Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

  The meeting broke up with practically everybody embarrassed, and I went over to Hay Boyden to talk to him about something that didn't have anything to do with Kennedy or Goldwater. It was about a bathtub enclosure I had sold him. He had insisted on installing it himself, saving himself about seven dollars and a half. Only it leaked, and his dining-room ceiling fell down, and Hay claimed that was the fault of the merchandise and not the installation. Hay had some poison left in his system from his argument with the boy, so he used it up on me. I answered him back with the truth, and walked away from him, and Commodore Rumfoord grabbed my hand and shook it. He thought I'd been defending his boy and Barry Goldwater.

  "What business you in?" he asked me.

  I told him, and, the next thing I knew, I had an order for storm windows all around on a four-story house in Hyannis Port. The Commodore called that big old house a cottage.

  "You're a Commodore in the Navy?" I asked him.

  "No," he said. "My father, however, was Secretary of the Navy under William Howard Taft. That's my full name: Commodore William Howard Taft Rumfoord."

  "You're in the Coast Guard?" I said.

  "You mean the Kennedy Private Fleet?" he said.

  "Pardon me?" I said.

  "That's what they ought to call the Coast Guard these days," he said. "Its sole mission seems to be to protect Kennedys while they water-ski behind high-powered stinkpots."

  "You're not in the Coast Guard?" I said. I couldn't imagine what was left.

  "I was Commodore of the Hyannis Port Yacht Club in 1946," he said.

  He didn't smile, and neither did I, and neither did his wife, whose name was Clarice. But Clarice did give a little sigh that sounded like the whistle on a freight train far, far away on a wet morning.

  I didn't know what the trouble was at the time, but Clarice was sighing because the Commodore hadn't held any job of any description since 1946. Since then, he'd made a full-time career of raging about whoever was President of the United States, including Eisenhower.

  Especially Eisenhower.

  So I went down to Hyannis Port in my truck to measure the Commodore's windows late in June. His driveway was on Irving Avenue. So was the Kennedys' driveway. And President Kennedy and I hit Cape Cod on the very same day.

  Traffic to Hyannis Port was backed up through three villages. There were license plates from every state in the Republic. The line was moving about four miles an hour. I was passed by several groups of fifty-mile hikers. My radiator came to a boil four times.

  I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, because I was just an ordinary citizen, and had to get stuck in lines like that. But then I recognized the man in the limousine up ahead of me. It was Adlai Stevenson. He wasn't moving any faster than I was, and his radiator was boiling, too.

  One place there, we got stuck so long that Mr. Stevenson and I got out and walked around a little. I took the opportunity to ask him how the United Nations were getting along. He told me they were getting along about as well as could be expected. That wasn't anything I didn't already know.

  When I finally got to Hyannis Port, I found out Irving Avenue was blocked off by police and Secret Service men. Adlai Stevenson got to go down it, but I didn't. The police made me get back into line with the tourists, who were being shunted down a street one block over from Irving Avenue.

  The next thing I knew, I was in Hyannis, going past the Presidential Motor Inn, the First Family Waffle Shop, the PT-109 Cocktail Lounge, and a miniature golf course called the New Frontier.

  I went into the waffle shop, and I called up the Rumfoords to find out how an ordinary storm-window salesman was supposed to get down Irving Avenue without dying in a hail of lead. It was the butler I talked to. He took down my license number, and found out how tall I was and what color my eyes were and all. He said he would tell the Secret Service, and they would let me by next time.

  It was late in the afternoon, and I'd missed lunch, so I decided to have a waffle. All the different kinds of waffles were named after Kennedys and their friends and relatives. A waffle with "strawberries and cream was a Jackie. A waffle with a scoop of ice cream was a Caroline. They even had a waffle named Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

  I had a thing called a Teddy—and a cup of Joe.

  I got through next time, went right down Irving Avenue behind the Defense Minister of Pakistan. Except for us, that street was as quiet as a stretch of the Sahara Desert.

