“Somewhere I’ll find you,” he sang in his head. “Someday my prince will come,” his heart answered. (That was another thing: even his ballads were old-fashioned. Most of them came from operettas. He didn’t even adjust the lyrics to his condition, but hermaphroditically sang for both sexes. It was a vestige of the old schism in him between the stuffed shirt and the prodigal.) “I am calling you — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh,” he sang mutely, soul seeking soul, love’s sonar. “Someday he’ll come along,” he rendered, “the man I love.”
Now, looking for Jean Arthur in earnest, he roamed the store, loped it — Feldman striding, darting, squinting, peering. There was a labored, frantic quality now (“Through the dark of night,” his head sang, “I’ve got to go where you are”), exactly like one partner to a comic appointment just missing the other in a revolving door, or losing her behind a pillar or a potted fern. “Some enchanted evening,” he warbled silently, “you will meet a stranger.”
He sat down to catch his breath in front of a tiny vanity table in Ladies’ Hats. He had not made his search in several months and he was rusty, unused to the strain.
He looked at himself in the table’s oval mirror. The tricky glass — hat sales up fourteen percent since it was installed — gave back a thinned, lengthened Feldman. Aware of the ruse (he had commissioned optical specialists in Baltimore to do his mirrors), he compensated by filling his cheeks with air. Too much, he thought, and let out a little. There, that’s what I look like. But he couldn’t be sure (only the mirrors in the employees’ toilets were accurate), and he stood up and gave himself half an hour to find his true love.
Picking girls who wouldn’t know him, he approached their counters in disguise. Now he was one sort of son, now the other. In Ladies’ Nightgowns he grinned shyly at the young woman behind the counter. By holding his breath for a minute and a quarter, he was able to bring a blush to his face.
“It’s a shower gift for my secretary,” he gulped. “She’s just about your size, ma’am. I guess I could get a better idea if you could sort of hold it up to your — to your — if you could sort of hold it up to yourself. Gee,” he said, “wow. I mean that’s very beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Its washable,” she said wearily, “it’s wrinkle-resistant. It won’t stain.” She took up her order pad. Feldman hesitated. “You throw it in the washer same as you would a bedsheet. It’s one of our sexiest items,” she said, looking at a point somewhere above his left shoulder. “Is that a charge, dearie?”
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“I do not,” she said.
“I’m Leo Feldman, and you’re fired.”
“I need this job,” she recited. “I’ve got to have an operation on my internal female organs. I’m saving up.”
“Out, dearie,” he told her. “You’re washed up, same as you would a bedsheet.”
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.