Searches & Seizures (37 page)

“All I have to say,” said Mr. Eisner, “is I’ve been living here since the place opened. That was January of seventy, and I told my wife a new decade, a new tomorrow. I spoke better than I knew. I never had any desire to lead men. I’ve got an I.G.A. Big deal, it’s a small franchise supermarket, I’m a grocer. I still go to business, but I’m here to tell you that I’m more interested in this place than I ever was in my store. That’s my livelihood, but I’m telling the truth. I should have made this move years ago. I live to come home every night. Weekends are like a vacation for me. I don’t even want to go away anymore. If you ask me, Miriam Schreiber was nuts to go abroad. Not me. I’ve got a community. I don’t mean
I
have, I don’t mean
me.
I’m chairman of the Buildings and Grounds Committee. We serve for eighteen months, and my term was up this past June. Let me tell you something, I fought like hell to retain my chairmanship—promises, deals, even a little mudslinging, if you want to know. I said my opponent who happens to live in Center House wanted to use the fountain out front as a private lake. ‘A private lake’—what the hell does that mean? I sweated the election, I ate my heart out. My wife said, ‘Ed, what do you need it, it’s a headache.’ You think I want power? I don’t give a
goddamn
for power! You think I care about being a big shot? Some big shot. No, what I care about is the buildings and grounds. That the fountain works and the lights are lit in the halls and no one is stuck in the elevator and the crab grass should drop dead. What I care about is that there ain’t no litter and when a rose is planted a rose comes up. I’m on the janitors’ asses like a top sergeant. They hate my guts, but I get things done.”

The speech was crazily moving. Preminger felt a swell of sympathy for Mr. Eisner, for all of them, though he did not know what to make of their strange call. They spoke to him like evangelists; their eyes shone. He brought chairs from the kitchen for those who were still standing, and found himself nodding at what they said, listening as carefully as he ever had to anything in his life. One by one each had his say. Never had people spoken this way to him, so clearly seeking his approval—more, his conversion, as if without it they would not be able to go on themselves. He felt wooed, bid for at some odd auction, standing by as his value rose and rose, fetching sums undreamed of.

“I think,” a man said, “he needs a clearer picture of the overall setup.”

“This is Mr. Morris Barney,” Salmi said. “He edits the house organ,
The House Organ,
and writes the highly readable column ‘A Story Within a Storey.’ “

“Three buildings,” Barney said briskly, naming them on his fingers, “North, South and Center. Two of them, North and South, high-rises, sixteen stories, each accommodating one hundred twenty-eight apartments, two hundred fifty-six for the pair. Center House, though only eleven stories high, has twenty-two apartments to the floor or two hundred and forty-two in all. This gives you a total of four hundred and ninety-eight units, a figure carefully thought out by the owners—”

“We’re the owners,” a woman said.

“We’re the owners. We
are
the owners,” Barney told her, “but let’s not kid ourselves, this place didn’t go up by itself and it didn’t go up because of
us.
Harris is the brains.”

“A brilliant man,” President Salmi said.

“—carefully thought out by the owners beforehand, the total falling just two units shy of the number officially designated by the U.S. Government as a project. This eliminates a considerable amount of red tape and static from the FHA should an owner find it necessary to sell. All right, four nine eight units, three zero five of them occupied by married couples—six hundred ten marrieds. Plus a hundred eighteen solitaries—the single, widowed, widowered and divorced, a handful. In addition, seventy-three apartments owned by brothers, brothers and sisters, mother/ child or father/child relationships—two or more people living together as a family with a designation other than married. Two hundred and three of these in all. In only two apartments in Harris Towers are there married couples with children—seven people. All right, here are your figures: six hundred ten man-and-wife; one hundred eighteen solitaries”—I’m a solitary, Preminger thought—“two hundred and three in mixed families and two couples with three children. A total population of nine hundred and thirty-eight people. The median age is sixty-one.”

