Searches & Seizures (41 page)

“If it hadn’t been for this one here,” Mrs. Jacobson told the bystanders, “I might not be alive to tell the tale. It was like crabs got me. It was terrible. All I wanted was to sit down in the water. I tell you, my entire life passed before my eyes. Oh yeah. There. That got it good. That’s right. I saw my childhood home in Poland. I relived my courtship and how we came to America and the place where we lived in Philadelphia. I saw the look on the mover’s face who broke my mama’s furniture when we came to Chicago, he should be moved himself in a truck a thousand miles. I saw our wedding.”

“You married the mover, Lena?” a woman asked.

“I married Jack. I saw our wedding.”

“Hey, Lena,” a man said, “did you see your wedding night?”

“Shh. He’s only a boy,” she said, indicating Preminger, bent over her right leg. She laughed and touched Preminger’s shoulder. “He wants to know did I see my wedding night.”

“What else did you see?”

“I saw my mother’s recipe for
lokshin kugel.
I saw the good times and I saw the bad.”

“It’s better than a picture book.”

She maneuvered her left leg into Preminger’s hands. “She says it’s better than a picture book. I saw all the good kalooky hands I ever got and Paulie grow up and move to California.” She swung her legs over the side of the chaise longue and sat up. “Listen, this is some lifeguard we elected. Darling—I can call you that because I’m an old woman and you’re a young pipsqueak—I’m telephoning Jack what you did, and if he don’t say whenever you’re downtown you can park for free in the garage I don’t know my old man.”

“Lena, you tell Jack what he did, he may come and do the boy an injury.”

“You hush. She says Jack will do you an injury.”

In fact he was invited to dinner. What he found surprising was how much he looked forward to it, and how disappointed he was when it was postponed. Jack Jacobson called him from the office. “Listen,” he said, “we talked it over. We invited you to come over for supper. What does it mean for a snappy young man to eat supper with a couple of old fogies? You’d be bored stiff. Give us a few more days on this. We’ll get some people together. My daughter Sylvia flies back from Cincinnati the middle of the week. She should be there. Let’s make it Friday night. That way no one has to go in on Saturday. You got something planned Friday night?”

“No,” Preminger said, “not Friday.”

“Then we’re in like Flynn. Friday it is. I called you first because it’s in your honor,” Jacobson said. “Leave everything to me. I got some people I especially want you to meet.”

Friday he closed the pool early and went upstairs to prepare for the dinner party. He showered carefully. Two weeks in the outdoors had given him an excellent tan. The swimming had done him good. A lot of his pot had disappeared and he could see his major ribs. Dressing scrupulously in a blue summer suit he’d had cleaned for the occasion, he carefully removed the lollipop headed pins from a crisp new shirt and placed them in a glass ashtray. He was amused by the cunning ways new shirts were folded, he was very cheerful.

But the party was a letdown. Sylvia, a pretty woman about his own age whom Preminger assumed to be divorced, had a date that evening and had to be downtown by eight-thirty. Preminger resented that no one had thought to fix him up. He’d assumed that people like these, family people, were always on the lookout for eligibility like his own. Yet no one had approached him with the names of likely girls or pressed for his attendance at their tables. Willing to serve as the bait in their legendary machinations, this was the first time he had been to any of their homes. The other guests were all from the condominium, and he couldn’t imagine who it was Jacobson had wanted him to meet.

“How about you, Preminger?” Jacobson asked, “you good for another bourbon and ginger ale?”

“Is there club soda?”

“
Club
soda. Ho ho. We got a real
shikker
in this one. He drinks like a goy. Lena, we got any seltzer for Buster Crabbe?” Buster Crabbe was only one of the names of swimmers he was to go by that evening. Johnny Weissmuller was another. And once Esther Williams.

“Ask him if he’ll take Seven-Up.”

“Water, I think.”

“Water he thinks,” Jacobson said.

“A busman’s holiday,” Lena said.

Jacobson brought his drink. “Want a piece of candy? Make it less sour?”