  There wasn't anything to see at all on the President's side, except for a new, peeled-cedar fence about eight feet high and two hundred feet long, with a gate in it. The Rumfoord cottage faced the gate from across the street. It was the biggest house, and one of the oldest, in the village. It was stucco. It had towers and balconies, and a veranda that ran around all four sides.

  On a second-floor balcony was a huge portrait of Barry Gold-water. It had bicycle reflectors in the pupils of its eyes. Those eyes stared right through the Kennedy gate. There were floodlights all around it, so I could tell it was lit up at night. And the floodlights were rigged with blinkers.

  A man who sells storm windows can never be really sure about what class he belongs to, especially if he installs the windows, too. So I was prepared to keep out from under foot, and go about my business, measuring the windows. But the Commodore welcomed me like a guest of great importance. He invited me to cocktails, and dinner, and to spend the night. He said I could start measuring the next day.

  So we had martinis out on the veranda. Only we didn't sit on the most pleasant side, which looked out on the Yacht Club dock and the harbor. We sat on the side that looked out on all the poor tourists being shunted off toward Hyannis. The Commodore liked to talk about all those fools out there.

  "Look at them!" he said. "They wanted glamour, and now they realize they're not going to get it. They actually expected to be invited to play touch football with Eunice and Frank Sinatra and the Secretary of Health and Welfare. Glamour is what they voted for, and look at 'em now. They don't even get to look at a Kennedy chimney up above the trees. All the glamour they'll get out of this administration is an overpriced waffle named Caroline."

  A helicopter went over, very low, and it landed somewhere inside the Kennedy fence. Clarice said she wondered who it was.

  "Pope John the Sixth," said the Commodore.

  The butler, whose name was John, came out with a big bowl.

  I thought it was peanuts or popcorn, but it turned out to be

  Goldwater buttons. The Commodore had John take the bowl out to the street, and offer buttons to the people in cars. A lot of people took them. Those people were disappointed. They were sore.

  Some fifty-mile hikers, who'd actually hiked sixty-seven miles, all the way from Boston, asked if they could please lie down on the Rumfoord lawn for a while. They were burned up, too. They thought it was the duty of the President, or at least the Attorney General, to thank them for walking so far. The Commodore said they could not only lie down, but he would give them lemonade, if they would put on Goldwater buttons. They were glad to. "Commodore," I said, "where's that nice boy of yours, the one who talked to us up in New Hampshire."

  "The one who talked to you is the only one I've got," he said. "He certainly poured it on," I said. "Chip off the old block," he said.

  Clarice gave that faraway freight-whistle sigh of hers again. "The boy went swimming just before you got here," said the Commodore. "He should be back at any time, unless he's been decapitated by a member of the Irish Mafia on water skis."

  We went around to the water side of the veranda to see if we could catch sight of young Robert Taft Rumfoord in swimming. There was a Coast Guard cutter out there, shooing tourists in motorboats away from the Kennedy beach. There was a sightseeing boat crammed with people gawking in our direction. The barker on the boat had a very loud loudspeaker, and we could hear practically everything he said.

  "The white boat there is the Honey Fitz, the President's personal yacht," said the barker. "Next to it is the Marlin, which
belongs to the President's father, Joseph C. Kennedy, former Ambassador to the Court of St. James."

  "The President's stinkpot, and the President's father's stinkpot," said the Commodore. He called all motorboats stinkpots. "This is a harbor that should be devoted exclusively to sail."

  There was a chart of the harbor on the verandah wall. I studied it, and found a Rumfoord Point, a Rumfoord Rock, and a Rumfoord Shoal. The Commodore told me his family had been in Hyannis Port since 1884.

  "There doesn't seem to be anything named after the Kennedys," I said.

  "Why should there be?" he said. "They only got here day before yesterday."

  "Day before yesterday?" I said.

  And he asked me, "What would you call nineteen-twenty-one?"

  "No, sir," the barker said to one of his passengers, "that is not the President's house. Everybody asks that. That great big ugly stucco house, folks, that's the Rumfoord Cottage. I agree with you, it's too big to be called a cottage, but you know how rich people are."

