Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

  IT WOULD TURN out that he had been through an ordeal that lasted much, much longer than the siege of Scipio, and was probably harder on him than Vietnam had been on me. He had been tried for child molestation in Dubuque, Iowa, where he had founded and run a free child-care center at his own expense.

  He wasn't married, a strike against him in the eyes of most juries, a character flaw like having served in the Vietnam War.

  "I GREW UP in Dubuque," he would tell me, "and the money I inherited was made in Dubuque." It was a meat-packing fortune.

  "I wanted to give something back to Dubuque. With so many single parents raising children on minimum wage, and with so many married couples both working to make enough to feed and clothe their children halfway decently, I thought what Dubuque needed most was a child-care center that was nice and didn't cost anything."

  Two weeks after he opened the center, he was arrested for child molestation because several of the children came home with inflamed genitalia.

  HE WAS LATER to prove in court, after smears were taken from the children's lesions, that a fungus was to blame. The fungus was closely related to jock itch, and may actually have been a new strain of jock which had learned how to rise above all the standard remedies for that affliction.

  By then, though, he had been held in jail without bail for 3 months, and had to be protected from a lynch mob by the National Guard. Luckily for him, Dubuque, like so many communities, had backed up its police with Armor and Infantry.

  After he was acquitted, he had to be transported out of town and deep into Illinois in a buttoned-up tank, or somebody would have killed him.

  THE JUDGE WHO acquitted him was killed. He was of Italian ancestry. Somebody sent him a pipe bomb concealed in a huge salami.

  BUT THAT SON of mine did not tell me about any of that until just before he said, "It's time to say, 'Good-bye.' " He prefaced the tale of how he had suffered so with these words: "I hope you understand, the last thing I wanted to do was make any demands on your emotions."

  "Try me," I said.

  THINKING ABOUT OUR meeting now fills me with a sort of sweetness. He had liked me enough, found me warm enough, to use me as though I were a really good father, if only for a little while.

  IN THE BEGINNING, when we were feeling each other out very gingerly, and I hadn't yet admitted that he was my son, I asked him if "Rob Roy" was the name on his birth certificate, or whether that was a nickname his mother had hung on him.

  He said it was the name on his birth certificate.

  "And the father on the birth certificate?" I asked.

  "It was the name of a soldier who died in Vietnam," he said.

  "Do you remember what it was?" I said.

  Here came a surprise. It was the name of my brother-in-law, Jack Patton, whom his mother had never met, I'm sure. I must have told her about Jack in Manila, and she'd remembered his name, and that he was unmarried and had died for his country.

  I thought to myself, "Good old Jack, wherever you are, it's time to laugh like hell again."

  "SO WHAT MAKES you think I'm your father instead of him?" I said. "Your mother finally told you?"

  "She wrote me a letter," he said.

  "She didn't tell you face to face?" I said.

  "She couldn't," he said. "She died of cancer of the pancreas when I was 4 years old."

  That was a shock. She sure hadn't lasted long after I made love to her. I've always enjoyed thinking of the women I have made love to as living on and on. I had imagined his mother, game and smart and sporty and funny, with lips like sofa pillows, living on and on.

  "She wrote me a letter on her deathbed," he continued, "which was put into the hands of a law firm in Dubuque, not to be opened until after the death of the good man who had married her and adopted me. He died only a year ago."

  "DID THE LETTER say why you were named Rob Roy?" I inquired.

  "No," he said. "I assumed it must be because she liked the novel by that name by Sir Walter Scott."

  "That sounds right," I said. What good would it do him or anybody else to know that he was named for 2 shots of Scotch, 1 shot of sweet vermouth, cracked ice, and a twist of lemon peel?

  "HOW DID YOU find me?" I said.

  "At first I didn't think I wanted to find you," he said. "But then 2 weeks ago I thought that we were entitled to see each other once, at least. So I called West Point."

  "I haven't had any contact with them for years," I said.

  "That's what they told me," he said. "But just before I called they got a call from the Governor of New York, who said he had just made you a Brigadier General. He wanted to make sure he hadn't been made a fool of. He wanted to make sure you were what you were claimed to be."

  "WELL," I SAID, and we were still standing in the reception room, "I don't think we need to wait for blood tests to find out whether you are really my son or not. You are the spit and image of me when I was your age.

  "You should know that I really loved your mother," I went on.

  "That was in her letter, how much in love you were," he said.

  "You will have to take my word for it," I said, "that if I had known she was pregnant, I would have behaved honorably. I'm not quite sure what we would have done. We would have worked something out."

  I led the way into my office. "Come on in. There are a couple of easy chairs in here. We can close the door."

  "No, no, no," he said. "I'm on my way. I just thought we should see each other just one time. We've done that now. It's no big thing."

  "I like life to be simple," I said, "but if you went away without another word, that would be much too simple for me, and for you, too, I hope."

  So I got him into my office and closed the door, and got us settled in facing easy chairs. We hadn't touched. We never would touch.

  "I would offer you coffee," I said, "but nobody in this valley has coffee."

  "I've got some in my car," he said.

