I don’t remember falling asleep, though I did notice how the evening stepped especially hard on the heels of the afternoon. Then it must have been late, because the commercial bustle of North Main Street had given way to other noises: the moaning of a barge below the levee, the rattling of a freight train over the bridge, the skirling of crickets, a tinkling toilet, a scratching mouse. Lying in the dark, I isolated every sound in the hope of discerning something particular. Just what it was I was listening for I couldn’t at first have said; then it came to me. I was listening for the sound of a turning knob, an opening door, the signal that my father had come home from his pawnshop for the night. Funny how you could miss a noise you never even remembered having heard.
Once I’d closed my eyes, I had a hard time prying them open again. By the time I did, sawing with my fingers at the gluey lids, it was morning; streamers of sunlight were making a Maypole of the mimosa outside my window. I yawned luxuriously as I raised myself on my elbows, creating an avalanche of tumbling books. Thus surrounded by the rubble of a day that had yet to begin, I recalled how unhappy I was.
I got out of bed and began to wander the apartment without pausing to change the clothes I’d slept in. To stand still was to invite unkind thoughts; add any more to what I was already shlepping around and I wouldn’t be able to budge. Keep moving, that was the ticket. Stay busy—though I was hard pressed to think of what to do next. Maybe I should make some coffee; people made coffee in the morning. And while I didn’t really care for the taste of it, I liked the musical trickle that the percolator made. It was a pleasant distraction from the silence of the apartment, which the hubbub outside called too much attention to.
Things picked up a little more when, cracking some eggs into a bowl, I turned on the electric mixer. I went into the closet, hauled out the Hoover, and plugged it in. Soon I was conducting a regular symphony of whir, gurgle, and drone, pleased at the way that they simulated the sounds of a lived-in apartment. But now that I’d turned on every appliance in the house, I began to have the uneasy feeling that the appliances were about to turn on me.
This, of course, was nonsense. Nevertheless, in a sweat I switched everything off. In the ensuing silence I realized that I was only being sensible. Beyond the obvious impracticality of running household appliances to no purpose in an empty apartment, the noise might have drowned out the news—which was surely at hand—of my papa’s release on bail. Any minute now the door would open, the telephone ring, so I sank into an understaffed armchair to wait. But for all his promised pulling of strings, I suspected that Uncle Morris was taking his own sweet time.
I turned on the console Zenith, consecrated by their portrait to the memory of my grandparents, and listened half expecting to hear some word of my father’s difficulties, that he had become an international episode. But while there was no mention of any Kaplan scandal, there was certainly plenty of tsuris to go around. The nation’s waters having proven unruly, other elements were getting into the act. The heartland was dust, its silos like desert relics inundated by time. Kindled by the friction of feet that the marathon dancers had fallen asleep on, a dance hall on Long Island was in flames. A lady flier known as the sweetheart of the jet stream had been taken for its own by thin air, and somewhere in the country where misfortune never struck, a baby had slipped down a hole.
You think you got problems? After the expense of son Clifford’s wedding (which had to be annulled when it was discovered that the bride had a past), “One Man’s Family” were having to tighten their belts. In “Portia Faces Life,” Portia was patently refusing to do so, having lost her third fiancé to a freak accident. There was trouble at the lodge hall, the Kingfish bilked out of the treasury by a designing female. Jimmy Durante was mortified, Mortimer Snerd afraid, and the Answer Man stumped by a question concerning the nature of truth.
Spies were in the unions, union defectors among the factory scabs, the criminal element in every walk of life. There were swing fanatics at Roseland, driven certifiably mad by Benny Goodman’s horn. There were homegrown loudmouths complaining that Benny’s style of music could be blamed for the current hekdish in Europe, where, according to H. V. Kalten-born’s pea-shooter delivery, the murder tallies were announced like the scores of sporting events.
Where had I been that nobody told me how God’s Depression-green earth was going straight to hell? Not that you could pin that one on me. If anybody had contributed to the sorry shape the world was in, it was my screwball family. Myself, all I’d done was go about my own business, abandoning everybody I knew.
