What amazed me is that no one seemed to mind Eli’s behavior much. His fame spread. Gerry was always calling my attention to some item about him in the Chicago papers. He gave a lot of interviews, Eli did, but he always seemed to do so reluctantly, almost as if he were being forced into it. I noticed, too, that whenever he won a prize, many of them involving fairly heavy cash, he would accept it with a slight grudgingness. “I am very pleased to have been awarded this prize, if only . . .” “I’m grateful to be the recipient of this prize, and though it pleases me greatly, it also makes me dubious of . . .” There was something phony about the whole deal, but it seemed to be working. I can’t speak about the importance of my brother’s writing, but he was a real public-relations genius.

  Maybe Eli thought I was insufficiently impressed by him, or thought that, unlike the rest of the world, I didn’t praise him enough, tell him how proud I was of him every other day, but then Gerry and I didn’t see much of him, even though we were now living in the same city, we on Lake Shore Drive, Eli and his new wife in Hyde Park.

  One day we get an invitation from the mayor’s office for an event at which Eli was going to be presented with a medal from the City of Chicago. There was a dinner involved and an award ceremony at Navy Pier. It was black tie. What the hell, I said to Gerry, let’s see how the other half lives.

  “Which half is that?” she said.

  This turned out to be not so dumb a question. At the reception before the dinner, every tuchis lecher in town was on display. One of the first sights I saw after entering the hall was the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet hugging a small guy named Walter Jacobson, used to be a batboy for the Cubs, who now does the local evening news. While they are hugging, I notice each of them is looking over the shoulder of the other to see if there’s someone more important in the room. A strange little guy named Studs Terkel, who has a radio interview show on the classical music station, is racing around pressing the flesh of everyone in the place. I don’t know much about him, but I remember Eli once calling him “a cracker-barrel Stalinist” and his laughing at the pleasure the phrase gave him. Gerry once asked me if I ever noticed that Eli seemed to laugh a lot but rarely smiled.

  Lots of women from the Gold Coast, the high-maintenance kind, were there with their tired-looking husbands, who’d probably be happier if they’d stayed home to watch the Bulls-Lakers game. I recognized a number of aldermen who, they don’t steal enough as it is, can always be counted on to show up for a free meal. Mike Ditka, the former coach of the Bears with his thick features, was talking to the mayor. Gerry spotted Jesse Jackson leaning in close to talk to a striking black woman who does the evening news on Channel 9.

  Then Eli walked in with his wife, who, after four years of marriage to my brother, already looked exhausted. There was something dark and haunted in her eyes. She seemed thinner than I remembered when I first met her. In her red gown and high heels, she was a few inches taller than Eli. Eli was wearing a tux with a wide sateen collar, a shirt with lots of big ruffles, and a red cummerbund and an enormous red bow tie of the kind which, if it flashed Kiss Me when you shook his hand, you wouldn’t be in the least surprised. He looked like a Jewish trombone player in the old Xavier Cougat orchestra. His wispy, now completely white hair was combed over and patted down to cover his baldness. He got the family talent, wherever in the hell it came from originally, but I got our old man’s thick hair, which maybe was the better deal.

  The dinner was first class: large platters of seafood to start, choice of prime rib or salmon, lots of wine, cherries jubilee to end. When the dishes were cleared, the mayor, who wasn’t known for fancy language, rose to say that culture has always been important to the city of Chicago, and then he reeled off the names of writers who had lived here, and he said that Eli was continuing in their line. In honoring Eli, he said, a man who had been born and grew up in Chicago and was now its greatest writer, the city was honoring one of its own, and he was proud to bestow the medal for literature on him, which he then did.

  Eli stood at the podium, the heavy medal dangling from his neck on a red-white-and-blue ribbon, the large red bow tie just above it. He looked clownish. He waited for the applause to end. He grinned. I looked over at Karen, his wife, who was sitting across from me. She was staring down at the tablecloth.

  “Well,” Eli began, “this is quite an honor. I want to thank the mayor for his kind words. I want to thank Lois Weisberg and others in the city’s Office of Culture. My big brother’s here tonight, so I have to be careful what I say. He’s a tough guy, and should I step out of line, he’s sure to let me have it. Isn’t that so, Lou?

  “The relation of writers to power is a subject with a long and often squalid history,” he continued. “I can’t help wondering if, in accepting this handsome medal and eating this luscious food, I’ve not become part of that history. Literature is supposed to represent truth, and, as such, to tell truth to power, if only because everyone else is frightened to do so.” Here Eli looked over to the mayor. “How’re you doing, kiddo?” he said.

  “Yes,” he went on, “truth speaks to power, but the question is, does power ever really listen? Or does it instead merely pretend to listen and honor it with occasions such as this evening’s gala? In Communist countries they take writers very seriously—so seriously that they often kill them. Here in the United States, in the city of Chicago specifically, they offer them a choice of roast beef or salmon. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the salmon over a firing squad any day. Still, it would be nice to be taken seriously, too.”

