Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

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?”