“Yes?” he said.
“It was on a Sunday afternoon,” Feldman said. “I’ll never forget this. Billy was about six or seven. Six, he was six. I had been sleeping, and when I woke up, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my son.”
“Go on.”
“He was beautiful. I had never seen how beautiful he was. He was sitting on the floor, cross-legged. You know? He had on these short pants, his back was to me. He had come in to be with me in the room while I slept. He pulled some toy cars along in wide arcs beside him and made the noises in his throat, the low rough truck noises, and the sounds of family cars like the singing master’s hum that gives the pitch. He had fire trucks and he did their sirens, and farm machinery that moved by slowly, going
chug chug chug
.”
“Is this true?” the warden asked.
“Yes,” Feldman said.
“What did you do?” the guard asked. “Did you kiss him?”
“No. I was afraid he’d stop.”
“How long did your mood last?”
“Something happened,” Feldman said.
“Yes?”
“I started to cry. It frightened him.”
“Did you tell him why you were crying?” The warden had come into the cell. He was searching Feldman’s face. Eternity was on the line. What did he have to come into the cell for? “Did you tell him why you were crying?” the warden asked again.
“Yes,” Feldman said. “I told him it was because he woke me up.”
“I see,” the warden said.
“You want the truth, don’t you, Warden?”
“We’ll see what the truth is.”
“Here’s what the truth is,” Feldman said. “Billy
wasn’t
in the room when I woke up. A couple of feathers had come out of my pillow, and I had this idea. I pulled a few more feathers out and I called the kid. ‘Billy, get in here. Come quickly.’
“He was standing in the doorway, and I told him to get his mother, that my feathers were coming out. I held one up for him to see and then I stuffed it back with some others which I had pushed into my bellybutton. He came over and stared at my stomach. A few feathers were on my chest, and he picked one up. ‘Don’t touch that feather. It’s mine. Put it back in my belly, where it belongs.’
“‘You’re fooling me,’ Billy said, and I started to scream as if I were in pain.
“‘Get your mother,’ ‘I yelled, ‘I need a doctor.’ I told him that if you lose fifteen feathers you die.”
Remembering it all, Feldman became excited. “‘Wait,’ I told him. ‘Count them first so your mother can tell the doctor and he’ll know what medicine to bring. Can you count to fifteen?’
“‘Yes,’ Billy said.
“‘Well, don’t make a mistake now, for God’s sake. You’re a pretty stupid kid, and I know how you get mixed up after twelve. Hurry, please, but don’t touch the feathers or more will come out.’ So he started to count the feathers, but they were all rolled up together and it was impossible. ‘Hurry,’ I shouted. He started to cry and got all mixed up and had to count them all over again. He couldn’t do it. He was in a panic. Finally I told him I had felt about eleven come out and that he’d better tell his mother that. As soon as he left, I pulled three more feathers out of the pillow and called him back. ‘Billy,’ I shouted, ‘three more feathers just came loose. If I lose one more I’m a dead man.’ He rushed over to see. Listen, he was sobbing, he was hysterical, out of control, but do you know what he managed to ask me? ‘Daddy,’ he said, ‘do I have feathers too?’ Don’t tell
me
about love. His daddy is dying of feather loss, and he wants to know if it’s contagious.
I am what I am, Warden
.” Feldman moved away from him and went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. “I blew it, right?” he said. “I stay here forever.”
“We are
all
what we are,” the warden said angrily. “Jackass, we are
all
what we are. What’s so terrific? ‘I am what I am,’ the hooligan says, and hopes by that to lend some integrity to his evil. To be what one is is
nothing
. It’s easy as pie. The physics of least resistance. What appealed to me in your story was the regret in your voice just now when you asked if you blew it. ‘We’ll see what the truth is,’ I said. And we shall. Think, Feldman. Think before you irrevocably indulge what you are. Did you tell him why you were crying?”
“What?”
“
Did you tell him why you were crying?
”
Feldman, astonished, stared at the warden. The guard laughed. “Hush,” the warden said, and turned back to look at Feldman with a bland indifference. “We have no time. Make your reply at once.”
