Читать книгу The Pawnbroker - Edward Lewis Wallant - Страница 12

TWO

But there were obstacles between him and his bed.

He parked the dusty Plymouth in the driveway and walked past the stone barbecue, across the flagstone patio with its expensive, yellow-painted garden furniture and the round table with the flowery umbrella in the middle. And suddenly, as he approached the back door of the house, he was burdened with his weight. For a moment he worried about the state of his health, tinkered carefully, but with eyes averted, with that inner mechanism which maintained his equilibrium. Until he opened the screened door and smiled wryly at the creak of it. Maybe it is my menopause, he thought, my change of life come early.

His sister rushed at him as he entered the kitchen.

“Ah, look at him, all worn out. Sol, totinka. Sit, sit. Bertha will get you a nice cool lemonade,” she said with stagy affection, her gray eyes reckoning slyly as always. “You should conserve, not work so hard, Solly.” A heavily built woman in her early fifties, she dressed too youthfully, and her hair was hairdresser-aged, the ends tipped with silver. “Sit. Let Bertha make you comfy with some lemonade.” She prodded him toward a kitchen chair with patting motions of her soft hands.

“I do not want lemonade, Bertha. Stop pushing me to sit! I am dirty—let me wash my hands. Do not concern yourself so much with my comfort all of a sudden,” he said. He saw, in his sister’s generosity, those sticky fingers that came away with more than they gave. “What do you want?” he asked coldly.

“Oh, Solly,” she scolded. Then she shrugged as though resigned to his lack of understanding. “Well, you know how bad the television has been working. So I figured if you start spending money repairing, it doesn’t pay.” She looked at him timidly for a moment. “I put down a little deposit on a new R.C.A. But I can get it back. If you object, I can get the deposit back. I just thought that . . .”

“All right, all right. Buy it,” he said indifferently. “If the others are ready, let us have dinner. Otherwise give me a bite of food now. I’m tired. I would like to go to bed soon.”

“Certainly, I’ll call them right away,” she said. “Selig is resting. His back is bothering him again. Ah, he’s so delicate, my husband.” Bertha spoke with a little smile of pride. “Thank God he has a brain, that he’s a schoolteacher. He’s so delicate, really,” she sighed, pretending wistfulness.

“He has a good appetite with his delicacy,” Sol said with the same unrevealing blandness of tone and expression.

For a moment Bertha’s face revealed her. Her eyes grew hard and her lips drew back slightly; she knew very well the shape and sound of a taunt. But she also knew which side all their bread was buttered on as well as who bought the bread. So, while her dislike of her brother grew a shade bigger, she smiled even more dotingly under her hostile eyes and ventured another intimate touch of his arm.

“Have I got a delicious piece of brisket for you, Solly; nice black roasted like Momma used to make,” she said warmly. “So go, you go wash up and I’ll call them all.”

Her smile didn’t fade when he left the room; it flicked off electrically. “And tell my big artist upstairs that supper is ready,” she called after him. She couldn’t say what she would have liked to her brother; he had them bound in a chain of money. But her son, Morton, was vulnerable to her irritation. In some ways, her son and her brother were two of a kind, both sullen, unattractive creatures who dampened her “Happy American Family” setting. Oh, she supposed it wasn’t Sol’s fault that he had gone through what he had. But it had been a prison, and the degradation and filth had rubbed off on him. God knew what had so soiled Morton!

When they all sat down to dinner, Bertha unhappily compared Morton and Sol with her husband and her daughter. Joan was talking to her father, and the two of them were smiling in a glow of intellectual rapport. You wouldn’t even guess they were Jews, Bertha thought proudly. Joan had thick, straight brown hair and even features. Her clear, shining skin was a testimonial to her mother’s care and feeding, her easy smile an open proof of family love. And Selig—rosy and fair, with the same straight brown hair his daughter had. What a contrast between his clean, pink face and Sol’s leaden grayness! And the dignity and cleverness with which he spoke. Why, he hardly moved his hands at all, and his voice was crisp with a delightfully Midwestern accent; so American!

