discomfort. Nobody need know. Zimmerman’s liquor truck brought me a dozen delicious bottles too conscience- contaminated to be drunk. I gave them to hostesses, as dinner gifts. At least Tanky knew good wine.
At the Italian Village I had ordered Nozzole, a decent Chianti which Tanky barely tasted. Too bad he didn’t allow himself to become tipsy. I might have made him an amusing cousinly confidence (off the record for us both). I, too, am involved in the lending of big sums. Tanky dealt in millions. As one who prepares briefing documents, I am involved with the lending of billions to Mexico, Brazil, Poland, and other hopeless countries. That very day, the representative of a West African state had been sent into my office to discuss aspects of his country’s hard- currency problems; in particular, restrictions on the importing of European luxury products, especially German and Italian automobiles used by the executive class (in which they made Sunday excursions with their ladies and all the kids to watch the public executions—the big entertainment of the week: he told this to me in his charming Sorbonnish English).
But Tanky would never have responded with confidences about the outfit. So I never did get a chance to open this potentially intriguing exchange between two Jewish cousins who dealt in megabucks.
Where this private, confidential wit might have been, there occurred instead a deep silence. Gulfs of silence are what give a basso profundo like mine its oceanic resonance when talk resumes.
It should be said that it’s not my office work that most absorbs me. I am consumed by different interests, passions. I am coming to that.
With time off for good behavior, Tanky would have only about eight full months to serve in a decent jail in the Sunbelt, where as a trained accountant he could reckon on being assigned light work, mostly fooling with computers. You would have thought that this would satisfy him. No, he was restless and pressing. He apparently thought that Eiler might have a soft spot for low-rumbling, off-the-wall Cousin Ijah. He may even have concluded that Ijah “had something” on the judge, if I know anything about the way minds work in Chicago.
In any case, Cousin Eunice telephoned again, to say, “I
I recognized that I couldn’t refuse. I was trapped. For when Coolidge was president the Brodskys had slept on Cousin Shana’s floor. We were hungry and she fed us. The words of Jesus and the prophets can never be extracted from the blood of certain people.
Mind, I absolutely agree with Hegel (lectures at Jena, 1806) that the whole mass of ideas that have been current until now, “the very bonds of the world,” are dissolving and collapsing like a vision in a dream. A new emergence of Spirit ls—or had better be—at hand. Or as another thinker and visionary has put it, mankind was long supported by an unheard music which buoyed it, gave it now, continuity, coherence. But this humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different, barbarous music welling up, and a different elemental force has begun to manifest itself, without form as yet.
That, too, is a good way to put the matter: a cosmic orchestra sending out music has suddenly canceled its performance. And where, with regard to the cousins, does that leave us? I confine myself to cousins. I do have brothers, but one of them is a foreign service officer whom I never see, while the other operates a fleet of taxicabs in Tegucigalpa and has written off Chicago altogether. I am blockaded in a small historical port, as it were. I can’t sail forth; I can’t even extricate myself from the ties of Jewish cousinhood. It may be that the dissolution of the bonds of the world affects Jews in different ways. The whole mass of ideas that have been current until now, the very bonds of the world…
What has Tanky to do with bonds or ties? Years in the underworld. Despises his sister. Thinks his cousin Ijah a creep. Here before us is a life to which all have consented. But not Cousin Ijah. Why is he a holdout? What sphere does he think
Well, we met in the Italian Village to drink Nozzole. The Village has three stories and three dining rooms, which I call Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. We ate our veal limone in Paradiso. In his need, Tanky turned to Ijah. Jewish consanguinity—a special phenomenon, an archaism of which the Jews, until the present century stopped them, were in the course of divesting themselves. The world as it was dissolving apparently collapsed on top of them, and the divestiture could not continue.
