Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

Feldman looked around the room for Oliver’s parents. Standing next to a striking woman in tweed, he saw a tall, handsome, successful-looking man wearing a card that said “Oliver B.’s Father.” He didn’t like their looks.

“Leo,” Lilly said, “look at this one. These are really charming.”

Feldman bent over the tiny desk and stared at the paper.

Dear Mom, Dear Dad ,

Your being here makes me glad.

Please look around and see our work ,

I hope you like it ,

Your son, Burke .

“Beautiful,” Feldman said, and glowered at Burke’s mother. He read all the notes, sneaking up to seats only moments after a parent had vacated them.

“You’ll eat your heart out, Leo,” Lilly said.

“Not at all, not at all,” Feldman said, waving her off. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, sweetheart, was there much idiocy in your family?” He went back to Billy’s desk and opened one of the workbooks. “Why,” asked the box beneath the story, “did Tim’s grandfather make Tim promise to keep the calf a secret until Sue’s birthday?” Below there was a sentence with the last word left blank: “Tim’s grandfather wanted the calf to be a—.” Billy had printed the word “apple” in the blank space. Feldman closed the book.

He went to the table at the back of the room and looked at the city the class had made. There was a water tower made from half a Quaker Oats box painted silver. It was supported by four black pencils stuck into the bottom. There were cigar-box schools and skyscrapers fashioned out of cereal boxes. Tiny windows had been cut into the cardboard and glazed with Scotch tape. There was an elaborate City Hall, a jail, a railroad station. The names of the builders had been worked into their buildings, and Feldman stared glumly at Oliver B.’s cunning little firehouse with its shiny brass peashooter for a fireman’s pole. He tried to find his son’s contribution but couldn’t see it anywhere. Then, behind the city, he noticed a small vague area with two crumpled-up wads of paper and a few loose pieces of gravel and clumps of dirt. He smoothed out one of the pieces of paper. “Grabage dunp. Billy F.,” it said.

Furious, he looked around for Lilly and saw her talking with Mrs. Blane. The teacher nodded and compressed her lips sympathetically. He watched them bitterly. He was going to march up there and pull his wife away from the woman, but his eye was caught suddenly by a series of charts and graphs tacked to the walls. Examining them, he saw that thinly disguised as games and contests, they indicated a kid’s standing in a particular subject. There were charts for spelling, reading, arithmetic, social studies, science — other things. By the name of each child was a tiny paper automobile pinned to a mapped track that led toward towns on a kind of West Coast called things like “Scholarsville” or “Goodstudentberg.” On the spelling chart Billy’s car had never even left its garage, and he had barely made it to the city limits on the reading and penmanship charts. On the arithmetic chart Billy had no automobile at all.

Next to these charts were others that were more advanced: arithmetic became mathematics, reading became literature, penmanship art, and so on. Only those children who had made it to the West Coast were represented on these new charts. Here they boarded little paper steamers and began a journey that led out through the Gulf of Graduation and took them across the University Ocean, past places like the Savant Islands and Curriculum Reef to seek port in the Bay of the Doctorate. Many of the children were just getting seaborne, although several were fairly far out, and some, like Oliver B., were already breasting the international date line. Feldman could find Billy’s name only on the good-citizenship chart, but he couldn’t locate the boat that went with it. Probably it had sunk. He shook his head and stared sadly at a series of launching pads that bloomed along the width of a blackboard. Feldman guessed that the rockets, in various stages of loft, represented the grand prospectus of each child’s achievements in the class. Billy’s hovered weakly over its launching pad like a thin flame just above its wick.

“It looks like the goddamned Stock Exchange in here,” he told Maurianna Q.’s mother, standing beside him. “Like the goddamned Big Board.”

“Are you one of the fathers?” the lady asked. “I don’t see your card.”

He looked quickly around the room and turned back to the woman. “I’m little Oliver B.’s daddy,” he told her softly…

Feldman tapped at his mouth one last time with his napkin and pushed back his chair. “Get him a tutor, Lilly,” he said. “Finish your oatmeal, Lil, and get him a tutor, kid. Money’s no object. None of your three-buck-an-hour graduate students, honeybunch. Get him a Nobel Prize winner. If he doesn’t shape up soon, we may have to institutionalize him.”

Because he couldn’t bear to enter an empty store, Feldman always tried to wait until twenty or thirty minutes after the doors opened before going to work. Sometimes, if he was early, he would stand outside, feeling ceremonial, beside the big brass plaque that bore his name and the date of the store’s founding. Seeing the plaque, and on it the solid, memorial letters of his name, he often had a sense — though the store, in an old building once a warehouse, had not yet been in existence twenty-five years — of ancestors, a family business, and had to remind himself forcibly that he was Feldman.

He pushed the big revolving doors, feeling, as he always did, heavier, and waiting, as he shoved slowly on the door’s metal rung to feel himself thicken with opulence, to become wider, gravid. The door spun him out onto the main floor, and he smelled at once the perfumes and face powders, the mascaras and polishes bright as sodas. By the high glass cases he knew himself some glamour mogul; by the lipstick cartridges like golden bullets a grand armorer, love’s field marshal among those shiny warheads. Art, art, thought Feldman, impresario of deep disks of rich rouge, pastel as flesh, of fine-grained dusting powders like soft, fantastic sand, of big plush puffs and cunning brushes. He stood by lotions in bottles, by cylinders of deodorant in a female climate of balmy aromatics, in a scent of white gardens, thinking of dreamy debauches in palatial bathrooms, of comic blows, cutie-pie spankings with the big fluffy puffs. Here, where other men might have felt intimidated, Persian Feldman lingered, feeling the very texture of his wealth, his soft, sissy riches, the unctuous, creamy, dreamy dollars.

I am the master of all I purvey.

(In the old days, new to ownership, he would take things from counters, filling his pockets with toys, wrist watches, cuff links, pulling a tie that had attracted him, stuffing it into his jacket; more attracted by his merchandise than any customer, unreluctant as an assured guest at a feast, and feeling just that, his own reflexive hospitality — knowing ultimate freedom, the last man on earth, nimbused with luck. There had been complaints, his own people had not known him, thought him a thief, a madman; some customers even, driven by an abstract loyalty to the ceremony of sale, daring to pull against him in ludicrous tug of war, to collar him, to call a cop. But it had not been these fools who had been able to stop his raids, nor even the complex decorum of inventory. Bookkeeping could not deal with him; it knew profit and loss, credit and debit, and made allowance even for pilferage that struck as malice or arrived as need. But it was helpless to explain what he did. There was no place on the ledger, no word for it, unless it was this: “Feldman.” It wasn’t any objection at last but his own: not surfeit finally, but surfeit’s mild adjunct, superfluity, his idea, grown to a principle, that things— all things —were just gewgaws, and that nothing, nothing could ever excuse a disturbed profit. A lost sale was lost forever, something gone out of his life. So he doubled the guard, was ruthless with shoplifters, prosecuted until it cost him thousands and the word got out: that his place was no place to get away with anything, that you might as well try to hold up a bank. And all this, the expense of prosecution, of tight security, was reflected at last in the books. Meanwhile, he had packed in six big boxes and stored in his garage all those things he had taken during the enthusiastic year of his spree, a monument — an objects lesson — that nothing, nothing, nothing was ever lost, that all was recoverable and advantage lay where advantage lay: everywhere , available as atmosphere. And one day he sent a truck to take it out, to bring it all back to the shelves and bins and counters to be sold this time, only keeping one thing back, a wallet, to remind him.)