The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant

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