Okay, now I take Eunice to lunch atop the First National skyscraper, one of the monuments of the most curious present (how weird can these presents get?). I show her the view, and far, far below us is the Italian Village, a thin slice of old-world architecture from Hansel-and-Gretel time. The Village is squeezed on one side by the green opulent swellings of the new Xerox headquarters and on the other by the Bell Savings Corporation.
I am painfully aware that Eunice has had cancer surgery. I know that there is a tormenting rose of scar tissue under her blouse, and she told me when we last met about the pains in her armpit and her terror of recurrence. Her command of medical terminology, by the way, is terrific. And you never get a chance to forget how much behavioral science she has studied. To counteract old affections and pity, I round up in self-defense any number of negative facts about the Metzger family. First, brutal Tanky. Then the fact that old Metzger used to frequent burlesque prick-tease shows when he could spare an hour from his duties at the Boston Store, and I would see him in those horny dark joints on South State Street when I was cutting school. But that was not so negative. It was more touching than sinful. It was his way of coming to life; it was artificial resuscitation. A man of any sexual delicacy may feel himself hit in the genitals by a two-by-four after doing his conjugal duty in the bungalow belt. Cousin Shana was a dear soul but there was nothing of the painted erotic woman about her. Anyway, South State Street was nothing but meat-and-potatoes lewdness in meat-and-potatoes Chicago. In the refined Orient, even in holy cities, infinitely more corrupt exhibitions were offered to the public.
Then I tried to see what I might convict Cousin Shana of, and how I might disown even her. Toward the end of her life, owner of a large apartment building, she hitchhiked on Sheridan Road to save bus fare. So as to leave more money to Eunice she starved herself, some of the cousins said. They added that she, Eunice, would need every penny of it because her husband, Earl, a Park District employee, deposited his weekly check as soon as he was paid, locked it in his personal savings account. Rejected all financial responsibility. Eunice put the children through school entirely on her own. She was a psychologist with the Board of Education. Mental testing was her profession. (Her
Eunice and I sit down at our reserved table atop the First National Bank and she transmits Tanky’s new request. Eagerness to serve her brother consumes her. She is a mother like her own mother, all-sacrificing, and a sister to match. Tanky, who would get to see Eunice once in five years, is now in frequent communication with her. She brings his messages to me. I am like the great fish in the Grimm fairy tale. The fisherman freed him from his net and has been granted three wishes. We are now at wish number two. The fish is listening in the executive dining room. What does Tanky ask? Another letter to the judge, requesting more frequent medical examinations, a visit to a specialist, a special diet. “The stuff he has to eat makes him sick.”
The great fish should now say, “Beware!”
Instead he says, “I can try.”
He speaks in his deeper tones, a beautiful depth, three notes bowed out on the double bass, or the strange baryton—an ancient stringed instrument, part guitar, part bass viol; Haydn, who loved the baryton, wrote moving trios for it.
Eunice said, “My special assignment is to get him out of there alive.”
To resume his existence deeper within the sphere of illicit money, operating out of hotels of the Las Vegas type, looking well (in sickness) amid glittering fixtures designed to make everybody the picture of perfect health.
Eunice was crowded with masses of feeling for which there was no language. She transferred her articulate powers to accessible themes. What made communication difficult was that she was very proud of the special vocabulary she had mastered. She was vain of her degree in educational psychology. “I am a professional person,” she said. She got this in as often as possible. She was the fulfillment of her mother’s obscure, powerful drive, her ambition for her child. Eunice was not pretty, but to Shana she was infinitely dear. She had been as daintily dressed as other small girls, in print party dresses with underpants (visible) of the same print material, in the fashion of the twenties. Among other kids her age she was, however, a giantess. Besides, the strain of stammering would congest her face. But then she learned to speak bold declarative sentences and these absorbed and contained the terrible energy of her stammer. With formidable discipline, she had harnessed the forces of her curse.
She said, “You’ve always been willing to advise me. I always felt I could turn to you. I’m grateful, Ijah, that
