Look at the Birdie

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Henry and Anne and Karpinsky, their eyes shining, tiptoed away from her, toward the door. And then the cops broke in.

  There were three of them—one with his gun drawn, the other two with their clubs ready. They grabbed Karpinsky.

  Right behind them came Henry’s and Anne’s fathers in tuxedos. They were wild with fear—fear that something awful had happened or was about to happen to their children. They had reported Henry’s and Anne’s disappearance as a kidnapping.

  Karpinsky’s mother sat up in bed, saw her son in the hands of the police. This was the last picture to be recorded in her mind in life. Karpinsky’s mother groaned and died.

  Ten minutes later, it was no longer possible to speak of Henry, Anne, and Karpinsky in a common action, in the same room, or even, poetically, in the same universe.

  Karpinsky and the police worked hopelessly to revive Karpinsky’s mother. Henry walked dazedly out of the building, with his appalled father begging him to stop and listen. Anne burst into tears that let her think of nothing. She was easily led by her father to his waiting car.

  Six hours later, Henry was still walking. He had reached the edge of the city, and the sun was coming up. He had done curious things to his evening clothes. He had thrown away his black tie and his cuff links and his shirt studs. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and had ripped the starched white bosom of his shirt, so that it looked something like an ordinary shirt opened at the throat. His once glossy black shoes were the color of city mud.

  He looked like a very young bum, which is what he had decided to be. A police cruiser finally found him, took him home. He didn’t have a civil word for anybody, and he wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t a child anymore. He was a badly jangled man.

  • • •

  Anne cried herself to sleep. And then, just about the time Henry was being brought home, she cried herself awake again.

  The light of dawn in her room was as pale as skimmed milk. In that light, Anne saw a vision. Anne’s vision was of a book. The name of the author was her own. In the book, Anne Lawson Heiler told the truth about the shallowness and cowardice and hypocrisy of the rich people in the city.

  She thought of the first two lines in the book: “There was a depression on. Most of the people in the city were poor and heartbroken, but there was dancing at the Athletic Club.” She felt much better. She went back to sleep again.

  Just about the time Anne went back to sleep, Stanley Karpinsky opened a window in his attic room. He took the apparatus from the table with the lion’s-claw feet, and he dropped the apparatus out the window piece by piece. Then he dropped his books and his microscope and all the rest of his equipment. He took a long time doing it, and some of the things made quite a racket when they hit the street.

  Somebody finally called the police about a crazy man dropping things out of a window. When the police came, and they found out who it was that was dropping things, they didn’t say anything to Karpinsky about it. They just cleaned up the mess in the street as best they could—cleaned it up sheepishly.

  Henry slept until noon that day. And when he got up, he got out of the house before anyone knew he was awake. His mother, a sweet, sheltered person, heard his car start, heard his tires swish in gravel, and he was gone.

  Henry drove with elaborate caution, dramatizing every motion he made in controlling the car. He felt that he had a terribly important errand to run—but he wasn’t sure what the errand was. His driving, then, took on the importance of the nameless errand.

  He arrived at Anne’s house while she was eating breakfast. The attitude of the maid who let Henry in was that Anne was a pathetic invalid. This was hardly the case. Anne was eating with gusto, and was writing in a school notebook between bites.

  She was writing her novel—angrily.

  Anne’s mother sat across the table from her, uneasily respecting the unfamiliar rites of creativity. The savagery of her daughter’s pencil strokes offended her, frightened her. She knew what the writing was about. Anne had let her read some of it.

  Anne’s mother was delighted to see Henry. She had always liked Henry—and she was sure Henry would help her to change Anne’s very bad mood. “Oh, Henry, dear,” she said, “have you heard the good news? Did your mother tell you?”

  “I haven’t seen my mother,” said Henry stolidly.

  Anne’s mother wilted. “Oh,” she said. “I—I talked with her on the phone three times this morning. She’s looking forward to having a long talk with you—about what happened.”

