A Bad Man (46 page)

“The classic struggles of artists. The genius’ rejections, but more, his first success. Hammerstein out front and the comic drunk backstage, his girl shoving coffee in him and making him walk.

“And though I am not a religious man, the windows of department stores at Christmas time.

“The cook on educational television. Likewise the dedication of weathermen and the seriousness of the officer giving the traffic conditions from the helicopter. Soldiers marching off to World War One, and singers who come down into the audience.

“Glamour, magic and plenitude, I tell you. Plenty of plenitude. High waste in restaurants. Steaks no man can finish by himself, bottomless cups of coffee and lots of butter. Balloons for the kiddies, and the waiter passing mints. Ditto the individual machinery of motel rooms: Vibrabeds and the chamois for shoes, packets of instant coffee and powdered cream—the gizmo to boil the water. The paper ribbon in deference to my ass across the toilet seat breaks my heart. The magician’s shy stooges and the tears of Miss America and her runners-up. Listen. ‘Happy Birthday’ in night clubs and the ‘Anniversary Waltz.’ God bless people who take their celebrations to night clubs, I say.
Listen
. Miracle drugs, the eye bank, and the first crude word of mutes. The moment they unwrap the bandages four weeks after the operation.
Listen. Listen to me
. The oaths of foreigners for their final papers. Night-school graduations. A cake for the new nigger in the neighborhood. Towns chipping in for anything. People cured of cancer, and the singing in the London Underground during the Blitz.
Listen, listen to me now. Listen to me!
Sheriffs shaming lynch mobs. Boys who ask ugly girls to dance, and vice versa. Last stands of individual men, and generosity from unexpected quarters.”

“I like New York in June, how about you?” Harold Flesh said. “I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?”

“That’s why the lady is a tramp,” Bisch said.

“Once, on shipboard,” Feldman said, “coming home from Europe, I was standing at the rail, looking down at the people who had come to greet their relatives and friends. There was a small band, and people were throwing streamers, confetti, pitching this bright storm of festival like a gay weather. And each person at the pier was pointing up at the great ship to see if he could find the person he had come to meet. And when he did, he would leap and make an involuntary shout. Or extend his arm and point up with one lengthened finger of welcome.

“Meanwhile, we on board were rapidly exchanging places with each other, shifting our positions along the rail, trying to catch a glimpse of whoever had come to meet us. The extended arms of those who, unspotted, had spotted the better targets of their friends would then follow the friend, all the energy of welcome confounded at the same time by the effort to set things straight, to get the person on board to stand still and look back at the person on the pier.

“
And it worked
. No one was there to meet me, and I could stand back and watch it all. Again and again I saw these great, straining magnetic fields of friendship click off contact after contact, the now mutual gestures leaping great distances, touching their loved ones with flung lines of force before they actually touched. The ship still had to dock, there was customs to clear, but they couldn’t wait, and so they pantomimed love, made the signals of lovers and the heart’s semaphore. No longer impatient even, already home, already in each other’s arms.

“And then, after a while, everyone had found everyone else. The arms ceased to crisscross in the air, ceased to sway, and a hush had fallen over us all, and though there was no room actually to do this, there was a kind of hands-on-hips gesture of standing back in estimate and appreciation. Appreciation. Yes. Appreciation. Pride. Making the eyes’ small talk that people do who have not seen each other in a long while. Feasting greedily on each change, making an inventory of differences and then discounting them, accepting the small betrayals of time in the windfall of their returns. Love moved me then.

“Do you understand? How about you, you? I’m decent.
I’m decent too!
”

He was wringing wet. His face had undergone a remarkable change—his passion visible now, open wide as the groan on a tragic mask. They had never seen him like this. Some of them couldn’t look at him; they stared down at their laps or toyed with the edges of their blankets.

Now it was Feldman’s silence, not theirs, as before it had been theirs and not his. A man, sighing, broke the quiet only to confirm it. There was one absolutely soundless moment of preparatory breathing in, drawing up and looking around, as if to gather up fallen gloves or paper cups on a lawn after a concert—precisely this sense of performance’s end, and a calm in the room like good weather, a lowered-pressure, washed-air quality of folly wised up. He saw he might make it and didn’t dare breathe, still hadn’t moved but remained, posed frozen, a little uncomfortable, wrenched, as though demonstrating a follow-through, on not taking chances with a beast.

