Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

It was one of his four or five lectures, and out of habit he still tried to keep the lists up to date, though with the falling off of demand and his all but official retirement — his agency had probably dropped him from its rolls; he didn’t know — his interest in his lists had become academic. Perhaps he was waiting for someone to put these questions to him seriously, an eventuality he reckoned might take place just after the powerful magician appeared. At any rate, he no longer actively pursued replacements, brooding uneasily about them like someone with a name or forgotten word on the tip of his tongue, and there was something anachronistic about some of his lists. He had no substitute, for example, for the “fun person” he would prefer to emergency-land on a jet with — Baby Jane Holzer.

He received the news by telephone. This was what he kept it for, he supposed: incoming and outgoing emergencies. (And also for the correct time and temperature, and to call movie houses to find out when the last feature went on.) He didn’t recognize the man’s voice, only its general tone: gentle but with a certain imperfectly concealed excitement. The way his name might be pronounced by a process server. The man used his first name — Marshall — and told him his father had died.

He flew across the country to Chicago. No fun person sat beside him in the plane, but he found the jet an appropriate and even dignified way to go to a funeral. Rather than urgency and speed he had an impression of stately motion, and from somewhere outside himself, outside perhaps even the plane, he saw himself in profile, his seat upright, his hands forward in his lap, the black seat belt which he kept fastened a decorous sash of mourning. Soberly he decided to purchase a drink and gravely ordered, impersonally as he could, from the passing stewardess.

The sight of the clouds and of a sky as gray as the sea was a fitting approximation of death’s mood in him. He was comforted by the serious presence of businessmen. They would have wills (he himself was an intestate heart patient), irrevocable trusts, safe-deposit boxes, ledgers in which — he imagined tiny writing — they had listed their holdings, a loving, responsible inventory written with Parker pens of their stocks and bonds, the occasional flier (Canadian mining stocks, small backwoods railroads), posthumous earnests of their humor which leavened their blue-chip probity. He supposed many of them to be lawyers, and it was this notion that brought his first forceful recognition that he was an heir. Strangely, there seemed nothing greedy in this awareness. If anything, it made his father’s death even more solemn, as if the transfer of property were a signal of the gravest succession, a rite like a twenty-first birthday — he was thirty-seven but something about his life (he was a schoolboy) had kept him childish, driven him further and further into kidhood — or a sad ceremony of the state. It was just that formal and historical. He would be a wise steward. This occurred to him with the stern idealism of a pledge, an oath of office.

He asked the stewardess for pencil and paper, and when she brought them he lowered the tray table on the seat in front of him and sketched his expectations as a sentimental act, a eulogy to his father. Working with figures that were at least fifteen years old (and at that based on things he’d overheard, occasional glimpses of bankbooks, his recollection of the high insurance premiums his father paid, scraps of memory of the man’s moods, the odd time or two he’d boasted of holding a stock that had split two or three for one), he put together an estimate of his inheritance — perhaps one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. He knew there was a sixty-thousand-dollar exemption but was not certain it applied to sons. What the death duties might be he had no idea, but he wished to be conservative — this would be the first token of the piety of that wise stewardship — and allowed himself an extravagant conservatism. Say the government took half; say funeral expenses and outstanding debts came to another ten thousand dollars. He would have about fifty thousand. It was no fortune, but he was proud of his father. It was more by several hundred percent than he himself could have left. He wept for his father and himself.

At O’Hare his mood changed. There was no one to meet him (who could have? he was an only child, his father’s brothers were dead; his dad’s sister, a chronic arthritic, lived in a wheelchair in Brooklyn; other than himself and a handful of eastern cousins on his mother’s side no one survived), and he saw how fatuous he had been on the plane, betrayed by the air that held him up, the jet’s great speed, his vulnerability just then to the seeming perfection of the people who had surrounded him. If they were lawyers why weren’t they traveling in first class? He was thankful he hadn’t struck up conversations with them and asked them his questions about death taxes, or offered, as he had been almost prepared to do, to hire them on the spot.

He got into a cab. The driver didn’t — or pretended he didn’t — know the way. “Does Kedzie cut through that far north? I don’t know if Kedzie cuts through that far north.” And so they spent time not on expressways or even main streets, but in neighborhoods, narrow one-way streets, cruising unfamiliar sections of the city he had once lived in, passing discrete yellow brick bungalows — brick everywhere, the brick interests powerful in Chicago, brick bullies, you couldn’t put up a wooden garage — in the ethnic western edges of the city. Am I being taken for a ride, he wondered, staring gloomily from the driver’s neck to the vicious meter. Six dollars and forty-five cents and no sight of land, no birds or green jetsam. Alarmed, he began a crazy, uneasy monologue, throwing out street names for the cabby’s benefit, making up facts, cluing him in that he was no stranger here.

“Cabanne. In the old days this was the red-light district. It was outside the city limits and Big Bill Thompson couldn’t do a thing about it. That’s interesting about Big Bill. You’d think from his name he was a giant or something. Actually he stood only a little over five and a half feet. They called him that because the smallest banknote he carried was a hundred-dollar bill. Oh look, they’ve torn down the animal hospital on Lucas and Woodward.”

The cabby glanced out the window. “Yeah, they needed the space for a vacant lot.”

Then he got tough. “Come on,” he said, “find out where we are. Ask at a gas station.”

He’d been there before it was finished, when all that had existed were three massive foundations like partially excavated ruins and a few Nissen huts (the archeologists might have stayed there) for the sales office and models of the layouts of the apartments. The buildings were up now, an eleven-story center building and two flanking high-rises. Pallidly bricked and lightly mortised — from a distance the walls had the look of pages on which messages have been rubbed out — and lacking ornament, they seemed severe as Russian universities. A modern fountain stood dead center before the main building like a conventionally hung picture. The place seemed encumbered by signs: instructions to tradesmen regarding deliveries, notices about visitor parking, an old hoarding with the names of all the firms that had had anything to do with the construction of Harris Towers, another with an enormous arrow directing prospects to the main office, others that pointed the way to the garages and pools, warnings to trespassers. The names of the buildings, derived from their positions and printed in thick, raised letters on wide brasses, reassured him. (He was a sucker for all stark address. A restaurant that took its name from its street number and spelled it out, writing a cursive Fifty-Seven for 57, was, for him, a piece of elegance that approached the artistic.)