We Are What We Pretend to Be

by Kurt Vonnegut

  She returned to Haley’s room, followed by Kitty, whose full hips swayed with studied grace as she crossed the bare floor to where Haley stood, his long fingers laced behind him, a fixed smile on his face.

  “So this is Haley,” Kitty exulted. Haley fidgeted under her warm, albeit vacant, gaze. Her face had much of the simple-naturedness of Annie’s, but the setting of this attribute was altogether enchanting, he thought. One year his senior, she was fully a woman, and her lush maturity made Haley feel very young and frail indeed.

  His awe must have shown, for Kitty crooned, “Aw, look at him, Annie. What’s the matter, youngster? Afraid of girls, or don’t you like it out here in God’s country?”

  “I think I’ll like it very much,” stammered Haley. “My mother used to tell me about when she was a little girl out here, and I got to feel it was kind of a second home of mine, too.”

  “But what a come-down from New York, I’ll bet—nightclubs, theaters, fancy stores, and everything.”

  “She’s crazy to hear about New York,” said Annie. “Four million men in New York.”

  “It was very different, certainly,” said Haley, thoughtfully. “We always lived in apartments, and there were a lot of interesting people around all the time. Father loved it, naturally. It was the only kind of life for him. But Mother always said she belonged back here.”

  “Well, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other for many years to come,” said Kitty as she left the room. “You’ll have to excuse me until supper—which had better be on time for a change, Annie dear.”

  Haley was agog. “She’s very beautiful, isn’t she, Annie?” he said.

  “That isn’t exactly news for around two hundred miles,” said Annie. “The General says she’s a lot smarter than some of the livestock in the neighborhood, too.” She changed the subject abruptly. “I almost forgot to point out the General’s welcome present.” She indicated a pair of silver military brushes, which rested side by side on the otherwise barren dresser top. “If you want to keep on the right side of him, keep your hair brushed, don’t be scared of him, and don’t ask to use the car. That car’s his pride and joy, and he doesn’t trust anybody within ten feet of it. It used to belong to a German general, and there’s not another car in the country that can touch it.”

  “That doesn’t sound very difficult,” laughed Haley.

  “And remember,” said Annie with severity, “no matter what he seems like at times, the General is one of the finest men alive. Now go downstairs and meet your cousin Hope. She’s in the sunroom.”

  As Annie had promised, Haley found Hope in the sunroom, her quasi-adult figure clad in denim trousers and a man’s shirt. She was seated tailor-fashion on the broad sill of a bay window. When she looked up at him, he felt as though his bones would melt. Her face was angelic beneath a honey-colored blizzard of close-cropped curls. The thoughtful depths of her dark green eyes, and the radiant cast of her features, dispelled in an instant the image of Kitty that Haley had thought would be foremost in his thoughts for the rest of his life. “Welcome to Ardennes Farm,” she said. “It’s good to have another young person around. This place needs young ideas like nobody’s business.”

  “I didn’t know the farm had a name,” said Haley.

  “Oh, yes,” said Hope wearily, “it’s in honor of a battle, just like everything else around here.”

  “Annie said you were very pretty, and you are,” said Haley, astonishing himself with his atypical gallantry, and with the sudden affection for Hope that surged within him.

  “Uh huh,” said Hope, and Haley guessed that she hadn’t heard him clearly, for her head was turned away from him, her gaze intent on what Haley perceived to be a horse-drawn wagon, which was making a fitful and noisy approach toward the house. “Look at that idiot, that big, childish, old fool, Haley,” she said irritably.

  As the wagon drew nearer, Haley saw that it was not moving continuously but was making a quick series of starts and stops, and that the man at the reins was standing on the empty wagon bed, dancing an abbreviated jig, and shouting at the top of his lungs. “Giddyap! by golly; whoa! by golly; giddyap! blast you; whoa! blast you . . .” A pink froth wreathed the mouth corners of the stamping, rearing horses.