As the morning wore on and the apartment filled with suffocating heat, I gave up on my father’s return. I raised myself with a groan from the armchair and plodded downstairs into the blistering street, where there was still not much to be found in the way of fresh air. A sitting duck for my own dark thoughts and the relentless largess of North Main, I decided that my first impulse was best: I should just keep moving.
Putting the Pinch behind me at Poplar Avenue, I crossed over into Main Street proper and trudged along in the hothouse sunshine. The air was dense with yellow vapor, smelling a mix of roasted peanuts and carbon monoxide, with a tinge of fresh poop from the horses of the mounted police. Clerks in sweaty seersucker dispatched couriers in a tocsin of bicycle bells. Ladies flashed their legs as they got out of taxis, drawing wolf whistles from the ranks of loafing bankers’ sons. Negro porters sniffed for some hint of a breeze, leaning at impossible angles to pull their laden handcarts rickshaw-style. Nobody seemed to be actively ignoring me, nor did they regard me with any special fondness or disdain.
When I turned left into Beale, entering the hurly-burly of the pawnshop district, I actually felt a kind of smartness insinuate itself into my step. I began to breathe a little easier as I drew nearer my father’s shop, to feel despite myself a little more like the resourceful Harry of old. But the feeling was short-lived, snuffed out by the sight of the bantam puller, pointlessly restored to his stool before the locked façade of Kaplan’s Loans. There he sat for no earthly good reason, the living reminder of everything that was wrong.
Touching a desiccated finger to the bill of his nautical cap, he gave me his mechanical salute, after which he had the temerity to croak, “You is late.”
This was more than the traffic would bear. Here was the two-faced creature himself, my uncle’s functionary and my father’s demon, the one who’d swapped my grandma for a box full of sparkles—and even in that he’d bungled the job so thoroughly that the cops wondered if the operation was queered on purpose. He had a nerve showing his prune puss around Kaplan’s, instead of staying down whatever funkhole he’d made off to when I spotted him last.
“Late for what, you stinking nigger troll!” I shouted so that the whole farcockte street could hear me—let them hear! And when words did nothing to dent the puller’s stolid composure, I spat full in his monkey face.
I prepared to stand my ground as he sprang for my throat. Together we would roll into the gutter, splashing blood on the cobbles, biting out plugs of flesh, and spitting teeth. Spectators trying to intervene would themselves be mangled. Meat wagons would draw up as bets went down. But while the gob of spittle slid snail-like down a crease of his stubbled cheek, Oboy remained unruffled. In fact, dabbing with a threadbare sleeve at his wrinkled punim, he actually looked to the cloudless sky like he thought it might rain. Then he leveled his sallow eyes at mine.
“Mistah Harry,” he rasped, and a squawking sound came from his diaphragm, making me think he was about to launch into a speech. That a reticent shvartzer should suddenly let loose a stream of tortured diction was nothing new to me. Go ahead, I thought, do your worst. But laconic as ever, Oboy said only, “Mistah Harry, looka here.”
He produced from his pocket what I had to assume was some instrument for settling the score with me. But it was nothing but an ordinary bobby pin, which he was holding forth like a prize I’d won for spitting in his face. While I tried hard to hang on to my anger, in the presence of such knuckleheaded irrelevance it slipped away. The shrunken homunculus had cheated me out of my moment. He hadn’t even done me the courtesy of calling me hypocrite, of accusing me to my miserable face of running out on my father just like he had.
Or had he? Because, as I turned my head to hide the waterworks that were starting up in my eyes, I had another thought: with its cover blown, Kaplan’s Loans could no longer front for anyone’s funny business. You could credit Oboy with having, however inadvertently, bought the pawnshop a reprieve. Okay, so he’d secured it at the expense of my grandma’s remains. But in playing broker to her posthumous mixed marriage, hadn’t he also released her from a sort of Ellis Island of the soul?
And now, was it in some similar spirit of emancipation that he was waving this bobby pin under my nose? Like it was the key to the mystery of all his dubious motives? If for no other reason than to end his taunting, I turned back and made a grab for the pin, but the puller snatched it out of my reach. As I was shrugging to show that I’d had it with his stupid game, he hopped down off his stool. He scuttled over to the door of the shop and, lifting the python-thick chain, began to jimmy the giant padlock.
