The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 18

"Judges aren't that way...." I corrected myself: "Some judges may be, but Eiler isn't."

Eunice only pressed harder. "Please, Ijah, don't brush me off. Tanky could get up to fifteen years. I'm not in a position to spell out the entire background. About his a.s.sociates, I mean...." I knew quite well what she meant; she was speaking of his Mob connections. Tanky had to keep his mouth shut if he didn't want the a.s.sociates to order his execution.

I said, "I more or less get the point."

"Don't you feel for him?"

"How could I not."

"You've led a very different life from the rest, Ijah, but I've always said how fond you were of the Metzgers."

"It's true."

"And loved our father and our mother, in the old days."

"I'll never forget them."

She lost control again, and why she sobbed so hard, no expert, not even the most discerning, could exactly specify. She didn't do it from weakness. That I can say with certainty. Eunice is not one of your fragile vessels. She is forceful like her late mother, tenacious, determined. Her mother had been honorably direct, limited and primitive.

It was a mistake to say, "I'll never forget them," for Eunice sees herself as her mother's representative here among the living, and it was partly on Shana's account that she uttered such sobs. Sounds like this had never come over this quiet office telephone line of mine. What a disgrace to Shana that her son should be a convicted felon. How would the old woman have coped with such a wound! Still refusing to surrender her mother to death, Eunice (alone!) wept for what Shana would have suffered.

"Remember that my mother idolized you, Ijah. She said you were a genius."

"That she did. It was an intramural opinion. The world didn't agree."

Anyway, here was Eunice pleading for Raphael (Tanky's real name). For his part, Tanky didn't care a d.a.m.n about his sister.

"Have you been in touch, you two?"

"He doesn't answer letters. He hasn't been returning calls. Ijah! I want him to know that I care!"

Here my feelings, brightened and glowing in the recollection of old times, grew dark and leaden on me. I wish Eunice wouldn't use such language. I find it hard to take. Nowadays WE CARE is stenciled on the walls of supermarkets and loan corporations. It may be because her mother knew no English and also because Eunice stammered when she was a kid that it gives her great satisfaction to be so fluent, to speak as the most advanced Americans now speak.

I couldn't say, "For Christ's sake don't talk b.a.l.l.s to me." Instead I had to comfort her because she was heartsick-a layer cake of heartsickness. I said, "You may be sure he knows how you feel."

Gangster though he may be.

No, I can't swear that Cousin Raphael (Tanky) actually is a gangster. I mustn't let his sister's clichs drive me (madden me) into exaggeration. He a.s.sociates with gangsters, but so do aldermen, city officials, journalists, big builders, fundraisers for charitable inst.i.tutions-the Mob gives generously. And gangsters aren't the worst of the bad guys. I can name greater evildoers. If I had been a Dante, I'd have worked it all out in full detail.

I asked Eunice pro forma why she had approached me. (I didn't need to be a clairvoyant to see that Tanky had put her up to it.) She said, "Well, you are a public personality."

She referred to the fact that many years ago I invented the famous-trials TV program, and appeared also as moderator, or master of ceremonies. I was then in a much different phase of existence. Having graduated near the top of my law-school cla.s.s, I had declined good positions offered by leading firms because I felt too active, or kinetic (hyperkinetic). I couldn't guarantee my good behavior in any of the prestigious partners.h.i.+ps downtown. So I dreamed up a show called Court of Law,_ in which significant, often notorious, cases from the legal annals were retried by brilliant students from Chicago, Northwestern, De Paul, or John Marshall. Cleverness, not inst.i.tutional rank, was where we put the accent. Some of our most diabolical debaters were from the night schools. The opportunities for dialectical subtlety, imposture, effrontery, eccentric display, nasty narcissism, madness, and other qualifications for the practice of law were obvious. My function was to pick entertaining contestants (defense and prosecution), to introduce them, to keep up the pace-to set the tone. With the help of my wife (my then wife, who was a lawyer, too), I chose the cases. She was attracted by criminal trials with civil rights implications. My preference was for personal oddities, mysteries of character, ambiguities of interpretation-less likely to make a good show. But I proved to have a knack for staging these dramas. Before the program I always gave the contestants an early dinner at Fritzel's on Wabash Avenue. Always the same order for me-a strip steak, rare, over which I poured a small pitcher of Roquefort salad dressing. For dessert, a fudge sundae, with which I swallowed as much cigarette ash as chocolate. I wasn't putting on an act. This early exuberance and brashness I later chose to subdue; it presently died down. Otherwise I might have turned into "a laff riot," in the language of Variety,_ a zany. But I saw soon enough that the clever young people whom I would lead in debate (mainly hustlers about to take the bar exam, already on the lookout for clients and avid for publicity) were terribly pleased by my odd behavior. The Fritzel dinner loosened up the partic.i.p.ants. During the program I would guide them, goad them, provoke, pit them against one another, override them. At the conclusion, my wife Sable (Isabel: I called her Sable because of her dark coloring) would read the verdict and the decision of the court. Many of our debaters have since become leaders of the bar, rich celebrities. After our divorce, Sable married first one and then another of them. Eventually she made it big in communications-on National Public Radio.

