Collected Stories

“Don’t you feel for him?”

“How could I not.”

“You’ve led a very different life from the rest, Ijah, but I’ve always said how fond you were of the Metzgers.”

“It’s true.”

“And loved our father and our mother, in the old days.”

“I’ll never forget them.”

She lost control again, and why she sobbed so hard, no expert, not even the most discerning, could exactly specify. She didn’t do it from weakness. That I can say with certainty. Eunice is not one of your fragile vessels. She is forceful like her late mother, tenacious, determined. Her mother had been honorably direct, limited and primitive.

It was a mistake to say, “I’ll never forget them,” for Eunice sees herself as her mother’s representative here among the living, and it was partly on Shana’s account that she uttered such sobs. Sounds like this had never come over this quiet office telephone line of mine. What a disgrace to Shana that her son should be a convicted felon. How would the old woman have coped with such a wound! Still refusing to surrender her mother to death, Eunice (alone!) wept for what Shana would have suffered.

“Remember that my mother idolized you, Ijah. She said you were a genius.”

“That she did. It was an intramural opinion. The world didn’t agree.”

Anyway, here was Eunice pleading for Raphael (Tanky’s real name). For his part, Tanky didn’t care a damn about his sister.

“Have you been in touch, you two?”

“He doesn’t answer letters. He hasn’t been returning calls. Ijah! I want him to know that I care!”

Here my feelings, brightened and glowing in the recollection of old times, grew dark and leaden on me. I wish Eunice wouldn’t use such language. I find it hard to take. Nowadays WE CARE is stenciled on the walls of supermarkets and loan corporations. It may be because her mother knew no English and also because Eunice stammered when she was a kid that it gives her great satisfaction to be so fluent, to speak as the most advanced Americans now speak.

I couldn’t say, “For Christ’s sake don’t talk balls to me.” Instead I had to comfort her because she was heartsick—a layer cake of heartsickness. I said, “You may be sure he knows how you feel.”

Gangster though he may be.

No, I can’t swear that Cousin Raphael (Tanky) actually is a gangster. I mustn’t let his sister’s cliches drive me (madden me) into exaggeration. He associates with gangsters, but so do aldermen, city officials, journalists, big builders, fundraisers for charitable institutions—the Mob gives generously. And gangsters aren’t the worst of the bad guys. I can name greater evildoers. If I had been a Dante, I’d have worked it all out in full detail.

I asked Eunice pro forma why she had approached me. (I didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to see that Tanky had put her up to it.) She said, “Well, you are a public personality.”

She referred to the fact that many years ago I invented the famous-trials TV program, and appeared also as moderator, or master of ceremonies. I was then in a much different phase of existence. Having graduated near the top of my law-school class, I had declined good positions offered by leading firms because I felt too active, or kinetic (hyperkinetic). I couldn’t guarantee my good behavior in any of the prestigious partnerships downtown. So I dreamed up a show called Court of Law, in which significant, often notorious, cases from the legal annals were retried by brilliant students from Chicago, Northwestern, De Paul, or John Marshall. Cleverness, not institutional rank, was where we put the accent. Some of our most diabolical debaters were from the night schools. The opportunities for dialectical subtlety, imposture, effrontery, eccentric display, nasty narcissism, madness, and other qualifications for the practice of law were obvious. My function was to pick entertaining contestants (defense and prosecution), to introduce them, to keep up the pace—to set the tone. With the help of my wife (my then wife, who was a lawyer, too), I chose the cases. She was attracted by criminal trials with civil rights implications. My preference was for personal oddities, mysteries of character, ambiguities of interpretation—less likely to make a good show. But I proved to have a knack for staging these dramas. Before the program I always gave the contestants an early dinner at Fritzel’s on Wabash Avenue. Always the same order for me—a strip steak, rare, over which I poured a small pitcher of Roquefort salad dressing. For dessert, a fudge sundae, with which I swallowed as much cigarette ash as chocolate. I wasn’t putting on an act. This early exuberance and brashness I later chose to subdue; it presently died down. Otherwise I might have turned into “a laff riot,” in the language of Variety, a zany. But I saw soon enough that the clever young people whom I would lead in debate (mainly hustlers about to take the bar exam, already on the lookout for clients and avid for publicity) were terribly pleased by my odd behavior. The Fritzel dinner loosened up the participants. During the program I would guide them, goad them, provoke, pit them against one another, override them. At the conclusion, my wife Sable (Isabel: I called her Sable because of her dark coloring) would read the verdict and the decision of the court. Many of our debaters have since become leaders of the bar, rich celebrities. After our divorce, Sable married first one and then another of them. Eventually she made it big in communications—on National Public Radio.