  "I'm sure," I said. "But don't go get it. Never mind, never mind." I cleared my throat. "If you'll pardon my saying so, you seem to be what I have heard called 'fabulously well-to-do.' "

  He said that, yes, he was fortunate financially. The Dubuque meat packer who married his mother and adopted him had sold his business to the Shah of Bratpuhr shortly before he died, and had been paid in gold bricks deposited in a bank in Switzerland.

  THE MEAT PACKER'S name was Lowell Fenstermaker, so my son's full name was Rob Roy Fenstermaker. Rob Roy said he certainly wasn't going to change his last name to Hartke, that he felt like Fenstermaker and not Hartke.

  His stepfather had been very good to him. Rob Roy said that the only thing he didn't like about him was the way he raised calves for veal. The baby animals, scarcely out of the womb, were put in cages so cramped that they could hardly move, to make their muscles nice and tender. When they were big enough their throats were cut, and they had never run or jumped or made friends, or done anything that might have made life a worthwhile experience.

  WHAT WAS THEIR crime?

  ROB ROY SAID that his inherited wealth was at first an embarrassment. He said that until very recently he never would have considered buying a car like the 1 parked outside, or wearing a cashmere jacket and lizard-skin shoes made in Italy. That was what he was wearing in my office. "When nobody else in Dubuque could afford black-market coffee and gasoline, I, too, did without. I used to walk everywhere."

  "What happened very recently?" I said.

  "I was arrested for molesting little children," he said.

  I itched all over with a sudden attack of psychosomatic hives.

  He told me the whole story.

  I said to him, "I thank you for sharing that with me."

  THE HIVES WENT away as quickly as they had come.

  I felt wonderful, very happy to have him look me over and think what he would. I had seldom been happy to have my legitimate children look me over and think what they would.

  What made the difference? I hate to say so, because my answer is
so paltry. But here it is: I had always wanted to be a General, and there I was wearing General's stars.

  HOW EMBARRASSING TO be human.

  THERE WAS THIS, too: I was no longer encumbered by my wife and mother-in-law. Why did I keep them at home so long, even though it was plain that they were making the lives of my children unbearable?

  It could be, I suppose, because somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that there might really be a big book in which all things were written, and that I wanted some impressive proof that I could be compassionate recorded there.

  I ASKED ROB Roy where he had gone to college.

  "Yale," he said.

  I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called "Plantation Owners' Tech."

  "I don't get it," he said.

  "I had to ask her to explain it myself," I said. "She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them."

  "That's a bit strong," he said. And then he asked me if my first wife was still alive.

  "I've only had 1," I said. "She's still alive."

  "There was a lot about her in Mother's letter," he said.

  "Really?" I said. "Like what?"

  "About how she was hit by a car the day before you were going to take her to the senior prom. About how she was paralyzed from the waist down, but you still married her, even though she would have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair."

  If that was in the letter, I must have told his mother that.

  "AND YOUR FATHER, is he still alive?" he said.

  "No," I said. "The ceiling of a gift shop fell on him at Niagara Falls."

  "Did he ever regain his eyesight?" he said.

  "Regain his what?" I said. And then I realized that his question was based on some other lie I had told his mother.

  "His eyesight," he said.

  "No," I said. "Never did."

  "I think it's so beautiful," he said, "how he came home from the war blind, and you used to read Shakespeare to him."

  "He sure loved Shakespeare," I said.

  "So," he said, "I am descended not just from 1 war hero, but 2."

  "War hero?" I said.

  "I know you would never call yourself that," he said. "But that's what Mother said you were. And you can certainly call your father that. How many Americans shot down 28 German planes in World War II?"

  "We could go up to the library and look it up," I said. "They have a very good library here. You can find out anything, if you really try."

  "WHERE IS MY Uncle Bob buried?" he said.

  "Your what?" I said.

  "Your brother Bob, my Uncle Bob," he said.

  I had never had a brother of any kind. I took a wild guess. "We threw his ashes out of an airplane," I said.

  "You have certainly had some bad luck," he said. "Your father comes home blind from the war. Your childhood sweet-heart is hit by a car right before the senior prom. Your brother dies of spinal meningitis right after he is invited to try out for the New York Yankees."

  "Yes, well, all you can do is play the cards they deal you," I said.

  "HAVE YOU STILL got his glove?" he said.

  "No," I said. What kind of glove could I have told his mother about when we were both sozzled on Sweet Rob Roys in Manila 24 years ago?

  "You carried it all the way through the war, but now it's gone?" he said.

  He had to be talking about the nonexistent baseball glove of my nonexistent brother. "Somebody stole it from me after I got home," I said, "thinking it was just another baseball glove, I'm sure. Whoever stole it had no idea how much it meant to me."

  He stood. "I really must be going now."

  I stood, too.

  I shook my head sadly. "It isn't going to be as easy as you think to give up on the country of your birth."

  "That's about as meaningful as my astrological sign," he said.

  "What is?" I said.

  "The country of my birth," he said.

  "You might be surprised," I said.

  "Well, Dad," he said, "it certainly won't be the first time."

