Two nights following his little drama at the pool, the night his shivah would formally have ended had he not already suspended it, he had visitors. Seven men and four women, a jury of his peers manqué. Not individually familiar to him, though he thought he might have seen a few of them and one or two might even have been in his house, he recognized even before they spoke that they had come as a group. His behind still tingled with the austere, ghostly caress of the hard mourner’s bench and he felt a sort of mixed curiosity and low-intensity outrage at the sight of them. How dare these people, so patently a band (the fact that there were so many of them was a sure sign that they had not all been able to make it — and, oh, he thought, what low time is it in my life that I have taken to counting my guests? — who clearly would have had to have arranged this call, who didn’t look like brothers and sisters or husbands and wives or fathers and daughters), take it for granted, after their own elaborate arrangements with each other, that he would be there without first ringing up? Did they count him as he had counted them? Yes, that’s how it was. They had his number.
“Mr. Preminger, how do you do?” a man hidden behind the others in the corridor said. “We have not yet had the pleasure. I am Mr. Salmi, first president of H.T.R.A., the Harris Towers Residents Association.”
My God, Preminger thought, the Father of my Condominium!
“These good people — may we come in? — are associated with me on the Committee of Committees.” Preminger stood aside. “They are chairmen of the various committees that exist in our condominium to enrich the social and cultural life of the residents, make our bylaws, establish liaison between residents and management, and adjudicate complaints.”
“I found the wristbands,” Preminger said.
“Forgive if you will our vigilante aspect. We are here to welcome and invite. Normally, of course, Miriam — Mrs. Julius Schreiber — would have been by to do this, but your father died while Mrs. Schreiber was abroad.”
“She’s still there,” someone said.
“So this extraordinary convocation has no purpose other than to bid you welcome and to officially acknowledge the Towers’ sadness at Phil’s — your father’s — passing.”
“Hear hear.”
“You know,” Salmi said, “we don’t normally jump all over a new resident like this. Harris Towers is first of all our home; only secondly is it our community. I’m not going to talk a lot of Mickey Mouse to you. We don’t, for example, even have our own flag like a lot of the condominiums do. The management had one designed, but we voted not to fly it. The Stars and Stripes is good enough for us. Still, for many of the residents — I don’t except myself — Harris Towers has provided the first opportunity we’ve ever had to participate on a pragmatic, viable level in the shaping of the quality of the community life. I want to underscore that word ‘participate.’ I’ll be coming back to it, if you’ll bear with me, more than once tonight. May I sit down, Mr. Preminger — Marshall?”
Preminger waved him to a seat.
“Listen,” Salmi said, leaning forward, “we’ve got a piece of Chicago here that belongs to us. Do you gather my meaning? What we do with it isn’t anybody’s business but our own. I’m talking about the principle of anything between consenting adults — not on the smut level, you understand. This is a great principle, a great principle. One of the great ideas of Western Man. We can use this place as an ordinary bedroom complex — a home first, I said, you’ll remember — or we can reach out and touch our environment, shape it for good or ill. The choice is each individual’s to make, and the choice is ours. Boy oh boy, I must sure sound corny to you. I must sure sound like a fanatic. But wait, you’ll see. But what am I doing monopolizing? I said ‘participate,’ and I meant participate. Mr. Ed Eisner has the floor.”
“All I have to say,” said Mr. Eisner, “is I’ve been living here since the place opened. That was January of seventy, and I told my wife a new decade, a new tomorrow. I spoke better than I knew. I never had any desire to lead men. I’ve got an I.G.A. Big deal, it’s a small franchise supermarket, I’m a grocer. I still go to business, but I’m here to tell you that I’m more interested in this place than I ever was in my store. That’s my livelihood, but I’m telling the truth. I should have made this move years ago. I live to come home every night. Weekends are like a vacation for me. I don’t even want to go away anymore. If you ask me, Miriam Schreiber was nuts to go abroad. Not me. I’ve got a community. I don’t mean I have, I don’t mean me. I’m chairman of the Buildings and Grounds Committee. We serve for eighteen months, and my term was up this past June. Let me tell you something, I fought like hell to retain my chairmanship — promises, deals, even a little mudslinging, if you want to know. I said my opponent who happens to live in Center House wanted to use the fountain out front as a private lake. ‘A private lake’—what the hell does that mean? I sweated the election, I ate my heart out. My wife said, ‘Ed, what do you need it, it’s a headache.’ You think I want power? I don’t give a goddamn for power! You think I care about being a big shot? Some big shot. No, what I care about is the buildings and grounds. That the fountain works and the lights are lit in the halls and no one is stuck in the elevator and the crab grass should drop dead. What I care about is that there ain’t no litter and when a rose is planted a rose comes up. I’m on the janitors’ asses like a top sergeant. They hate my guts, but I get things done.”
The speech was crazily moving. Preminger felt a swell of sympathy for Mr. Eisner, for all of them, though he did not know what to make of their strange call. They spoke to him like evangelists; their eyes shone. He brought chairs from the kitchen for those who were still standing, and found himself nodding at what they said, listening as carefully as he ever had to anything in his life. One by one each had his say. Never had people spoken this way to him, so clearly seeking his approval — more, his conversion, as if without it they would not be able to go on themselves. He felt wooed, bid for at some odd auction, standing by as his value rose and rose, fetching sums undreamed of.
“I think,” a man said, “he needs a clearer picture of the overall setup.”
“This is Mr. Morris Barney,” Salmi said. “He edits the house organ, The House Organ, and writes the highly readable column ‘A Story Within a Storey.’ “
“Three buildings,” Barney said briskly, naming them on his fingers, “North, South and Center. Two of them, North and South, high-rises, sixteen stories, each accommodating one hundred twenty-eight apartments, two hundred fifty-six for the pair. Center House, though only eleven stories high, has twenty-two apartments to the floor or two hundred and forty-two in all. This gives you a total of four hundred and ninety-eight units, a figure carefully thought out by the owners—”
“We’re the owners,” a woman said.
“We’re the owners. We are the owners,” Barney told her, “but let’s not kid ourselves, this place didn’t go up by itself and it didn’t go up because of us. Harris is the brains.”
“A brilliant man,” President Salmi said.
“—carefully thought out by the owners beforehand, the total falling just two units shy of the number officially designated by the U.S. Government as a project. This eliminates a considerable amount of red tape and static from the FHA should an owner find it necessary to sell. All right, four nine eight units, three zero five of them occupied by married couples — six hundred ten marrieds. Plus a hundred eighteen solitaries — the single, widowed, widowered and divorced, a handful. In addition, seventy-three apartments owned by brothers, brothers and sisters, mother/ child or father/child relationships — two or more people living together as a family with a designation other than married. Two hundred and three of these in all. In only two apartments in Harris Towers are there married couples with children — seven people. All right, here are your figures: six hundred ten man-and-wife; one hundred eighteen solitaries”—I’m a solitary, Preminger thought—“two hundred and three in mixed families and two couples with three children. A total population of nine hundred and thirty-eight people. The median age is sixty-one.”