  And then Eli just stopped. That was it. Done. Finished. At first people didn’t know what to do. Everyone looked at the mayor, who, after an interval of maybe ten seconds, began to applaud, which allowed everyone else in the room to do so, though the clapping was polite at best. I looked over at Eli’s wife, who, returning my look, rolled her eyes back in her head, as if to say, “He’s your brother, you figure him out.”

  Eli, now back at our table, leaned over and said to me, “So, how did I do?”

  “I’d have to say that you didn’t exactly knock ’em dead.”

  “That’s OK,” he said. “The main thing is that I knocked ’em.”

  Gerry took a cab home—she had an early-morning appointment the next day—and I stuck around a little longer. When I was getting ready to leave, Eli asked me if I would mind taking his wife home. He had some business to attend to after the party. I said of course, why not?

  I had been around my sister-in-law maybe four times, and never alone. I wasn’t sure what we’d have to talk about, but it turned out that it didn’t matter much because she did most of the talking.

  “You know, Louis,” she said as I pulled out of the garage at Navy Pier, “Eli and I are splitting up. He’s an impossible person, which you must already know.”

  “I’ve had some strong hints,” I said.

  “He needs to flirt with all kinds of women. His fame as a writer gives him some strange aphrodisiac quality for them, or so I suppose. They like to sleep with a famous writer. What I find hard to understand is that he doesn’t seem to have all that much interest in what really, you know, goes on in bed. He’s a very impatient lover, Eli. Forgive my not saying this more politely, but your brother doesn’t know a clitoris from a kneecap.”

  I nearly drove over the median into onrushing Outer Drive traffic.

  “It was a serious mistake on my part ever to start up with your brother. He humiliates me in public. He ignores me in private. I’m sure that someday he’ll put me in one of his novels as a witch and whore and add a few bad hygienic habits at no extra charge. I don’t care. I don’t need money from him. To be free from him is gift enough. I’ll be very happy no longer to be Mrs. Eli Black the Fourth. I’m sure there’ll be a few more Mrs. Eli Blacks, all with numbers after their names, like ennobling suffixes.”

  When I pulled over to the curb in front of her and Eli’s apartment at the Cloisters, before opening the door, she said, “Your brother thinks that because he’s an artist he can do what he wants, hurt people whenever he likes. Everything is justified by his books. As an astronomer, I don’t think Eli knows how small, how truly insignificant, he really is. Maybe someday he’ll find out. Goodbye, Louis.” She shook my hand as she left the car, and I never saw her again.

  Maybe it was a year after this that Gerry and I went to a Jewish United Fund dinner and found ourselves seated at the same table with a young guy named Rick Feldrow. He was a lawyer who also wrote novels; all of them were made into movies, and damn good movies, too. He was bald, small, but looked firm, like he must’ve spent some time on treadmills. When we were introduced, he said he’d heard that I was Eli Black’s brother. When I told him I was, he opened up to me in a way that took me a little by surprise.

  “I can’t tell you how much I admire your brother’s writing,” he said. “He’s my personal hero—make that my household god.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because he writes like an angel. Because he understands what is really going on in the country. Because his novels will live forever.”

  “How’s it you’re so sure of all this?”

  “Well,” he said, “I can’t of course be sure. But right now, of everyone who’s scribbling away, he looks like the top contender to be read fifty or a hundred years from now.”

  “Have you met my brother?”

  “Never,” he said. “I’d still be daunted to meet him. When I was young, I used to imagine that Eli Black was my father, that I had inherited his talent, that he would guide me through the rocky places in life. My own father, who was a physician, never had much time for me, and when he did, he was hypercritical.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said. “But I don’t think you’d have had much luck with my brother Eli as a father, either.”

  “Really?” he said. “Why’s that?”

  I felt a light kick under the table from Gerry. “It’s complicated,” I said, and turned to the woman sitting on my left.

  Eli and I were never in anything like regular touch. Six, eight months might go by without either of us calling the other. Sometimes we’d meet at the funeral of a cousin—Eli had a touch of family sentimentality. But one day he calls and says that he has to meet me on urgent business. How’s tomorrow for lunch? he wants to know.

  We met at the Standard Club. Eli was waiting in the foyer, dressed in one of his racy suits, this one black-and-white checks, a shirt with thick red stripes, white collar and cuffs, and a yellow necktie. As we walked to our table in the main dining room, I sensed people staring at us—at my brother, for Eli’s picture was fairly often in the papers and he qualified around town as a celebrity.

  After the waiter took our order, Eli, looking around the room, smiled and said, “Wouldn’t the old man be amused to see us having lunch in this joint? We’ve both come a long way from Roosevelt Road and Kedzie.”

  “You a lot way farther than me,” I said. “But what’s on your mind?”

  “I need a loan of a quarter of a million dollars,” he said.

  “That’s a pretty serious number. For what, may I ask?”

  “I’m in deep water with a man named Sid Gusio on a bad deal I made in an investment in nursing homes.”

  “Where do you come to know a thug like Gusio?” I asked.

  “I met him at the Riviera Club, where I play racquetball,” Eli said. “A very amiable fellow, or so he at first seems.”

