Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

A limousine called for him on Sunday and took him, the only passenger, to the chapel. Then he rode alone in it to the cemetery. For a time he tried to speak to the driver, miles forward of him in the strange car, but the man’s perfect manners and funereal deference made it difficult. Preminger turned oddly condolent by the man’s performance, attempted to reassure him and said a strange thing: “It’s all right. I’m not tumbled by grief. My father and I weren’t close these last years. I’m from out of town. Someone else made these arrangements. I’m not overcome or anything.”

“You don’t know what you are,” the driver answered.

So instead of talking he took stock of the appointments in the Cadillac, the individual air-conditioning controls, the electric windows and a panel in the door beside him that slid back to reveal a cigar lighter. There were three separate reading lights in the back. What was curious about luxury was the low opinion it gave you of yourself because you had not anticipated your needs as cleverly as people who did not even know you. He could not get used to the stern ideals manifest in the car’s appointments. This is what some people expect, he thought, and felt depressed not only because he did not expect these things himself but because he could not think of anyone he knew who did. The driver, casually using the strange gauges and controls which to Preminger, spying them from the distant back seat, were as complicated as instruments in remote technologies, seemed unconscious of the car. They could have been riding in a ’58 Chevy.

Then he knew what was so awful. How comfortable he was — as if master upholsterers had taken his measure, fitting the car to him more perfectly than any chair he’d ever sat in. The climate was equally perfect, post-card temperature, the low humidity of deep sleep. Subtle adjustments had been made for his clothing, all that he carried in his pockets, where his hair thinned revealing scalp, environment molding itself to him, to the skin of his wrists and his ankles within their light sheath of stocking, to his toes in their woody envelope of shoe. It was as if his chemistry were known, published like secret papers. Someone had a fix on him. Though they rode in silence, the sounds of the thick traffic outside velvetized to mellow plips and hisses, he felt seduced by arguments. He could literally have ridden like this forever. He wanted never to reach the cemetery, always to follow his father’s hearse through the traffic of the world, the limousine’s headlights shining in broad day, a signal, right of way theirs like something constitutional.

On the way back his mood shifted, and he struggled to recover it, feeling nostalgia for that hour’s ride to the cemetery. When the driver opened his door in the driveway of South Tower he told Preminger to wait — it was almost a command — and unlocked the trunk of the car. “This is for you,” he said, extending a manila envelope. “The deed to the plot’s in there, and the death certificate and contract with the cemetery. Wait a minute.” He walked behind the car again. “Here’s your yahrzeit, here’s your bench.” He handed Marshall a jelly glass of wax gray as old snow. A tip of wick grew like a poor plant through the surface of the wax. Then he gave him a sort of cardboard bench.

“What’s this?”

“For sitting shivah, ” the driver said.

Marshall took the bench and held it up. It was very light. He could see notches marked A and B, dotted lines, a legend that said FOLD HERE. A sort of wood grain was printed on one surface of the cardboard like the corky flecks on a cigarette filter. “It’s paper,” he said indignantly.

“Low center of gravity,” the driver said. “It’ll support three hundred pounds.”

Upstairs he placed the bench beside the television set in the living room, across from his father’s leather couch, and put the yahrzeit candle unlit on top of the refrigerator, where he remembered seeing one when his parents mourned. He wondered if he intended to sit shivah.

Someone knocked. A woman stood at the front door in a long housecoat, holding a bowl of water. “I apologize,” she said breathlessly. “This should have been outside the door when you got back from the cemetery.”

“What is it?”

“You wash your hands. You’re supposed to do it before you go in the house. It’s just a ceremony, it’s only a ritual,” she said, excusing either him for not knowing or herself for bringing it too late. She held the bowl out to him. “Just splash your hands. To tell you the truth, I need the bowl back.” He dipped his hands in the water. “I’ll see you later,” she said.

Back in the apartment he sat down on the low bench, his knees as high as his chest in a vague gynecological displacement. All around him his father’s new furniture glowed seductively. He thought of himself as bereft, shipwrecked, settled at sea on a spar, or on — at last — the desert island of his propositions. He had brought nothing with him; he’d had nothing to bring. Such speculations as those in his lecture were no game (he would amend the lecture), but the dream inventory of the already abandoned. What such people did to pass time, scheduling desires like trains, had somehow filtered down, returned like bottles to civilization. Perhaps he thought as criminals thought, longing out like cards on the table, his lists the ordered priorities of such fellows, the idle bookkeeping of the shitty condition.

Yet even he had options. He could quit his bench, turn the place back into the good hotel it had been the night before — or even accept sixty-two cents on the dollar and get out entirely. Or try for more. (Like all ultimatums and binds, the management’s was riddled with loopholes.) How free the will! Till the moment of death how open-ended a man’s life! It was at last astonishing that there was so much suffering, so little revenge. Sit shivah? Why, he should stand it tiptoe, climb all over it. He was in his father’s skin now, plunging into Pop’s deepest furniture, but all along the attraction had been that it was someone else’s, that he’d been granted the dearest opportunity of his life — to quit it, a suicide who lived to tell the tale. (But to whom?) Wrapping himself in another’s life as a child rolls himself in blankets or crawls beneath beds to alter geography. But where was everybody? When would the doorbell ring?

Answering his wish, as if his new freedom brought with it special powers, it actually did ring. Just before he opened the door he pulled off his shoes, remembering that he was supposed to mourn in stockinged feet, and rushed to ignite the yahrzeit. Dressed now, the woman who had brought him the bowl was standing there. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“I have to speak with you.”

“Come in.”

Closing the door behind her, she stepped into the apartment and looked around. “I’m sorry about your father,” she said nervously. Preminger nodded solemnly. Though he’d never seen her before her brief errand, there was something familiar about her. A large woman in perhaps her early forties, she wore her hair in a weighty golden beehive and seemed as imposing as the hostess in a restaurant, a woman men kidded warily. He could see her with big menus in her hand and wondered if she was a widow. She was the age of the men and women who’d been his parents’ friends when he was in high school, in that long-gone postwar prime time when his father earned more than he ever had before or since, when his parents had begun to take vacations in the winter — Miami, cruises to the Caribbean, others that grazed South America’s long coast, nibbling Caracas, Tobago, Cayenne. Seeing this woman, he recalled those trips, how proud he’d been of his parents, how proud of the Philco console television and Webcor wire recorder and furniture and fur and stock brochures that had poured into their home in those days, a high tide of goods and services, a full-time maid and a second car, his father’s custom suits, his mother’s diamonds lifted from their settings and turned into elaborate cocktail rings like the tropical headgear of chorus girls in reviews. It was at this time that there had begun to appear new friends, this woman’s age, people met on cruises, in Florida, at “affairs” to which his parents had eagerly gone, bar mitzvahs and weddings — he’d seen the checks, for fifty or a hundred dollars, made out to the sons and daughters of their new friends, children they’d never met — and dinner dances where his father pledged two or three hundred whatever the cause. Proud of all the checks his father wrote, of all the charities to which they subscribed — to fight rare diseases, to support interfaith schools, the Haganah, the Red Cross, Schweitzer, Boys Town, the Fund for the Rosenbergs, the Olympic Games Committee, the Democratic Party and Community Chest — proud of his parents’ whimsical generosity that bespoke no philosophy save the satisfaction of any need, the payment of any demand.