Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“Take it off,” Bisch said. “I’ll check.”

“You’ll check? You don’t have to check. You can see it doesn’t fit.”

“I want to see the measurements on the tickets.” He turned to his apprentice. “Get the body book.”

The man came back with an enormous ringed notebook. Bisch took the book from him and spread it open on a sewing table. “Here’s your page,” he said, peering at the figures on the page and then at those on the tickets. He took a tape measure and measured the different planes of Feldman’s clothes. “Every figure checks out perfectly, Leo. It’s a well-made suit of clothes.”

“Well, where did you get those figures? Nobody measured me.”

“They come from the physician,” Bisch’s apprentice said. It was the first indication Feldman had that they expected him to die. These were to be the graveclothes of a wasted Feldman.

He refused to wear the suit and sent a message at once to Warden’s Desk. (It was a prisoner’s only recourse to direct appeal and was rarely used. The petition had to be framed as a question backed up by a single reason. If the response was negative, the petitioner was subject to a heavy fine or a severe punishment for “Aggrandizement.”)

Feldman waited nervously for his reply. He had it inside of half an hour:

Yes. A guest should be comfortable. If you’re uncomfortable in the suit, don’t wear it. Get your old suit from Convict’s Wardrobe and have it pressed. W. Fisher .

When it was ready Feldman put it on. It was enormous, almost as big on him as the other had been small. He sent another note to Warden’s Desk. The reply came:

Yes. Suit yourself. Come as you are. Warden F .

Feldman, released from his cell at 7:45 by a guard with a machine gun, went to the party in his blue fool suit.

The guard led him down passages he had never seen. Every hundred feet or so there were abandoned directions — narrowing converging walls, crawl spaces, oblique slopes. They might have been traveling along the played-out channels of a mine, tracing prosperity’s whimmed route. They came to locked doors, barred gates. Bolts shot, tumblers bristled, plopped, falling away before the guard’s keys and signals. Feldman had the impression he moved through zones, seamed places, climbing a latitude — as once, in winter, driving north from the Florida Keys, he had come all the way up the country to the top of Maine, feeling the subtle, dangerous differences, the ominous botanical shifts and reversals of season.

They came to a last steel door. The guard moved Feldman against the wall with the muzzle of his machine gun. “Fix your tie,” he said, “or I’ll kill you.”

Feldman looked back along the dim passageway through which they had just come. He felt like a bull in the toril before a fight, a bronco in the chute. The sunlight will startle me, he thought. I’ll be confused by the day. Men will thrust capes at me. Cowboys will scrape their spurs across my sides. Not a mark on me till now, he thought sadly. He mourned his ruined flanks.

The guard inserted a key into the door, and a buzzer buzzed somewhere on the other side. As the door slid back into the wall an enormous butler stepped toward them, pulling his huge formal silhouette through the lighted room behind him. “Hands up,” he said quietly.

“The butler’s a bodyguard,” the guard explained. “He has to frisk you in case you bribed me on the way over.”

“He’s clean,” the butler said gloomily.

The guard tilted his cap further back on his head with the barrel of his machine gun and leaned casually against the wall. “I guess I’ll hang around the kitchen till it’s time to take him back,” he said. “Who’s supervising?”

“Molly Badge.”

“Molly? No kidding? I haven’t seen old Molly since I was with the Fire Department and she catered the dinner dance. Good old Molly.”

“Come inside,” the butler told Feldman. “No tricks tonight. Some of the guests are plainclothesmen. Follow me.”

He followed the butler through the doorway. He was conscious of the brightness; he had not seen so much light since his arrest months before. He wondered where they were — outside the walls, more deeply within them? Coming here, he’d had a sense of tunneling, of a Chinesey-boxish progress. The warden lived well, but there was about the place an air of exile, as if, perhaps, he were someone bought off, bribed to live here. Taking in everything, he had an impression of wells sunk miles, a special flicker in the lights that hinted of generators, a suggestion of things done to the air. The wood, so long now had he lived without wood, seemed strange, extravagant. The upholstery and drapes, though he suspected no windows lay behind them, were almost oriental in their luxury. He moved across the carpet as over the fabricked backs of beasts in a dream. Apprehension was gone. Here the blue fool suit, loose on his body, no travesty, was a robe, exotic, falling away from his chest like the awry gown of a seducer. Will there be women? he wondered. He hoped so. He rubbed his hands together and turned to the butler. “I’m a sucker for civilization,” he told him.

The butler pulled back the heavy doors to the library and motioned him inside. Feldman found himself on tiptoe, leaning forward, his eyes darting, in the eager posture of a host. The room was empty. The butler left him.

The library was ship-in-the bottle, oakey. “Oakey-doakey,” Feldman said. Wing-chaired. Beamish. Rifles over the mantelpiece, a clock with a visible movement, dark portraits of the founders of banks. “Generations of gentiles,” Feldman said. There was a big desk behind which a landlord with a schmear in his integrity could kill himself. “After brandy,” Feldman said, “a silver bullet in a silver sideburn.” The will would be read here to out-of-towners in black suits.

There were decanters of whiskey and silver bottles of soda. He fixed a drink, drank it off quickly and made another. When he turned, the warden, in carpet slippers and a red silk smoking jacket, was watching him. Feldman raised his glass. “To crime and punishment,” he said.

The warden motioned Feldman to go ahead. “I’m pleased you came,” he said, “and glad you’ve made yourself comfortable, though I doubt the sincerity of your ease. I wanted the sergeant to show you this room first. Do you like it?”

“A showcase, Warden,” he said.

The warden smiled. “I’m being urbane,” he said. He sat in a wing chair and crossed his legs smartly. Feldman saw the bright bottom of a carpet slipper, like the clean soles of the shoes of an actor on a rug on a stage. He stared at the light that slipped up and down the smooth stripe of his trousers. “Say what you will, Feldman,” the warden said, “but urbanity is a Christian gift. Rome, London, Wittenberg, Geneva— cities , Feldman. The history of us Christians is bound up with the history of the great cities. I mean no offense, of course, but yours is a desert sensibility, a past of pitched tents and camps. Excuse me, Leo, but you’re a hick. Have you held canes? Have binoculars hung from your jackets?” He indicated a portrait in a gilt frame. “Just a moment,” he said, standing. He moved to the portrait and pulled a small chain, turning on the light in an oblong reflector. “Where would you buy one of these? Tell me, merchant. You see? You don’t know. You’ve seen them, but you haven’t experienced them. I’ve stood beside sideboards and spent Christmas with friends. There’s leather on my bookshelves, Feldman. I’ve been to Connecticut. I know how to sail. What are you in our culture? A mimic. A spade in a tux at a function in Harlem.

“I make this astonishing speech to you not out of malice. It’s way of life against way of life with me, Feldman. I show you alternatives to wholesale and retail. I push past your poetics, your metaphors of merchandise, and scorn the emptiness of your caveat emptor . I, the least of Christians, do this. Come, the others will have gathered.”