The Pawnbroker. Edward Lewis Wallant
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.”
“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