  "Demoralized and bankrupt by confiscatory taxation," said the Commodore. "You know," he said, "it isn't as though Kennedy was the first President we ever had in Hyannis Port. Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were all guests of my father in this very house. Kennedy is simply the first President who's seen fit to turn the place into an eastern enclave of Disneyland."

  "No, mam," said the barker, "/ don't know where the Rumfoords get their money, but they don't have to work at all, I know that. They just sit on that porch there, and drink martinis, and let the old mazooma roll in."

  The Commodore blew up. He said he was going to sue the owners of the sight-seeing boat for a blue million. His wife tried to calm him down, but he made me come into his study with him while he called up his lawyers.

  "You're a witness," he said.

  But his telephone rang before he could call his lawyers. The person who was calling him was a Secret Service Agent named Raymond Boyle. I found out later that Boyle was known around the Kennedy household as the Rumfoord Specialist or the Ambassador to Rumfoordiana. Whenever anything came up that had to do with the Bumfoords, Boyle had to handle it.

  The Commodore told me to go upstairs and listen in on the extension in the hall. "This will give you an idea of how arrogant civil servants have become these days," he said. So I went upstairs.

  "The Secret Service is one of the least secret services I've ever come in contact with," the Commodore was saying when I picked up the phone. "I've seen drum and bugle corps that were less obtrusive. Did I ever tell you about the time Calvin Coolidge, who was also a President, as it happened, went fishing for scup with my father and me off the end of the Yacht Club dock?"

  "Yessir, you have, many times," said Boyle. "It's a good story, and I want to hear it again sometime. But right now I'm calling about your son."

  The Commodore went right ahead with the story anyway. "President Coolidge," he said, "insisted on baiting his own hook, and the combined Atlantic and Pacific Fleets were not anchored offshore, and the sky was not black with airplanes, and brigades of Secret Service Agents were not trampling the neighbors' flowerbeds to puree."

  "Sir—" said Boyle patiently, "your son Robert was apprehended in the act of boarding the President's father's boat, the Marlin."

  "Back in the days of Coolidge, there were no stinkpots like that in this village, dribbling petroleum products, belching fumes, killing the fish, turning the beaches a gummy black."

  "Commodore Rumfoord, sir," said Boyle, "did you hear what I just said about your son?"

  "Of course," said the Commodore. "You said Robert, a member of the Hyannis Port Yacht Club, was caught touching a vessel belonging to another member of the club. This may seem a very terrible crime to a landlubber like yourself; but it has long been a custom of the sea, Mr. Boyle, that a swimmer, momentarily fatigued, may, upon coming to a vessel not his own, grasp that vessel and rest, without fear of being fired upon by the Coast Guard, or of having his fingers smashed by members of the Secret Service, or, as I prefer to call them, the Kennedy Palace Dragoons."

  "There has been no shooting, and no smashing, sir," said Boyle. "There has also been no evidence of swimmer's fatigue. Your Robert went up the anchor line of the Marlin like a chimpanzee. He swarmed up that rope, Commodore. I believe that's the proper nautical term. And I remind you, as I tried to remind him, that persons moving, uninvited, unannounced, with such speed and purposefulness within the vicinity of a President are, as a matter of time-honored policy, to be turned back at all costs—to be turned back, if need be, violently."

  "Was it a Kennedy who gave the order that the boarder be repelled?" the Commodore wanted to know.

  "There was no Kennedy on board, sir."

  "The stinkpot was unoccupied?"

  "Adlai Stevenson and Walter Reuther and one of my men were on board, sir," said Boyle. "They were all below, until they heard Robert's feet hit the deck."

  "Stevenson and Reuther?" said the Commodore. "That's the last time I let my son go swimming without a dagger in his teeth. I hope he was opening the seacocks when beaten insensible by truncheons."

  "Very funny, sir," said Boyle, his voice developing a slight cutting edge.

  "You're sure it was my Robert?" said the Commodore.

  "Who else but your Robert wears a Goldwater button on his swimming trunks?" asked Boyle.

  "You object to his political views?" the Commodore demanded.