The decor in the Jacobson’s apartment was nothing like that in his father’s. They had moved from a large apartment on the South Side and brought all their things with them. Seven rooms of furniture crammed into five. Preminger was certain the heavy pieces were absorbing all the air conditioning in the hot apartment. In a while Jacobson, sweating, told Lena to open a window.

“Won’t that work against the air conditioning?”

“It ain’t on,” Lena said. “Air conditioning gives Jack a cold.”

Preminger hated people who got colds from air conditioning.

“Only place I don’t catch cold from air conditioning is in Chinese restaurants in California,” Jacobson said.

“I see.”

“Don’t ask me why.”

The conversation was pretty much what he heard at the pool, from the women names he was not familiar with, and from the men dark, illiberal talk of stores broken into and advancing hordes of blacks. He was astonished to learn that many of the men carried guns. Jacobson showed him one he wore inside his jacket. Someone else moved his hair with his fingers and showed him a scar. He kept silent, but even without his saying anything they seemed to know his position and sought constantly to provoke him.

“You’re a college man,” one said. “I suppose the talk up in the ivory tower is that the
shvartzers
are abused, that we been robbing them blind for years, that we’re slumlords and get them to sign paper they don’t understand. Am I right?”

“They try to see both sides,” Preminger said mildly.

“Both sides. Hah. You hear that? Both sides. I work with these people. I worked with them all my life. Yeah, yeah, and in the old days I lived next-door to them. They’re shiftless. On one side they’re shiftless and on the other side they’re worthless. There’s your both sides.”

“What’s the matter,” someone else said angrily, “the Jews weren’t oppressed for years? They were oppressed plenty, believe me. But they didn’t go crying to the NAACP.”

“They went crying to the B’nai B’rith,” Preminger said.

“You compare the B’nai B’rith to the NAACP? The Jews are the best friends the Negro ever had.”

“We vote Democratic. We got a name for ourselves all over the world as nigger-lovers.”

“Just more anti-Semitism,” someone said sadly.

“I’m not going to change your minds,” Preminger said. “Why don’t we just stop talking about it?”

“That’s the ticket,” Lena Jacobson said. “He’s young, he’s an idealist. Leave him to heaven.”

During dinner they wanted his opinions on Vietnam, on welfare and minimum hourly wage laws. What concerned them most, however, was the campus situation—SDS, the Weathermen. Why were they so angry? They saw him, he realized at last, as a representative of the younger generation. He was there to be baited.

“For God’s sake,” he cried, “look at my hair. Is it longer than yours? Am I wearing bellbottoms? Is anything tie-dyed? I swear to you, I washed my hands before I came to the table.”

“Drugs. What about drugs?”

“I take ten milligrams of Coumadin.”

“You hear? He admits it.”

“It’s a blood-thinner. I had a heart attack.”

“Do you smoke Mary Jane? Have you ever smoked horse?”

“You don’t smoke horse. You inject it.”

“You know an awful lot about it.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Do you drop acid?”

“I’m thirty-seven years old.”

“This boy saved my life,” Lena pleaded.

“It’s true,” Jack said. “No more.”

They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

Afterwards they went back into the living room. Marshall poured himself a very large bourbon. Two of the women went into the kitchen to help Lena with the dishes. A third walked around the apartment and studied the photographs—there might have been a hundred of them—on the Jacobsons’ walls. “Lena, this one of Laurie, it’s very nice. I never saw it.”

“The one with Milton’s grandson?” Lena called.

“The blond?”

“Sherman. Milton’s grandson.”

“Who’s Milton?” a man asked.

“Wait, I can’t hear you, the disposal’s on.”

“I said,
who’s Milton?
”

“Milton,” Lena called from the kitchen, “Sherman’s grampa. Paul’s partner’s father-in-law.” She came into the living room, drying her hands on a dish towel. “A brilliant man. And what a gentleman! You remember, Jack, when we were to California and he had us to supper in his home? Brilliant. A brilliant man.”

