“No. There’s such a thing as a coffin courtesy. I’m a grown man. I haven’t even said basic stuff like if there’s anything I can do, anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Thank you,” Preminger said, “it’s kind of you to offer, but really there’s nothing.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” Harris said. “Will you pray with me?” he asked suddenly.
“Pray?” Startled, Marshall started to rise but Harris restrained him.
“No, no,” he said, “We don’t have to get on our knees. We’ll do it right here on the bench. Everything dignified and comfortable, everything easy.”
“Hey, listen—”
“Hey, listen,” Harris prayed. “Your servants may not always understand Your timing, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Sometimes it might seem unfortunate, even perverse. Was there a real need, for example, to take Philly Preminger, a guy in the prime? How old could the man have been? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? With penicillin and wonder drugs that’s a kid, a babe. Was there any call to strike down such a guy? You, who gave him sleek hair, who grew his sideburns and encouraged his mustache, who blessed him with taste in shirts, shoes, bellbottoms and turtlenecks, you couldn’t also have given him a stronger heart? Why did you make the chosen people so frail, oh God, give them Achilles heels in their chromosomes, set them up as patsies for cholesterol and Buerger’s disease, hit them with bad circulation and a sweet tooth for lox? You could have made us hard blond goyim, but no, not You.”
“Look here—”
“Look here, oh Lord,” Harris prayed, “the bereaved kid here wants to know. Didn’t you owe his daddy the courtesy of a tiny warning attack, a mild stroke, say, just enough to cut down on the grease and kiss off the cigarettes? Here’s a man not sixty years old and retired three years and in his condominium it couldn’t be two — I can get the exact figures for You when I get back to the office—a guy who put his deposit down months before we dug the first spadeful for the foundation, and got his apartment fixed up nice, just the way he wanted it, proud as a bride when the deliveries came, the American of Martinsville, the Swedish of Malmö, who made new friends, the life of the party poolside, a cynosure of the sauna and a gift to the dollies, the widows of Chicago’s North Side—who’ll have plenty to say to You themselves, I’ll bet, once their eyes are dry and they make sense of what’s hit them—and You knock him down like a tenpin, You make him like a difficult spare. Lead kindly light, amen.” He turned, beaming, to Preminger. “Gimme that old time religion,” he said. “We got business. You got the will, Shirley?”
The lawyer patted his breast pocket.
“You were my father’s lawyer?”
Fanon patted it a second time.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Harris said. He winked at Preminger. “That’s how he wins his cases. The juries eat it up.”
Fanon reached inside his jacket, pulled out a legal document bound in blue paper. Unfolding it, he took out his glasses, put them on and began to move his lips rapidly, making no sound. “The reading of the will,” Joe Colper whispered. Fanon wet his thumb and flipped the page, continuing to read to himself. He looked like a man davening, and it seemed the most orthodox thing that had happened that evening.
When Fanon finished, he folded the paper and placed it back inside his jacket pocket.
“Well?” Harris said.
“The boy gets the condominium,” Fanon said.
“Airtight?”
“Like a coffee can.”
“Will it stand up in court?”
“Like a little soldier.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else.”
“Let me see that,” Marshall said.
The lawyer handed the will over to him. It was very short, a page and a half and most of that merely concerned with authenticating itself. Marshall could see that Fanon was right. He got the condominium and the furnishings. It was his father’s signature. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What about the rest of the estate?”
“There isn’t any rest of the estate.”
“Well, there must be. Insurance policies, stocks. My father was very active in the market.”
They looked at him and smiled. “Nope. He cashed his policies. He sold his stocks.”
“I figured about a hundred twenty-five thousand. I was being conservative.”
Joe Colper put his arm on Preminger’s shoulder. “The apartment was forty-five thou. He paid cash. The furnishings must have cost another twenty.”
“The man hadn’t worked for three years,” Fanon said. “Say his food and incidentals cost him ten a year. He had some tastes, your old man. That’s ninety-five.”
“I figured one hundred twenty-five thousand. That still leaves thirty thousand.”
Colper and Fanon shrugged. “Tell him,” Harris said, “about maintenance.”
“Maintenance?”
“That’s the thing sticks in their throat,” Colper said.
“He bought a condominium from us,” Fanon said. “Where does it say we sold him an elevator?”
“A carpeted lobby,” Colper said.
“Game rooms, party rooms, a heated pool, central air conditioning,” Fanon said.
“These are ‘extras,’ ” Colper told him.
“Maintenance is three hundred a month,” Fanon said.
“Okay,” said Harris, “here’s the story. I hate to trouble you with details at a terrible time like this, but we’ve got to face facts. Time and the hour runs through the roughest day. He was behind in the maintenance when he passed. He was broke. I never saw such a guy for spending dough. And he was so cautious when I first knew him. Prudent. Wouldn’t you say prudent, Shirley?”
“Very prudent.”
“But toward the last — well, toward the last he spent and spent. Call me a cab, keep the change.”
“A real sport,” Colper said.
“There was drunken sailor in him.”
Marshall, who melted when he heard a lowdown, melted. It was as if they’d been up all night together. He felt grotty, intimate, like a man with a shirttail loose at a poker table. “I sound terrible,” he said. “I’m not greedy. I’m not a greedy person. I didn’t have expectations, I never lived as if I was coming into dough. You sprung this will on me. Naturally I’m surprised.”
“Sure,” Harris said, “naturally you’re surprised. You get a shot like this you fall back on your instincts. Inside every fat man there’s a wolf, there’s a buzzard, there’s a chicken hawk.”
“That’s human nature,” Joe Colper said.
“It’s why logic was invented,” his father’s lawyer said, “to tame surprise and make the world consecutive.”
“We understand your…lapse,” Harris said, “Shit, sonny—”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
“Happy birthday. Shit, sonny, I’m your uncle, I like you. Come home and I’ll take you to the ball game and get you a hot dog. Listen, there isn’t a single one of us who wouldn’t give his eyeteeth to behave like you just did. We’re not grand characters, we ain’t angelfaces. Petty hits us where we live. Let go, relax. What a kick it would be to let the other guy pick up the check in a restaurant! Keep your hands in your pockets, it’s cold out. Sit still. What are you reaching around like a fucking contortionist to pay the other guy’s toll at the bridge? I’ll give you a tip: don’t tip. You know the guy who’s got it made? The creep in the movies who plays up to the uncle because he thinks there might be an extra buck in the till for him when the old bastard croaks. So don’t apologize to us for your character. When Counselor Fanon laid the will on you and you gave us that ‘Let me see that’ and that ‘What about the rest of the estate?’ I was proud of you. Did you see him, Joe? Shirley? Whining like a baby and his old man dead in the coffin not fifteen feet away.”