The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [61]
She stared at him blankly. She couldn’t ask him to lend her the money now because she would be under obligation to him. Instead she said quickly, “I just wanted to be sure you would save my job.”
“’Tis yours, Missie, whenever you’re ready to come back,” he said, pressing her hands between his big ones. He held back the velvet curtain and she slipped from the saloon and hurried along Delancey Street, her eyes on the dirty sidewalk and her mind on her problems.
There was a light in the shop window on the corner of Orchard and Rivington. She glanced inside at the shelves stocked with a hodgepodge of goods, each with a little pink ticket affixed to it, and at the shadowy figure of a man behind the brass grille. Zev Abramski, the pawnbroker, she remembered O’Hara telling her. “He keeps the Lower East side going … he’ll lend twenty cents till Friday for your husband’s Sunday shirt.”
Missie peered in the window for a while, thinking, and then she turned and ran around the corner, back to the room where Sofia lay dead with a cardboard valise full of jewels under her bed.
Zev Abramski was not a solitary man by choice, but for many reasons. He was twenty-five years old, short with a slender build and a pale complexion. His thick black hair was combed straight back, he had sensitive brown eyes, a firm mouth, and the long-fingered hands of a musician. He was extremely fastidious: He went twice a week to the public baths and everyday he wore a fresh white shirt laundered free by a Chinese woman on Mott Street, who secretly used his pawnshop to finance her gambling at mah-jongg. Even on the hottest days Zev wore a sober blue tie because in his mind it established a psychological barrier between him and the ragged, shirt-sleeved populace who came to him to borrow money on their pathetic possessions.
He lived alone in two dusty rooms behind his shop, amid bits and pieces of furniture left unclaimed by their previous owners. The only thing he had ever bought was a lovely old piano that filled one room, and even that wasn’t new. It came from a secondhand shop on Grand Avenue and it had taken him four years of weekly installments to pay for it. He had taught himself to play and though he was no maestro, it pleased him. Music, and the books piled in every corner and on every chair and table, filled the emptiness of his life when at nine-thirty every night excepting the Sabbath he turned the sign from “Open” to “Closed” and locked his shop for the night.
Zev had lived on the corner of Orchard and Rivington for thirteen of his twenty-five years, yet though he was well known in the neighborhood, where almost everyone had been his customer, he could not call any one of them his friend. He told himself it was because of the nature of his business, but he knew that wasn’t true. He was afraid of friendship.
Every night, except Friday when he went to temple, he would walk down Delancey to Ratner’s restaurant, where he would eat a bowl of mushroom and barley soup and kasha varnishkes, his favorite dish of bulgur wheat and noodles. Then he would walk back again, closing the door that led to his shop and to reality, and run his fingers across the ivory keys and dream. The dreams always began with his family. On the good nights they turned into the fantasies of what his life might have been, but more often than not, they simply retraced the story of his life.
The music flowed softly from his fingers as he summoned up the dim memories of his early childhood in the small shtetl on Russia’s northern coast. When he was a child, summers had been green and sunny and he had run free in the tall, sharp forest grass, and winters had been wild and snowy and his feet had slid from under him as he had walked with his father across the frozen river. But no matter how cold it was, he was always warm and cozy in his padded coat with the little fur chapka covering his ears and muffling the sounds of the horse-drawn sleighs. He remembered clutching his mother’s hand,