Judge Eiler, then a young lawyer, was more than once a guest on the program. So to my cousins I remained thirty years later the host and star of Court of Law,_ a media personality. Something magical, attributes of immortality. Almost as though I had made a ton of money, like a Klutznik or a Pritzker. And now I learned that to Eunice I was not only a media figure, but a mystery man as well. "In the years when you were gone from Chicago, didn't you work for the CIA, Ijah?"

"I did not. For five years, out in California, I was in the Rand Corporation, a think tank for special studies. I did research and prepared reports and a.n.a.lyses. Much the kind of thing the private group I belong to here now does for banks...."

I wanted to dispel the mystery-scatter the myth of Ijah Brodsky. But of course words like "research" and "a.n.a.lysis" only sounded to her like spying.

A few years ago, when Eunice came out of the hospital after major surgery, she told me she had no one in all the world to talk to. She said that her husband, Earl, was "not emotionally supportive" (she hinted that he was close-fisted). Her daughters had left home. One was in the Peace Corps and the other, about to graduate from medical school, was too busy to see her. I asked Eunice out to dinner-drinks first in my apartment on Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive. She said, "All these dark old rooms, dark old paintings, these Oriental rugs piled one on top of the other, and books in foreign languages-and living alone" (meaning that I didn't have horrible marital fights over an eight-dollar gas bill). "But you must have girls-lady friends?"

She was hinting at the "boy question." Did the somber luxury I lived in disguise the fact that I had turned queer?

Oh, no. Not that, either. Just singular (to Eunice). Not even a different drummer. I do no marching.

But, to return to our telephone conversation, I finally got it out of Eunice that she had called me at the suggestion of Tanky's lawyer. She said, "Tanky is flying in tonight from Atlantic City"-gambling-"and asked to meet you for dinner tomorrow."

"Okay, say that I'll meet him at the Italian Village on Monroe Street, upstairs in one of the little private rooms, at seven P. M. To ask the headwaiter for me."

I hadn't really talked with Tanky since his discharge from the army, in 1946, when conversation was still possible. Once, at O'Hare about ten years ago, we ran into each other when I was about to board a plane and he was on the incoming flight. He was then a power in his union. ( Just what this signified I have lately learned from the papers.) Anyway, he spotted me in the crowd and introduced me to the man he was traveling with. "I want you to meet my famous cousin, Ijah Brodsky," he said. At which moment I was gifted with a peculiar vision: I saw how we might have appeared to a disembodied mind above us both. Tanky was built like a professional football player who had gotten lucky and in middle age owned a ball club of his own. His wide cheeks were like rosy Meissen. He sported a fair curly beard. His teeth were large and square. What are the right words for Tanky at this moment? Voluminous, copious, full of vitamins, potent, rich, insolent. By way of entertainment he was putting his cousin on display-bald Ijah with the eyes of an orangutan, his face flat and round, transmitting a navet more suited to a brute from the zoo-long arms, orange hair. I was someone who emitted none of the signals required for serious consideration, a man who was not concerned with the world's work in any category which made full sense. It pa.s.sed through my thoughts that once, early in the century, when Pica.s.so was asked what young men in France were doing, he answered, "La jeunesse, c'est moi._ "But I had never been in a position to ill.u.s.trate or represent anything._ Tanky, in fun, was offering me to his colleague as an intellectual, and while I don't mind being considered clever, I confess I do feel the disgrace of being identified as an intellectual.

By contrast, consider Tanky. He had done well out of his rackets. He was one of those burly people who need half an acre of cloth for a suit, who eat New York sirloin strip steaks at Eli's, put together million-dollar deals, fly to Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Bermuda. Tanky was saying, "In our family, Ijah was the genius. One of them, anyway; we had a couple or three."

I was no longer the law-school whiz kid for whom a brilliant future had been predicted-so much was true. The tone of derision was justified, insofar as I had enjoyed being the family's "rose of expectancy."

As for Tanky's dark a.s.sociate, I have no idea who he may have been-maybe Tony Provenzano, or Sally (Bugs) Briguglio, or Dorfman of the Teamsters Union insurance group. It was not Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was then in jail. Besides, I, like millions of others, would have recognized him. We knew him personally, for after the war Tanky and I had both been employed by our cousin Miltie Rifkin, who at that time operated a hotel in which Hoffa was supposed to have an interest. Whenever Hoffa and his gang came to Chicago, they stayed there. I was then tutoring Miltie's son Hal, who was too fast and foxy to waste time on books. Longing to see action, Hal was only fourteen when Miltie put him in charge of the hotel bar. It amused his parents one summer to let him play manager, so that when liquor salesmen approached him, Miltie could say, "You'll have to see my son Hal; he does the buying. Ask for the young fellow who looks like Eddie Cantor." They would find a fourteen-year-old boy in the office. I was there to oversee Hal, while teaching him the rules governing the use of the ablative (he was a Latin School pupil). I kept an eye on him. A smart little kid of whom the parents were immensely proud.