  "CAN YOU TELL me who in this valley might have gasoline?" he said. "I'll pay anything."

  "Do you have enough gas to make it back to Rochester?" I said.

  "Yes," he said.

  "Well," I said, "head back the way you came. That's the only way you can get back, so you can't get lost. Right at the Rochester city limits you will see the Meadowdale Cinema Complex. Behind that is a crematorium. Don't look for smoke. It's smokeless."

  "A crematorium?" he said.

  "That's right, a crematorium," I said. "You drive up to the crematorium, and you ask for Guido. From what I hear, if you've got the money, he's got the gasoline."

  "And chocolate bars, do you think?" he said.

  "I don't know," I said. "Won't hurt to ask."

  40

  NOT THAT THERE is any shortage of real child-molesters, child-shooters, child-starvers, child-bombers, child-drowners, child-whippers, child-burners, and child-defenestrators on this happy planet. Turn on the TV. By the luck of the draw, though, my son Rob Roy Fenstermaker does not happen to be one of them.

  OK. MY STORY is almost ended.

  And here is the news that knocked the wind out of me so recently. When I heard it from my lawyer, I actually said, "Ooof!"

  Hiroshi Matsumoto was dead by his own hand in his hometown of Hiroshima! But why would I care so much?

  HE DID IT in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese time, of course, while sitting in his motor-driven wheelchair at the base of the monument marking the point of impact of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima when we were little boys.

  He didn't use a gun or poison. He committed hara-kiri with a knife, disemboweling himself in a ritual of self-loathing once practiced by humiliated members of the ancient caste of professional soldiers, the samurai.

  And yet, so far as I am able to determine, he never shirked his duty, never stole anything, and never killed or wounded anyone.

  Still waters run deep. R.I.P.

  IF THERE REALLY is a big book somewhere, in which all things are written, and which is to be read line by line, omitting nothing, on Judgment Day, let it be recorded that I, when Warden of this place, moved the convicted felons out of the tents on the Quadrangle and into the surrounding buildings. They no longer had to excrete in buckets or, in the middle of the night, have their homes blown down. The buildings, except for this 1, were divided into cement-block cells intended for 2 men, but most holding 5.

  The War on Drugs goes on.

  I caused 2 more fences to be erected, 1 within the other, enclosing the back of the inner buildings, and with antipersonnel mines sown in between. The machine-gun nests were reinstalled in windows and doorways of the next ring of buildings, Norman Rockwell Hall, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and so on.

  It was during my administration that the troops here were Federalized, a step I had recommended. That meant that they were no longer civilians in soldier suits. That meant that they were full-time soldiers, serving at the pleasure of the President. Nobody could say how much longer the War on Drugs might last. Nobody could say when they could go home again.

  GENERAL FLORIO HIMSELF, accompanied by six MPs with clubs and sidearms, congratulated me on all I had done. He then took back the two stars he had loaned me, and told me that I was under arrest for the crime of insurrection. I had come to like him, and I think he had come to like me. He was simply following orders.

  I asked him, as 1 comrade to another, "Does this make any sense to you? Why is this happening?"

  It is a question I have asked myself many times since, maybe 5 times today between coughing fits.

  His answer to it, the first answer I ever got to it, is probably the best answer I will ever get to it.

  "Some ambitious young Prosecutor," he said, "thinks you'll make good TV."

  HIROSHI MATSUMOTO'S SUICIDE has hit me so hard, I think, because he was innocent of even the l
ittlest misdemeanors. I doubt that he ever double-parked, even, or ran a red light when nobody else was around. And yet he executed himself in a manner that the most terrible criminal who ever lived would not deserve!

  He had no feet anymore, which must have been depressing. But having no feet is no reason for a man to disembowel himself.

  It had to have been the atom bomb that was dropped on him during his formative years, and not the absence of feet, that made him feel that life was a crock of doo-doo.

  AS I HAVE said, he did not tell me that he had been atom-bombed until we had known each other for 2 years or more. He might never have told me about it, in my opinion, if a documentary about the Japanese "Rape of Nanking" hadn't been shown on the prison TVs the day before. This was a program chosen at random from the prison library. A guard who did the choosing couldn't read English well enough to know what the convicts would see next. So there was no censorship.

  The Warden had a small TV monitor on his desk, and I knew he watched it from time to time, since he often remarked to me about the inanity of this or that old show, and especially I Love Lucy.

  THE RAPE OF Nanking was just one more instance of soldiers slaughtering prisoners and unarmed civilians, but it became famous because it was among the first to be well photographed. There were evidently movie cameras everywhere, run by gosh knows whom, and the footage wasn't confiscated afterward.

  I had seen some of the footage when I was a cadet, but not as a part of a well-edited documentary, with a baritone voice-over and appropriate music underneath.

  The orgy of butchery followed a virtually unopposed attack by the Japanese Army on the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, long before this country became part of the Finale Rack. Hiroshi Matsumoto had just been born. Prisoners were tied to stakes and used for bayonet practice. Several people in a pit were buried alive. You could see their expressions as the dirt hit their faces.