“Thank you,” Salmi said, “for a brilliant breakdown.” He turned to Preminger. “Almost a thousand people,” he said. “Many small towns aren’t as large. We’re practically a government,” he said breathlessly. “We’re a microcosm. If we can make it work here, why can’t they make it work on the outside? Do you follow me? The answer is simple. Where are your blacks? Where are your PR’s? The answer is simple, my dear Marshall. There aren’t any. We’re not only a community, we’re a
ghetto! You
know things, you’re a scholar. Athens was a ghetto. Rome was. For slaves read custodians, read carpenters, gardeners and the three lads in the underground garage. Read lifeguards and the girls in the office and the executives of the corporation and you have the new Athens on the North Side. Twenty-five people, outsiders, twenty-five on the nose to support the life of nine hundred and thirty-eight, one to thirty-seven. Not a good ratio, Preminger. Count police, fire, civil service and spoils appointments in Chicago as a whole and you have one to less than nineteen. How do we catch up? What’s the economics, Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget?”

Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget looked like all the clubwomen who had ever introduced Preminger to his audiences on the lecture circuit. When she spoke, however, she sounded tougher than any of them ever had, biting off her words like a lady Communist. “Bleak,” she said. “Four nine eight apartments. A maintenance that varies with the size and location of the unit but averages two hundred and fifty dollars a month.” (Were they dunning him, then? Was that what this was all about?) “Times four hundred ninety-eight makes a nut of one hundred and twenty-four thousand, five hundred dollars. That’s the sum we turn over to Harris each month and which he disburses as expenses and payroll. One hundred and twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars—and its
pea
nuts.” She pronounced the word as if she were shelling them in her mouth.

“Shall we raise the maintenance?” It was President Salmi. “Shall we, Marshall? What happens when they strike? When the staff strikes? Shall we raise the maintenance? What do you say we each put in an additional fifty a month? The median age here is sixty-one, Barney tells us. We’re approaching fixed incomes. Because we’re a new Athens on the North Side will the foundations help us out, do you think? Shall we nickel-and-dime ourselves and raise the monthly maintenance gradually until the five extra dollars becomes ten and the ten fifteen and the fifteen thirty and the thirty the original fifty we were so afraid of, and the fifty some outrageous figure we can’t even conceive of now? One day it will come to that. It
will.
It will have to. But wait. I see an alternative. We cut down services. We drain the pool, fire a janitor or two. Run the heat and air conditioning only at peak times. Watch the flowers die. Learn skills, basic mechanics and carpentry and the electrician’s wisdom. Do for ourselves. But! But don’t ask
me
to be your president! I’ll not preside over such an organization!”

“Don’t ask me to oversee that sort of budget,” Mrs. Ornfeld moaned.

“I wouldn’t print such news,” Barney said.

“So you see, Marsh?” Salmi said. “Are you looking at this picture? Paradise. A paradise these houses and towers. Open not yet two years, a one hundred percent occupancy since barely March. Do you see? Are you watching? Here too is the decline of the Roman Empire, the dissolution of the city-states. How does it feel to be in history?”

Preminger nodded.

“So when I
say
participate, I
mean
participate,” Salmi said. “It ain’t all sweetness and it ain’t all light, and all worlds go broke and every hope wears a thin tread and punctures like a tire. The forecast is not terrific and the times they are a-changing. What happened to Dad, my dear young orphan, happens also on a scale so massive as to be incomprehensible to finite minds like ours. Death is built into the universe like windows in walls.”

Moved, Preminger sat silently on the rug. He was not embarrassed by the speech. None of them were; he heard them breathing, sighing, felt the calm induced by truth. No one hurried to break the silence Salmi had shaped. Here, at last, was his father’s eulogy, the
shivah
perfected. If he hadn’t thought they would take it as a stunt he would have crawled to the mourner’s bench and sat on it.

“But cheer up,” Salmi said quietly, “take heart, my friends. Land maybe ho, my good Marshall. If all is losing, all’s not yet lost. We’re organized. We gamble against the house—do you like the joke?—but we’re informed of the odds. Most of them”—he indicated the residents throughout the buildings—“think we’re too self-important, ‘Squeak squeak,’ they say for Mickey Mouse. ‘Neigh,’ they go for horseshit, our neighbors and neighsayers. But perhaps we haven’t explained ourselves properly. We may not have made ourselves clear.”

