God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Eliot, because he almost never left his office except to fight fires, was the man to whom all fire calls were sent. That was why he had two telephones by his cot. The black one was for Foundation calls. The red one was for fire calls. When a fire call came in, Eliot would push a red button mounted on the wall under his commission as a Notary Public. The button activated a doomsday bullhorn under the cupola on top of the firehouse. Eliot had paid for the horn, and the cupola, too.

  There was an earsplitting thunderclap.

  "Now, now--now, now," said Eliot in his sleep.

  His black telephone was about to ring. Eliot would awake and answer it by the third ring. He would say what he said to every caller, no matter what the hour:

  "This is the Rosewater Foundation. How can we help you?"

  It was the Senator's conceit that Eliot trafficked with criminals. He was mistaken. Most of Eliot's clients weren't brave enough or clever enough for lives of crime. But Eliot, particularly when he argued with his father or his bankers or his lawyers, was almost equally mistaken about who his clients were. He would argue that the people he was trying to help were the same sorts of people who, in generations past, had cleared the forests, drained the swamps, built the bridges, people whose sons formed the backbone of the infantry in time of war--and so on. The people who leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker than that--and dumber, too. When it came time for their sons to go into the Armed Forces, for instance, the sons were generally rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically undesirable.

  There was a tough element among the Rosewater County poor who, as a matter of pride, stayed away from Eliot and his uncritical love, who had the guts to get out of Rosewater County and look for work in Indianapolis or Chicago or Detroit. Very few of them found steady work in those places, of course, but at least they tried.

  The client who was about to make Eliot's black telephone ring was a sixty-eight-year-old virgin who, by almost anybody's standards, was too dumb to live. Her name was Diana Moon Glampers. No one had ever loved her. There was no reason why anyone should. She was ugly, stupid, and boring. On the rare occasions when she had to introduce herself, she always said her full name, and followed that with the mystifying equation that had thrust her into life so pointlessly:

  "My mother was a Moon. My father was a Glampers."

  This cross between a Glampers and a Moon was a domestic servant in the tapestry-brick Rosewater Mansion, the legal residence of the Senator, a house he actually occupied no more than ten days out of any year. During the remaining 355 days of each year, Diana had the twenty-six rooms all to herself. She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned alone, without even the luxury of having someone to blame for making dirt.

  When Diana was through for the day, she would retire to a room over the Rosewater's six-car garage. The only vehicles in the garage were a 1936 Ford Phaeton, which was up on blocks, and a red tricycle with a fire bell hanging from the handlebars. The tricycle had belonged to Eliot as a child.

  After work, Diana would sit in her room and listen to her cracked green plastic radio, or she would fumble with her Bible. She could not read. Her Bible was a frazzled wreck. On the table beside her bed was a white telephone, a so-called Princess telephone, which she rented from the Indiana Bell Telephone Company for seventy-five cents a month, over and above ordinary service charges.

  There was a thunderclap.

  Diana yelled for help. She should have yelled. Lightning had killed her mother and father at a Rosewater Lumber Company picnic in 1916. She was sure lightning was going to kill her, too. And, because her kidneys hurt all the time, she was sure the lightning would hit her in the kidneys.

  She snatched her Princess phone from its cradle. She dialed the only number she ever dialed. She whimpered and moaned, waiting for the person at the other end to answer.

  It was Eliot. His voice was sweet, vastly paternal--as humane as the lowest note of a cello. "This is the Rosewater Foundation," he said. "How can we help you?"

  "The electricity is after me again, Mr. Rosewater. I had to call! I'm so scared!"

  "Call any time you want, dear. That's what I'm here for."

  "The electricity is really gonna get me this time."

  "Oh, darn that electricity." Eliot's anger was sincere. "That electricity makes me so mad, the way it torments you all the time. It isn't fair."

  "I wish it would come ahead and kill me, instead of just talk about it all the time."

  "This would be a mighty sad town, dear, if that ever happened."

  "Who'd care?"

