Feldman drew a deep breath. “Still,” he said finally, “I have not been unstirred.”
“Come on,” a convict said irritably, “your life’s on the line. What is this?”
“I have not been unstirred,” Feldman repeated firmly. “I’m accused of my character. This is my character: I’ve been moved, roused. Lumps in the throat and the heart’s hard-on. I’m telling you something.”
He began to list all the things that had ever moved him, all the things which might have moved them. “Anthems of any nation. Anthems do. The Polack mazurka and male Greek side step. The national dances. Ethnic stamping and the fine, firm artillery of the clog dance. A certain kind of amateurism. The abandon of drunk elder uncles at weddings. There is a clumsy rhythm in me, I tell you, the blood and heart’s oom-pa-pa. So I have not been unstirred, that’s all.
“Girls blowing kisses, cold on floats.”
“Now wait a minute,” said the man who had stepped on his heels.
“Overruled,” Feldman said.
“Hold on a second,” the man said.
“Overruled! I’m telling you about my heart. You asked and I’m telling you. I’ve been moved.
“The beards of real estate men in centennial summers,” he began again desperately, “their barbershop convictions. Movie stars on telethons for charity. The sweetness of conservationists. Professors emeritti who talk about their field in the afternoon on the radio. I hate the fire that the forest ranger hates. What do you think? It’s not so difficult to break matches before throwing them away, or to make certain your campfire’s extinguished. What does it cost a person to carry a litter bag in his automobile? I am stirred that these should be causes.
“I saw a movie on the Late Show. It was made in the thirties, the Depression. One of the characters opened the front door of his apartment to bring in the paper and the milk. There was a picture on the front page of his ex-wife, who had just gotten engaged to his law partner. They showed a close-up of the paper, and while he was reading the story about his ex-wife’s engagement, I read the headlines on the stories around it: ‘Grand Jury Brings in True Bill on Gangland Slaying’; ‘Shipyard Heiress Elopes with Swami, Grandpa Seeks Annulment’; ‘Arctic Expedition Arrives South Pole.’ This was the news. Do you understand? This was the news. I wept.
“And vulgarity. Spangles, brass and all the monuments of the middle class. Luxury motels — listen to me — cloverleaf highways, and the polite wording of signs along the route apologizing for construction, the governor’s signature big at the bottom. The charities of businessmen. Their attentions to the blind, their fresh-air funds, and the parades of their brotherhoods. Their corny clowning and their tossed candies.
“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.