But her faint smile slipped away when she turned back to her son. Morton ate with his thin face close to his plate, shoveling in the food with quick darts of his fork like a Chinese plying chopsticks. His dark, unattractive face resembled those of the young ghetto scholars she remembered from her childhood, morose, intense, despising appearance. It depressed her just to look at him, made her feel a melancholy guilt which invariably turned to anger. He was not there enjoying the family meal, but, like his uncle, only hurrying toward his own solitude.

Sol ate slowly and deliberately. Eating was something he had to do, and the tastes made no difference to him. Despite Bertha’s cajoling promise about the brisket, he ate only the vegetables, as always. He never ate meat, because it sickened him; it just never seemed important to remind his sister of that distaste.

“. . . and Sid is taking me to that new Japanese film, Daddy.”

Joan liked the aspect of the typically American family, which Bertha tried to develop, in spite of the intellectual pretensions that sometimes obligated her to scorn Americanism. Somewhat more generous and good-natured than her mother, she was even able to include her Uncle Sol in that rosy-tinted picture. She referred to Sol as being an old-fashioned bachelor, a very learned European ex-professor, and intimated to outsiders that his taciturnity was only a guise for a shyly affectionate nature.

“The thing is,” Selig said, “Hollywood is just interested in making money.” His fresh, youthful face was good-natured but not very mobile or expressive, as though too much animation might belie his alleged delicacy. Now he sighed in wan regret. “No, to Hollywood, culture is just a dirty word. Callow, that’s the word for American culture. They have so much to learn from the Europeans.”

“That’s what Sid was saying, Dad, exactly that. He said that we live in a cultural vacuum here.”

“Hey, that’s good—cultural vacuum. Perfect. He sounds like a bright young man, your Sid.” He smiled affectionately at his daughter and patted her arm.

“He is a nice boy,” Bertha interrupted. “But is he serious? I mean I don’t want you to get too . . . intimate,” she said, casting her eyes down in an attitude of daintiness. She knew what she meant, too, how hot in the pants you could get at that age—how well she remembered! She glanced at Selig with a little throb of reminiscence. But then, when she looked at Sol next to him, she felt an inward shudder of disgust like the hidden, other side of her feelings about her husband, and for a moment she imagined her brother naked and wondered how a woman ever could have loved him. “I mean,” she went on, “it can be a problem with young people. You get all emotional like, you know. Maybe you lose your head a little. . . .”

“Oh, Mother, you sound so old-fashioned,” Joan said.

“She’s right, Bertha,” Selig said with a little chuckle. “You don’t understand youth today. They’re sensible enough but they have different standards.”

The voices filled the room, rang on the cut-glass bowl of salad, the sideboard of good mahogany, with its bronze mortar and pestle, its framed picture of the long-forgotten Nazermans, father and mother of Sol and Bertha. Morton kept his eyes on the food like some searcher for gold, and Sol chewed slowly beside him, his eyes flat behind the black-rimmed steel-sided glasses.

Selig and Joan went back to talking about movies, and Selig observed that another trouble with Hollywood was that they were unwilling to face life. Suddenly noticing his silent brother-in-law, Selig smiled sympathetically and decided to include him in the conversation.

“Does that make sense to you, Solly, that the Europeans are more willing to face life?”

“Oh yes, they are willing to face life,” Sol answered, without intonation, as he went on eating, chewing and swallowing, eating with his numbed taste in the midst of all the meaningless talk.

Selig shrugged at Joan and Bertha. “What could you do?” his face said. Friendliness rolled off that man like water off porcelain.

Joan indicated with a wink that she would give it a try. This was almost a regular after-dinner game with them, trying to “draw Sol out,” and they considered it a sort of amusing demonstration of their own good will and charity.

