“Thank you,” Salmi said, “for a brilliant breakdown.” He turned to Preminger. “Almost a thousand people,” he said. “Many small towns aren’t as large. We’re practically a government,” he said breathlessly. “We’re a microcosm. If we can make it work here, why can’t they make it work on the outside? Do you follow me? The answer is simple. Where are your blacks? Where are your PR’s? The answer is simple, my dear Marshall. There aren’t any. We’re not only a community, we’re a ghetto! You know things, you’re a scholar. Athens was a ghetto. Rome was. For slaves read custodians, read carpenters, gardeners and the three lads in the underground garage. Read lifeguards and the girls in the office and the executives of the corporation and you have the new Athens on the North Side. Twenty-five people, outsiders, twenty-five on the nose to support the life of nine hundred and thirty-eight, one to thirty-seven. Not a good ratio, Preminger. Count police, fire, civil service and spoils appointments in Chicago as a whole and you have one to less than nineteen. How do we catch up? What’s the economics, Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget?”
Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget looked like all the clubwomen who had ever introduced Preminger to his audiences on the lecture circuit. When she spoke, however, she sounded tougher than any of them ever had, biting off her words like a lady Communist. “Bleak,” she said. “Four nine eight apartments. A maintenance that varies with the size and location of the unit but averages two hundred and fifty dollars a month.” (Were they dunning him, then? Was that what this was all about?) “Times four hundred ninety-eight makes a nut of one hundred and twenty-four thousand, five hundred dollars. That’s the sum we turn over to Harris each month and which he disburses as expenses and payroll. One hundred and twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars — and its peanuts.” She pronounced the word as if she were shelling them in her mouth.
“Shall we raise the maintenance?” It was President Salmi. “Shall we, Marshall? What happens when they strike? When the staff strikes? Shall we raise the maintenance? What do you say we each put in an additional fifty a month? The median age here is sixty-one, Barney tells us. We’re approaching fixed incomes. Because we’re a new Athens on the North Side will the foundations help us out, do you think? Shall we nickel-and-dime ourselves and raise the monthly maintenance gradually until the five extra dollars becomes ten and the ten fifteen and the fifteen thirty and the thirty the original fifty we were so afraid of, and the fifty some outrageous figure we can’t even conceive of now? One day it will come to that. It will. It will have to. But wait. I see an alternative. We cut down services. We drain the pool, fire a janitor or two. Run the heat and air conditioning only at peak times. Watch the flowers die. Learn skills, basic mechanics and carpentry and the electrician’s wisdom. Do for ourselves. But! But don’t ask me to be your president! I’ll not preside over such an organization!”
“Don’t ask me to oversee that sort of budget,” Mrs. Ornfeld moaned.
“I wouldn’t print such news,” Barney said.
“So you see, Marsh?” Salmi said. “Are you looking at this picture? Paradise. A paradise these houses and towers. Open not yet two years, a one hundred percent occupancy since barely March. Do you see? Are you watching? Here too is the decline of the Roman Empire, the dissolution of the city-states. How does it feel to be in history?”
Preminger nodded.
“So when I say participate, I mean participate,” Salmi said. “It ain’t all sweetness and it ain’t all light, and all worlds go broke and every hope wears a thin tread and punctures like a tire. The forecast is not terrific and the times they are a-changing. What happened to Dad, my dear young orphan, happens also on a scale so massive as to be incomprehensible to finite minds like ours. Death is built into the universe like windows in walls.”
Moved, Preminger sat silently on the rug. He was not embarrassed by the speech. None of them were; he heard them breathing, sighing, felt the calm induced by truth. No one hurried to break the silence Salmi had shaped. Here, at last, was his father’s eulogy, the shivah perfected. If he hadn’t thought they would take it as a stunt he would have crawled to the mourner’s bench and sat on it.
“But cheer up,” Salmi said quietly, “take heart, my friends. Land maybe ho, my good Marshall. If all is losing, all’s not yet lost. We’re organized. We gamble against the house — do you like the joke? — but we’re informed of the odds. Most of them”—he indicated the residents throughout the buildings—“think we’re too self-important, ‘Squeak squeak,’ they say for Mickey Mouse. ‘Neigh,’ they go for horseshit, our neighbors and neighsayers. But perhaps we haven’t explained ourselves properly. We may not have made ourselves clear.”
“Trust the people,” Mrs. Ornfeld said.
Salmi turned fiercely to Morris Barney. “You could write an editorial. I’ve told you this a hundred times. Lay it on the line, let them know. Wake them up!”
“My press is free,” Barney said.
“Yeah, yeah, sure.”
“They don’t want to read that stuff, Herb.”
Salmi turned back to Preminger. “Well, I’m an old war-horse,” he said apologetically. “I make these speeches. Look, there are committees — Entertainment, Activities, the newspaper. A few like Buildings and Grounds and Units and Budget are largely watchdog to see that the management keeps up its share of the bargain. But there are others — the Good Neighbors, Emergency, Security, Education. New Residents I foresee will soon be absorbed, since we’re one hundred percent occupied. My colleagues have mimeographed sheets which explain the function of these committees. They’ll leave them with you. You’ll look them over. Sixty-one,” he said wearily. “The median age in this room is that. It feels like ninety. Oh, boy. Oh, well. Read the stuff. Think and study. See where your talents lead you.”
“I will.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Thirty-seven,” Salmi said. “You’re the youngest resident, you know that? Younger even than the children of the two couples whose children still live with them.”
“I am?”
“Yeah,” President Salmi said, “you’re the hope of the future, the new generation.”
“Was my father on a committee? Is that why there’s an opening?” Preminger asked. “Do you want me to carry on his work?”
“Your father was here for the ride. He rode us piggyback.”
“I’d like to do some special pleading,” Morris Barney said. “My understanding is that Marshall is studying for his doctorate. He probably has a flair for writing. I could use a guy like that on the paper.”
“Not so fast,” Mrs. Ehrlmann said, “a college man’s natural place would be on my Education committee.”
“Thirty-seven and built like a horse,” someone else said, “a shoe-in for Security.”
“I have a heart condition,” Preminger told the husky man who had spoken.