“What’s so brilliant about him?” Preminger asked.

“He’s eighty-four years old if he’s a day.”

“But what’s so brilliant about him?”

“He’s brilliant. A genius.”

“How?” asked Preminger.

“How? How what?”

“How is he brilliant? How’s he a genius?”

“That’s right. He’s very brilliant.”

“How?”

“He’s eighty-four years old if he’s a day.”

“That doesn’t make him brilliant,” Preminger said.

“I didn’t say that made him brilliant.”

“I saved your life,” Preminger told her, “I think that entitles me to an explanation of how Milton, Sherman’s grampa, Paul’s partner’s father-in-law, is a genius.”

“Hey, you,” Jack Jacobson said.

“No, Jack, he’s right. You want to know why he’s brilliant? I’ll tell you why he’s brilliant. He’s brilliant because he’s got brains.”

“What sort of brains? What does he think about?”

“He’s retired. He’s eighty-four years old. He’s retired.”

“I see. He’s retired,” Preminger said, “does that mean he isn’t brilliant anymore?”

“He’s just as brilliant as he ever was.”

“How?”

“He’s got a house.”

“He’s got a house? That makes him brilliant? That he’s got a house?”

“He’s got fifteen rooms.”

“So?”

“It’s on a hill. In the Hollywood Hills. On a steep hill. On the top of a steep hill in the Hollywood Hills. They call it a hill. It’s a mountain.”

“Then why do they call it a hill?”

“With a private road that winds up the mountain. And when you get to the top there’s his house. With a patio. Beautiful. With a beautiful patio.”

“How is he brilliant?”

“I’m telling you. In the patio there are marble slabs. Slabs of marble. Like from the most beautiful statues. And the truck that brought them to set them in the patio broke down on the hill. On the mountain. And the old gentleman was so impatient he couldn’t wait. The driver went back down the hill to get help, but Milton couldn’t wait. Eighty-four years old and he picked up the slab from the back of the truck and put it on his shoulder and carried it by himself up the mountain. It weighed ninety pounds.”

“Oh,” Preminger said, “you mean he’s strong. You don’t mean he’s brilliant. You mean he’s strong.”

“I mean he’s brilliant.”

“
How? How is he brilliant?
”

“When his wife saw what he was doing she nearly died. ‘Milton,’ she yelled, ‘you must be crazy. Carrying such weight up a mountain. Wait till the truck is fixed.’ But he wouldn’t listen and went down for another slab. And for another and another. He must have carried eight slabs up the hill. A thousand pounds.”

“That makes him brilliant? An eighty-four-year-old man carrying that kind of weight up a mountain because he wasn’t patient enough to wait for the truck to be repaired?”

“Ah,” Lena said, “it was an
open
truck. He thought people would steal the marble before the driver came back. He worked five hours, six.”

“What makes him brilliant? How’s he a genius?”

“Wise guy,” Lena screamed, “when the driver finally got back with the part for the truck Milton couldn’t straighten up. His neck was turned around from where the weight of the slabs of marble had rested on it and he couldn’t move it. He was like a cripple. He couldn’t straighten up. He couldn’t turn his head. They had to put him to bed!”

“
What makes him brilliant?
” Preminger was shouting.

“What makes him
brilliant?
I’ll
tell
you what makes him brilliant. He was in bed five months. Paralyzed. The best doctors came to him. They couldn’t do a thing. It strained him so much what he’d done he couldn’t even talk it hurt his neck so. He had a television brought into his bedroom. He watched it all day. Everything he watched. If his family came to him he waved them away. He watched the television all day and late into the night. And his favorite program was Johnny Carson. He stayed up for that. And one night Johnny had on a—what do you call it—a therapist, and the therapist was talking about how arthritics could be helped by exercise and she had this gadget it was like a steel tree. It was set up on the stage and there were bars and like rings hanging from it, and the therapist showed how a person could straighten out a crooked limb or a bad joint by hanging from a ring here and a bar there and stretching like a monkey.”