Only the grandchildren, infrequent visitors now that school had begun, gave him any trouble, and on these he unleashed all the authority he could muster, in fact all that with their grandparents he had kept stifled out of a deference not so much to their age as to his own character. With these children, however, awed as he was by his responsibility for their safety, he was ruthless, discovering in his shouted instructions and commands, and in the pitch of the whistle he blew at them, a barely controlled hysteria. “Out of the pool. Sit in that lounge chair for ten minutes!” “No running, no running. I’ve already warned you.” “Shallow end, shallow end!” The mothers and grandparents beamed at the disciplinary figure he projected, a manifestation at last of something they had threatened the children with for years, the man who would do things to them if they did not behave in restaurants or went too close to the cages in zoos. Yet when he saw what the score was, how he was being used as a bogyman, he rebelled by determining to settle an old score: the ancient saw about how long one must wait before going into the water after eating. His mother’s generation held that at least an hour had to pass before one could safely swim without cramping. Nothing had changed. Forgetting that it was they who had installed him in the first place and that his expertise, like his helmet and lotions, came from the office itself, they turned to him as their lifeguard, to arbitrate when the children’s nagging became too much for them. The boldest thing he did during his tenure was to assert, once and for all, ex cathedra, that there was nothing in it, that the incidence of cramp during digestion was no greater than afterwards, that time wasn’t in it at all, that being wet wasn’t. To his astonishment they abandoned at once a position they had held all their lives.
But at last even the presence of the children grew familiar, and he became indifferent to all but the most flagrant violations of safety, indifferent to everything save his own still surviving image of himself as their lifeguard. Though it was just here that he hedged. Harris had had Fanon draw up a disclaimer of responsibility for the safety of the residents during this special session of the pool. This each resident had been made to read and sign before being permitted to enter the pool area. Seeing in the document a loophole which might have left him holding the bag should anything happen, as if responsibility traveled a circuit and had if it were not at one point along the line to be at another, Preminger wrote in above Harris’s a disclaimer of his own: “And while Marshall Preminger, acting lifeguard, will do everything in his power to maintain order in the pool and save the life of anyone who through carelessness or accident finds him- or herself in difficulty, it is nevertheless understood that the said Marshall Preminger is not legally responsible for the safety of the swimmers.” (And did they see, he wondered, what a guy he was, how his lifeguard’s italics saved him, how while exempting himself from legal responsibility — just good common sense, just good business practice, just wise stewardship — he did nothing to repudiate the more important guilts?)
But no one drowned. It never came up. Only once did he find it necessary to leave his platform to help someone. Lena Jacobson, standing in perhaps four feet of water, had suddenly begun to dance and moan. “I’m cramping,” she cried. “I’m cramping.” She looked toward the platform.
“Are you in trouble?” Preminger called.
“It’s nothing to write home about,” she said, “but I’ve got this terrific cramp in my right leg. It pinches. If you’d be so kind?”
“Hold on,” Preminger said, “I’ll get you.” He climbed down from the platform and entered the pool at the shallow end, wading heavily toward the center rope near which Mrs. Jacobson stood. “Take the rope,” he said. “Hold on to that.”
“You know I didn’t even see it,” she said, “in the excitement I didn’t even see it.”
Meanwhile he continued to wade toward her, the resistance of the water forcing him into a sort of odd swagger.
“Just in time,” she said when he had come up to her. “That was a narrow squeak.” He took her arm and they strolled toward the steps. It was exactly as if he were taking her in to dinner. Meanwhile she chatted amiably to him. “I’ve been walking in swimming pools all my life and nothing like this ever happened before. I can’t get over it. One minute I’m having a good time and the next I’m not. It’s just like, you know, life.”
“I’m glad you didn’t panic.”
“No. I kept my head. I got a cool head on my shoulders.”
“How’s the cramp now?” He helped her up the steps.
“I can’t even feel it. It’s like it fell out of my foot. There’s just a little tingle like pins and needles.”
“That can be worked out with massage,” Preminger said.
“Would you do that?” she asked. “If you don’t want to touch my varicose veins I could put on my slacks.”
“Don’t be silly.” Preminger moved her to a chaise longue where he had her stretch out her legs. He pulled a chair up beside her and began to knead the right calf. Two or three people had gathered to watch. “Step back, please,” Preminger said, “give this woman some air, will you? Show’s over, folks.” They didn’t budge, and he returned to Mrs. Jacobson’s right leg, extemporizing massaging leverages as he went along. First he pulled two fingers down the back of her calf, then pinched in a lateral line, then jabbed in a vertical. He plucked at her varicose veins.
“If it hadn’t been for this one here,” Mrs. Jacobson told the bystanders, “I might not be alive to tell the tale. It was like crabs got me. It was terrible. All I wanted was to sit down in the water. I tell you, my entire life passed before my eyes. Oh yeah. There. That got it good. That’s right. I saw my childhood home in Poland. I relived my courtship and how we came to America and the place where we lived in Philadelphia. I saw the look on the mover’s face who broke my mama’s furniture when we came to Chicago, he should be moved himself in a truck a thousand miles. I saw our wedding.”
“You married the mover, Lena?” a woman asked.
“I married Jack. I saw our wedding.”
“Hey, Lena,” a man said, “did you see your wedding night?”
“Shh. He’s only a boy,” she said, indicating Preminger, bent over her right leg. She laughed and touched Preminger’s shoulder. “He wants to know did I see my wedding night.”
“What else did you see?”
“I saw my mother’s recipe for lokshin kugel. I saw the good times and I saw the bad.”
“It’s better than a picture book.”
She maneuvered her left leg into Preminger’s hands. “She says it’s better than a picture book. I saw all the good kalooky hands I ever got and Paulie grow up and move to California.” She swung her legs over the side of the chaise longue and sat up. “Listen, this is some lifeguard we elected. Darling — I can call you that because I’m an old woman and you’re a young pipsqueak — I’m telephoning Jack what you did, and if he don’t say whenever you’re downtown you can park for free in the garage I don’t know my old man.”
“Lena, you tell Jack what he did, he may come and do the boy an injury.”
“You hush. She says Jack will do you an injury.”
In fact he was invited to dinner. What he found surprising was how much he looked forward to it, and how disappointed he was when it was postponed. Jack Jacobson called him from the office. “Listen,” he said, “we talked it over. We invited you to come over for supper. What does it mean for a snappy young man to eat supper with a couple of old fogies? You’d be bored stiff. Give us a few more days on this. We’ll get some people together. My daughter Sylvia flies back from Cincinnati the middle of the week. She should be there. Let’s make it Friday night. That way no one has to go in on Saturday. You got something planned Friday night?”