Then the big shots came and the chapel cheered up. These were the officials from the condominium: the sales manager, Joe Colper; Shirley Fanon, the corporation’s lawyer; Sid Harris, the president himself. They had come together, three wide men in beautiful business suits and sharp shoes. They wore blocky paper yarmulkes which stood high on their heads and somehow gave them the appearance of cantors. They moved vigorous as a backfield in some subtle choreographed way that made it impossible to tell which was the leader. They came down the center aisle and took up positions at the coffin: Colper at the head, Fanon at the foot and Harris in the middle. They looked down on his father like fairies at cribside, and for a moment Marshall thought they would sing. No one approached them, though their celebrity had sparked something in the room, even among his father’s old friends. Even Preminger was excited. One of the neighbors told him who they were, but by then he knew; he’d heard his comforters’ murmurs, picked up their pleased, congratulatory whispers. “Wasn’t that nice?” one said, and his friend had answered, “Gentlemen.” It was a word others used too, the presence of the three bringing it out almost reflexively. Preminger wasn’t sold yet—he resented this queer gratitude, ubiquitous as pollen—but then they were upon him and he understood.
“Sid Harris,” Sid Harris said, and shoved a hard hand at him. “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you,” Preminger said, returning the pressure as best he could.
Harris frowned disapprovingly. “Not under these circumstances,” he said and dropped Preminger’s hand. “My associates,” he said, naming them.
“Sorry for your trouble,” Colper said.
“Condolences,” said Shirley Fanon and winked.
“Ditto, ditto. We’re all shook,” Harris said. “These things happen. What can I say? Terrible shock, et cetera, et cetera. Look, Marshall—it’s Marshall, right?—I’m not small-timing Pop’s death. He was a gentleman. Mike’s dead, I’m alive, you got me? Life goes on. You know what my rabbi says? ‘Fuck death. Live as if it don’t exist because it does.’”
“That’s some rabbi,” Preminger said.
“You’d love him. The Miracle Rabbi of the Chicago Condominiums. Sleeps in a little sukkah behind the swimming pool with the inner tubes, water toys and chlorine. Got himself a nice little setup in the filtration butke with the towels and the first-aid kit. What the fuck am I talking about? Fanon, you know?” Shirley Fanon shrugged. “Joe Colper?”
“What’s that, Boss?”
“What’s on my mind?”
“I just got here, Boss,” Colper said.
“Must be my grief. Hangs on like a summer cold.” He shook his head. “Got to pull myself together. Fanon, help me up off the floor. Colper, take one arm. Marshall, kid, grab another.” He sat down at the front of the chief mourners’ bench and patted it, inviting Preminger to join him. When he held back, the other two moved in, hustling him toward Harris.
“Hey,” he protested, “what is this? This is a memorial chapel. Will you have some respect?” Even to him it sounded as if he were offering them refreshment.
“Fellows, the game’s up,” Harris said. “He knows who we are.”
“The Jewish Mafia,” Shirley Fanon said.
“The Kosher Nostra,” said Joe Colper.
Preminger looked around desperately. They weren’t bothering to keep their voices down. His father’s old friends and the people from the condominium were taking it all in. Incredibly, they seemed to approve. He appealed to one man who earlier had claimed to have been very close to his father. The man shrugged. “The owners are clowns,” he said.
“Lehrman’s got our number,” Harris said. “Listen to Lehrman.”
“They’re tummlers.”
“A barrel of monkeys?” Harris asked.
“Sure,” Lehrman said, “you ought to be on the stage.”
“We’re better off,” Harris, Fanon and Colper all said together.
“Come on,” Preminger said, “what right have you got to behave like this? You don’t know me. You think this shit is charming? That nerve and craziness makes you lovable? What an incredible slant you three have on yourselves. I haven’t been in my father’s life for years, but that’s him dead up there. He grew long hair and bought new clothes and I didn’t know about it. We told each other old stuff on the long distance and sent each other shirts on our birthdays. He changed his furniture and went Swedish modern and I sat like a schmuck in a rooming house and lived like a recessive gene, but—”
“That’s right,” Harris said cheerfully, “let it all out. Cry.”
“Go to hell,” Preminger said.
“But?” Shirley Fanon reminded him.
“But it’s a death. I’m not going to stand by while you turn it into the cheap heroics of personality.” He stared at Harris. “Are you married?” he asked.
“Who ain’t married?”
Preminger closed his eyes. “Your wife is growing cancer,” he said. “She’s a cancer garden. I give her eight months.”
“Hey, that’s pretty outrageous,” one of the neighbors said.
“Name of the game,” Preminger said calmly. “That’s what this gangster is up to. It’s grandstanding from Rod Steiger pictures, it’s ethnic crap art.”
“Go, go,” Harris said.
“Go, go screw yourself.” He turned to the people from the condominium who had pressed forward to hear. “What, you think it’s hard? This kind of talk? You think it’s hard to do? It’s easy. It makes itself up as you go along. You think it’s conversation? It’s dialogue. Conversation is hard. I don’t do conversation. Like him”—he jerked his thumb toward Harris—“I don’t even feel much of this.”