“Uncle Sol, I’m going to buy you a decent pair of glasses whether you like it or not. Maybe tortoise shell, those heavy, movie-producer kind.”

“Thank you, but my own will do very well,” Sol answered without looking up.

“Don’t you want to look interesting, maybe like a man of destiny?” Joan said.

He just glanced at her with cold disdain.

“And Ivy League clothes? You have a big frame, you’d look just fabulous, Uncle Sol.”

“Sure, Ivy League,” Sol said with a thin smile. “Many of my customers wear the little caps with the buckle in the back.” And he went on eating, wiping out the remains in his plate with a piece of bread, in a stilted imitation of un satisfied hunger.

His retort had the power to cast a pall on their game; none of them liked to be reminded of where their money came from.

“Those Shwartsas,” Bertha said in disgust. She always avoided telling people about her brother’s business, feeling they would visualize some crafty old, hand-rubbing Yid with a big nose.

“Mother,” Joan admonished.

“Please, Bertha,” Selig said in pedagogical reproof. “You know I don’t like to hear you refer to Negroes like that.”

“Oh yes, I forgot,” Bertha apologized. “Negroes, I mean.” They were so intelligent and so liberal, her husband and her daughter. It seemed to be the style to be liberal nowadays. She really ought to keep up with things. Sometimes she felt like such a dope.

Suddenly her eye fell on her son, still eating silently and voraciously. She turned a half-guilty cruelty toward him, as though, with some compulsive pecking-order instinct, she knew he was the only victim for her there.

“And you, the big picture drawer, my artiste. You have nothing to say for yourself?” She waited a moment, watching how he ignored her, ignored all of them, his skinny, misanthropic face scowling at the food. Sometimes she felt she hated him; he embarrassed her deeply. “Couldn’t be that we don’t interest you?” There was no response from her son. “Look at you! Like an animal wolfing the food, scowling. I know why you got those pimples, that bad skin. It’s your nature—you poison yourself.”

“She’s right, son,” Selig said. “Maybe Mother is a little harsh on you, but the truth is that you just let yourself go. That attitude isn’t going to make you an artist. A man needs some self-discipline no matter what his calling is.”

“They’re right, Mort,” Joan said, as though she regretted the necessity of agreeing.

“Sometimes I’m ashamed for the neighbors,” Bertha said. “My own son walking around, acting and looking like a bum.”

Suddenly Morton jerked his head up and glared savagely around at them, as though just finding himself surrounded by enemies.

“Why the hell don’t you all leave me alone?” he snarled, his sallow face desperate and defiant.

“Now, Morton!” Selig sat erect in spite of his delicate back. “That will be just about enough.”

“Ah, there’s a runt in every litter,” Bertha said. “I don’t know what I did to deserve . . .”

“Don’t blame yourself, Mom,” Joan said. “He’s a neurotic. I honestly think it would be a good idea for him to pay a visit to an analyst.”

Morton pushed away from the table and stood up, a rigid, aged-looking youth with brooding, dark-circled eyes. As a child he had had tantrums and used to spit at them. He had no friends and stayed away from girls because he felt that if they ever insulted him he might be tempted to kill them. Several years before, his teachers had discovered his talent for drawing and, upon their advice and with his Uncle Sol’s financing, he had been allowed to go to an art school, which he was still attending. Without the drawing and the painting, he sometimes thought, he might have considered suicide. He rarely thought about his uncle, only harbored a vague feeling of gratitude, not for his uncle’s largesse, which was something they all shared in without gratitude, but rather because Sol was the only one who left him alone.

“All right,” he said to them. “I can’t take any more of this. You make me feel like vomiting everything I ate. Well, I’m sorry to spoil your fun, but I’m going upstairs. You’ll have to find something else to crap on.” He swept them with a final look of hatred before turning and leaving the room.

“Now I ask you,” Bertha said to her brother, calling on the silent witness to her tribulation. “Can you blame me?”