He was still thinking he might just make it when the warden spoke. “But he’s
kidding
,” the warden said.

“I’m not,” Feldman said. “I swear it.”

“He
is
. He made it all up.”

“I meant it. I meant it all.”

“He’s selling you a bill of goods,” the warden said.

“We didn’t believe him, Warden,” a convict said.

“It’s true,” Feldman said.

“Objection not sustained,” the warden said sweetly. “Contempt of court,” he added, smiling.

Here was justice, Feldman thought, watching him. The man’s dapper, discreet power seemed to be on him like a form of joy. He had never seemed so charming; he had the look of one unarmed, a sort of chairless, whipless, unpistoled lion-tamer rakishness, or of a general in civvies.

“Take him,” Feldman shouted suddenly. “
Take him!
”

But they hadn’t understood. Only the warden knew what he had said. “That will do, Leo,” he said softly. “Now then, men, where do we stand? Thus far I’ve been able to keep this quiet, but it’s Thursday morning already, and if the court doesn’t finish its work soon I may have to put out a cover story. It’s a good thing I came in when I did. He had you going there. Well, brief me, please.”

“We’ve heard the evidence, Warden,” a convict said.

“What, all of it? About his family?”

“Yes sir.”

“About Victman?”

“Yes sir.”

“Freedman?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’ve heard the evidence, and he’s still alive?” the warden said cheerfully. “Have you heard about Dedman then?”

“Not about Dedman, sir. No, sir.”

“Well then, that explains it. Tell us about Dedman, Feldman.”

“A man can’t be made to testify against himself,” Feldman said.

The warden considered him for a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’m Warden Fisher, the fisher of bad men. I make the rules, and what happens here happens because I make it happen or because I let it happen. You’re innocent. I declare it a standoff and direct these men to ignore whatever they may have heard up to now. Feldman’s innocent. I whitewash his history and make good all the bad checks drawn on his character. He stands or falls on Dedman. Is that fair, Feldman?”

Feldman stared at him.

“Good. Then it’s a deal. We shall have all of it, however. You must give us all of it. All right then. Attention, everyone. Feldman gives us Dedman.” The warden, who had been standing, now sat down on a cot. He folded his arms across his chest and looked up impassively, waiting for him to explain what was inexplicable.

Feldman began.

“I had a friend,” he said. “Leonard Dedman.”

“No one met your boat, Feldman. No one met your boat, you said.”

“No. This was after…He wouldn’t have met it. It was after I decided we could be friends.”

“
You
decided?”

“Yes. I used to watch them. Boys. In the towns where I lived. I wasn’t envious, you understand. It was strange to me. I grew up in small towns where boys tossed pebbles at each other’s windows, where they imitated the sounds of birds, made signals.” He spoke as before. There was no other way now. “I’d been in their rooms and seen them cross-legged on the bed, browsing possessions, scholars of toy, touching the gifts with a curious peace. Solaced with balls, getting their heft, rolling them off with a wave of the hand. Examining guns and aiming at space, squeezing the trigger and blowing their breath down the barrel as if to clear it—death’s light housekeeping. The model airplanes, the ships and cars and toy soldiers—calmed by all the bright lead effigies of the dangerous world snug in their palms. Borrowing, trading, and a major greed. I understood this. But afterwards, after the trades, an amnesty of self, a queer quiet when the playing began. Using the toys, to be sure, but something else, something undeclared but binding—”

“Dedman. Feldman, Dedman.”

“But
binding
. It was honor. In the fields, running, exercising—”

“Dedman, Feldman. Feldman, Dedman.”

“—the honor still there. And even in their angers, their roughnesses, there were those who were sure to be each other’s allies, doing favors in a fight, passionate to cheer or console, committed as seconds in old-timey duels. A balance in the world like a struck bargain.

“It was curious to me how they knew whom to select, how they chose up their sides so that there were teams within teams, natural combinations, feats of friendship beyond athletics, a construct of amities. One boy, in practice, who always threw a particular other boy the ball without being asked. And no one left out, not even myself, though when I had the ball I never knew who to throw it to, and had to choose, and sometimes threw it away.