Judge Eiler, then a young lawyer, was more than once a guest on the program. So to my cousins I remained thirty years later the host and star of Court of Law, a media personality. Something magical, attributes of immortality. Almost as though I had made a ton of money, like a Klutznik or a Pritzker. And now I learned that to Eunice I was not only a media figure, but a mystery man as well. “In the years when you were gone from Chicago, didn’t you work for the CIA, Ijah?”

“I did not. For five years, out in California, I was in the Rand Corporation, a think tank for special studies. I did research and prepared reports and analyses. Much the kind of thing the private group I belong to here now does for banks….”

I wanted to dispel the mystery—scatter the myth of Ijah Brodsky. But of course words like “research” and “analysis” only sounded to her like spying.

A few years ago, when Eunice came out of the hospital after major surgery, she told me she had no one in all the world to talk to. She said that her husband, Earl, was “not emotionally supportive” (she hinted that he was close-fisted). Her daughters had left home. One was in the Peace Corps and the other, about to graduate from medical school, was too busy to see her. I asked Eunice out to dinner—drinks first in my apartment on Lake Shore Drive. She said, “All these dark old rooms, dark old paintings, these Oriental rugs piled one on top of the other, and books in foreign languages—and living alone” (meaning that I didn’t have horrible marital fights over an eight-dollar gas bill). “But you must have girls—lady friends?”

She was hinting at the “boy question.” Did the somber luxury I lived in disguise the fact that I had turned queer?

Oh, no. Not that, either. Just singular (to Eunice). Not even a different drummer. I do no marching.

But, to return to our telephone conversation, I finally got it out of Eunice that she had called me at the suggestion of Tanky’s lawyer. She said, “Tanky is flying in tonight from Atlantic City”—gambling—“and asked to meet you for dinner tomorrow.”

“Okay, say that I’ll meet him at the Italian Village on Monroe Street, upstairs in one of the little private rooms, at seven P. M. To ask the headwaiter for me.”

I hadn’t really talked with Tanky since his discharge from the army, in 1946, when conversation was still possible. Once, at O’Hare about ten years ago, we ran into each other when I was about to board a plane and he was on the incoming flight. He was then a power in his union. (Just what this signified I have lately learned from the papers.) Anyway, he spotted me in the crowd and introduced me to the man he was traveling with. “I want you to meet my famous cousin, Ijah Brodsky,” he said. At which moment I was gifted with a peculiar vision: I saw how we might have appeared to a disembodied mind above us both. Tanky was built like a professional football player who had gotten lucky and in middle age owned a ball club of his own. His wide cheeks were like rosy Meissen. He sported a fair curly beard. His teeth were large and square. What are the right words for Tanky at this moment? Voluminous, copious, full of vitamins, potent, rich, insolent. By way of entertainment he was putting his cousin on display—bald Ijah with the eyes of an orangutan, his face flat and round, transmitting a naяvete more suited to a brute from the zoo—long arms, orange hair. I was someone who emitted none of the signals required for serious consideration, a man who was not concerned with the world’s work in any category which made full sense. It passed through my thoughts that once, early in the century, when Picasso was asked what young men in France