“Trust the people,” Mrs. Ornfeld said.

Salmi turned fiercely to Morris Barney. “You could write an editorial. I’ve told you this a hundred times. Lay it on the line, let them know. Wake them up!”

“My press is free,” Barney said.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

“They don’t want to read that stuff, Herb.”

Salmi turned back to Preminger. “Well, I’m an old war-horse,” he said apologetically. “I make these speeches. Look, there are committees—Entertainment, Activities, the newspaper. A few like Buildings and Grounds and Units and Budget are largely watchdog to see that the management keeps up its share of the bargain. But there are others—the Good Neighbors, Emergency, Security, Education. New Residents I foresee will soon be absorbed, since we’re one hundred percent occupied. My colleagues have mimeographed sheets which explain the function of these committees. They’ll leave them with you. You’ll look them over. Sixty-one,” he said wearily. “The median age in this room is that. It feels like ninety. Oh, boy. Oh, well. Read the stuff. Think and study. See where your talents lead you.”

“I will.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven,” Salmi said. “You’re the youngest resident, you know that? Younger even than the children of the two couples whose children still live with them.”

“I am?”

“Yeah,” President Salmi said, “you’re the hope of the future, the new generation.”

“Was my father on a committee? Is that why there’s an opening?” Preminger asked. “Do you want me to carry on his work?”

“Your father was here for the ride. He rode us piggyback.”

“I’d like to do some special pleading,” Morris Barney said. “My understanding is that Marshall is studying for his doctorate. He probably has a flair for writing. I could use a guy like that on the paper.”

“Not so fast,” Mrs. Ehrlmann said, “a college man’s natural place would be on my Education committee.”

“Thirty-seven and built like a horse,” someone else said, “a shoe-in for Security.”

“I have a heart condition,” Preminger told the husky man who had spoken.

“I hoped this wouldn’t happen,” Salmi said. “Let’s not bum’s-rush this man. It’s enough right now to get a commitment of interest from him.
Are
you interested?”

“I
am,
” Preminger said earnestly. “It’s a question of where I’ll be able to do the most good.”

“Sleep on it, Marshall,” Salmi, rising, said.

“I will, but I think I can give you assurances now.” It sounded grand. Such words had never been in his mouth before. He could taste them. He could give assurances, pledges, wheeling and dealing in the stocks and bonds of the civil. He spoke from the highest plateau of the civic and formal. Men in groups, he’d noticed—till now he’d never been one—no matter their private status or lack of it, regardless of their ordinary one-on-one style, often spoke with a fluency that surfaced like submarines in the middles of seas. Where did they come from, these facts at the blunt fingertips, these figures sitting on the tongue like names and primary colors, all the law-court style like foreign language converted in dreams? Were we political then, our causes and positions mysterious and concealed and only waiting on us to be revealed at rallies and assemblies, or even in mobs? He’d thrilled to the articulate accounts of eyewitnesses breathed into microphones offered like cigarettes, to all the passionate summations of the rank and file and spiels of the momentarily possessed, fearing in their charmed patter only the failure of his own. How had he, thrity-seven, a Ph.D. candidate and heart patient—yes, you’d think that would count for something, add at least to his vocabulary of pain and fear—waiting on his next attack (and an ex-seventeen-thousand-dollar-a-year lecturer at that, though the lectures had all carefully been worked out in private and delivering them had involved no more than simply reading aloud), managed to avoid his share of public speaking? Why had there been no issues in his life? “I think I can give you assurances now,” he repeated, trying to stand. He loved whoever loved him. If there was fury in him, vengeance and retaliation like the wound springs and coils in bombs, there was also gratitude—what they offered was rebuff’s sweet opposite—and eye-for-an-eye obligation like a perfect bookkeeping. He stood before them and held his hands like pans in a scale. “It isn’t a question of sleeping on it. All that’s at issue is which committee can make the most of me, of whatever minimal talents I possess. Later this evening I intend to put through a long-distance call to a colleague in Montana. I shall ask him to forward my belongings to my Chicago address—this as an earnest of my commitment to make a life here.