Feldman had to. He had to. “I told him—” But he didn’t finish. He couldn’t talk. “I told him—” He held out his hands helplessly.
“Yes?” the warden said. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him that I thought he was beautiful. I told him I loved him. I lifted him up next to me in the bed. I held him in my arms.” He was sobbing.
“Good,” the warden said, “not only what you told him but also what you did. Good.” He turned to the guard. “Guard, I think we can let this man join the others.” Feldman was on the cot now, his head in his hands, and the warden gripped him by the shoulders. “There, there,” he said, “it’s all right. Everything is all right. You’ll be back in your regular cell in a jiffy” He looked back at the guard. “Make the arrangements, Guard, please.” He slapped Feldman on the back. “Well,” he said, “I think this calls for a celebration. As a matter of fact, I usually give a party in Warden’s Quarters when a man is reclaimed from solitary. Let’s say Friday night. About eightish. Will you be able to come to dinner?” He leaned down and whispered to Feldman. “Stop it. Stop your crying. Get it out of your head, you fool, that you’ve been mortified by the devil. You think you’re rid of your soul and now your comfort comes, but it isn’t so. I’m not the devil, and you’ve still got your soul. Your passion’s on you like perfume. Undream your dreams of fuck and freedom. Your warden warns you. Stop it. Stop your crying. You’ll need your tears.”
F
eldman, behaving, sold his quota of toothpaste and shaving articles and filter-tip cigarettes in the canteen—no more, no less—and tried to feel the virtue that is the reward of the routinized life. He thought with dread of the volumes in the library that bore his name, and guessing what might be in them, tried to act in such a manner that others might think him some other Feldman. He made small talk with the guards, just as the others did, warming to their crude kidding like some old yardman. (It was true. Each time they addressed him he felt as if he had just come from trimming hedges, pulling weeds, growing roses. He felt soil on himself and the small sharp plunge of thorns, and thought comfortably about baths with brown soap and worried about frost, about drought, about flood and the blight of beetles.) He looked for them to kid him, encouraged it in small ways, offering himself like a sparring partner or the bandaged man in a first-aid demonstration. He had it in him, he felt, to be a favorite, like a fatty, like a baldy, like a loony, like a spoony. Like a dummy. Like a guy with clap, with lush, beautiful daughters, with a small dong. He envied the loved, classic fall guys and thought with jealousy of the libeled butts in the prison paper: the “Nigger Lips” Johnsons and “Pigface” Parkers and “Beergut” Kellys and all the others.
“Give me gland trouble,” he prayed. “Treble my chins and pull back my hairline. Make me a farter, a stutterer, a guy bad at games. A patsy make me. Amen.”
He was afraid of the warden, afraid of his party, afraid in particular, afraid in general. It was as if he were a traveler unused to the currencies of a new country. He was reminded of all queer special units used to fix values: the score of butter and the proof of booze, the carat of gold and the pile of a carpet and the line of a tire. The way of a warden, he thought.
A memorandum came down from the warden that the dinner would be semiformal and that Feldman had permission to request the pre-release of the suit of clothes the state had made for his discharge. Feldman took the note to the tailor shop and showed it to Bisch. It was still months until his release. “Is this ready?” he asked Bisch.
“Sure,” Bisch said, “it was ready a week after you came. I’ll have my apprentice get it.”
The apprentice brought back a dark suit of coarse material. There were stiff tickets pinned to both sleeves of the jacket and over the breast and stapled across the creases of the trousers. Faint chalky marks, like military piping, were soaped around the seams at the shoulders.
“Try it on,” Bisch said.
Feldman took off the blue fool suit Bisch had made for him and struggled into the new clothes. It was as if the suit had been made for someone of exactly his frame but twenty or thirty pounds lighter. “It doesn’t fit,” Feldman said. “It’s too tight.”
“Where?”
“Where? Everywhere. Across the shoulders, in the back, around the arms, the waist, the crotch, the seat. Everywhere. There’s some mistake here.”
“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.