  "I'd care."

  "You care about everybody. I mean who else?"

  "Many, many, many people, dear."

  "Dumb old woman--sixty-eight years old."

  "Sixty-eight is a wonderful age."

  "Sixty-eight years is a long time for a body to live without having one nice thing ever happen to the body. Nothing nice ever happened to me. How could it? I was behind the door when the good Lord passed out the brains."

  "That is not true!"

  "I was behind the door when the good Lord passed out the strong, beautiful bodies. Even when I was young, I couldn't run fast, couldn't jump. I have never felt real good--not once. I have had gas and swole ankles and kiddley pains since I was a baby. And I was behind the door when the good Lord passed out the money and the good luck, too. And when I got nerve enough to come out from behind the door and whisper, 'Lord, Lord--dear, sweet Lord--here's little old me--' wasn't one nice thing left. He had to give me an old potato for a nose. He had to give me hair like steel wool, and had to give me a voice like a bullfrog."

  "It isn't a bullfrog voice at all, Diana. It's a lovely voice."

  "Bullfrog voice," she insisted. "There was this bullfrog up there in Heaven, Mr. Rosewater. The good Lord was going to send it down to this sad world to be born, but that old bullfrog was smart. 'Sweet Lord,' that smart old bullfrog said, 'if it's all the same to you, Sweet Lord, I'd just as soon not be born. It don't look like much fun for a frog down there.' So the Lord let that bullfrog hop around in Heaven up there, where nobody'd use it for bait or eat its legs, and the Lord gave me that bullfrog's voice."

  There was another thunderclap. It raised Diana's voice an octave. "I should have said what that bullfrog said! This ain't such a hot world for Diana Moon Glamperses, neither!"

  "Now, now, Diana--now, now," said Eliot. He took a small drink from a bottle of Southern Comfort.

  "My kiddleys hurt me all day, Mr. Rosewater. They feel like a red-hot cannonball full of electricity was going through them real slow, and just turning round and round, with poisoned razorblades sticking out of it."

  "That can't be very pleasant."

  "It ain't."

  "I do wish you'd go see a doctor about those darn kidneys, dear."

  "I did. I went to Dr. Winters today, just like you told me. He treated me like I was a cow and he was a drunk veterinarian. And when he was through punching me and rolling me all around, why he just laughed. He said he wished everybody in Rosewater County had kiddleys as wonderful as mine. He said my kiddley trouble was all in my head. Oh, Mr. Rosewater, from now on you're the only doctor for me."

  "I'm not a doctor, dear."

  "I don't care. You've cured more hopeless diseases than all the doctors in Indiana put together."

  "Now, now--"

  "Dawn Leonard had boils for ten years, and you cured 'em. Ned Calvin had that twitch in his eye since he was a little boy, and you made it stop. Pearl Flemming came and saw you, and she threw her crutch away. And now my kiddleys have stopped hurting, just hearing your sweet voice."

  "I'm glad."

  "And the thunder and lightning's stopped."

  It was true. There was only the hopelessly sentimental music of rainfall now.

  "So you can sleep now, dear?"

  "Thanks to you. Oh, Mr. Rosewater, there should be a big statue of you in the middle of this town--made out of diamonds and gold, and precious rubies beyond price, and pure uranimum. You,
with your great name and your fine education and your money and the nice manners your mother taught you--you could have been off in some big city, riding around in Cadillacs with the highest mucketymucks, while the bands played and the crowds cheered. You could have been so high and mighty in this world, that when you looked down on the plain, dumb, ordinary people of poor old Rosewater County, we would look like bugs."

  "Now, now--"

  "You gave up everything a man is supposed to want, just to help the little people, and the little people know it. God bless you, Mr. Rosewater. Good night."

  6

  "NATURE'S LITTLE DANGER SIGNALS--" Senator Rosewater said to Sylvia and McAllister and Mushari darkly. "How many did I miss? All of them, I guess."

  "Don't blame yourself," said McAllister.