Necessarily I spent much time in the bar, and so became acquainted with the Hoffa contingent. Goons, mostly, apart from Harold Gibbons, who was highly urbane and in conversation, at least with me, bookish in his interests. The others were very tough indeed, and Cousin Miltie made the mistake of trying to hold his own with them, man to man, a virile brute. He was not equal to this self-imposed challenge. He could be harsh, he accepted nihilism in principle, but the high-powered executive will simply was not there. Miltie couldn't say, as Caesar did to a sentry who had orders not to let him pa.s.s, "It's easier for me to kill you than to argue." Hoffas are like that.

Tanky, then just out of the service, was employed by Miltie to search out tax-delinquent property for him. It was one of Miltie's side rackets. Evictions were common. So it was through Miltie Rifkin that Cousin Tanky (Raphael) met Red Dorfman, the onetime boxer who acted as broker between Hoffa and organized crime in Chicago. Dorfman, then a gym teacher, inherited Tanky from his father, from Red, the old boxer. A full set of gang connections was part of the legacy.

These were some of the people who dominated the world in which it was my intention to conduct what are often called "higher activities." To "long for the best that ever was": this was not an abstract project. I did not learn it over a seminar table. It was a const.i.tutional necessity, physiological, temperamental, based on sympathies which could not be acquired. Human absorption in faces, deeds, bodies, drew me toward metaphysics. I had these peculiar metaphysics as flying creatures have their radar. Maturing, I found the metaphysics in my head. And school, as I have just told you, had little to do with it. As a commuting university student sitting for hours on the elevated trains that racketed, bob-bled, squealed, pelted at top speed over the South Side slums, I boned up on Plato, Aristotle, or St. Thomas for Professor Perry's cla.s.s.

But never mind these preoccupations. Here in the Italian Village was Tanky, out on a $500,000 bond, waiting to be sentenced. He didn't look good. He didn't have fast colors after all. His big face was swelled out by years of brutal business. The amateur internist in me diagnosed hypertension-250 over 165 were the numbers I came up with. His inner man was toying with a stroke as the alternative to jail. Tanky kept the Edwardian beard trimmed, for his morale, and that very morning, as this was no time to show white hairs, the barber might have given it a gold rinse. The kink of high vigor had gone out of it, however. Tanky wouldn't have cared for my sympathy. He was well braced, a man ready to take his lumps. The slightest hint that I was sorry would have irritated him. Experienced sorry-feelers will understand me, though, when I say that there was a condensed ma.s.s of troubles on his side of the booth. This ma.s.s emitted signals for which I lacked the full code.

An old-time joint opposite the First National, where I have my office on the fifty-first floor (those upswept incurves rising, rising), the Italian Village is one of the few restaurants in the city with private recesses for seduction or skulduggery. It dates back to the twenties and is decorated like a saint's-day carnival in Little Italy, with strings of electric bulbs and wheels of lights. It also suggests a shooting gallery. Or an Expressionist stage set. Prohibition fading away, the old Loop was replaced by office buildings, and the Village became a respectable place, known to all the stars of the musical world. Here visiting divas and great baritones gorged on risotto after singing at the Lyric. Signed photos of artists hung on the walls. Still, the place retained its Al Capone atmosphere-sauce as red as blood, the foot smell of cheeses, the dishes of invertebrates raked up from sea mud.

Little was said of a personal nature. I worked across the street? Tanky said. Yes. Had he asked what my days were like, 1 would have begun by saying that 1 was up at six to play indoor tennis to start the blood circulating, and that when I got to the office I read the New York Times,_ the Wall Street Journal, The Economist,_ and Barrons,_ and scanned certain printouts and messages prepared by my secretary. Having noted the outstanding facts, I put them all behind me and devoted the rest of the morning to my private interests.

But Cousin Tanky did not ask how my days were spent. He mentioned our respective ages-I am ten years his senior-and said that my voice had deepened as I grew older. Yes. My ba.s.so profundo served no purpose except to add depth to small gallantries. When I offer a chair to a lady at a dinner party, she is enveloped in a deep syllable. Or when I comfort Eunice, and G.o.d knows she needs it, my incoherent rumble seems to give a.s.surance of stability.

Tanky said, "For some reason you keep track of all the cousins, Ijah."

The deep sound I made in reply was neutral. I didn't think it would be right, even by so much as a hint, to refer to his career in the union or to his recent trial.

"Tell me what happened to Miltie Rifkin, Ijah. He gave me a break when I got out of the army."

"Miltie now lives in the Sunbelt. Married to the switchboard operator from the hotel."