  “Um,” said Henry. “What’s the good news, Mrs. Heiler?”

  “They got him a job,” said Anne. “Isn’t that swell?” Her wry expression made it clear that she thought the news was something less than swell. She thought Henry was something less than swell, too.

  “That poor man—last night—Mr. Karpinsky,” said Anne’s mother, “he has a job, a wonderful job. Your father and Anne’s father got on the phone this morning, and they got Ed Buchwalter to hire him at Delta Chemical.” Her soft brown eyes begged Henry moistly to agree that there was nothing wrong in the world that could not be repaired easily. “Isn’t that nice, Henry?” she said.

  “I—I guess it’s better than nothing,” said Henry. He didn’t feel a great deal better.

  His apathy crushed Anne’s mother. “What else could anyone do, Henry?” she said beseechingly. “What do you children want us to do next? We feel awful. We’re doing everything we can for the poor man. If there were anything we could do for the poor woman, we would. It was all an accident, and anybody in our position would have done the same thing—with all the kidnappings and murders and I don’t know what all in the papers.” She began to weep. “And Anne’s writing a book as though we were some kind of criminals, and you come in here and can’t even smile, no matter what anybody tells you.”

  “The book doesn’t say you’re any criminal,” said Anne.

  “It certainly isn’t very complimentary,” said Anne’s mother. “You make it sound as though your father and I and Henry’s father and mother and the Buchwalters and the Wrightsons and everybody were just tickled pink so many people were out of work.” She shook her head. “I’m not. I think the Depression is sickening, just sickening. How do you want us to act?” she asked pipingly.

  “The book isn’t about you,” said Anne. “It’s about me. I’m the worst person in it.”

  “You’re a nice person!” said Anne’s mother. “A very nice person.” She stopped weeping now, smiled twitteringly, moved her elbows up and down as though they were the wing tips of a happy little bird. “Can’t we all cheer up, children? Isn’t everything going to be all right?” She turned to Henry. “Smile, Henry?”

  Henry knew the kind of smile she wanted, and, twenty-four hours before, he would have given it to her automatically—the kind of smile a child gave a grown-up for kissing a hurt well. He didn’t smile.

  The most important thing to Henry was to demonstrate to Anne that he wasn’t the shallow booby she apparently thought he was. Not smiling helped—but something more manly, more decisive was called for. It suddenly dawned on him what the nameless errand was that he’d set out upon. “Mrs. Heiler,” he said, “I think maybe Anne and I should go see Mr. Karpinsky, and tell him how sorry we are.”

  “No!” said Anne’s mother. It was sharp and quick—too sharp, too quick. There was panic in it. “I mean,” she said, making erasing motions with her hands, “it’s all taken care of. Your fathers have already been down to talk to him. They apologized to him and told him about the job and …” Her voice trailed off. It was apparent even to her what she was really saying.

  She was really saying that she could not stand the idea of Henry’s and Anne’s growing up—the idea of their ever looking closely at tragedy. She was saying that she herself had never grown up, had never looked closely at tragedy. She was saying that the most beautiful thing money could buy was a childhood a lifetime long—

  Anne’s mother turned away. Her turning away was the clos
est she could come to telling Henry and Anne to go see Karpinsky and his tragedy, if they felt they had to.

  Henry and Anne went.

  • • •

  Stanley Karpinsky was in his room. He was sitting at the big table with the lion’s-claw feet. He was staring into the middle distance, his thumb tips clamped lightly between his teeth. Heaped on the table before him were the few things that had survived the drop from the window at dawn. Karpinsky had salvaged what he could—mostly books in sprung bindings.

  Karpinsky now listened to two people coming up the stairs. His door was open, so there was no need to knock. Henry and Anne simply appeared in the doorway.

  “Well,” said Karpinsky, rising, “the King and Queen of the Universe. I couldn’t be more surprised. Come in.”

  Henry bowed stiffly. “We—we wanted to tell you how sorry we are,” he said.

  Karpinsky bowed in reply. “Thank you very much,” he said.