Sol got up then, too, his head full of pain, the food leaden in his stomach. “Do not bother me with your squabbles, Bertha,” he said. “Eat each other up, for all I care, but do not bother me! I will go upstairs now. I will shower and turn on my fan and then read until I sleep. My door will be closed. For my part, you can do what you want; do you understand?”

With that, he left the room, appreciating at least the silence he could impose on them when he displayed anger; that he had been able to buy from them.

In the private bathroom adjoining his bedroom, he stood under the cool shower with his eyes closed. The sound of the water drove their voices from his ears. He filled the glass-doored shower stall. The water, running over the puffy, inarticulate structure of his face, seemed to be dissolving his features. It ran over the bulky, subtly deformed body, the body he never looked at, with its peculiar unevennesses, its inexplicable collapses and thickenings. There was a piece of his pelvic bone missing, two of his ribs were gone, and his collarbone slanted in weird misdirection. Seeing him, one might wonder what kind of bizarre accident had malformed him so shrewdly, with such perverse design. But when he dried and covered himself with a robe, it became apparent that, by some coincidence (or queer design), each distortion had been compensated for by another, and nothing untoward showed in his clothed body except perhaps the careful awkwardness of his walk, in which he observed his delicate balance with each step.

For a long time he lay on his bed reading, beside the open window. The fan swung cool drafts on him; little billows of summer scent fell over his face, smells of flowers and cut grass. From the surrounding yards came voices, the clinking of glasses, the hiss of hoses and sprinklers. From above came the restless movements of his nephew, drawing or painting or just pacing out his sick and furious misery. It was all nothing to Sol Nazerman. He was reading The Memoirs of Henri Brulard in French and he made his brain dwell on the intricacies of a distant past.

When the light had been gone from his window for a long time and the crickets were as loud as the random sounds of the few people still outside in their yards, he laid the book down on the night table and turned off the light. Then he convinced himself that he was sleepy; it worked and very quickly, too, and he slept.

His face was pressed against the wood. His eyes were in the open part between the slats of the cattle car. The plains of Poland moved by monotonously, almost repetitively, as though the train were still and the same landscape were being displayed over and over again. His son David squealed with a rodent sound of helplessness somewhere down near Sol’s leg. “I’m slipping in it. Daddy, in the dirty stuff. I can’t stay up.” But what could he do about it? He was pressed into that one position by two hundred other bodies. So he studied the tidal landscape. Yes, it was the same view over and over. There, that house, low and black, with a broken stone chimney, he had seen that at least a dozen times. They were just standing still and, by some odd circumstance, the earth was being unrolled for their view. “Do something for him,” his wife, Ruth, cried harshly beside him. She had little Naomi up against her chest, held there without her arms, for the crush of bodies held them all as in ice. “Sol, don’t let him fall down in that! All our filth is down there. It would be terrible for him to lie in it!” Just moving his nose down an inch toward the carpeting of feces nauseated Sol. The child would turn his insides out. He tried to move a little more than his fingers, felt the soft, damp hair of David’s head as it slid slowly downward. “I can’t,” he complained peevishly. “What do you expect of me? I cannot move a muscle.” In the dim, slatted light he saw his wife’s grim face. She seemed to hate him for all this. “But I can’t, I can’t. I can do nothing.” His voice sounded flat and unconcerned and he tried to put more passion into it. “I am helpless, do you hear?” She continued looking at him with burning eyes and motionless features, like one of those startlingly lifelike wax figures. “I can do nothing.” His voice still came out in the same dispassionate, soulless way. There came the sound of the boy at his feet making savage, empty retches, vomiting and slipping around in the bottomless filth. The roar of the train, the endless wailing of all the crushed people, and his wife’s burning glass eyes in a waxen face. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” Sol shrieked in the awful din.

The Pawnbroker moaned in his sleep without waking. No one stirred in the house; they were used to his noisy sleep.