept pace with him, step for step. The sky hung like a down-sagging green canopy. There was no breeze, no sound of insect or bird. The silence was so intense that he imagined a long endless chord of music just beyond his physical ability to hear it. Even their footsteps were silent.
Ahead of them appeared the broken, rusty wire fence and the long low buildings blackened by weather and sagging under the years. A wooden tower leaned forlornly to one side, and the tall chimney standing in the ruin of a brick building was like a monument to a forgotten race. Nothing moved; no wind mourned the gaping windows.
They reached the fence and stopped there.
A black-uniformed figure came out of the nearest building. They waited for him to approach. There was no such thing as surprise there. He walked stiffly up to Sol and looked up at him with empty eye sockets; it was Murillio. Then he faced down to a slip of paper in his hand and he read:
"Your dea
d are not buried here."
Sol tried to object. He reached down for his voice but was able only to bring up an immense strangling pain.
He woke up waving his arms in the dimness. The doctor was standing over him. It was dark outside.
"I must have been dreaming," he apologized. "How long have I been sleeping here?"
"Only about an hour. I'm surprised you woke up so soon. How do you feel?"
"I am all right. I must go now. There is the store. I just walked out without..."
"There are still police there, don't worry. If I were you, I would get home and try to rest. You have had a great shock, apparently. I'd like to give you a prescription."
"No, no, I can't know yet what I must do. There, see," he said, standing up carefully. "I'm all right now. If you will tell me how much I owe you..."
The doctor waved his hand indifferently.
"No, I insist. I am scrupulous about money matters," Sol said.
The doctor looked at him strangely. "I can see you are," he said. "Suppose we wait a day or two and have you stop back so I can look you over. That is, unless you have a family doctor...."
"No, I have none. Very well, in a day or so."
He went down into the street and took a minute to plot his position. Then he saw the faint shape of the pawnshop sign and he headed for it.
The front door was open and the lights were on. Moe Leventhal and another policeman were inside, leaning on the counter. A man in civilian clothes was down on the floor with a flashlight and a little box of some kind. His pockets were filled with pads. It was quiet there, the store a lifeless tomb again.
"It's all right, Solly," Leventhal said gently. "We'll watch things. Why don't you go home now?"
Sol shrugged and looked around.
"Will you be all right?" Leventhal asked. "Can you make it home all right?"
"Yes, yes," he said and began walking out of the store.
"Oh, Solly, the keys, leave us the keys," Leventhal called after him.
He took the keys out and handed them to the policeman. Then he started toward the street again.
But in the doorway he imagined he heard the voice of Jesus Ortiz's mother screaming at him as she had before, and he turned back to cry out to the two policemen.
"All right, all right, I know what hurts her. I hear all of them screaming again. What does she want from me? Can't she see that I am weeping for her, that I am weeping for all of them now! Who asked for it? So maybe I love all of them, does it do any good? Doesn't that make it worse?"
Leventhal looked at his companion, and the man on the floor got up. They moved as though to restrain him, but he turned and hurried out.
For a minute or two he tried to think rationally about where he was going, what he was going to do.
Then he began to cry.
On his face was the wetness, in his mouth the strange saline taste. Blinded by his weeping, he bumped into people, was jostled by the bone and flesh of their bodies. In his head there was no stillness, no composure, only this terrible rushing, this immense fluid pouring. He thudded into people and felt them and took into himself their peculiar odors of sweat and breath, of dirt and hair, the smell of the great mortal decay that was living because it was dying. And when he tried to wipe his eyes, indeed, cleared them momentarily, he saw the ineffable marvel of their eyes and skins.
So he was caught in the flow of them as he tried to find the wellspring of his own tears. Until he realized he was crying for all his dead now, that all the dammed-up weeping had been released by the loss of one irreplaceable Negro who had been his assistant and who had tried to kill him but who had ended by saving him. For a moment he stopped on the pavement with a frown twisting his face as the people eddied past. What had impelled Ortiz to throw himself like a shield before him? Could it perhaps have been just the practical fear of not wanting the robbery to become too dangerous a venture? Had Ortiz himself had time to really know? He could not have had time to pick his way through the torturous litter of his soul to discover what else had prompted that act. And if it had been a mystery in the end to Ortiz, what right did he have to expect more? So his tears continued as he moved through the crowding filth of the people toward the river, dirty himself, mouthing his own salty tears, hopeless, wretched, strangely proud.
Then he was at the river, alone except for two men far down the curbing that bordered the water. He wiped his eyes clear again and he stood watching the river as it slid obscurely under the bridges toward the sea, bright and glittery in the boat lights on its surface, so vast in its total, never anything here and now, as it hurried slowly toward the obscurity of the salty ocean; so great, so touching in its fleeting presence. The wetness dried on his cheeks and a great calm came over him.
The two men, Cecil Mapp and John Rider, came walking by. They said hello to him, but he seemed to be talking to himself. John Rider elaimed he was counting all his money, but Cecil Mapp said, "No, man, that man suffer."
Actually, the Pawnbroker was counting his losses and forgiving himself as he watched the river.
"Rest in peace, Ortiz, Mendel, Rubin, Ruth, Naomi, David ... rest in peace," he said, still crying a little, but mostly for himself. He took a great breath of air, which seemed to fill parts of his lungs unused for a long time. And he took the pain of it, if not happily, like a martyr, at least willingly, like an heir.
Then he began walking to the subway to take the long, underground journey to Tessie's house, to help her mourn.
BOOKS BY EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK EDITIONS
FROM HARCOURTBRACE & COMPANY
THE CHILDREN AT THE GATE
THE PAWNBROKER
THE TENANTS OF MOONBLOOM
The Pawnbroker Page 25