  Hope jumped through the open window onto the lawn below and ran toward the wagon, waving her arms. She reached it when it was less than one hundred yards from where Haley stood squinting into the bright, level rays of the setting sun. He watched with admiration Hope’s courage and vigor, and with melancholy reflections of his own deficiency in those manly qualities, as she scrambled onto the wagon, stamped on it with fury, and berated the man at the reins.

  “What do you want to do, kill the poor horses with those awful bits?” Haley heard her say.

  “I’m darn well going to have the most obedient pair of horses in the state; that’s what I’m trying to do,” bellowed the driver. “Now get back in the house and set the table or something!” He was short and plump, something like Annie, Haley thought, and he wore a disheveled ten-gallon hat, whose limp brim fluttered in the wind from the south, occasionally slapping at his steel-rimmed spectacles as he argued. “Now get! Go on and get! Giddyap! by golly.” The wagon jolted forward ten feet. “Whoa!” The driver hauled back on the reins.

  Hope dropped from the wagon, ran to the head of the frantic team, and unsnapped the reins from the bridles. “You’ll regret that piece of high-handedness, young lady,” threatened the driver, pink with anger. In another moment, she had freed the team from the tongue and traces and set them trotting toward the barnyard.

  Haley gaped as the man seized Hope by the arm and fetched her a smart slap on her behind. “Didn’t hurt,” she yelled. The man, still grasping her arm, marched her toward the house. “Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care,” she chanted, as they scuffled nearer and nearer to Haley.

  “We’ll see who cares,” said the man. He thrust her before him into the sunroom. Haley instinctively ducked behind a chair. “Now go upstairs, Miss I-know-so-much-more-than-anybody. No supper for you tonight, and no movies for a month. Do we understand each other?”

  “Simply don’t care at all,” said Hope. She turned and walked turtle-slow to the foot of the stairs. “I repeat,” she said, “that I don’t care. I might add that this must have looked simply wonderful to cousin Haley, who’s hiding behind the red chair.”

  The man wheeled to glare at Haley’s shelter. Haley bobbed up from behind the chair’s high back and bared his teeth in what he hoped would look like a smile. “How do you do, sir,” said Haley.

  “You’re Haley Brandon?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, how do you do, young man? I’m your uncle, the great big bad bully the girls call ‘the General.’ Welcome to Ardennes Farm, and what were you doing behind the chair? Did I scare you, eh?” The General chuckled jovially.

  Haley smiled sheepishly. “I just didn’t want to intrude—”

  “Sorry about that disturbance,” the General interrupted. “It’s the sort of thing that could happen in any family—maybe not quite as often,” he added thoughtfully. “You saw it all from the first?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. Then I don’t have to justify my actions. You saw the outrage that gave me no alternative.” He dismissed the matter with a shrug. “Well, first let me say that we’re glad you’re here. My sister brought you up as her own, and that’s what I intend to do. I know a good bit about you already from your mother’s letters. You’re thinner than I expected—a whole lot thinner—but otherwise she kept me pretty well posted. She was a lot better letter writer than I am. I know you’re quite a piano player, for one thing, and that you were looking forward to going to Chicago to study at the Conservatory this winter, before all this happened. That right?”

  “Yessir, it is. I—”

  “Good for you. If there’s anything I admire in a man, it’s ambition. Frankly, wanting to be a piano player seems like a funny one to me, but, like I’ve told th
e girls a million times, ‘I don’t care what you want to be, just as long as it’s honest, and you want to be the best there is.’ I think maybe we can send you to Chicago, all right.”

  Haley broke into his first heartfelt smile of the interview.

  “I’ve heard you’re pretty smart all the way around, too,” the General continued. He settled into a chair and lit a cigarette. “Here you are sixteen, and you’ve already finished up high school. Wish you’d give some of your brains to Kitty. Looks like she’ll be in high school until the diamond jubilee of the atom bomb.” He motioned for Haley to sit down. “I hope you haven’t got a swelled head about your school record.”