Now, Tanky might have given me_ fascinating information about Miltie, for I know that Cousin Miltie had been dying to draw Hoffa deeper into the hotel operation. Hoffa had such reservoirs of money behind him, all those billions in the pension fund. Miltie was stout, near obese, with a handsome hawk face, profile-proud, his pampered body overdressed, bedizened, his glance defiant and contentious. A clever moneymaker, he was choleric by temperament and, in his fits, dangerously quick to throw punches. It was insane of him to fight so much. His former wife, Libby, weighing upward of 250 pounds, hurrying about the hotel on spike heels, was what we used to call a "suicide blond" (dyed by her own hand). Catering, booking, managing, menacing, bawling out the garde-manger,_ firing housekeepers, hiring bartenders, Libby was all made up like a Kabuki performer. In trying to restrain Miltie (they were less man and wife than business partners), she had her work cut out for her. Several times Miltie complained to Hoffa about one of his goons, whose personal checks were not clearing. The goon-his name escapes me, but for parking purposes he had a clergy sticker on the winds.h.i.+eld of his Chrysler-knocked Miltie down in the lobby, then choked him nearly to death. This occurrence came to the attention of Robert F. Kennedy, who was then out to get Hoffa, and Kennedy issued a subpoena for Cousin Miltie to testify before the McClellan Committee. To give evidence against Hoffa's people would have been madness. Libby cried out when word came that a subpoena was on its way: "Now see what you've done. They'll chop you to bits!"

Miltie fled. He drove to New York, where he loaded his Cadillac on the Queen Elizabeth. _ He didn't flee alone. The switchboard operator kept him company. They were guests in Ireland of the American amba.s.sador (linked through Senator Dirksen and the senator's special a.s.sistant, Julius Farkash). While staying at the U. S. emba.s.sy, Miltie bought land for what was to have become the new Dublin airport. He bought, however, in the wrong location. After which, he and his wife-to-be flew to the Continent in a transport plane carrying the Cadillac. They did crossword puzzles during the flight. Landing in Rome...

I spared Tanky these details, many of which he probably knew. Besides, the man had seen so much action that they wouldn't have been worth mentioning. It would have been an infraction of something to speak of Hoffa or to refer to the evasion of a subpoena. Tanky, of course, had been forced to say no to the usual federal immunity offer. It would have been fatal to accept it. One understands this better now that the FBI wiretaps and other pieces of evidence in the Williams-Dorfman trial have been made public. Messages like: "Tell Merkle that if he doesn't sell us the controlling interest in his firm on our terms, we'll waste him. Not only him. Say that we'll also hack up his wife and strangle his kids. And while you're at it, pa.s.s the word to his lawyer that we'll do the same to him and his wife, and his kids."

Tanky personally was no killer. He was Dorfman's man of business, one of his legal and financial team. He was, however, sent to intimidate people who were slow to cooperate or repay. He crushed his cigar on the fine finish of desks, and broke the framed photographs of wives and children (which I think in some cases a good idea). Millions of dollars had to be involved. He didn't get violent over trifles.

And naturally it would have been offensive to speak of Hoffa, for Tanky might be one of the few who knew how Hoffa had disappeared. I myself, reading widely (with the motives of a concerned cousin), was persuaded that Hoffa had entered a car on his way to a "reconciliation" meeting in Detroit. He was immediately knocked on the head and probably murdered in the backseat. His body was shredded in one machine, and incinerated in another.

Much knowledge of such happenings was in Tanky's looks, in the puffiness of his face-an edema of deadly secrets. This knowledge made him dangerous. Because of it he would go to prison. The organization, convinced that he was steadfast, would take care of him. What he needed from me was nothing but a private letter to the judge. "Your honor, I submit this statement to you on behalf of the defendant in U.S._ v. Raphael Metzger._ The family have asked me to intercede as a friend of the court, and 1 do so fully convinced that the jury has done its job well. I shall try to persuade you, however, to be lenient in sentencing.

Metzger's parents were decent, good people...." Adding, perhaps, "I knew him in his infancy" or "I was present at his circ.u.mcision."

These are not matters to bring to the court's attention: that he was a whopping kid; that nothing so big was ever installed in a high chair; or that he still wears the expression he was born with, one of a.s.surance, of cheerful insolence. His is a case of the Spanish proverb: Genio y figura Hasta la sepultura._ The divine or, as most would prefer to say, the genetic stamp visible even in corruption and ruin. And we belong to the same genetic pool, with a certain difference in scale. My frame is much narrower. Nevertheless, some of the same traits are there, creases in the cheeks, a turn at the end of the nose, and most of all, a tendency to fullness in the underlip-the way the mouth works toward the sense-world. You could identify these characteristics also in family pictures from the old country-the Orthodox, totally different human types. Yet the cheekbones of bearded men, a band of forehead under a large skullcap, the shock of a fixed stare from two esoteric eyes, are recognizable still in their descendants.

Cousins in an Italian restaurant, looking each other over. It was no secret that Tanky despised me. How could it be a secret? Cousin Ijah Brodsky, speaking strange words, never really making sense, acting from peculiar motives, obviously flaky. Studied the piano, was touted as some kind of prodigy, made a sensation in the Kimball Building (the Noah's ark of stranded European music masters), worked at Comptons Encyclopedia, edited a magazine, studied languages-Greek, Latin, Russian, Spanish-and also linguistics.