  “Very sorry,” said Anne. “Thank you,” said Karpinsky.

  There followed an embarrassed silence. Henry and Anne had apparently prepared no speeches other than their first ones, and yet seemed to expect great things of their visit.

  Karpinsky was at a loss as to what to say next. Of all the players in the tragedy, Henry and Anne had certainly been the most innocent, the most faceless. “Well!” said Karpinsky. “How about some coffee?”

  “All right,” said Henry.

  Karpinsky went to the gas burner, lit it, put water on. “I have a swell job now,” he said. “Suppose you heard.” He was no more overjoyed by this belated piece of good luck than Henry and Anne had been.

  There was no response from Henry and Anne.

  Karpinsky turned to look at them, to guess, if he could, what it was they expected from him. With great difficulty, rising above his own troubles, Karpinsky caught on. They had had a soul-shaking brush with life and death, and now they wanted to know what it had all meant.

  Karpinsky, ransacking his brain for some foolish tidbit of thought to give them, surprised himself by finding something of real importance.

  “You know,” he said, “if we had fooled her last night, I would have considered my life at a satisfactory end, with all debts paid. I would have wound up on skid row, or maybe I would have been a suicide.” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “Now,” he said, “if I’m ever going to square things with her, I’ve got to believe in a Heaven, I’ve got to believe she can look down and see me, and I’ve got to be a big success for her to see.”

  This was profoundly satisfying to Henry and Anne—and to Karpinsky, too.

  Three days later, Henry told Anne he loved her. Anne told him she loved him, too. They had told each other that before, but this was the first time it had meant a little something. They had finally seen a little something of life.

  THE GOOD EXPLAINER

  The office of Dr. Leonard Abekian was in a bad part of Chicago. It was behind a false front of yellow brick and glass block built out from the first floor of a narrow Victorian mansion whose spine was spiked with lightning rods. Joe Cunningham, treasurer of a bank in a small town outside of Cincinnati, arrived at Dr. Abekian’s office by taxicab. He had spent the night in a hotel. Joe had come all the way from Ohio, under the impression that Dr. Abekian had had phenomenal successes in curing sterility. Joe was thirty-five. He had been married ten years without fathering a child.

  The waiting room was not impressive. Its walls were goose-fleshed pink Spackle. Its furnishings were cracked leatherette and chromium-plated tubes. Joe had to put down a feeling that the office gave him at once—a feeling that Dr. Abekian was a cheap quack. The air of the place was little more impressive than a barbershop’s. Joe put down the feeling, told himself that Dr. Abekian was too absorbed in his work and too little interested in money to put up an impressive front.

  There was no nurse or receptionist at the waiting room desk. The only other soul in the room was a boy about fourteen years old. He had his arm in a sling. The nature of this solitary patient disturbed Joe, too. He had expected to find the waiting room filled with people like himself——childless people who had traveled great distances to see the famous Dr. Abekian, to get the final word on what the trouble was.

  “Is—is the doctor in?” Joe asked the boy.

  “Ring the bell,” said the boy.

  “Bell?” said Joe.

  “On the desk,” said the boy.

  Joe went to the desk, found a bell button on it, pressed it, heard a buzzer ring somewhere deep in the house. A moment later, a harried-looking young woman in a white uniform came in from the back part of the house, closed a door on the wailing of a child. “I’m sorry,” she said, “the baby isn’t well. I have to go back and forth between him and the office. Can I help you?”

  “Are you Mrs. Abekian?” said Joe.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I talked to you on the phone last night,” said Joe.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “You made appointments for yourself and your wife?”

  “That’s right,” said Joe.

  She referred to an appointment pad. “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Cunningham?”

  “Right,” said Joe. “My wife had some shopping. She’ll be along. I’ll go in first.”

  “Fine,” she said. She nodded at the boy with his arm in a sling. “You go in right after Peter here.” She took a blank form from the desk drawer, tried to ignore the squalling of the baby in the back of the house. She wrote Joe’s name at the top of the form, and she said, “You’ll have to excuse the distractions.”