  “I just liked school was all,” said Haley, blushing, “and I went to summer school. I don’t think I’m any smarter than—”

  “Don’t say Kitty,” warned the General. “I was just going to tell you a story about a man I grew up with, just in case you were cocky about being smart in school. I see you aren’t, but I’ll tell it to you anyway. I learned a lot from what happened to him.”

  “I’d like very much to hear about it,” said Haley.

  “Well, Haley, this boyhood chum of mine was a lot like you, from what I’ve heard about you. He was always reading books, books, books—everything he could get his hands on. We used to ask him to come fishing or to play baseball, and things like that, and he always had the same answer: ‘No thanks, I just got a new book that looks very interesting.’ Sometimes he’d forget to stop reading for meals. By the time he was fifteen, he knew more about the royal family of Siam and the slum problem in Vladivostok than I knew about the back of my hand. All his teachers swore he was a genius, and said he’d be at least President of the United States when he was thirty-five.” He paused to give Haley a meaningful look.

  Haley attempted to appear as solemn and absorbed as possible. “What finally became of him?” he asked soberly.

  The General seemed satisfied that his story was carrying the proper impact. “When World War II broke out, this man was immediately made an officer. Everybody expected him to win the war single-handedly. But when the going got tough over there in France, he cracked up completely. It turned out he didn’t know the first thing about leadership, and he couldn’t even take care of himself, so he was sick all the time.” The General lowered his voice. “The morale in his company was so bad that all his men had thrown away their gas masks rather than carry them on marches. The first thing you know, the Jerries dropped mustard-gas shells all over them. Zip! One whole company wiped out! And I’ll always say it was a library card that killed them. See my point?”

  “Yessir, I think so. He was one-sided. Is that it?”

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” said the General, beaming. “You expressed it perfectly. That’s why I brought my whole family out here to the farm to live after the war, to keep us all from getting soft, from getting one-sided. Now spruce up for supper. People with dirty fingernails don’t get to eat around here.”

  II.

  At 2 a.m. Central Standard Time, as reckoned by the parlor mantel clock in the home of Brigadier General William Cooley, retired, a light beam left the burning sun. At 2:08 it glanced from the lip of a moon crater, and a second later died on earth, in the staring eyes of Haley Brandon.

  Haley lay sleepless between cool sheets, his thin arms folded behind his head, his eyes fixed on the window through which the wistful moonlight streamed. He felt wholly a stranger. None of the old, seemingly sweetly reasonable patterns of the past now applied. He was not actively melancholy—it was too soon for that. Rather, he was like a settler on his first day in a foreign land, bemused by his initial contacts with unfamiliar customs, not yet ready to admit that it would be those customs instead of his own that would enable him to remain and prosper.

  “We’ll see to it that you earn your way as best you can—with good, old-fashioned work. Sounds harsh, maybe, but you’ll thank us for it in later years. We’ll put some meat on you, too,” the General had said at supper. The sweat- and sinew-worship that seemed to pervade life at Ardennes Farm was a great curiosity to Haley. Robust was the password. As a Manhattan cliff-dweller, he had won the loyalty of his small circle of friends—most of them adults and fellow musicians—with the cleverness of his fingers on a piano keyboard, with his promise as a concert pianist. Now, he reflected, the emphasis had been changed to the cleanliness of his fingers, to whether he could move a piano.

  Haley thought about the peculiar man into whose hands he had been delivered for guidance. The General, he knew from having heard his mother talk about him, was a competent manager, a brave soldier, and well off financially, though not given to exhibiting the last-named quality. He had taken over management of the old Cooley farmstead, run by tenants for nearly a generation, after his retirement from the Army. Haley remembered a few discussions between his mother and father as to the truth of his mother’s contention that the General, “down deep,” had a heart of gold. His mother had never been able to produce much evidence for the affirmative. His father, on the other hand, had always had dozens of incidents to recall, which seemed to back up his opinion that the General was a “pompous, selfish old teddy bear with sawdust for brains.” As he lay abed for his first night in his new home, Haley thought he liked the General. The man was gruff, certainly, but he always gave sound reasons for the things he did.