I had taken America up in the wrong way. There was only one language for a realist, and that was Hoffa language. Tanky belonged to the Hoffa school-in more than half its postulates, virtually identical with the Kennedy school. If you didn't speak real, you spoke phony. If you weren't hard, you were soft. And let's not forget that at one time, when his bosses were in prison, Tanky, their steward, managed an inst.i.tution that owns more real estate than the Chase Manhattan Bank.

But to return to Cousin Ijah: music, no; linguistics, no; he next distinguished himself at the University of Chicago Law School, after he had been disappointed in the university's metaphysicians. He didn't practice law, either; that was just another phase. A star who never amounted to anything. He fell in love with a concert harpist who had only eight fingers. Unrequited, it didn't pan out; she was faithful to her husband. Ijah's wife, who organized the TV show, had been as shrewd as the devil. She couldn't make anything of him, either. Ambitious, she dismissed him when it became plain that Ijah was not cut out for a team player, lacked the instincts of a go-getter. She was like Cousin Miltie's wife, Libby, and thought of herself as one of an imperial pair, the dominant one.

What was Tanky to make of someone like Ijah? Ijah was not_ pa.s.sive. Ijah did_ have a life plan. But this plan was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In fact, he didn't appear to have any contemporaries. He had contacts with the living. Not quite the same thing.

The princ.i.p.al characteristic of our existence is suspense._ n.o.body-n.o.body at all-can say how it's going to turn out.

What was curious and comical to Tanky was that Ijah should be so highly respected and connected. This deep-toned Ijah, a member of so many upper-cla.s.s clubs and a.s.sociations, was a gentleman. Tanky's cousin a gentleman! Isatis_ bald head with the reasonably composed face was in the papers. He obviously made pretty good money (peanuts to Tanky). Maybe he would be reluctant to disclose to a federal judge that he was closely related to a convicted felon. If that was what Tanky thought, he was mistaken.

Years ago, Ijah was a kind of wild-a.s.s type. His TV show was like a Second City act, a Marx Brothers routine. It went on in a fever of absurdities.

Ijah's conduct is much different now. Today he's quiet, he's a gentleman. What does it take to be a gentleman? It used to require hereditary lands, breeding, conversation. Toward the end of the last century, Greek and Latin did it, and I have some of each. If it comes to that, I enjoy an additional advantage in that I don't have to be anti-Semitic or strengthen my credentials as a civilized person by putting down Jews. But never mind that.

"Your Honor, it may be instructive to hear the real facts in a case you have tried. On the bench, one seldom learns what the wider human circ.u.mstances are. As Metzger's cousin, I can be amicus curiae in a larger sense.

"I remember Tanky in his high chair. Tanky is what he was called on the Schurz High football squad. To his mother he was R'foel. She called him Folya, or Folka, for she was a village woman, born behind the pale. A tremendous infant, strapped in, struggling with his bonds. A powerful voice and a strong color. Like other infants he must have fed on Pablum or farina, but Cousin Shana also gave him more potent things to eat. She cooked primitive dishes like calf 's-foot jelly in her kitchen, and I remember eating stewed lungs, which had a spongy texture, savory but chewy, much gristle. The family lived on Hoyne Street in a brick bungalow with striped awnings, alternating broad bands of white and cantaloupe. Cousin Shana was a person of great force, and she kept house as it had been kept for hundreds of years. She was a wide woman, a kind of human blast furnace. Her style of conversation was exclamatory. She began by saying, in Yiddish, 'Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear!' And then she told you her opinion. It may be that persons of her type have become extinct in America. She made an immense impression on me. We were fond of each other, and I went to the Metzgers' because I was at home there, and also to see and hear primordial family life.

"Shana's aunt was my grandmother. My paternal grandfather was one of a dozen men who had memorized the whole of the Babylonian Talmud (or was it the Jerusalem one? here I am ignorant). All my life I have asked, 'Why do that?' But it was done.

"Metzger's father sold haberdashery in the Boston Store down in the Loop. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire he had been trained as a cutter and also as a designer of men's clothing. A man of many skills, he was always nicely dressed, stocky, bald except for a lock at the front, combed to swerve to the right. Some men are mutely bald; his baldness was expressive; stressful lumps would form in his skin, which dissolved with the return of calm. He said little; he grinned and beamed instead, and if there is a celestial meridian of good nature, it intersected his face. He had guileless abbreviated teeth with considerable s.p.a.ces between them. What else? He was a stickler for respect. n.o.body was to take his amiability for granted. When his temper rose, failure to find words gave him a stifled look, while large lumps came up under his scalp. One seldom saw this, however. He suffered from a tic of the eyelids. Also, to show his fondness (to boys) he used harmless Yiddish obscenities-a sign that he took you into his confidence. You would be friends when you were old enough.

"Just one thing more, Your Honor, if you care about the defendant's personal background. Cousin Metzger, his father, enjoyed stepping out in the evening, and he often came to play cards with my father and my stepmother. In winter they drank tea with raspberry preserves; in summer I was sent to the drugstore to buy a quart brick of three-layered ice cream-vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. You asked for 'Neapolitan.' It was a penny-ante poker game and often went on past midnight."

