Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

He went to the toy department — he should have looked there first; hung up on kids, she’d be, the darlin’ angelface — where he spotted a gentle-looking blonde with a cute, snub little nose he associated with figure-skaters. The girl he had in mind would be soft-spirited, her female internal organs ripe and luscious as the top strawberries in a basket. He hung back a moment to form a plan, then went up to her.

“I need about a hundred toys,” he began. “They’re for an orphanage. These kids have had tough lives; most of their parents are in prisons or asylums. A lot are from broken homes where neither the mother nor the father was deemed morally fit to retain custody. Many of these children were with their folks when they were killed in auto accidents and train wrecks or burned to death in fires. You can imagine what it’s like for them.”

“Yessireee,” she said flatly. “Have you seen our new war line? WW Two?” She scooped up some metal tanks and pieces of artillery and placed them on the countertop. “Everything’s scale,” she said. “There’s a bomber that drops artificial napalm. We’ve got a model of the atomic bomb exactly like the one that killed seventy-four thousand people in Nagasaki.”

Feldman tipped his hat.

“There’s a terrific special on rubber knives.”

“I’m Leo Feldman,” he said.

“This is interesting,” she said, and lifted down a sort of chemistry set. “It’s the new germ-warfare kit. It’s perfectly harmless, but if you dust this powder on a wood, stone or metal surface, it grows a fungus. There are gases too. They don’t do any damage, but the smell is terrible.”

“You’re transferred to Lingerie,” he said curtly.

Mooncalf, he accused himself. Stargoose! Cometshmuck! He walked away, shaking himself to remember who he was. But by this time he knew, and what he looked like without a mirror. Not the wiseguy, not the dullard; he was the old man himself, the stern paterfamilias of damn fools and creeps — the loveless grump of the world.

In this mood, in his office, Feldman read his messages and opened his mail.

There was the usual number of charities. At his level they did not always ask for contributions but invited him to join committees. He set these aside for Miss Lane to reject with the excuse that while time did not permit, etc., etc., they could use his name on their letterhead (although to a few he had her fire off righteous declarations of opposition in principle). On one letter he recognized his name on the list of sponsors printed down the side of the stationery. My second notice, he thought, and threw it in the wastebasket.

He had become a sort of public spirit. So prominent was his name on so many letterheads that the real community leaders had no idea of how little he actually did. They embraced him, welcomed him warmly to their executive class, and once they had almost made him Man of the Year. Where, Feldman wondered, was the vaunted anti-Semitism in the upper reaches of his society; where was the famous aloofness and coolness he had counted on? He couldn’t, he supposed, rise to the presidency of an insurance company, a railroad, a steel mill, a utility, and there was no real future for him in Detroit, none in the north woods — he worked in softer fabrics — but the gray-haired ranks of all philanthropists remained ready to open for him. Money talked: it talked to money. There wasn’t a country club in the state — not a hunt club, not a horse club or a talk club or a fuck club — that was closed to him. He could drink bourbon over ice in any of them. He could part his hair in the middle, and no one would laugh. He could wear a vest, a pocket watch, retire behind steel frames. But there was something tame and flat in wealth. He knew there was nothing he could buy, except his comfort, that would please him. He knew more: there was nothing he could give. The thought of sponsoring museums where people came to look six seconds at a given work of art and took home a deeper impression not of beauty but of all the things in the world that did not belong to them depressed him. It spoke ill for wealth if all that one could usefully do with it was give it away. There was something repressive in money finally, something inhibiting. Rich men used it as a lesson to poor men, dispensed it — whatever the sums; he had seen the restrictive clauses in those grants, the ironclad regulations — cautious and painstaking as chemists doling out the proportions of a boring formula.

An executive — what was that? That was nothing to be. He had no heart for empire; only for the day to day, hand-to-hand, rough-and-tumble of imperialism, of which, sadly, empire was the single issue. But already, failing the Diaspora, he was dug in. Poor little rich boy, he mocked himself. Don’t mock me , he stormed. Only the damn miser counts his blessings. Pain has degrees. There are numbers on thermometers. Gloom isn’t staved with reasons. Look, he thought, clinching it, at that department on the fourth floor, for God’s sake, with its gifts for the man who has everything: personalized cue balls, solid gold zippers, framed thousand-dollar bills. Why, that, in his life, was what he had been reduced to: gestures gestured by the man who has gestured everything. He got by on joyless joie de vivre and forced life force.

Last week he had made a speech in his book department, introducing Vice-Admiral Marlow (“Sea Power”) Bellingstone, USN Ret. He had read the man’s autobiography and wired his publisher, promising to split expenses if he could get the Admiral for an autographing party. He took out a half-page ad and called the local naval-recruiting office for a color guard. (The Navy would have nothing to do with the Vice-Admiral, and Feldman had had to settle for Billy in a sailor suit.) Standing on a raised platform draped with bunting, Feldman had addressed the crowd.

“It is my high privilege,” he told them, “to pipe Admiral Bellingstone here aboard the Feldman . Many of his provocative views are familiar to you. His idea about extending the twelve-mile limit until sea mass exactly displaces land mass and each nation has its mirror image in the water — do I read you right, Admiral?” The Admiral saluted. “—is already known to most Americans. His career-long fight with the Pentagon to recognize Britain, rather than Communism, as the real threat to this nation is equally well known. So, too, are the Admiral’s efforts to restore our country once again to its rightful place as leader in the world’s whaling community. ‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ as the Admiral puts it in his book, ‘to let foreign Denmark put one over on us in this department.’”

Feldman lifted one of the Admiral’s books off a tall stack. “An admirable work, Admiral,” he said, and touched his forehead in salute. The Admiral saluted back, and Feldman turned again to the crowd. “Less familiar, perhaps, but gone into here in careful detail is the Admiral’s fascinating proposal to form a team of naval historians and sea geographers to try to establish once and for all the historicity of Davy Jones’s locker. The Admiral’s belief that if we find it we’ll probably also rediscover the lost city of Atlantis could be one of the brilliant serendipities of the twentieth century.” (Even as he spoke, Feldman took the measure of his own outrageousness and disapproved. There was a lot of talk about the poor man hanging while the rich man got off scot-free, but there were other inequities. How much nonsense a rich man could speak!) “I am reminded, as just in passing I peruse the Admiral’s useful index, of his frightening warning about the danger of salt leakage from the ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway. In the Admiral’s phrase, we are ‘bleeding the Atlantic’ In just seventy billion years — do I have these figures right, Admiral? — the Great Lakes will turn saline. What are we supposed to do then?