“Nix!” I told him, looking nervously east and west for lurking detectives. “Cheezit!” When he paid no attention, I stepped toward him and turned my back, making a feeble attempt to shield him from view. I nodded and grinned idiotically at the passers-by, a couple of whom responded with a knowing wink. At one point, turning enough to observe the puller’s progress, I saw that he’d already sprung the lock. He was unwinding the chain—the sound bringing to mind the scene in “Captain Blood” where they release the galley slaves—and folding the lattice. I stood a hotfooted lookout as Oboy nipped inside the shop and tore the sheriff’s notice from the window. In an instant he was back at the door, which he flamboyantly held open for me.
I might have stood there debating the issue if I hadn’t been so anxious not to make more of a spectacle than we already had. So I hesitated only long enough to give the puller a put-upon sigh, then stepped quickly into the shop. Still, it wasn’t lost on me how Oboy’s ordinarily inscrutable puss—just before he darted forward to resume his perch—had about the liver lips an unprecedented touch of smugness. It was an expression that made me feel eerily as if everything that had happened to date was a part of some devious plan. It had all been by way of arranging a moment when I would walk into these off-limits premises by myself. A dumb idea, I put it behind me as I hurriedly shut the front door.
Then I wished somebody would tell me what to do next. Of course it didn’t take an Einstein to figure that, in a place as stuffy as this, you might switch on the ceiling fans. And since the lights were attached to the fans, it involved no extra energy to shed a little light on the subject.
The shop was naturally no less a shambles than it had been the day before, a disorder that took my father’s scrupulous chaos a step or two further. The thought of his upset merchandise was undoubtedly causing Sol Kaplan to turn over in his cell. So I asked myself where was the crime if the proprietor’s son straightened up a bit in his absence. Even as I wondered why bother, I was already going through the motions. I was making myself useful—did I hear somebody say “for a change”?
At first, afraid that at any second I might be detained by the arm of the law, I worked hastily. I shored up the Saratoga trunks and the toppled Gladstone bags, stood the gardening tools at attention, sorted a shelf of items that were graduated in size from pipes to saxophones. I wound the clocks, plugged in the Wurlitzer, rebaled the scattered magazines and sheet music, stacking them in solid bluffs on either side of the aisle. This was more like it, I thought, and began to relax a bit. I took the time, as I righted the overturned bottles of patentless elixirs, to read their labels: one boasting certain spirit-banishing properties, another the dual attributes of shrinking hemorrhoids and restoring hair. I picked up a stray pair of opera glasses and looked through both ends, examined here a fallen jacket, there a sword in a tarnished silver scabbard, and thought: item, one shiny black clawhammer tailcoat, once owned by a preacher said to have raised the corpse of a man who died owing him money; item, one parade saber with bronze hilt and serial notches, passed according to tradition from expiring father to surviving son at Manassas, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood …
It didn’t altogether delight me to find that I still had such amazing recall of my father’s ledgers. Here was information that my already overloaded mind could have done without. On the other hand, it was maybe not entirely to my detriment that my head remained a depository for my papa’s accounts, because when I looked in the narrow cubby that he’d set aside for his office, I saw that the top of his old wooden lectern was bare. The cops must have also confiscated his books.
So it seemed that, with my peculiar knack for remembering, I was in a position to render my father a service. Rather than let him come back from the pokey only to be crushed by the loss of his precious ledgers, I could duplicate them, almost verbatim if I wanted. With identical binders and a little speculation as to prices and rates of interest, I could make a virtual facsimile edition—I could even reproduce the crabbed handwriting that overwhelmed the margins like a flight of crows. Wasn’t my penmanship at least the equal of my papa’s for illegibility? With the exception of the crap acquired during my sabbatical, I could recite for the record the origin of almost every item I recognized and make educated guesses (such as who would know the difference) about those I didn’t. I could invent what I couldn’t copy from memory; it was my talent. But why would I want to do such a thing?
