Searches & Seizures (31 page)

He got out at South Tower but couldn’t get beyond the front door. There was no doorman, but a sort of complicated telephone arrangement had been set up in the outside hall. Where the dial would normally have been was a plastic window with numbers that appeared in it when you turned a knob at its side, like a routing device at the check-in desk of motels. These were the apartment numbers, he guessed. Lifting the phone from its cradle probably signaled the apartment whose number appeared in the plastic window. There was no directory. He spun the knob all the way around hoping that the superintendent might be listed but the numbers were stolid as code. Remembering only that his father’s apartment was on the fifteenth floor, he made a fifteenth-floor number appear in the window and lifted the phone.

“Yes?”

“Hello?”

“Yes?”

“Hello? I’m in the lobby. I’m Phil Preminger’s son, Marshall. I flew in for the funeral. I don’t remember my father’s apartment number.”

“Yes?”

“Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you. Yes?”

“Well, I don’t have his apartment number. Could you let me in? Someone from this building called, but I never got his name. He may have given it to me but in the excitement it didn’t register.”

“I don’t know who called you.”

“Do you know my father’s apartment? Maybe the man who called me is still up there.”

“I’m not at liberty to give out that information.”

“I just flew fifteen hundred miles. What am I supposed to do? Did you know my father?”

“I knew Philip Preminger. I was very sorry to hear Philip Preminger died.”

“Thank you.”

“We had pleasant chats beside the pool.”

“The man who called me said he was a neighbor.”

“We are all neighbors.”

“Could you ring the bell? I’ve got luggage. Maybe I could leave my luggage with you while I find out what to do.”

Suddenly her voice turned hard. “Listen,” she said, “you may be who you say you are. If you are, you are. What did you say your name was?”

“Marshall Preminger.”

“Just a minute.” Whoever it was had evidently left the phone. In a moment she was back. “All right, what’s your father’s sister’s name?”

“My father’s sister?”

“What’s her name? Your aunt.”

“Faye.”

“Last name?”

“Faye Saiger.”

“All right. When’s the interment?”

“Sunday. He said Sunday, the thirteenth. What is all this?”

“What is all this? This proves you could be a fake. Everything you told me is in today’s
Tribune.
You find out from the notices if there’s survivors, then you come and clean out the place before the body is even in the ground. You have the address of every condominium in the city. You figure they’re all old people in them.”

“This happens?”

“Everything happens. They shouldn’t print those things.”

“Look,” he said, “I’m Marshall Preminger. Phil was my father. What am I going to do with my luggage? What apartment did he live in? Where’s the interment?”

“Read the
Trib.
”

“Don’t you see? If I had the paper I wouldn’t have to ask you. I’d know.”

“Verisimilitude.”

“What?”

“It’s a trick.”

“I’ll go to the office. They’ll tell me.”

“I apologize in advance if you’re really his son. I’m sorry for your trouble. I’m just protecting him.”

“If I’m not who I say I am,” he said slyly, “I could wait until someone comes out. I could wait until someone comes out and then go in.”

“Sure,” she said, “they try that too. We look you over from behind the glass. If you seem suspicious we get help.”

He went to the office, identified himself and asked for the key. The salesmen were out. The boss was at lunch. The girl was a little nervous. His father’s was the first death in Harris Towers and she wasn’t sure about the legalities. He still held his suitcase—he felt marvelous now that he could be seen—a man from the world in a wrinkled summer suit, a modified Panama hat with a narrow, striped barber-pole band. Where did he get his power? From his long sideburns, his salesman features, from his tie which, loosened in the taxi, hung from his neck like the whistle of a coach, from his spongy composition soles, from his being thirty-seven and fit, it must appear, as a fiddle, in the prime of his life. From his loss, his primogenitive aspect. People would sympathize, say they loved his dad. That would be their word; his, in that outfit, would be Pop.

“The legalities,” he said, “don’t start until Pop’s body’s in the ground. You don’t even
think
of the legalities till the rabbi goes home. I’ve talked on long-distance telephones. I haven’t slept. I’ve been in the sky in airplanes.” He rubbed his face, hoping she would pick up the rasp of stubble, hoping his beard had darkened. “I haven’t shaved.” The cab had not been air-conditioned. A grand ring of sweat stained the underarms of his suit, round and wide as pawprints. “I need a shower.” Potency spilled from his disreputable circumstances, his fleshy thighed, big-assed good looks, like an M.C.’s in a night club. “The legalities begin when no one’s crying. Give me the key.”

She gave it to him. He went back to South Tower.

The lobby was gorgeous, red flock on the walls, narrow smoked mirrors ceiling-to-floor, black low leather-and-chrome sofas and chairs, short glass tables on thick carpet the color of blood. There were tubular lamps and a huge chandelier with staggered, concentric rings of tiny bulbs that reminded him of the one on
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Comedy Hour.
It was astonishing after the low-rent government housing impression he’d had from the outside. It was as if he’d been admitted to some plush speakeasy or tasty Mafioso palace buried in warehouse gut. He put it down to security, inconspicuous consumption, and rode up to his father’s floor, where the corridors swept back from the elevator at modest angles like the wings on airplanes and the red flock had been replaced by gold.

He let himself into 15E. “Hello?” No one was there. It had not really occurred to him that he would be alone in the apartment. He removed his jacket and placed it across the back of a chair, deciding that for the time being he would confine himself to the living room. He sat, prim as a guest asked to wait on the couch, then rose and walked to the enormous television and turned it on. It was color. The Saturday morning cartoon shows looked splendid, everything in bright, solid colors like plastic sculpture in museums. He watched for twenty minutes, expecting the phone to ring. Once it did and he turned the volume down guiltily, but it was a wrong number. He jabbed off the set.

Judging by the living room, his father’s apartment was not what he expected. There were no pictures of his mother or himself, and he recognized no pieces from the old place. Everything was new and expensive and in marvelous taste, the apartment of a bachelor twenty years younger than his father (himself if he could have afforded it?) or of a couple without children. The lobby could have served as a model. Leather, chrome, glass. Swedish stuff, Finnish, the low geometry of high countries. Elsewhere there might be pieces he’d recognize, but he couldn’t leave the living room. He thought his father might still be in the bedroom.

In an hour he went into the kitchen. Brown built-ins, a refrigerator, a hooded electric stove, a line of cupboards—everything the color of new shoes. He took ice water from the spigot on the refrigerator by putting his mouth directly under the faucet. Leaving the kitchen he investigated the rest of the apartment, the rooms falling to him quickly now, like towns at the close of a war. Here and there were things he recognized, though almost nothing from the time he still lived with his parents; just things he’d seen on visits when, first sonless, then wifeless, his father had made his subsequent moves.

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.