The Umbrella Man and Other Stories Read online

  Mrs. Bixby picked up the envelope that was still lying in the box. She opened it and pulled out the Colonel’s letter:

  I once heard you saying you were fond of mink so I got you this. I’m told it’s a good one. Please accept it with my sincere good wishes as a parting gift. For my own personal reasons I shall not be able to see you anymore. Good-bye and good luck.

  Well!

  Imagine that!

  Right out of the blue, just when she was feeling so happy.

  No more Colonel.

  What a dreadful shock.

  She would miss him enormously.

  Slowly, Mrs. Bixby began stroking the lovely soft black fur of the coat.

  What you lose on the swings you get back on the roundabouts.

  She smiled and folded the letter, meaning to tear it up and throw it out of the window, but in folding it she noticed that there was something written on the other side:

  P.S. Just tell them that nice generous aunt of yours gave it to you for Christmas.

  Mrs. Bixby’s mouth, at that moment stretched wide in a silky smile, snapped back like a piece of elastic.

  “The man must be mad!” she cried. “Aunt Maude doesn’t have that sort of money. She couldn’t possibly give me this.”

  But if Aunt Maude didn’t give it to her, then who did?

  Oh God! In the excitement of finding the coat and trying it on, she had completely overlooked this vital aspect.

  In a couple of hours she would be in New York. Ten minutes after that she would be home, and the husband would be there to greet her; and even a man like Cyril, dwelling as he did in a dark phlegmy world of root canals, bicuspids, and caries, would start asking a few questions if his wife suddenly waltzed in from a weekend wearing a six-thousand-dollar mink coat.

  You know what I think, she told herself. I think that goddamn Colonel has done this on purpose just to torture me. He knew perfectly well Aunt Maude didn’t have enough money to buy this. He knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it.

  But the thought of parting with it now was more than Mrs. Bixby could bear.

  “I’ve got to have this coat!” she said aloud. “I’ve got to have this coat! I’ve got to have this coat!”

  Very well, my dear. You shall have the coat. But don’t panic. Sit still and keep calm and start thinking. You’re a clever girl, aren’t you? You’ve fooled him before. The man never has been able to see much further than the end of his own probe, you know that. So just sit absolutely still and think. There’s lots of time.

  Two and a half hours later, Mrs. Bixby stepped off the train at Pennsylvania Station and walked quietly to the exit. She was wearing her old red coat again now and carrying the cardboard box in her arms. She signalled for a taxi.

  “Driver,” she said, “would you know of a pawnbroker that’s still open around here?”

  The man behind the wheel raised his brows and looked back at her, amused.

  “Plenty along Sixth Avenue,” he answered.

  “Stop at the first one you see, then, will you please?” She got in and was driven away.

  Soon the taxi pulled up outside a shop that had three brass balls hanging over the entrance.

  “Wait for me, please,” Mrs. Bixby said to the driver, and she got out of the taxi and entered the shop.

  There was an enormous cat crouching on the counter eating fishheads out of a white saucer. The animal looked up at Mrs. Bixby with bright yellow eyes, then looked away again and went on eating. Mrs. Bixby stood by the counter, as far away from the cat as possible, waiting for someone to come, staring at the watches, the shoe buckles, the enamel brooches, the old binoculars, the broken spectacles, the false teeth. Why did they always pawn their teeth, she wondered.

  “Yes?” the proprietor said, emerging from a dark place in the back of the shop.

  “Oh, good evening,” Mrs. Bixby said. She began to untie the string around the box. The man went up to the cat and started stroking it along the top of its back, and the cat went on eating the fishheads.

  “Isn’t it silly of me?” Mrs. Bixby said. “I’ve gone and lost my pocket book, and this being Saturday, the banks are all closed until Monday and I’ve simply got to have some money for the weekend. This is quite a valuable coat, but I’m not asking much. I only want to borrow enough on it to tide me over till Monday. Then I’ll come back and redeem it.”

  The man waited, and said nothing. But when she pulled out the mink and allowed the beautiful thick fur to fall over the counter, his eyebrows went up and he drew his hand away from the cat and came over to look at it. He picked it up and held it out in front of him.

  “If only I had a watch on me or a ring,” Mrs. Bixby said, “I’d give you that instead. But the fact is I don’t have a thing with me other than this coat.” She spread out her fingers for him to see.

  “It looks new,” the man said, fondling the soft fur.

  “Oh yes, it is. But, as I said, I only want to borrow enough to tide me over till Monday. How about fifty dollars?”

  “I’ll loan you fifty dollars.”

  “It’s worth a hundred times more than that, but I know you’ll take good care of it until I return.”

  The man went over to a drawer and fetched a ticket and placed it on the counter. The ticket looked like one of those labels you tie on to the handle of your suitcase, the same shape and size exactly, and the same stiff brownish paper. But it was perforated across the middle so that you could tear it in two, and both halves were identical.

  “Name?” he asked.

  “Leave that out. And the address.”

  She saw the man pause, and she saw the nib of the pen hovering over the dotted line, waiting.

  “You don’t have to put the name and address, do you?”

  The man shrugged and shook his head and the pen nib moved on down to the next line.

  “It’s just that I’d rather not,” Mrs. Bixby said. “It’s purely personal.”

  “You’d better not lose this ticket, then.”

  “I won’t lose it.”

  “You realize that anyone who gets hold of it can come in and claim the article?”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Simply on the number.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What do you want me to put for a description?”

  “No description either, thank you. It’s not necessary. Just put the amount I’m borrowing.”

  The pen nib hesitated again, hovering over the dotted line beside the word ARTICLE.

  “I think you ought to put a description. A description is always a help if you want to sell the ticket. You never know, you might want to sell it sometime.”

  “I don’t want to sell it.”

  “You might have to. Lots of people do.”

  “Look,” Mrs. Bixby said. “I’m not broke, if that’s what you mean. I simply lost my purse. Don’t you understand?”

  “You have it your own way then,” the man said. “It’s your coat.”

  At this point an unpleasant thought struck Mrs. Bixby. “Tell me something,” she said. “If I don’t have a description on my ticket, how can I be sure you’ll give me back the coat and not something else when I return?”

  “It goes in the books.”

  “But all I’ve got is a number. So actually you could hand me any old thing you wanted, isn’t that so?”

  “Do you want a description or don’t you?” the man asked.

  “No,” she said. “I trust you.”

  The man wrote “fifty dollars” opposite the word VALUE on both sections of the ticket, then he tore it in half along the perforations and slid the lower portion across the counter. He took a wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted five ten-dollar bills. “The interest is three per cent a month,” he said.

  “Yes, all right. And thank you. You’ll take good care of it, won’t you?”

  The man nodded but said nothing.

  “Shall I put it back in the box for you?”

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