Why should I be a party to the perpetuation of my papa’s legacy of woolgathering and outright lies, especially now when I had the chance to start from scratch? Because, with Sol Kaplan temporarily out of the way, I found myself possessed of a rare opportunity. Given the run of the place and minus the nuisance of my father’s supervision, I could make some progress toward putting Kaplan’s Loans to rights. There were worse ways of spending your time, I decided, than in taking inventory. If I applied myself, who knew but I might have the new books ready before my father was let out of jail. He’d return to find his accounts in apple-pie order. Every entry would be described with a pruned economy, each debit and credit column a model of sound commercial arithmetic. While I was at it, I might even make a few other changes.
For one thing, I would weed out this cash drawer stuffed with everything but cash, full of stale knishes and expired receipts for items that would never be sold. Such as this one—brittle as an autumn leaf, a moth flying out from beneath it—for a legless rocking horse, or this for a milking stanchion with crotcheted slipcover, a knotty-pine casket with contents unnamed. Later I would get rid of the worthless items themselves.
As I crumpled up the stubs and tossed them into a nearby fishing creel, I gloated over how quickly I had begun to get the hang of things. All at once I was coming into a wealth of practical wisdom. Flushed with complacency, my brain was discharging ideas the way cigars are handed out at a bris. Here was my birthright—the good head for business that had needed only a desperate enough hour to announce itself.
It was clear to me now that Kaplan’s would definitely have to drop the loans for a while. No new merchandise should be taken in until this outrageous surplus had first been substantially reduced. For the time being we would become a (perfectly legitimate, of course) retail commodities outfit. In a few weeks, when we’d cleared sufficient capital to make it advantageous again, we could resume the practice of lending money. We could promote our competitive interest rates in the newspaper and on advertising fliers dropped from skywriting airplanes. You would see us compared favorably to our tight-fisted competition on hoardings and the sides of trolleys, on the sandwich board that Oboy might be induced to wear. Firmly established as a going concern, Kaplan’s would no longer be prey to anyone’s meddling. A certain once necessary evil—which you will notice that I’m not naming names—wouldn’t be necessary anymore. In its final phase of reorganization, the shop would be proof against even my papa’s excesses; this thanks to the balanced judgment and shrewd entrepreneurial instincts of his son. What with the coming war in Europe, we would make money hand over tochis—war, as I’d always been told, being good for trade.
And when Naomi, God bless her convex pupik, came back from St. Louis to find me an authentic mensch, when she saw how I’d become the bulwark of a reunited family, a breathing testimonial to the recovered pride and sagacity of the Kaplan men, we would be married. So what if we were next to being next of kin. Who’s superstitious? If our son—I’d just realized that I wanted a son—if he should happen to be born with two heads, then so be it, we’d give him two names: Pete and Repeat, for instance; or Lucifer and Michael, like the bad and good angels, so the kid could have it both ways.
Again I congratulated myself on the inspired turn my thoughts were taking. Not pipe dreams but capable and mature deliberations, they were worthy of one whose feet were planted securely on the ground. Only to think such thoughts was to acquire weight and substance. My head overripe with momentous ideas, I had to cup my chin in my hands, propping my elbows on the blotter-topped counter for support. We would have a grand reopening complete with tricolor banners and balloons, a raffle in which customers would win what we couldn’t otherwise give away. There would be shnaps and sponge cake like at a bar mitzvah, a rabbi to smash a bottle over the till—or so I was imagining when the door chimes pealed and a customer sauntered in.
He was a whip-thin old darkie with a courtly but weathered face beneath a broad-brimmed hat, wearing a dappled gray suit the texture of molting plumage. Tucked under his arm was a brown paper parcel that he carried with an exaggerated importance. I started to tell him we were closed, can’t you read?, when I remembered that the notice had been torn from the window. I looked apprehensively over his shoulder, expecting maybe a signal from Oboy—patrolmen had seen the old man enter and trouble was on the way. At the same time, I figured, where was the problem? Just as soon as this character realized I wasn’t my father, he would make his excuses and turn on his heel. It was the song and dance I recalled so well from that afternoon of the miscarried funeral.