“Or secrets. They told secrets, each day trusting the other with a shame or a plot, trading these as they had their toys.

“How did they
know?
How? This was the thing I didn’t understand. How they made up their minds whom to like. It had nothing to do with talents, and even less with qualities, or the loved gifted and the loved good would have had it all. It was a Noah’s Ark of regard.

“Was it love? Was friendship love?”

“Dedman, damnit. Damnit, Dedman. Get to Dedman. Get to the part where you betrayed him.”

“I met Dedman in the city when I came there a few years after my father died,” Feldman said. “He was my age and had come from the West. Like myself he had no family. We lived next door to each other in the same rooming house and sometimes ate our meals together. He had been a student, but he’d had to drop out because he had no money. He never had a talent for money. All the time we knew each other, I became richer and richer and he remained the same.”

“But you gave him money,” the warden said.

“Yes. To start up businesses. Dedman’s businesses. They always failed.”

“Yes,” the warden said.

“It was Dedman who proposed our friendship,” Feldman said. “He asked for it formally. It was a wonder he didn’t go down on his knees.”

“Was Dedman queer?” Bisch asked.

“Yes. He was queer. But not in the way you mean. He was queer. ‘We should be friends,’ he said, ‘us birds of a feather. We should take pledges, slice flesh and brush bloods. Two people like us, like the last left alive, no kin in the kit.’

“‘Too sad, Dedman,’ I told him. ‘Too serious, kid. It’s your America’

“‘It’s
their
America.’

“He felt it did Dedman, his condition a guilt. With a whine for a war cry he assaulted my camp. A poet he was, and two poems he had. Feldman was Dedman’s, and Dedman was Feldman’s. He rhymed our lives, orphan for orphan and hick for hick, and what he made of the city we’d found, I won’t even say. And the rooming house, of course. He told me it was significant that we sometimes chose the same restaurant and picked the same soup. (But he had no sense about money, and what I did for budget he did for hunger.) Each evening a courting, petitions, a woo, his reasons my roses and chocolates. ‘And what have
you
got to trade?’ I asked him. ‘And show me
your
toys,’ I said. But Dedman’s dowry was the lack of one. ‘Bankruptcy, Dedman,’ I warned him. ‘Love flies out the window when the wolf comes in the door.’

“About this time I had come on the spoor of my fate. A jobber I was in those days—small-time, of course, just riding the fads and making a go. But getting first clues about a better class of merchandise. Brand names and top grade, first cut and choice and prime. Founded 1780. (This was my dream.) Aspirations of the pushcart heart, stirrings—I have
not
been unstirred—in the spieler’s soul. (Grand pianos are grand. Peddler.
Old clothesman. Alley cat!
) Riddled with need I was, hunting a piece of the action like a grapple of grail. ‘Shit on the shoddy,’ I declared to the roomers, and scorning thread-barrenness, gave up the place. I found an apartment, and what do you think?

“Dedman, of course. It took him a week. We were neighbors again. No sense about money, no feel for the score. ‘Dedman,’ I asked, ‘just what do you do?’ He was a clerk, he drove taxis, he worked at a bench, a gardener, an usher, a pumper of gas. Caddy, orderly,
schlepper
of mail. What didn’t Dedman? Dedman of the semiskill and the student duty. For understand, these were all summer jobs, Christmas rush, the small-time tasks of piecemeal pressure, timed to semesters, holidays, school dismissed because of the snowstorm. As though simply by going through a process of part-time employment, he could maintain the fiction that he was making it the hard way like orphans before him. He lived in a myth. And without the squirrel’s sense of winter but only his busyness had this strange garret notion of himself, laying in his profitless, pointless struggles like grist for those plaque landmarks that honor puny origins. ‘On this day, in this place, on this spot, nothing happened, Dedman,’ I told him.

“But all he gave me was the
old
business—hot pursuit and the language of romance. ‘Two can live cheaply as one,’ he said, and slipped me ardor and the arguments of old time’s sake.

“‘Dedman, Dedman, tell no tales,’ I told him. There had
been
no old times, you understand, only Dedman’s hard-sold dream out of books of a Damon Dedman and a Pythias Feldman, a Romulus Leonard and Remus Leo. (And what he made of our names! ‘Leonard, the Leo-hearted,’ I called him once.)