  Haley flexed his fingers and recalled the dreamlike quality his music had given his life in the past; and a pleasurable shudder passed over him as he reminded himself that that part of his life would begin anew in thirty days—for the General had promised that he might go to Chicago to resume his studies then. That was all that really mattered, Haley decided. Knowing that that much of the future was assured, he decided that he could adjust to any of the new order’s rigors and get along with just about anyone.

  It was certainly to the General’s credit as a man of compassion that he should understand the importance of music to his new charge, Haley thought, for the man was as tone-deaf as a sparrow, and so were two of his three daughters. Judging from the whistling and humming they did, he had concluded that only Hope was able to carry a tune. Haley had heard that this was a hereditary trait. His mother, or, as Annie had reminded him, his foster mother, had been similarly afflicted. In this thought Haley found some consolation for his not being a blood relative of the Cooleys. There were apparently no instruments on the farm, and the evening’s choice of radio programs had indicated that the General and his family found homicide far more entertaining than music. As Haley had undressed for bed, he had been surprised to hear an excellent, if untrained, tenor voice singing hymns in the barn, and he had wondered who it might have been. It could not have been a Cooley, at any rate. He decided to ask about it in the morning.

  Tomorrow his new life would begin in earnest in the vast, unfamiliar flatness of the plain—a world of strange sounds and sights and attitudes. He was, the General had said, to help with the haying.

  He turned over, pulled the sheet over his head, and closed his eyes. Haley dreamed of saying good night to his mother and father, of wishing them, handsome and young in evening clothes, a pleasant time at their party. He dreamed of the friends who had come to get him the next morning, to tell him that he must stay with them for a little while, that there had been an automobile accident, that he mustn’t cry, that he must be a man. . . . He had cried.

  III.

  Haley was awakened the next morning by a banging on his door, a shout by his ear, and the shock of a cold washcloth on his face. He sat upright and saw the General standing at the foot of the cot, squat, fat, and laughing. A towel was knotted about the man’s abdomen; with another he was rubbing his bare chest to a glowing pink. “You’re not in the music business, boy; you’re a farmer now. Take a cold shower, and be down for breakfast in ten minutes, or you don’t eat,” he trumpeted.

  “Yessir,” said Haley. Ten minutes later he was seated, puffing and shivering, at the long kitchen table, ducking his head now and then to
avoid the flying elbows of Annie, who was energetically making flapjacks on the range behind him. The hot water faucet in the shower stall had been a cruel fraud, he reflected resentfully. The glare from the naked bulb that hung over the table hurt his eyes. He looked away from it to the blackness outside the windows and realized with sleepy awe that he would be seeing a sunrise for the first time in his life. “Good morning,” he said, after waiting fruitlessly for someone—Annie, Hope, or the General—to acknowledge his presence.

  The General and Hope sat across the table from him. Both gave him cursory nods. Hope’s expression was sullen, and the General’s boisterous spirits of a few minutes ago seemed to have fled. Haley supposed that they were still nourishing the unpleasantness of the previous afternoon. Uncomfortable in that sort of silence, Haley tried to break it again. “It’s a nice morning,” he said.

  The General looked up. “Brush your teeth this morning, boy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good,” said the General firmly. “Dirtiest place in the world, next to the fingernails, the human mouth is.”

  “Speak for yourself,” muttered Hope. Haley was grateful that only he seemed to have heard her. The General gave no sign, devoting his full attention to the flapjacks Annie had placed before him. As had been the case at supper the night before, the General was the first to be served. Haley gathered that it was customary not to talk during breakfast.

  As he gulped the last of his strong, black coffee, the back door opened, and a muscular, black-haired man, apparently in his thirties, entered. His clothes were threadbare denim, but his manners were wonderfully courtly, Haley thought, and his grooming faultless. His face was shaved and scrubbed to the luster of wax apples, and his heavily pomaded hair resembled a patent-leather helmet. He crossed the room to a chair next to the range, made a brief bow to each person at the table, and sat down.