But this one must have seen something other than my old, not-so-solid self; it was apparent already how I had changed. Or why else would he have politely doffed his hat, revealing a billow of hair like a scouring pad, and smiled a regular gates of horn? Having placed his parcel on the counter, he’d begun to unfasten a bow of shaggy twine.
Grateful as I was for the authority he’d seen fit to invest in my person, I was sorry to have to inform him—clearing my throat with a crowing noise that surprised us both—that he should save his energy.
“We’re a strictly retail enterprise here at Kaplan’s,” I told him, trying on the argot for size, satisfied that it wasn’t such a bad fit. “Cash’n carry’s the long and the short of it, policy of the new management. Sorry uncle, no loans today.”
I happened to notice that the brown wrapping paper that the old-timer continued to unfurl contained a book, The Travels of Marco Polo no less, its pages gilt-edged like Scriptures, its title embossed in copper on a dun-colored kid binding with a patina-green metal hasp.
Myself, I wasn’t sure where in creation Marco Polo had traveled, but just looking at the book was enough to give you ideas. I could picture him at some juncture in his wanderings, about to cross a broad river where archers were poised for his protection on the forked tongues of dragons. I saw the trunks spilling silks and goblets and devil’s inventions, the camels champing intelligently in their golden reins. I saw the whole caravan shimmering miragelike as it boarded a paddle-wheeled ark several parasangs long. Buff-skinned ladies were chained to their litters, their jeweled navels shining through lounge pajamas like beacons through fog. Sadly they played on their dulcimers and slide trombones.
“This here a rare edition,” the old gent was saying, having totally ignored my caveat. His voice had a soothing bass resonance and his breath, as he leaned toward me over the counter, exuded a pleasant fragrance of gingery rosé. “It were salvage by my pappy from the wreck a the steamboat Sultana, long with sixty-leven white folk an a sho’t ton a hemp. This uz famous, the city have ereck a stone which you can read it bout my pappy Mistah Hezeki Sledge. Well suh, the time have come when the book turn around an hexchange the compliment. What it done am it have save his natchl life. See that, tha’s a bullet hole.”
I was beginning to feel certain mutinous stirrings, unbusinesslike palpitations in the area of my chest. It was a kind of excitement that threatened to undermine the reputation for hard-headed professionalism I hoped shortly to enjoy. I nodded like now I’d heard everything.
“Un-hunh, and I’m the Rabbi Shmelke of Pshishke.”
This tripped the old guy up, if only momentarily. During that lull I came to understand how, in business, your left hand might take liberties that the right need not know about.
As the old-timer began tentatively to resume his pitch, I slowly unfolded my arms. I sent the fingers of my left hand spidering down the counter toward a booklet of unstubbed pawn tickets. This, along with the rubber stamp and ink pad, I began to gather toward me. At the same time, with my right hand I punched a cash register key, the drawer springing open with a silvery brrrng. Looking idly in the till, the way you’d peer into a sack to see what was for lunch, I interrupted the old guy to offer him two bits.
His venerable head recoiled as if from the impact of such an insulting offer. “You be pull my leg or what!” he exclaimed. “I have you ta know this are a priceless hairloom, got gre-e-e-at sentimental valyah!”
As his frown intensified, his lower lip extended until it drooped over his chin like a sock in a wringer. “I is mos disappointed,” he repined. “Course, in time like these whachacall-em hard time which it ain’t never been no soff time down on Beale…” He inhaled as if to steady himself for the sacrifice he was called on to make, then presented his impressive set of ivories again.
“Time like these, I b’lieve I can see my way ta let y’all have this precious volume fo the picayune price a, shall we say, fi dollah.”
My jaw dropped over the unnegotiable distance between five dollars and twenty-five cents. Any self-respecting merchandiser would have given the old bluffer the bum’s rush out the door. But I told myself that this type of sparring would stand me in good stead for subsequent transactions—I needed the practice. Without further hesitation I came back with a compromise.
“A buck,” I said, “take it or leave it.”