  "I mention the button as a means of identification. Your son's politics do not interest the Secret Service. For your information, I have spent seven years protecting the life of a Republican, and three protecting the life of a Democrat," said Boyle.

  "For your information, Mr. Boyle," said the Commodore, "Dwight David Eisenhower was not a Republican."

  "Whatever he was, I protected him," said Boyle. "He may have been a Zoroastrian, for all I know. And whatever the next President is going to be, I'll protect him, too. I also protect the lives of persons like your son from the consequences of excessive informality where the Presidential presence is concerned." Now Boyle's voice really started to cut. It sounded like a handsaw working on galvanized tin. "I tell you, officially and absolutely unsmilingly now, your son is to cease and desist from using Kennedy boats as love nests."

  That got through to the Commodore, bothered him. "Love nests?" he said.

  "Your Robert has been meeting a girl on boats all over the harbor," said Boyle. "He arranged to meet her today on the Marlin. He was sure it would be vacant: Adlai Stevenson and Walter Reuther were a shock."

  The Commodore was quiet for a few seconds, and then he said, "Mr. Boyle, I resent your implications. If I ever hear of your implying such a thing about my son to anyone else, you had better put your pistol and shoulder holster in your wife's name, because I'll sue you for everything you've got. My Robert has never gone with a girl he wasn't proud to introduce to his mother and me, and he never will."

  "You're going to meet this one any minute now," said Boyle. "Robert is on his way home with her."

  The Commodore wasn't tough at all now. He was uneasy and humble when he said, "Would you mind telling me her name?"

  "Kennedy, sir," said Boyle, "Sheila Kennedy, fresh over from Ireland, a fourth cousin of the President of the United States."

  Robert Taft Rumfoord came in with the girl right after that, and announced they were engaged to be married.

  Supper that night in the Rumfoord cottage was sad and beautiful and happy and strange. There were Robert and his girl, and me, and the Commodore and his lady.

  That girl was so intelligent, so warm, and so beautiful that she broke my heart every time I looked at her. That was why supper was so peculiar. The girl was so desirable, and the love between her and Robert was so sweet and clean, that nobody could think of anything but silly little things to say. We mainly ate in silence.

  The Commodore brought up the subject of politics just once. He said to Robert, "Well—uh—will you still be making speeches around the country
, or—uh—"

  "I think I'll get out of politics entirely for a while," said Robert.

  The Commodore said something that none of us could understand, because the words sort of choked him.

  "Sir?" said Robert.

  "I said," said the Commodore, '"I would think you would.'"

  I looked at the Commodore's lady, at Clarice. All the lines had gone out of her face. She looked young and beautiful, too. She was completely relaxed for the first time in God-knows-how-many years.

  One of the things I said that supper was was sad. The sad part was how empty and quiet it left the Commodore.

  The two lovers went for a moonlight sail. The Commodore and his lady and I had brandy on the veranda, on the water side. The sun was down. The tourist traffic had petered out. The fifty-mile hikers who had asked to rest on the lawn that afternoon were still all there, sound asleep, except for one boy who played a guitar. He played it slowly. Sometimes it seemed -like a minute between the time he would pluck a string and the time he would pluck one again.

  John, the butler, came out and asked the Commodore if it was time to turn on Senator Goldwater's floodlights yet.

  "I think we'll just leave him off tonight, John," said the Commodore.

  "Yes, sir," said John.

  "I'm still for him, John," said the Commodore. "Don't anybody misunderstand me. I just think we ought to give him a rest tonight."

  "Yes, sir," said John, and he left.

  It was dark on the veranda, so I couldn't see the Commodore's face very well. The darkness, and the brandy, and the slow guitar let him start telling the truth about himself without feeling much pain.

  "Let's give the Senator from Arizona a rest," he said. "Everybody knows who he is. The question is: Who am I?"

  "A lovable man," said Clarice in the dark.

  "With Goldwater's floodlights turned off, and with my son engaged to marry a Kennedy, what am I but what the man on the sight-seeing boat said I was: A man who sits on this porch, drinking martinis, and letting the old mazooma roll in."