Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

Only the spare bedroom was the same, furnished with the twin beds and blond furniture of his high school days. Under the thick glass on his desk were photographs of himself and of friends whose names he’d forgotten, and the only picture in the entire apartment of his mother. He was not moved, either by the photos — he recognized them all, remembered when they’d been taken, how he’d felt posing; no time had passed; how could he be moved? — or by the preserved quality of his old room, his though he’d never spent a single night in it or even seen it before he walked into it just now for the first time.

In his father’s room the bed was empty, carefully made, high as a chest of drawers under its tufted spread and fluffed pillows. Another television, a black Sony with a dark screen, sat on a chrome stand facing it. Under so well made a bed the linen would be smooth and fresh. (Where were the neighbors who’d removed the dead man’s sheets and pillowcases and punched his pillows like a bread dough?) On impulse he disturbed one corner of the bedspread near the headboard. The pillowcase was a print, a single enormous Audubon bluejay. He drew the spread the rest of the way down and raised the blanket: another bluejay, big on the king-size bed as a pony. He touched the percale, smooth as paper in a dictionary. My God, he thought, this sheet must cost four hundred dollars. He rushed back to the spare bedroom — his room — and pulled the spread back from one of the twin beds. White, muslin, it did not seem even to have been ironed. Naked, he would have bruised his body on it. Carefully he re-tucked both the beds, thinking of his Egyptian father, pharaohed up to the eyes in treasure. It seemed a shame he had to be interred elsewhere. Then he recalled that he didn’t know where they had taken the body.

Though he had grown up in Chicago he’d lived remarkably free of death — the blessing of a small family — and couldn’t think of the name of a single Jewish cemetery. His mother had died when he was on a lecture tour eight years before. She’d been visiting her sister who still had a bungalow in New Jersey, and was buried in the family plot in Hackensack, literally at her parents’ feet. His father had gotten his itinerary from his agent (those were the good old days; he’d had an agent, an itinerary) and called him in Salt Lake City, and he’d flown to Newark, flown to his mother’s death as he’d flown to his father’s. His maiden aunt had been willing, even anxious, to surrender her rights in her sister, the notion that the man had lain with her sister exalting his father and making her fear him. It was his father who’d insisted on Hackensack. “Someone would have to sit with her in the baggage car. Don’t ask me to do that. I’d throw myself under the wheels.” If it occurred to them that Marshall might sit with his mother, they hadn’t said anything. “I’ll come back,” his father promised, “when it’s my time I’ll come back to be with her.” Irritated, he used the absence of his mother’s photographs to unburden himself of the pledge his father had made and which he had only just now remembered.

He went to the extension phone in his father’s bedroom expecting to find a space on the dial for the office or even a “7” for room service, but it was an ordinary phone. (Though actually it wasn’t. It was a custom job in a felt-lined box like a case for dueling pistols. If its lid hadn’t been raised he would never have noticed it.) He had to hunt around for a directory (he found it in an antique sword case, a rebuilt McCormack Plaza phoenixy on the front cover) and look up the number of Harris Towers. A salesman told him that the girl he had spoken to and who had promised to find out where they had taken his father had gone to lunch. Leaving the apartment, he went downstairs, the key to someone else’s apartment in his pocket somehow reassuring and making him feel lucky. He walked four blocks to a drugstore and looked up the details of his father’s burial in the Tribune.

The body was at Pfizer’s Funeral Home in a coffin the color of the appliances in his father’s kitchen. The coffin was open and he saw that his father had grown long hair, sideburns, a mustache. The effect — the shirt beneath his Edwardian blazer was a wallpaper print, his tie, cut from the same cloth, almost invisible against it — was oddly healthy, obscurely powerful. “It sounds crazy,” a director whispered, “but hippies make a terrific appearance in a box.” It was true; his father seemed to glow. He looked marvelous, solider in death than in life, though Marshall hadn’t seen him since he’d grown his new hair and bought his new wardrobe.

He felt no particular grief, only a curious letdown, and wanted to explore this. The only person there he knew was Joe Cane, a business associate of his father. “Don’t get me wrong,” Marshall said. They had gone outside to smoke. “I loved him a lot. I’m fucked up like a jigsaw puzzle, but he had nothing to do with that. My life is largely unexamined, Joe, but he was a sensible guy. He didn’t give me bad times. And he gave me good advice. He was against my going into the lecture business. Even in my senior year at college, I was pulling three hundred, sometimes four hundred bucks for a lecture. It started as a gag, you know. I wrote a parody of a travel lecture—‘Mysterious Minneapolis’—and my roommate sent a copy of it to this bureau. That’s how I first got started with them. Pop came up when I did it in St. Paul and laughed harder than anybody, but afterwards he told me not to count on it.”

“He should never have retired,” Cane said, a tiny well-dressed man who looked the same now as he had in the Forties. Cane reminded Marshall of Roosevelt. Thinner, he had the old President’s handsome sobriety and looked always a little worried. Marshall respected him. He appeared a talisman of responsibility and competence. The manager of the Chicago office of the firm for which his father traveled, he had always seemed mysterious. He had lived in an orphanage until he was seventeen. (Cane was not his name, Joe wasn’t. He had become that person — this was the mystery — out of some other person.) He was totally self-made. There were Book-of-the-Month Club selections in his house and on the desk in his office.

“He was tired out, Joe. The road exhausted him.”

“He could have worked in the office. He could have written his own ticket.”

“He was a salesman.”

“He could have sold from the office. The costume jewelry business isn’t what it was, but buyers still come to Chicago. He could have hired college boys to work his territory and seen the buyers here. He could have used the telephone more. Lots of men do it.”

“I don’t know.”

“It was jealousy. He didn’t want anybody to think he was working for me. He couldn’t stand me. I loved Phil, but he always had a resentment against me.”

“That’s silly. Why would he be jealous? He was a very dynamic man.”

“He was the Wabash Cannonball, but he was jealous. Always. I was an executive and he was a salesman. I didn’t make more money. He made more money, though I got more benefits. As an executive I was entitled to extra stock options. He resented that.”

“He loved being a salesman.”

“He hated it. He wanted his own desk in his own office and his own secretary, not somebody from the typing pool. He wanted ceremony. When the firm took over the seventh floor of the Great Northern Building I worked my can off to get him that office. New York wanted the space for a showroom. He thought it was me blocking him.”

“Jesus, Joe, please don’t talk this way about him. You make him sound small.”

“Small? He was Yellowstone National Park. Only pipsqueaks like me have decorum and character. Men like Phil are mad and petty and great.”