“Please,” Harris said, rising, “please, neighbors, give us some room. The man’s right. Say your last goodbyes to Phil while I apologize to his son.” They drifted off, dissolving like extras in movies told to move on by a cop. He sat down wearily and turned to Preminger. “Will you take back what you said about my wife?” he asked softly.
“Oh, please,” Preminger said.
“Will you take back what you said about my wife? She ain’t in it.”
“All right,” Preminger told him, sitting down. “I take it back.”
“You hit the nail on the head,” Harris said. “Didn’t he hit the nail on the head, Joe? Shirley, don’t you think he…Gee, there I go again. But you know something? I’m sick and tired of showing off for these people. The bastards ain’t ever satisfied. I put in a shuffleboard, a pool, a solarium. I gave them a party room. They wanted a sauna and I got it for them. They walk around with my hot splinters in their ass. There’s a master antenna on the roof you can pull in Milwaukee it looks like a picture in National Geographic. Energy, energy—they worship it in other people. Momzers. And me, I’ve got no character. I give ’em what they want. I’m sorry I leaned on you.”
“We were both at fault.”
Harris sighed. “I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Forget it.”
“No. There’s such a thing as a coffin courtesy. I’m a grown man. I haven’t even said basic stuff like if there’s anything I can do, anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Thank you,” Preminger said, “it’s kind of you to offer, but really there’s nothing.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” Harris said. “Will you pray with me?” he asked suddenly.
“Pray?” Startled, Marshall started to rise but Harris restrained him.
“No, no,” he said, “We don’t have to get on our knees. We’ll do it right here on the bench. Everything dignified and comfortable, everything easy.”
“Hey, listen—”
“Hey, listen,” Harris prayed. “Your servants may not always understand Your timing, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Sometimes it might seem unfortunate, even perverse. Was there a real need, for example, to take Philly Preminger, a guy in the prime? How old could the man have been? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? With penicillin and wonder drugs that’s a kid, a
babe. Was there any call to strike down such a guy? You, who gave him sleek hair, who grew his sideburns and encouraged his mustache, who blessed him with taste in shirts, shoes, bellbottoms and turtlenecks, you couldn’t also have given him a stronger heart? Why did you make the chosen people so frail, oh God, give them Achilles heels in their chromosomes, set them up as patsies for cholesterol and Buerger’s disease, hit them with bad circulation and a sweet tooth for lox? You could have made us hard blond goyim, but no, not You.”
“Look here—”
“Look here, oh Lord,” Harris prayed, “the bereaved kid here wants to know. Didn’t you owe his daddy the courtesy of a tiny warning attack, a mild stroke, say, just enough to cut down on the grease and kiss off the cigarettes? Here’s a man not sixty years old and retired three years and in his condominium it couldn’t be two—I can get the exact figures for You when I get back to the office—a guy who put his deposit down months before we dug the first spadeful for the foundation, and got his apartment fixed up nice, just the way he wanted it, proud as a bride when the deliveries came, the American of Martinsville, the Swedish of Malmö, who made new friends, the life of the party poolside, a cynosure of the sauna and a gift to the dollies, the widows of Chicago’s North Side—who’ll have plenty to say to You themselves, I’ll bet, once their eyes are dry and they make sense of what’s hit them—and You knock him down like a tenpin, You make him like a difficult spare. Lead kindly light, amen.” He turned, beaming, to Preminger. “Gimme that old time religion,” he said. “We got business. You got the will, Shirley?”
The lawyer patted his breast pocket.
“You were my father’s lawyer?”
Fanon patted it a second time.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Harris said. He winked at Preminger. “That’s how he wins his cases. The juries eat it up.”
Fanon reached inside his jacket, pulled out a legal document bound in blue paper. Unfolding it, he took out his glasses, put them on and began to move his lips rapidly, making no sound. “The reading of the will,” Joe Colper whispered. Fanon wet his thumb and flipped the page, continuing to read to himself. He looked like a man davening, and it seemed the most orthodox thing that had happened that evening.
When Fanon finished, he folded the paper and placed it back inside his jacket pocket.
“Well?” Harris said.
“The boy gets the condominium,” Fanon said.
“Airtight?”
“Like a coffee can.”
“Will it stand up in court?”
“Like a little soldier.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else.”
“Let me see that,” Marshall said.
The lawyer handed the will over to him. It was very short, a page and a half and most of that merely concerned with authenticating itself. Marshall could see that Fanon was right. He got the condominium and the furnishings. It was his father’s signature. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What about the rest of the estate?”
“There isn’t any rest of the estate.”
“Well, there must be. Insurance policies, stocks. My father was very active in the market.”
They looked at him and smiled. “Nope. He cashed his policies. He sold his stocks.”
“I figured about a hundred twenty-five thousand. I was being conservative.”
Joe Colper put his arm on Preminger’s shoulder. “The apartment was forty-five thou. He paid cash. The furnishings must have cost another twenty.”
“The man hadn’t worked for three years,” Fanon said. “Say his food and incidentals cost him ten a year. He had some tastes, your old man. That’s ninety-five.”
“I figured one hundred twenty-five thousand. That still leaves thirty thousand.”
