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 p
onder 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."
"It goes without saying. All the great scientists have had imagination and emotion. I mean, they are not mechanics." George chuckled with the mellow exultation of someone responding to a glass of wine. "Particularly in philosophy—there you see where the two fields overlap."
"Socrates was really on the borderline of drama," Sol said, running his eyes over the ledger for appearance's sake. Appearance for whom? For George Smith or Sol Nazerman? What was the difference? So he gave the poor beast a few minutes of talk!
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if his philosophy wasn't an outgrowth of the Greek drama, a direct outgrowth. Why Herbert Spencer goes on to say..."
The Greek drama! What was all this, a madhouse? And yet he let himself form words that made brilliant sense to the incubus-ridden creature before him.
And in spite of everything, their talk created a small, faintly warming buzz in the pawnshop. It did nothing to disturb or alleviate the abandoned wreckage of the stock; nothing profound or original was arrived at, no conclusions were even dared. Just so might the conversation of two prisoners talking late at night in their cell ease the talkers; because of nothing more than the sounds of another voice that did not importune or demand. Only, perhaps, the burned spirit of the colored man was warmed in the bright, myriad reflections of the big names and words, and possibly also, in some lesser, more remote way, the consciousness of the rock-colored Pawnbroker, who put a proper face on their vagary all the while by thumbing in a businesslike fashion through the big ledger.
Until finally a point was reached beyond the Pawnbroker's discretion. Someone outside studied the assortment of cameras and musical instruments in the window, threatened to come in to buy. Sol, all business again, wrote out the record of their transaction, put the lamp under the counter, and solemnly gave George Smith the ticket. George studied the little piece of cardboard with a regretful yet hopeful sigh, knowing his visit was over beyond appeal; but knowing, too, that he had at least the rain check for another time.
Some minutes after he had gone, a curse of anger and pain erupted from the lips of the Pawnbroker. "That damned fool with all his talk—crazy Shwartsa bastard! What does he want from me?" And all of it was no more than a whisper, so that Jesus Ortiz only turned curiously toward the sibilance for a moment on his way out to get their lunches.
In the evening, Ortiz took his pay from Sol's hand and then stood blowing dreamily over the edges of the bills.
"I got a uncle lives out in Detroit," he said, staring now at the sleeve that covered Sol's tattoo. "He been in business for forty years—clothes he sell. My old lady tell me that man solid as the Rock of Gibraltar in that town. All the time he plow the profit back in, get better capitalize all the time. They have race riots, depressions out there, but that business of my uncle get stronger and stronger all the time, no matter what. The cops even call him Mister. He belong to merchant organizations and all. He got him a son 'bout my age, and that kid in the store gonna get it all when my uncle kick off. See, that business make him solid. Hey, like a king a little, pass his crown on down to the kids. My mother tell me we was out there to visit when I was around four years old. I think I remember him; it's hard to tell. I seen pictures of him so I don't know if I remember seein' him or just seem like I do from all the times I look at his picture." He snatched his eyes from the empty space and took a deep, resolute breath. "I'm gonna get me a business, I got that in mind for sure," he said almost fiercely to Sol. "All I need is the money, the goddam loot!" He flicked contemptuously at the little sheaf of bills and then put it into his pocket.
"Save your pennies," Sol said with all the warmth of a carnival shill.
"I gonna do that, Sol," he said with a level, ruthless stare. Then his face performed that mimelike change to smile. "Anyhow I learnin' something about business from a master, meantime." His eyes were flat with his undeniable curiosity, and there was something reminiscent of Tangee's dissecting gaze as he looked at Sol. "Tell me one thing," he demanded in a voice shaded by whispering intensity. "How come you Jews come to business so natural?"
Sol looked at him with harsh amusement.
"How come, how come. You want to steal my secret of success, hah. Well, Jesus," he said ironically, "I will do you a favor; it is part of my obligation to you as an apprentice. Really it is very simple. Pay attention, though, or you may miss something."
Jesus held out against the stinging humor for whatever might slip from his employer's scornful monologue, his eyes as clear and receptive as those of a cat searching the dusk for nourishment.
"You begin with several thousand years during which you have nothing except a great, bearded legend, nothing else. You have no land to grow food on, no land on which to hunt, n
ot enough time in one place to have a geography or an army or a land-myth. Only you have a little brain in your head and this bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that there is something special about you, even in your poverty. But this little brain, that is the real key. With it you obtain a small piece of cloth—wool, silk, cotton—it doesn't matter. You take this cloth and you cut it in two and sell the two pieces for a penny or two more than you paid for the one. With this money, then, you buy a slightly larger piece of cloth, which perhaps may be cut into three pieces and sold for three pennies' profit. You must never succumb to buying an extra piece of bread at this point, a luxury like a toy for your child. Immediately you must go out and buy a still-larger cloth, or two large cloths, and repeat the process. And so you continue until there is no longer any temptation to dig in the earth and grow food, no longer any desire to gaze at limitless land which is in your name. You repeat this process over and over and over for approximately twenty centuries. And then, voilà—you have a mercantile heritage, you are known as a merchant, a man with secret resources, usurer, pawnbroker, witch, and what have you. By then it is instinct. Is it not simple? My whole formula for success—'How to Succeed in Business,' by Sol Nazerman." He smiled his frozen smile.
"Good lesson, Sol," Jesus said. "It's things like that make it all worth while." All right, you are a weird bunch of people, mix a man up whether you holy or the worst devils. I figure out yet what's behind that shit-eatin' grin. "I thank you for the lesson, boss, oh yes. So much better listenin' to you than goin' out for the quick dollar. I can't hardly wait for tomorrow's classes." He whirled around like a dancer, at least capable of that reminder, that taunt of his grace and youth. "You all heart, Solly, all heart," he said over his shoulder as he sauntered out with his leopard walk in the cold fight of Sol's smile.
"Go, Jesus, go in peace," the Pawnbroker murmured, his hand resting on the phone, which he expected to ring at any moment.
The Pawnbroker Page 5