  Sid Gusio was the Chicago Syndicate’s man in charge of gambling and prostitution, and, as that job description implies, not a man to fool with. Eli had no more business with a man like Gusio than a mouse walking into the den of a lion.

  “He’s a dangerous character, Eli.”

  “Tell me about it,” Eli said. “He was, he said, putting me onto a good thing. For a hundred-grand investment in a nursing home complex being built in Oak Lawn, I’d get triple my investment back within two years, or so he claimed. Only now he tells me that they vastly underestimated costs. I need to come up with another two hundred and fifty grand to protect my original investment. Except that Gusio made it evident that I didn’t have much choice in the matter. It wasn’t, he made it plain, an entirely voluntary matter. I couldn’t just walk away and lose my original investment of a hundred thousand, though at this point I wouldn’t mind doing that. But walking away, I strongly suspect, isn’t really an option.”

  I couldn’t help thinking: Eli, my schmuck brother, gets his ass in a sling every time he ventures away from his desk. Eli, who wouldn’t know reality if it hit him in the face, the man who writes books telling everyone else they’re living badly. Eli going up against Sid Gusio was no contest.

  “What makes you so sure he won’t come back to you for still more money?”

  “Nothing,” Eli said. I could sense his fear. Also his embarrassment. Always so goddamn knowing about everything, Eli was reduced to coming to his big brother for help.

  “You don’t have any of this money yourself?” I asked.

  “I have a high nut, Lou, lots of ex-wives, kids, school bills, you don’t know the half of it.”

  “Christ, Eli, every time I open the paper someone’s giving you a new prize. You must get ten or twenty grand a shot for talks. And what about the dough your books bring in? How broke can you be?”

  “Look, Lou, without going into details, all I can tell you is that I don’t have the money and no prospects of getting it except from you.”

  I had already made up my mind to lend Eli the money, but for some reason I didn’t want to make it easy for him. I hate to admit it, but I found myself enjoying this.

  “Suppose I loan you the money,” I said. “What’re you offering in collateral? The Pulitzer Prize?”

  “How about I give you the continuing royalties for my first three novels?” he said, quite serious.

  “An IOU will do, with a schedule of repayment,” I said. “But Eli, maybe you’ll take a little free literary advice. Don’t ever put Sid Gusio into one of your novels. Unless you want a couple of knee-replacement operations.”

  One day at the office, my secretary tells me that David Black is on the phone. I don’t recall knowing any David Black, but I pick up the phone anyway.

  “Hello, Uncle Lou,” a voice says. “I’m your brother Eli’s son, and I’m in Chicago for a couple of days and I wonder if we could maybe meet.”

  Then it clicked in. David was Eli’s son by his first marriage. I remember him only as a child. He must be in his thirties by now. He lived in northern California—Santa Rosa, if I remembered correctly.

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Staying with your dad?”

  “No,” he said, “it turns out that my father’s out of town. I’m here on business, staying at the Continental Hotel on Michigan Avenue. I don’t know Chicago at all. But is it possible we could meet for lunch or a drink?”

  “Sure, kid,” I said. “It’d be fine.”

  We arranged to meet the next day at a bar in the Drake Hotel called the Coq d’Or, which served good sandwiches and which, if you arrived after the lunch rush, provided a certain amount of privacy, though I wasn’t sure what this boy and I had to talk about.

  The first thing I discovered was that my nephew was no kid. He was balding, slightly paunchy, with his father’s nose and slightly flared nostrils. He was taller than Eli and darker. Something a little soft about him, vulnerable, but something, too, that made my heart go out to him. It was probably his having grown up without a father.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” he said, putting out his hand.

  We took a table against the far wall and ordered beers and hamburgers. I asked him what brought him to Chicago.

  “I’m here for a conference,” he said. “I’m a civil engineer and work for the California highway system. The conference is about state highway funding. Dull stuff to most people, I suppose, but important in my line of work.”

  “Have you seen your father recently?”

  “I called him before coming to town, but he told me that he was going to be in London.”

  “Are you in regular touch with him?”

  “Irregular touch would be closer to it. Sometimes a year or two will go by without any contact. Usually I call him on his birthday.”

  Eli had divorced David’s mother when he was three years old. She took him to California and remarried there a few years later. Eli hadn’t much money in those days and saw his son no more than once a year, if that. When he remarried and had other children, he saw him even less.

  “I learned to get on without my father,” David said. “When I was a teenager, I sort of followed his career in the newspapers. At school nobody knew that my father was the famous writer, which was fine by me. My stepfather, who died two years ago, was a decent man. My mother had two other children with him, but he always treated me fairly. I have no complaints.”

  David told me that he had three children of his own. Eli had not yet seen the youngest, a boy who was four years old. I thought how much my own wife missed having grandchildren.

  “I suppose the one grudge I hold against my father is the way he portrayed my mother in one of his novels, where he makes her out to be so vengeful and little more than an obstacle to his own career. I’ve always wanted to say something to him about the meanness of that, but I’ve never had the guts. When it comes to his writing, he can be very touchy, my father.”

 

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