Now he would know for future reference, and put the word out on the street, that Harry Kaplan was nobody’s fool. He had the gift of driving a hard bargain; he had the horse sense. I dipped into the till where the jeweler’s glass lay among loose change, and pushed back my specs to stick the lens in my eye. Now I wanted the visor, the rubber thumb, all the paraphernalia my papa had used to complete the illusion that he was what he pretended to be. The props made the man—this might have been true in my father’s case, though in my own I was more convinced by the minute that I was born for this job.
Making a show of examining the old man’s property more closely, however, I made the mistake of actually examining it more closely. Through the lens I couldn’t help but observe certain features I’d overlooked at first glance.
“Two dollah fitty cent,” countered the old-timer, having chosen this moment to revise his expectations. But I was too absorbed in my scrutiny of his book to be distracted.
What I saw, when I’d unclasped and parted the covers, were crumbling mud-brown pages, water-stained and undulant as the lip of a clamshell. I saw how the print was aged to unreadability, the washed-out maps and drawings bled to apparition. I saw a pear-shaped hole several hundred pages deep, which I thought was less likely the work of a bullet than a worm.
I almost groaned aloud at how generous the bid of an entire buck now seemed. There was of course nothing for it but to retract my extravagant offer, the question being how to do it with a measure of diplomacy. Not that this crafty old codger, who was currently conceding unprompted to a buck seventy-five, deserved any special treatment. But I wouldn’t want him to accuse me of violating the particulars of haggling, especially on this inaugural occasion. It wouldn’t do that I should be taken for an amateur.
In an effort to override the change of heart my face must have betrayed, the old man had made his move. Already he was extending a shell-pink palm to receive his loan. A little flustered but still determined to back out of the transaction, I searched my mind for a way to get rid of him. Then I had an idea. Affably reaching over the counter, I took hold of his parchment-dry hand and gave it a hearty shake.
“Fine, fine,” I assured him in response to an inquiry that neither of us had heard him make. “Always nice to see you, fairly makes my day. Next time bring the wife. And by the way, have you had a chance to read this? Well, so long. Ver farblondjet. Abyssinia.”
My intention was that, confounded by my erratic behavior, the customer would grab up his property and beat a hasty retreat. For a few seconds the old man did seem to be genuinely taken aback, but instead of fleeing the shop, he continued to stand his ground. He studied my face, evidently undecided as to whether I was pulling a fast one or just plain nuts. In the end, whatever his conclusion, he was suddenly all teeth again, returning my handshake so vigorously that the jeweler’s loupe fell from my eye.
Then it was my turn to grow anxious, wanting to retrieve my fingers from the grubby warmth of his tenacious grip. No fooling, I wanted my hand back. But the old man hung on so tightly that you’d have thought he had hold of a leprechaun. He kept pumping my arm like he expected me to start spitting shekels.
“Young man,” he announced, as together we seemed to be shaking on the deal, “it done look like you’n me is in bidness.”
Later that afternoon I took in a battered bugle. It wasn’t much, but the hepcat character who brought it in really handed me a laugh. He told me that he’d shaken it down, along with a peck of persimmons, from a tree where an angel was napping in Handy Park. This I recorded dutifully, entering the accounts on cardboard shirtfronts in place of the ledgers I planned to buy.
After the bugle I took in a lump of rusty metal that could have been a Cracker Jack prize, though the luckless veteran who pawned it guaranteed it was none other than the “Congregational Legion of Honor, awarded for bravery above and beyond the call of the wild.” I was skeptical until he offered to throw in, as a bonus, Baby Face Nelson’s trigger finger in a jar of alcohol. Then I paid a little more than face value for a pair of pennies, pinched (according to my customer) from the eyes of a famous dead hoofer. He boasted that he’d used them thereafter for the taps on his own dancing shoes.
I took in a tambourine made from a lynching victim’s hide, a locket containing a curl of Shirley Temple’s hair, some gold-capped molars that Casey Jones had lost in a brawl. I took in a hand-carved walking stick with its crook whittled into the shape of a serpent’s head. The draggle-footed party didn’t say so, but I thought it might have passed for the rod that Moses used to perform his magic tricks. Maybe this was stretching it, but that’s what it put me in mind of—the magic rod the bashful prophet sometimes borrowed from his brother Aaron, the talkative one.