"I understand you're a friend of Gerald Eiler," said Tanky.

"Acquaintance...."

"Ever been to his house?"

"About twenty years ago. But the house is gone, and so is his wife. I also used to meet him at parties, but the host who gave them pa.s.sed away. About half of that social circle is in the cemetery."

As usual, I gave more information than my questioner had any use for, using every occasion to transmit my sense of life. My father before me also did this. Such a habit can be irritating. Tanky didn't care who was in the cemetery. You knew Eiler before he was on the bench?" Oh, long before...." Then you might be just the guy to write to him about me."

By sacrificing an hour at my desk I might spare Tanky a good many years of prison. Why shouldn't I do it for old times' sake, for the sake of his parents, whom I held in such affection. I had_ to do it if I wanted to continue these exercises of memory. My souvenirs would stink if I let Shana's son down. I had no s.p.a.ce to work out whether this was a moral or a sentimental decision.

I might also write to Eiler to show off the influence I so queerly had. Tanky's interpretation of my motives would make a curious subject. Did I want to establish that, bubble brain though I seemed to him, there were sound reasons why a letter from me might carry weight with a veteran of the federal judiciary like Eiler? Or prove that / had lived right? He would never concede me that. Anyway, with a long sentence hanging over him, he was in no mood to study life's mysteries. He was sick, deadly depressed.

"It's pretty snazzy across the street over at First National."

Below, in the plaza, is the large Chagall mosaic, costing millions, the theme of which is the Soul of Man in America. I often doubt that old Chagall had the strength necessary to take such a reading. He is too levitational. Too many fancies.

I explained: "The group I'm with advises bankers on foreign loans. We specialize in international law-political economy and so forth."

Tanky said, "Eunice is very proud of you. She sends me clippings about how you're speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations. Or you're sitting in the same box with the governor at the opera. Or were the escort of Mrs. Anwar Sadat when she got an honorary degree. And you play tennis, indoors, with politicians.'"_ How was it that Cousin Ijah's esoteric interests gave him access to these prominent people-art patrons, politicians, society ladies, dictators' widows? Tanky came down heavy on the politicians. About politicians he knew more than I ever would, knew the real_ guys; he had done business with the machine people, he had cash-flow relations with them. He could tell me_ who took from whom, which group owned what, who supplied the schools, hospitals, the county jail and other inst.i.tutions, who milked public housing, handed out the franchises, made the sweetheart deals. Unless you were a longtime insider, you couldn't find the dark crossings used by the mob and the machine. They were occasionally revealed. Very recently two hit men tried to kill a j.a.panese dope supplier in his car. Tokyo Joe Eto is his name. He was shot three times in the skull and ballistics experts are unable to explain why not a single bullet penetrated the brain. Having nothing more to lose, Tokyo Joe named the killers, one of whom proved to be a deputy on the county sheriff's payroll. Were other city or county payrollers moonlighting for the Mafia? n.o.body proposed to investigate. Cousin Tanky knew the answers to many such questions. Hence the gibing look he gave me in the booth. But even that look was diluted, much below full strength. Facing the shades of the prison house, he was not well. We had our share of wrongdoers in the family, but few who made it to the penitentiary. He didn't mean to discuss this with me, however. All he wanted was that 1 should use such influence as I might have. It was worth a try. Another iron in the fire. As for my motive in agreeing to intercede, it was too obscure to be worth the labor of examination. Sentiment. Eccentric foolery. Vanity. "Okay, Raphael. I'll try a letter to the judge."

I did it for Cousin Metzger 's tic. For the three bands of Neapolitan ice cream. For the furious upright growth of Cousin Shana's ruddy hair, and the avid veins of her temples and in the middle of her forehead. For the strength with which her bare feet advanced as she mopped the floor and spread the pages of the Tribune_ over it. It was also for Cousin Eunice's stammer, and for the elocution lessons that cured it, for the James Whitcomb Riley recitations she gave to the captive family and the determination of the "a-a-a-a" with which she stood up to the challenge of "When the Frost Is on the Punkin." I did it because I had been present at Cousin Tanky's circ.u.mcision and heard his cry. And because his c.u.mbersome body was now wrapped in defeat. The curl had gone out of his beard. He looked like Death's sparring partner and his cheeks were battered under the eyes. And if he thought that /was the sentimentalist and he_ the nihilist, he was mistaken. I myself have some experience of evil and of the dissolution of the old bonds of existence; of the sores that have broken out on the body of mankind, which I, however, have the impulse to touch with my own hands.

I wrote the letter because the cousins are the elect of my memory.