Colper and Fanon shrugged. “Tell him,” Harris said, “about maintenance.”
“Maintenance?”
“That’s the thing sticks in their throat,” Colper said.
“He bought a condominium from us,” Fanon said. “Where does it say we sold him an elevator?”
“A carpeted lobby,” Colper said.
“Game rooms, party rooms, a heated pool, central air conditioning,” Fanon said.
“These are ‘extras,’ ” Colper told him.
“Maintenance is three hundred a month,” Fanon said.
“Okay,” said Harris, “here’s the story. I hate to trouble you with details at a terrible time like this, but we’ve got to face facts. Time and the hour runs through the roughest day. He was behind in the maintenance when he passed. He was broke. I never saw such a guy for spending dough. And he was so cautious when I first knew him. Prudent. Wouldn’t you say prudent, Shirley?”
“Very prudent.”
“But toward the last—well, toward the last he spent and spent. Call me a cab, keep the change.”
“A real sport,” Colper said.
“There was drunken sailor in him.”
Marshall, who melted when he heard a lowdown, melted. It was as if they’d been up all night together. He felt grotty, intimate, like a man with a shirttail loose at a poker table. “I sound terrible,” he said. “I’m not greedy. I’m not a greedy person. I didn’t have expectations, I never lived as if I was coming into dough. You sprung this will on me. Naturally I’m surprised.”
“Sure,” Harris said, “naturally you’re surprised. You get a shot like this you fall back on your instincts. Inside every fat man there’s a wolf, there’s a buzzard, there’s a chicken hawk.”
“That’s human nature,” Joe Colper said.
“It’s why logic was invented,” his father’s lawyer said, “to tame surprise and make the world consecutive.”
“We understand your…lapse,” Harris said, “Shit, sonny—”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
“Happy birthday. Shit, sonny, I’m your uncle, I like you. Come home and I’ll take you to the ball game and get you a hot dog. Listen, there isn’t a single one of us who wouldn’t give his eyeteeth to behave like you just did. We’re not grand characters, we ain’t angelfaces. Petty hits us where we live. Let go, relax. What a kick it would be to let the other guy pick up the check in a restaurant! Keep your hands in your pockets, it’s cold out. Sit still. What are you reaching around like a fucking contortionist to pay the other guy’s toll at the bridge? I’ll give you a tip: don’t tip. You know the guy who’s got it made? The creep in the movies who plays up to the uncle because he thinks there might be an extra buck in the till for him when the old bastard croaks. So don’t apologize to us for your character. When Counselor Fanon laid the will on you and you gave us that ‘Let me see that’ and that ‘What about the rest of the estate?’ I was proud of you. Did you see him, Joe? Shirley? Whining like a baby and his old man dead in the coffin not fifteen feet away.”
“Takes guts,” Colper said.
“I think we have a young man here who’s no hypocrite,” Shirley Fanon said.
“I’m not listening to this,” Marshall said, and fled to the front where his father’s coffin lay open. He looked inside; he might have been watching the sea from the deck of a ship.
“Gee,” Harris said, coming up beside him and looking down too, “that’s some tan.”
“The pool,” Fanon said.
“Maybe the pool, maybe the solarium,” Colper said.
“Anyway, the little extras that maintenance pays for,” Fanon said. “We’ll split the difference. He took advantage of all of them. He lived way up on the fifteenth floor and rode shit out of the elevator.”
“What do you want?” Marshall asked them.
“We didn’t hound him,” Harris said. “Don’t look at me reproachfully. That man lays there dead of his own accord. Voices weren’t raised. Nobody nagged him, nobody dunned. No threats were made, we never served a summons. Two times, maybe three, the gentleman’s letter went out over my signature, last names and misters.”
“ ‘We feel that you may have overlooked…’ ” Fanon said. “ ‘If yo
u have already remitted, kindly disregard…’ ”
“Like a four flush was a piece of amnesia,” Colper said.
“Like he was an absent-minded professor.”
“We knew he was strapped,” Fanon said. “That every day the furniture truck came.”
“He owed seven months’ maintenance,” Harris said. “Two thousand one hundred dollars. But who’s counting at a time like this?”
“In a week it’ll be eight months,” Fanon said.
“Let’s walk away from the coffin, please,” Harris said. He put his hand on Marshall’s sleeve. “Appreciate my position, Mr. Preminger. Real estate’s involved here. Titles and certificates. A condominium’s a delicate thing. Speaking statutorily. Shirley’s the legal eagle. Explain to him, Shirl.”
Fanon told Preminger that though he would probably get clear title to the place, the will would have to be probated. He named the various steps in the procedure. It could take anywhere from nine months to a year. In the meanwhile the maintenance—which by law he wasn’t required to pay until he held clear title—would continue to build up. He could owe them almost six thousand dollars before the condominium was his.
“I’ll sell it. I’ll put it on the market,” Preminger said.
“Well, you can’t do that until the will’s been probated.”
“I’ll sublet.”
“You’d need dispensation from the court. The dockets are logjammed. Anyway, the money would have to go into escrow. You’d still be responsible for the three hundred every month.”
Searches & Seizures Page 24