  "If a man has but one child," said the Senator, "and the family is famous for producing unusual, strong-willed individuals, what standards can the man have for deciding whether or not his child is a nut?"

  "Don't blame yourself!"

  "I have spent my life demanding that people blame themselves for their misfortunes."

  "You've made exceptions."

  "Damn few."

  "Include yourself among the damn few. That's where you belong."

  "I often think that Eliot would not have turned out as he has, if there hadn't been all that whoopdee-doo about his being mascot of the Fire Department when he was a child. God, how they spoiled him--let him ride on the seat of the Number One Pumper, let him ring the bell--taught him how to make the truck backfire by turning the ignition off and on, laughed like crazy when he blew the muffler off. They all smelled of booze, of course, too--" He nodded and blinked. "Booze and fire engines--a happy childhood regained. I don't know, I don't know, I just don't know. Whenever we went out there, I told him it was home--but I never thought he would be dumb enough to believe it."

  "I blame myself," said the Senator.

  "Good for you," said McAllister. "And, while you're at it, be sure to hold yourself responsible for everything that happened to Eliot during World War Two. It's your fault, without a doubt, that all those firemen were in that smoke-filled building."

  McAllister was speaking of the proximate cause of Eliot's nervous breakdown near the end of the war. The smoke-filled building was a clarinet factory in Bavaria. It was supposedly infested by a hedgehog of S.S. troops.

  Eliot led a platoon from his company in an assault on the building. His customary weapon was a Thompson submachinegun. But he went in with a rifle and fixed bayonet this time, because of the danger of shooting one of his own men in the smoke. He had never stuck a bayonet into anybody before, not in years of carnage.

  He pitched a grenade into a window. When it went off, Captain Rosewater went through the window himself, found himself standing in a sea of very still smoke whose undulating surface was level with his eyes. He tilted his head back to keep his nose in air. He could hear Germans, but he couldn't see them.

  He took a step forward, stumbled over one body, fell on another. They were Germans who had been killed by his grenade. He stood up, found himself face-to-face with a helmeted German in a gas mask.

  Eliot, like the good soldier he was, jammed his knee into the man's groin, drove his bayonet into his throat, withdrew the bayonet, smashed the man's jaw with his rifle butt.

  And then Eliot heard an American sergeant yelling somewhere off to his left. The visibility was apparently a lot better over there, for the sergeant was yelling, "Cease fire! Hold your fire, you guys. Jesus Christ--these aren't soldiers. They're firemen!"

  It was true: Eliot had killed three unarmed firemen. They were ordinary villagers, engaged in the brave and uncontroversial business of trying to keep a building from combining with oxygen.

  When the medics got the masks off the three Eliot had killed, they proved to be two old men and a boy. The boy was the one Eliot had bayoneted. He didn't look more than fourteen.

  Eliot seemed reasonably well for about ten minutes after that. And then he calmly lay down in front of a moving truck.

  The truck stopped in time, but the wheels were touching Captain Rosewater. When some of his horrified men picked him up, they found out Eliot was stiff, so rigid that they might have carried him by his hair and his heels.

  He stayed like that for twelve hours, and would not speak or eat--so they shipped him back to Gay Paree.

  "What did he seem like there in Paris?" the Senator wanted to know. "Did he seem sane enough to you then?"

  "That's how I happened to meet him."

  "I don't understand."

  "Father's string quartet played for some of the mental patients in one of the American hospitals-- and Father got talking to Eliot, and Father thought Eliot was the sanest American he had ever met. When Eliot was well enough to leave, Father had him to dinner. I remember Father's introduction: 'I want you all to meet the only American who has so far noticed the Second World War.' "

  "What did he say that was so sane?"

  "It was the impression he made, really--more than--than the particular things he said. I remember how my father described him. He said, 'This young Captain I'm bringing home--he despises art. Can you imagine? Despises it--and yet he does it in such a way that I can't help loving him for it. What he's saying, I think, is that art has failed him, which, I must admit, is a very fair thing for a man who has bayoneted a fourteen-year-old boy in the line of duty to say.' "

  "I loved Eliot on sight."