  Joe tried a shy smile. “To me,” he said, “that’s the most beautiful sound in the world.”

  She gave a tired laugh. “You’ve come to the right place to hear beautiful sounds like that,” she said.

  “How many children do you have?” said Joe.

  “Four,” she said. And then she added, “So far.”

  “You’re very lucky,” said Joe.

  “I keep telling myself so,” she said.

  “You see,” said Joe, “my wife and I don’t have any.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “That’s why my wife and I have come to see your husband,” said Joe.

  “I see,” she said.

  “We came all the way from Ohio,” said Joe.

  “Ohio?” she said. She looked startled. “You mean you just moved to Chicago from Ohio?”

  “Ohio’s still our home,” said Joe. “We’re up here just to see your husband.”

  She looked so puzzled now that Joe had to ask, “Is there another Dr. Abekian?”

  “No,” she said. And then she said, too quickly, too watchfully, too brightly to make Joe think he really had come to the right place, “No, no—there’s only one. My husband’s the man you want.”

  “I heard he’d done some wonderful things with sterility cases,” said Joe.

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes—he has, he has,” she said. “May—may I ask who recommended him?”

  “My wife heard a lot of talk around about him,” said Joe.

  “I see,” she said.

  “We wanted the best,” said Joe, “and my wife asked around, and she decided he was the best.”

  She nodded, frowned ever so slightly. “Uh-huh,” she said.

  Dr. Abekian himself now came out of his office, shepherding a mournful, old, old woman. He was a tall, flashily handsome man—flashy by reason of his even white teeth and dark skin. There was a lot of the sharpness and dazzle of a nightclub master of ceremonies about him. At the same time, Dr. Abekian revealed an underlying embarrassment about his looks, too. He gave Joe the impression that he would have preferred, on occasion anyway, a more conservative exterior.

  “There must be something I could take that would make me feel better than I do,” the old, old woman said to him.

  “You take these new pills,” he said to her gently. “They may be just what you’ve been looking for. If not, we’ll try, try, try again.” He waved the boy with the broken arm int
o his office.

  “Len—” said his wife.

  “Hm?” he said.

  “This man,” she said, indicating Joe, “this man and his wife came all the way from Ohio to see you.”

  In spite of herself, she made Joe’s trip seem such a peculiar thing that Joe was now dead certain that a big, foolish mistake had been made.

  “Ohio?” said Dr. Abekian. His incredulity was frank. He arched his thick, dark eyebrows. “All the way from Ohio?” he said.

  “I heard people from all over the country came to see you,” said Joe.

  “Who told you that?” he said.

  “My wife,” said Joe.

  “She knows me?” said Dr. Abekian.

  “No,” said Joe. “She just heard about you.”

  “From whom?” said the doctor.

  “Woman talk,” said Joe.

  “I—I’m very flattered,” said Dr. Abekian. “As you can see,” he said, spreading his long-fingered hands, “I’m a neighborhood general practitioner. I won’t pretend that I’m a specialist, and I won’t pretend that anyone has ever traveled any great distance to see me before.”

  “Then I beg your pardon,” said Joe. “I don’t know how this happened.”

  “Ohio?” said Dr. Abekian.

  “That’s right,” said Joe.

  “Cincinnati?” said the doctor.

  “No,” said Joe. He named the town.

  “Even if it were Cincinnati,” said the doctor, “it wouldn’t make much sense. Years ago, I was a medical student in Cincinnati, but I never practiced there.”

  “My wife was a nursing student in Cincinnati,” said Joe.

  “Oh, she was?” said the doctor, thinking for a moment that he’d found a clue. The clue faded. “But she doesn’t know me.”

  “No,” said Joe.

  Dr. Abekian shrugged. “So the mystery remains a mystery,” he said. “Since you’ve come all this distance—if there’s anything I can do—”

  “They want children,” said the doctor’s wife. “They haven’t had any.”