He asked the stewardess for pencil and paper, and when she brought them he lowered the tray table on the seat in front of him and sketched his expectations as a sentimental act, a eulogy to his father. Working with figures that were at least fifteen years old (and at that based on things he’d overheard, occasional glimpses of bankbooks, his recollection of the high insurance premiums his father paid, scraps of memory of the man’s moods, the odd time or two he’d boasted of holding a stock that had split two or three for one), he put together an estimate of his inheritance — perhaps one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. He knew there was a sixty-thousand-dollar exemption but was not certain it applied to sons. What the death duties might be he had no idea, but he wished to be conservative — this would be the first token of the piety of that wise stewardship — and allowed himself an extravagant conservatism. Say the government took half; say funeral expenses and outstanding debts came to another ten thousand dollars. He would have about fifty thousand. It was no fortune, but he was proud of his father. It was more by several hundred percent than he himself could have left. He wept for his father and himself.
At O’Hare his mood changed. There was no one to meet him (who could have? he was an only child, his father’s brothers were dead; his dad’s sister, a chronic arthritic, lived in a wheelchair in Brooklyn; other than himself and a handful of eastern cousins on his mother’s side no one survived), and he saw how fatuous he had been on the plane, betrayed by the air that held him up, the jet’s great speed, his vulnerability just then to the seeming perfection of the people who had surrounded him. If they were lawyers why weren’t they traveling in first class? He was thankful he hadn’t struck up conversations with them and asked them his questions about death taxes, or offered, as he had been almost prepared to do, to hire them on the spot.
He got into a cab. The driver didn’t — or pretended he didn’t — know the way. “Does Kedzie cut through that far north? I don’t know if Kedzie cuts through that far north.” And so they spent time not on expressways or even main streets, but in neighborhoods, narrow one-way streets, cruising unfamiliar sections of the city he had once lived in, passing discrete yellow brick bungalows — brick everywhere, the brick interests powerful in Chicago, brick bullies, you couldn’t put up a wooden garage — in the ethnic western edges of the city. Am I being taken for a ride, he wondered, staring gloomily from the driver’s neck to the vicious meter. Six dollars and forty-five cents and no sight of land, no birds or green jetsam. Alarmed, he began a crazy, uneasy monologue, throwing out street names for the cabby’s benefit, making up facts, cluing him in that he was no stranger here.
“Cabanne. In the old days this was the red-light district. It was outside the city limits and Big Bill Thompson couldn’t do a thing about it. That’s interesting about Big Bill. You’d think from his name he was a giant or something. Actually he stood only a little over five and a half feet. They called him that because the smallest banknote he carried was a hundred-dollar bill. Oh look, they’ve torn down the animal hospital on Lucas and Woodward.”
The cabby glanced out the window. “Yeah, they needed the space for a vacant lot.”
Then he got tough. “Come on,” he said, “find out where we are. Ask at a gas station.”
He’d been there before it was finished, when all that had existed were three massive foundations like partially excavated ruins and a few Nissen huts (the archeologists might have stayed there) for the sales office and models of the layouts of the apartments. The buildings were up now, an eleven-story center building and two flanking high-rises. Pallidly bricked and lightly mortised — from a distance the walls had the look of pages on which messages have been rubbed out — and lacking ornament, they seemed severe as Russian universities. A modern fountain stood dead center before the main building like a conventionally hung picture. The place seemed encumbered by signs: instructions to tradesmen regarding deliveries, notices about visitor parking, an old hoarding with the names of all the firms that had had anything to do with the construction of Harris Towers, another with an enormous arrow directing prospects to the main office, others that pointed the way to the garages and pools, warnings to trespassers. The names of the buildings, derived from their positions and printed in thick, raised letters on wide brasses, reassured him. (He was a sucker for all stark address. A restaurant that took its name from its street number and spelled it out, writing a cursive Fifty-Seven for 57, was, for him, a piece of elegance that approached the artistic.)
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?”