"Raphael Metzger's parents, Your Honor, were hardworking, law-abiding people, not so much as a traffic violation on their record. Over fifty years ago, when the Brodskys came to Chicago, the Metzgers sheltered them for weeks. We slept on the floor, as penniless immigrants did in those days. We children were clothed and bathed and fed by Mrs. Metzger. This was before the birth of the defendant. Admittedly, Raphael Metzger became a tough guy. Still, he has committed no violent crimes and it is possible, with such a family background, that he may yet become a useful citizen. In presentencing hearings, doctors have testified that he suffers from emphysema and also from high blood pressure. If he has to serve a sentence in one of the rougher prisons, his health may be irreparably damaged."

This last was pure malarkey. A good federal prison is like a sanatorium. I have been told by more than one ex-convict: "They made a new man out of me in jail. They fixed my hernia and operated my cataracts, they gave me false teeth and fitted me with a hearing aid. On my own, I could never afford it."

A veteran like Eiler has received plenty of clemency letters. Thousands of them are sent by civic leaders, by members of the Congress, and, sure as shooting, by other federal judges, all of them using the low language of high morals-payola letters putting in a good word for well-connected const.i.tuents or political buddies, or old friends in the rackets. You can leave it to Judge Eiler to read between the lines.

I may even have been effective. Tanky got a short sentence. Eiler certainly understood that Tanky was acting on instructions from the higher-ups. If there were kickbacks, he didn't keep much of the money. Presumably a few bucks did stick to his fingers, but he never would have owned four large homes, like some of his bosses. I take it, too, that the judge was aware of secret investigations then going on and of indictments being prepared by grand juries. The government was after bigger game. These are not matters which Eiler will ever discuss with me. When we meet, we talk music or tennis, sometimes foreign trade. We gossip about the university. But Eiler was aware that a stiff sentence might have endangered Tanky's life. He would have been suspected of giving information to get out sooner. It is generally agreed that Tanky's patron, Dorfman, was killed last year after his conviction in the Nevada bribery case because he would have been sent to prison for life and he might therefore well have chosen to make a deal with the authorities. Dorfman was shot in the head last winter by two men, executed with smooth skill in a parking lot. The TV cameras took many close-ups of the bloodstained slush. n.o.body bothered to wash it away, and in my fantasy the rats came at night to lap it. Expecting to die, Dorfman made no arrangement to protect himself. He hired no bodyguards. A free-for-all shoot-out between bodyguards and hit men might have brought reprisals against his family. So he silently endured the emotions of a doomed man, as he waited for the inevitable hit.

A word about how people think of such things in Chicago, about this life to which all have consented. Buy cheap, sell dear is the very soul of business. The foundations of political stability, of democracy, according even to its eminent philosophers, are swindle and fraud. Now, smoothness in fraud arranges immunity for itself. The top executives, the lawyers at the nucleus of power, the spreaders of the most fatal nets-they_ are never shredded and incinerated, they_ never leave the blood of their brains in parking lots. Therefore Chicagoans accord a certain respect to those four-mansion crooks who risk their lives in crimes of high visibility. We are looking at the fear of death that defines your essential bourgeois. The Chicago public doesn't examine its att.i.tudes as closely as this, but there you are: the Mob big shot has prepared his soul for execution. He must._ For such elementary reminders that justice in some form still exists the plain man is grateful. (I am having a moment of impotent indignation; let's drop it.) I have to relate that I was embarra.s.sed by the delivery of a case of Lafite-Rothschild prior to the sentencing. I hadn't yet mailed my letter to the judge. As a member (inactive) of the bar, I record this impropriety with discomfort. n.o.body need know. Zimmerman's liquor truck brought me a dozen delicious bottles too conscience-contaminated to be drunk. I gave them to hostesses, as dinner gifts. At least Tanky knew good wine.

At the Italian Village I had ordered Nozzole, a decent Chianti which Tanky barely tasted. Too bad he didn't allow himself to become tipsy. I might have made him an amusing cousinly confidence (off the record for us both). I, too, am involved in the lending of big sums. Tanky dealt in millions. As one who prepares briefing doc.u.ments, I am involved with the lending of billions to Mexico, Brazil, Poland, and other hopeless countries. That very day, the representative of a West African state had been sent into my office to discuss aspects of his country's hard-currency problems; in particular, restrictions on the importing of European luxury products, especially German and Italian automobiles used by the executive cla.s.s (in which they made Sunday excursions with their ladies and all the kids to watch the public executions-the big entertainment of the week: he told this to me in his charming Sorbonnish English).

But Tanky would never have responded with confidences about the outfit. So I never did get a chance to open this potentially intriguing exchange between two Jewish cousins who dealt in megabucks.

Where this private, confidential wit might have been, there occurred instead a deep silence. Gulfs of silence are what give a ba.s.so profundo like mine its oceanic resonance when talk resumes.

It should be said that it's not my office work that most absorbs me. I am consumed by different interests, pa.s.sions. I am coming to that.

With time off for good behavior, Tanky would have only about eight full months to serve in a decent jail in the Sunbelt, where as a trained accountant he could reckon on being a.s.signed light work, mostly fooling with computers. You would have thought that this would satisfy him. No, he was restless and pressing. He apparently thought that Eiler might have a soft spot for low-rumbling, off-the-wall Cousin Ijah. He may even have concluded that Ijah "had something" on the judge, if I know anything about the way minds work in Chicago.

