I was still faced with the problem of reserves, of creating alternates for first choices who would not or could not attend. Now my problem was the reverse of what it had been in the beginning. Then I had been overwhelmed by the apparent superfluity of the eminent; now I was aware that any substitution was bound to be unsatisfactory.
It was the creation of the second team, however, that ultimately brought out my most exquisite sense of nuance and that made the fiercest demands on my artistic imagination. Again I created not power itself but the illusion of power and glamour in depth. A Magi done with mirrors, as it were. In a way I was almost sorry when later I had to scratch off each alternate candidate as first choices made their decisions to come. (It would have been one more thing I had gotten away with.)
Once my lists were prepared the real work began. There were instructions to give the basic nine, schedules and suggestions for follow-ups. All this took time and I saw that the first meeting would have to be pushed back another two months. It was necessary, too, to guarantee the loyalty of my nine workers. Margaret and Nate were easy, of course, but many of the others I had not seen in years. I set aside three weeks for winning them over, and began by trying to revive their interest in the old flamboyant Boswell.
DR. MORTON PERLMUTTER. INSTITUTE OF MAN. UNIFERSITY OF ILLINOIS. CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS. I AM BEHIND CONVOCATION OF CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY, ARTS, MANKIND, RELIGION AND WHAT HAVE YOU. FANTASTIC OPPORTUNITY TO STUDY LIFE AS IT IS LIVED AT THE TOP. MORE FUN THAN A FIELD TRIP TO PAPUA. FREE EATS. FREE SPEECH. FREE LOVE. NATE’S PLACE. NEW YORK. DETAILS FOLLOW.
My Dear Rabbi Messerman, Shalom:
Your presence is respectfully requested at the charter meeting of a new spiritual organization whose membership will be made up of the world community’s leading religious and secular authorities. Although I will not burden you now with the full details, we are hoping to attract some of the Yeshiva people in Cincinnati, as well as several of the more important goyim.
When further details and the reservation blank arrive, please indicate whether you prefer fish or fowl.
Field Marshal Augustus Lano,
Presidential Ranch House,
Los Farronentes, QR.
I am sending you this through one of my contacts in the International Red Cross in the hopes that it reaches you in time.
There is about to be established in New York a new secret organization whose purpose, the vis-à-vis confrontation of world leaders in an atmosphere of peaceful cordiality, is one which I am sure you must endorse.
It will be necessary for you to come to America for this. Because of the willful perversity of an unfortunate official policy toward you your current status is one of persona non grata, and it may be more convenient if you could arrange to come up by two-man submarine through the St. Lawrence Seaway. You could swim to Cleveland and make it from there to the Turnpike and New York. However I leave these details to you. More follows.
Today Los Farronentes, Q.R. Tomorrow the world, eh, Lano? P.S. How’s the crabgrass?
Dear Harold Flesh,
Some of the boys thought Nate’s. Hush hush. Q.T. S.S. N.K.V.D.
These I followed with other letters — matey, detailed, sincere. I sent brochures, gifts, reply-prepaid telegrams. With some of these men I had, in our mutual past, already vaguely alluded to a Club, for this was not a new idea with me. Many were used to doing me favors, but I let them see that no favor they had ever done me was quite complete without this one; I played on their sense of being allowed to participate in a human continuum outside their own, generating in them not duty, not love, but the high privilege of knowing some human fact in perspective — a small immortality. No one knew as well as I the irresistible appeal of the words “for old time’s sake.” Ultimately, of course, they had to come round.
Then I set to work on the other fifty-seven. Again I wrote letters, feeling something already historical and marked about the very pen that inscribed “Mon cher Picasso,” “Dear Oppenheimer,” “Exquisite Miss Taylor,” and taking an almost physical pleasure just in folding the paper and addressing and sealing the envelopes. It was as though, stamped, these already enjoyed the status of official documents, artifacts, the thin, blue, barber-pole- edged airmail envelopes like a kind of money. I sent the letters special delivery; it was satisfying to know that they would have to be signed for, that whoever got my letter would see my name, my handwriting, handle something I had handled. It was only the spurious tactility of the famous, the special sense that they alone could give of possessing an almost healing power in their touch. It was only the barbarous, talismanic power of the autograph book, and I should have known better, but for the time I was caught up.
On a chart I devised I kept a strict accounting of when and to whom a letter had been sent. I allowed three days and then followed up the letter with a person-to- person phone call from the booth in the Columbus Circle subway station. It was perhaps the most intensely active period of my life. I didn’t spare myself for a moment. My room on Fifty-eighth Street became my office; stationary, stamps, rough drafts of letters, charts, lists and telegram blanks were everywhere. I felt like Marx loose in the Bronx. Late into every night I wrote, rendered, revised, polished, aiming in these letters to the fifty-seven for the fat, safe, exactly perfect pitch of ultimate respectability.
It was spring and warm for that time of year in New York. I worked away with the windows flung wide, unconscious of hunger, discomfort, heat, weariness, time. It must have been then that I caught the draft.
VI
The cough was dry, hard, a sustained and piercing howl from the chest. I could bring nothing up with it. Worse during the day, it seemed to have something to do with the light itself, with the very sunshine. It didn’t seem to have any connection with my body. My throat did not tickle; my chest, when I blew out long, deep experimental exhalations, seemed clear. But every so often the rhythm of my existence was broken by a sudden, irrelevant explosion, strident as a signal.
In a few days I began to notice after each seizure a light residual sensitivity low on my left side — not an ache, rather a kind of flesh memory of contact, as after a handshake, or a pressure, not in itself unpleasant, like the thin sensation that you are still wearing your hat just after you have taken it off. Gradually, however, and almost in direct proportion to the subsidence of the cough, this pressure developed from increasingly less vague sensations into an intense and unbearable pain. I had the impression when I moved my hand inside my pants to touch the area that it actually glowed with a special localized heat. “I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble,” I groaned. Nor did it ease my fear when just two aspirin killed my pain. I’d been had. What, I thought, two aspirin? For this? For what I’ve got? I felt that my body was playing with me, teasing me into a phony confidence.