The Wolf That Fed Us

by Robert Lowry

  THE GOLD BUTTON

  HE CLOSED HIS EYES as the noiseless elevator ascended.

  “Is it raining out?” the elevator operator asked.

  He opened his eyes, but the elevator man was looking at the other occupant, a pinchfaced stenographer with her hair in a rat-tail bun who held a paper cup of hot coffee from the building’s cafeteria in her hand.

  “Haven’t been out,” the girl said.

  The young man let his eyelids droop again. The leather briefcase under his arm and the seventy-five-dollar gray sharkskin suit he wore didn’t speak nearly so loudly as the tiny gold Army Honorable Discharge button in his lapel. He was thinking: This lousy job. I should have drawn out my thousand bucks and gone anyplace, done anything but take a lousy job. What kind of goof was I overseas thinking that all this would be something worth getting back? Christ, he thought, what happens to a guy when he’s over there for two years? Why does all of this look so good? What’s so superior about the boredom of civilian life compared to the boredom of army life? Laying American girls and eating the food you want. But now that I’ve got those two things I don’t even notice them.

  “It’s your floor,” the elevator man said.’

  He opened his eyes and started his legs in motion. He’d been out two months—no more sergeant’s stripes on his arms, no more discipline, no more anything GI, a decent job doing advertising layouts—yet what he’d expected simply hadn’t come true. He’d thought that the moment he took off his uniform everything would become real again—all his perceptions jumping into sharp focus. He’d thought that he could recapture the naturalness he’d felt before going into the army; that the nightmare the army had been would be over. But it was all still with him: his life was more dreamlike than ever now.

  He was walking down a smooth hall past frosted doors displaying names in gold leaf. He looked at his watch. I’m early. Appointment for ten and it’s only nine forty-two. I do everything too eagerly. I learned how to loaf in the army but now I’m a child again at all of this.

  He opened a door marked JULIUS PRINGLE and went into the reception room, where his feet sank deep into the expensive rug. He thought that he might look a little ridiculous to the chubby bright-eyed girl at the desk.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  He glanced at his watch again. I’m a fool, he thought. I’ve got to learn everything over again.

  “I think I’m early,” he said.

  “Mr. Pringle hasn’t come in yet,” the girl smiled.

  “Do you mind if I wait?” he asked.

  “Please do. He should be here any minute.”

  He sat down in front of her desk and she resumed opening the morning mail. Unzipping the briefcase, he brought out the ad layout he’d done for Pringle.

  YOU’VE WON THE WAR

  YOU OWE YOURSELF A REST . . .

  at Snowdown!

  Making notes for color-separation on the margin, he found even the motion of writing strange and disagreeable.

  Not much carousing, no confusion, he thought. I did it all the way a good clean-cut American boy is supposed to do it. Wasted no time, just got myself a job and started in. And I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m doing. How can a fake job like this have any meaning after seeing the cities of Italy lying in ruins, every girl for sale, every citizen a beggar? How can I love Americans throwing seventy tons of paper down on war heroes after having my nose shoved into the suffering of human beings who have neither paper, clothes nor food? Even if they were wrong, even if they were guilty . . .

  His head was pounding again, as it had done so often this past couple of months. The idea that he might be crazy flashed through his mind. Maybe this life was the dream, maybe he was still overseas in uniform and all this was only a revery while he sat in the rain at Bizerte dock waiting to board an LST for Italy. . . .

  “Do you mind if I peek?” she asked.

  He’d already begun to rise, not noticing that she was coming around the desk to him, but now he sat down again and even tried to smile up at her. No war in her face, he thought. They were all safe from everything here, they knew nothing at all. They read the daily papers and got along without butter in the restaurants and held on to their jobs, that was their war. She’s innocent and kind of nice, he thought, and I have no interest whatever in her.

  “Sure, come on and look,” he said. “It’s your layout.”

  “Oh, it’s nice!” she exclaimed. “And I like the photo.”

  He noticed she wore a tiny Phi Beta Kappa key pinned on her green sweater. The breasts probably aren’t altogether real, he decided, but she’s cute. And how intellectual.

  “Well, your boss’ll no doubt lure plenty of people up to Snowdown this year,” he told her. “Everybody’s going to agree with him that they deserve a rest.”

  “Oh, he already has more reservations than he can fill. The ad is really just for . . . well, distinction, I suppose you’d call it.”

  He smiled. So he wasn’t even selling anything. Of all jobs why had he had to go into anything connected with advertising? Of all the beautiful fake jobs . . . He felt hot and bored. The girl was standing close to him, studying layout as if she were trying to memorize it. He couldn’t get up without pushing against her . . . or was that such a bad idea? Her perfume made him dizzy.

  The phone rang and she went to answer it.

  “It was Mr. Pringle,” she said. “He told me to ask you if you could come back at eleven. He’s been held up.”

  He shoved the layout into his briefcase. “Yeah, sure,” he said, “that’ll be fine.” He stood up to go.

  “Oh by the way,” she said, “you haven’t seen the new additions to our office, have you? We just got them yesterday—why don’t you come in and have a look?”

  He followed her into Pringle’s office. The dominating object in the room was a massive mahogany desk with nothing on it but a pen-stand and a picture of Pringle’s wife.