In any case, Cousin Eunice telephoned again, to say, "I must_ see you." In her own behalf, she would have said, "I'd like_ to see you." So I knew it was Tanky. What now?

I recognized that I couldn't refuse. I was trapped. For when Coolidge was president the Brodskys had slept on Cousin Shana's floor. We were hungry and she fed us. The words of Jesus and the prophets can never be extracted from the blood of certain people.

Mind, I absolutely agree with Hegel (lectures at Jena, 1806) that the whole ma.s.s of ideas that have been current until now, "the very bonds of the world," are dissolving and collapsing like a vision in a dream. A new emergence of Spirit ls-or had better be-at hand. Or as another thinker and visionary has put it, mankind was long supported by an unheard music which buoyed it, gave it now, continuity, coherence. But this humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different, barbarous music welling up, and a different elemental force has begun to manifest itself, without form as yet.

That, too, is a good way to put the matter: a cosmic orchestra sending out music has suddenly canceled its performance. And where, with regard to the cousins, does that leave us? I confine myself to cousins. I do have brothers, but one of them is a foreign service officer whom I never see, while the other operates a fleet of taxicabs in Tegucigalpa and has written off Chicago altogether. I am blockaded in a small historical port, as it were. I can't sail forth; I can't even extricate myself from the ties of Jewish cousinhood. It may be that the dissolution of the bonds of the world affects Jews in different ways. The whole ma.s.s of ideas that have been current until now, the very bonds of the world...

What has Tanky to do with bonds or ties? Years in the underworld. Despises his sister. Thinks his cousin Ijah a creep. Here before us is a life to which all have consented. But not Cousin Ijah. Why is he a holdout? What sphere does he think he_ is from? If he doesn't get into the action so gratifying for the most significant and potent people around, where does he satisfy his instincts?

Well, we met in the Italian Village to drink Nozzole. The Village has three stories and three dining rooms, which I call Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. We ate our veal limone in Paradiso. In his need, Tanky turned to Ijah. Jewish consanguinity-a special phenomenon, an archaism of which the Jews, until the present century stopped them, were in the course of divesting themselves. The world as it was dissolving apparently collapsed on top of them, and the divest.i.ture could not continue.

Okay, now I take Eunice to lunch atop the First National skysc.r.a.per, one of the monuments of the most curious present (how weird can these presents get?). I show her the view, and far, far below us is the Italian Village, a thin slice of old-world architecture from Hansel-and-Gretel time. The Village is squeezed on one side by the green opulent swellings of the new Xerox headquarters and on the other by the Bell Savings Corporation.

I am painfully aware that Eunice has had cancer surgery. I know that there is a tormenting rose of scar tissue under her blouse, and she told me when we last met about the pains in her armpit and her terror of recurrence. Her command of medical terminology, by the way, is terrific. And you never get a chance to forget how much behavioral science she has studied. To counteract old affections and pity, I round up in self-defense any number of negative facts about the Metzger family. First, brutal Tanky. Then the fact that old Metzger used to frequent burlesque p.r.i.c.k-tease shows when he could spare an hour from his duties at the Boston Store, and I would see him in those h.o.r.n.y dark joints on South State Street when I was cutting school. But that was not so negative. It was more touching than sinful. It was his way of coming to life; it was artificial resuscitation. A man of any s.e.xual delicacy may feel himself hit in the genitals by a two-by-four after doing his conjugal duty in the bungalow belt. Cousin Shana was a dear soul but there was nothing of the painted erotic woman about her. Anyway, South State Street was nothing but meat-and-potatoes lewdness in meat-and-potatoes Chicago. In the refined Orient, even in holy cities, infinitely more corrupt exhibitions were offered to the public.

Then I tried to see what I might convict Cousin Shana of, and how I might disown even her. Toward the end of her life, owner of a large apartment building, she hitchhiked on Sheridan Road to save bus fare. So as to leave more money to Eunice she starved herself, some of the cousins said. They added that she, Eunice, would need every penny of it because her husband, Earl, a Park District employee, deposited his weekly check as soon as he was paid, locked it in his personal savings account. Rejected all financial responsibility. Eunice put the children through school entirely on her own. She was a psychologist with the Board of Education. Mental testing was her profession. (Her racket,_ Tanky might have called it.) Eunice and I sit down at our reserved table atop the First National Bank and she transmits Tanky s new request. Eagerness to serve her brother consumes her. She is a mother like her own mother, all-sacrificing, and a sister to match. Tanky, who would get to see Eunice once in five years, is now in frequent communication with her. She brings his messages to me. I am like the great fish in the Grimm fairy tale. The fisherman freed him from his net and has been granted three wishes. We are now at wish number two. The fish is listening in the executive dining room. What does Tanky ask? Another letter to the judge, requesting more frequent medical examinations, a visit to a specialist, a special diet. "The stuff he has to eat makes him sick."

The great fish should now say, "Beware!"

Instead he says, "I can try."