  "Isn't there some other word you could use?"

  "Than what?"

  "Than love."

  "What better word is there?"

  "It was a perfectly good word--until Eliot got hold of it. It's spoiled for me now. Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word." He looked up at an oil painting of his deceased wife. "For instance--I loved her more than I loved our garbage collector, which makes me guilty of the most unspeakable of modern crimes: Dis-crim-i-nay-tion."

  Sylvia smiled wanly. "For want of a better word, could I go on using the old one--just for tonight?"

  "On your lips it still has meaning."

  "I loved him on sight in Paris--and I love him when I think of him now."

  "You must have realized pretty early in the game that you had a nut on your hands."

  "There was the drinking."

  "There's the heart of the problem right there!"

  "And there was that awful business with Arthur Garvey Ulm." Ulm was a poet Eliot had given ten thousand dollars to when the Foundation was still in New York.

  "That poor Arthur told Eliot he wanted to be free to tell the truth, regardless of the economic consequences, and Eliot wrote him a tremendous check right then and there. It was at a cocktail party," said Sylvia. "I remember Arthur Godfrey was there--and Robert Frost--and Salvador Dali--and a lot of others, too."

  " 'You go tell the truth, by God. It's about time somebody did,' Eliot said to him. 'And if you need any more money to tell more truth, you just come back to me.'"

  "Poor Arthur wandered around the party in a daze, showing people the check, asking them if it could possibly be real. They all told him it was a perfectly wonderful check, and he came back to Eliot, made sure again that the check was not a joke. And then, almost hysterically, he begged Eliot to tell him what he should write about."

  " 'The truth!' said Eliot."

  " 'You're my patron--and I thought that as my patron you--you might--'"

  " 'I'm not your patron. I'm a fellow-American who's paying you money to find out what the truth is. That's a very different sort of thing.'"

  " 'Right, right,' said Arthur. 'That's the way it should be. That's the way I want it. I just thought there was maybe some special subject you--'"

  " 'You pick the subject, and be good and fearless about it.'"

  " 'Right.
' And before he knew what he was doing, poor Arthur saluted, and I don't think he'd even been in the Army or Navy or anything. And he left Eliot, but he went around the party again, asking everybody what sorts of things Eliot was interested in. He finally came back to tell Eliot that he had once been a migratory fruit-picker, and that he wanted to write a cycle of poems about how miserable the fruit pickers were."

  "Eliot drew himself up to his full height, looked down on Arthur, his eyes blazing, and he said, so that everybody could hear, 'Sir! Do you realize that the Rosewaters are the founders and the majority stockholders in the United Fruit Company?' "

  "That wasn't true!" said the Senator.

  "Of course it wasn't," said Sylvia.

  "Did the Foundation have any United Fruit stock at all at that time?" the Senator asked McAllister.

  "Oh--five thousand shares, maybe."

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing," McAllister agreed.

  "Poor Arthur turned crimson, slunk away, came back again, asked Eliot very humbly who his favorite poet was. 'I don't know his name,' said Eliot, 'and I wish I did, because it's the only poem I ever thought enough of to commit to heart.'"

  " 'Where did you see it?'"

  " 'It was written on a wall, Mr. Ulm, of the men's room of a beer joint on the border between Rosewater and Brown Counties in Indiana, the Log Cabin Inn.' "

  "Oh, this is weird, this is weird," said the Senator. "The Log Cabin Inn must have burned down-- oh God--in 1934 or so. How weird that Eliot should remember it."

  "Was he ever in it?" McAllister asked.

  "Once--just once, now that I think back," said the Senator. "It was a dreadful robbers' roost, and we would never have stopped there if the car hadn't boiled over. Eliot must have been--ten?--twelve? And he probably did use the men's room, and he probably did see something written on the wall, something he never forgot." He nodded. "How weird, how weird."

  "What was the poem?" said McAllister.