  “An army friend of Mr. Pringle’s sent them back from Germany,” she said. “Aren’t they lovely?”

  He didn’t see what she meant. He felt only like getting away from her and her simple brightness. How old was she? Maybe twenty-four. Unmarried. A New York girl. Frozen-faced on the street but obviously on the make when alone with almost any eligible-looking male. He felt that she was knocking herself out to hold him here, and yet he didn’t react. Before the army he would have been interested in her interest, in any girl’s interest. He’d been twenty, twenty-two then. Now he was twenty-six. Was that the difference? He couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t age, it was that big chunk of his life spent in dreaming. It was coming back to the subject-matter of the dream now and finding it even more unreal than his GI life. Nothing here for him.

  “Don’t you see them? The maps!” she said. “I think they’re perfectly thrilling. Look at the exquisite colors on this one. China—made in 1604. Isn’t the general effect lovely? I just love old maps. I certainly do envy the fellows overseas having the chance to buy up things like that.”

  He tried to show interest by going across the room and staring at one of the framed maps on the wall. He didn’t even see it He could only think, What I should have done was to go to Mexico, take my thousand bucks and go to Mexico and paint. Now I’ll never go. I had my chance, the army years paid for my chance, but now it’s over. I thought I could find myself again in this kind of trash but I’ll never find myself here.

  He felt the back of her hand brush against his and he looked down into the puppy-dog brightness of her eyes. So he pulled her over to him and kissed her. She was disgustingly plump, no bone in her at all, a feather-bed, and he thought he ought to feel nauseated but didn’t’. He felt nothing. No participation. He remembered the wild furloughs he’d had, one in Rome, another in Paris a month after the liberation. They had been bitter, lonely, full of longing for America. They’d been defeated by his refusal to believe that an army experience could ever mean anything to him personally. And yet here he was back in America,
in a sharkskin suit, with a decent job, thinking of Maria and Jeanette as more real than this American girl he held in his arms—this GI dream whose language he could understand but whose past four years echoed nothing real or important in his mind.

  There was no resistance in her; she was as soft as her past. Mechanically he shoved his hand into the sweater, under the brassiere. She gasped, leaving a cool circle on his cheek. Brutally, an army man without responsibility, he thrust his cupped left hand under her skirt and now she did stiffen. “Don’t,” she said. “You——”

  He heard himself laugh. He let her go and she stood there with rounded shoulders, her pride gone, a corkscrew of hair dangling across her pink face. She looked at him like a hurt lost thing and he thought, You American girls want men but you have no price, you have no reason for anything, you have no excuse for your lechery other than those overfunctioning glands of yours built up by good eating while half the world starved. I could never be sentimental about any of you, I’m from another country.

  As if she’d heard his thoughts she turned and went into the outer office. She was combing her hair when he came out. Buttoning his coat, he looked down at her, expecting at the very least a cold hurt glance. Instead she smiled.

  “You have lipstick on your mouth,” she said, holding out her clean handkerchief.

  “I have one.” He wiped it off, and she smiled again.

  “Things do happen to working girls these days, don’t they,” she said, showing the clean white teeth.

  Her well-fed kindly face made him think of another face, thin and starved, that had belonged to a girl he’d sat down next to on a bench in Piazza Cavour a year ago. It had been her noon lunch hour and she was greedily eating a piece of stale gray bread as her main and only course. She’d told him that she made three thousand lire, or thirty dollars, a month as a stenographer; with restaurant meals costing from four to eight dollars each, she was slowly starving to death—not yet having picked up the current Roman working-girl habit of slipping out evenings to grab a free meal and a quick lovelife from a GI with bulging pockets. He couldn’t escape from the image of her.

  “I’m sorry I did that,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Her smile flashed on. “You did get a little out of hand—but I’ll forgive you this time. Should I tell Mr. Pringle that you’ll be back at eleven, then?”

  “Eleven.” He looked at his watch. “Forty-five minutes from now.”

  She was still gazing at him. As he opened the door to leave she spoke up. “I wonder whether you’d be as prompt for a date as you are for a business appointment.”

  He didn’t answer. He let the door close softly behind him and went along the corridor past the frosted doors.

  The same elevator stopped for him. He felt anxious to reach the street, to get into a bar and have that double shot. The incident with the girl ought to mean something—if he couldn’t believe even in the adventure of women any more, what could he believe in? Embracing that girl as coldly as he had meant a negation of sex, a complete lack of any real interest in the subject. And what else was he supposed to get out of a seventy-dollar-a-week civilian job that was in itself meaningless, leading nowhere?

  I wonder if I have guts enough to quit, he thought, and wander around awhile, and look at things, and maybe find myself? I wonder if that shot will give me courage?

  He knew the answer but he didn’t accept it. The elevator was showing up now, it stopped. But before the operator opened the door he turned and asked very seriously, in the same high nasal, “Is it raining outside, did you notice?”

  He looked down into the short-chinned face of the fellow. His fists were hard as marble; he wanted to hit him. “You know goddamn well what it’s doing outside,” he said. “The weather hasn’t changed in years in your country.”

  And he walked out into the lobby, feeling ridiculous and alone, a native of no land, a part of nothing real, a man wearing a button and heading for a drink and not much else.

  He twisted the gold button from his lapel and dropped it into his pocket.

  THE END