Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

"Yes," I said.

  I had assumed that we were as deep in the station as anyone could go. How wrong I was! Mary Kathleen opened the iron door on an iron staircase going down, down, down. There was a secret world as vast as Carlsbad Caverns below. It was used for nothing anymore. It might have been a sanctuary for dinosaurs. It had in fact been a repair shop for another family of extinct monsters--locomotives driven by steam.

  Down the steps we went.

  My God--what majestic machinery there must have been down there at one time! What admirable craftsmen must have worked there! In conformance with fire laws, I suppose, there were lightbulbs burning here and there. And there were little dishes of rat poison set around. But there were no other signs that anyone had been down there for years.

  "This is my home, Walter," she said.

  "Your what?" I said.

  "You wouldn't want me sleeping outdoors, would you?" she said.

  "No," I said.

  "Be glad, then," she said, "that I have such a nice and private home."

  "I am," I said.

  "You not only talked to me--you hugged me," she said. "That's how I knew I could trust you."

  "Um," I said.

  "You're not after my hands," she said.

  "No," I said.

  "You know there are millions of poor souls out on the street, looking for a toilet somebody will let them use?" she said.

  "I suppose that's true," I said.

  "Look at this," she said. She led me into a chamber that contained row on row of toilets.

  "It's good to know they're here," I said.

  "You won't tell anybody?" she said.

  "No," I said.

  "I'm putting my life in your hands, telling you my secrets like this," she said.

  "I'm honored," I said.

  And then out of the catacombs we climbed. She led me through a tunnel under Lexington Avenue, and up a staircase into the lobby of the Chrysler Building. She skied across the floor to a waiting elevator, with me trotting behind. A guard shouted at us, but we got into the elevator before he could stop us. The doors shut in his angry face as Mary Kathleen punched the button for the topmost floor.

  We had the car all to ourselves, and upward we flew. Within a trice the doors slithered open on a place of unearthly beauty and peace within the building's stainless-steel crown. I had often wondered what was up there. Now I knew. The crown came to a point seventy feet above us. Between us and the point, as I looked upward in awe, there was nothing but a lattice of girders and air, air, air.

  "What a glorious waste of space!" I thought. But then I saw that there were tenants after all. Myriads of bright yellow little birds were perched on the girders, or flitting through the prisms of light admitted by the bizarre windows, by the great triangles of glass that pierced the crown.

  The vast floor at whose edge we stood was carpeted in grassy green. There was a fountain splashing at its center. There were garden benches and statues everywhere, and here and there a harp.

  As I have already said, this was the showroom of The American Harp Company, which had recently become a subsidiary of The RAMJAC Corporation. The company had occupied this space since the building opened in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. All the birds I saw, which were prothonotary warblers, were descended from a single pair released back then.

  There was a Victorian gazebo near the elevator, which contained the desks of the salesman and his secretary. A woman was sobbing in there. What a morning it was for tears! What a book this is for tears!

  The oldest man I had ever seen came tottering out of the gazebo. He wore a swallowtail coat and striped trousers and spats. He was the sole salesman, and had been since Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was the man who had released from the hot cage of his hands and into this enchanted space the first two prothonotary warblers. He was ninety-two years old! He looked like John D. Rockefeller at the end of his life, or like a mummy. The only moisture left in him, seemingly, was faint dew on the surface of his eyes. He was not entirely defenseless, however. He was president of a pistol club that shot at targets shaped like men on weekends, and he had a loaded Luger the size of a Doberman pinscher in his desk. He had been looking forward to a robbery for quite some time.

  "Oh--it's you," he said to Mary Kathleen, and she said that, yes, it was.

  She was accustomed to coming here almost every day and sitting for several hours. The understanding was that she was to get out of sight with her shopping bags, in case a customer came in. There was a further understanding, which Mary Kathleen had now violated.

  "I thought I told you," he said to her, "that you were never to bring anybody else with you, or even to tell anybody else how nice it was up here."

  Since I was carrying three shopping bags, he concluded that I was another derelict, a shopping-bag man.

  "He isn't a bum," said Mary Kathleen. "He's a Harvard man."

  He did not believe this for a minute. "I see," he said, and he looked me up and down. He himself had never even graduated from grammar school, incidentally. There had been no laws against child labor when he was a boy, and he had gone to work in the Chicago factory of The American Harp Company at the age of ten. "I've heard that you can always tell a Harvard man," he said, "but you can't tell him much."

  "I never thought there was anything special about Harvard men," I said.

  "That makes two of us," he said. He was being most unpleasant, and clearly wanted me out of there. "This is not the Salvation Army," he said. This was a man born during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. Imagine that! He said to Mary Kathleen, "Really--I'm most disappointed in you, bringing somebody else along. Should we expect three tomorrow, and twenty the day after that? Christianity does have its limits, you know."

  I now made a blunder that would land me back in el calabozo before noon on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. "As a matter of fact," I said, "I'm here on business."

  "You wish to buy a harp?" he said. "They're seven thousand dollars and up, you know. How about a kazoo instead?"

  "I was hoping you could advise me," I said, "as to where I could buy clarinet parts--not whole clarinets, but just clarinet parts." I was not serious about this. I was extrapolating a business fantasy from the contents of my bottom drawer at the Arapahoe.

  The old man was secretly electrified. Thumbtacked to the bulletin board in the gazebo was a circular that advised him to call the police in case anyone expressed interest in buying or selling clarinet parts. As he would tell me later, he had stuck it up there months before--"like a lottery ticket bought in a moment of folly." He had never expected to win. His name was Delmar Peale.

  Delmar was nice enough later on to make me a present of the circular, which I hung on my office wall at RAMJAC. I became his superior in the RAMJAC family, since American Harp was a subsidiary of my division.

  I was certainly no superior of his the first time we met, though. He played cat-and-mouse with me. "Many clarinet parts, or a few?" he asked cunningly.

  "Quite a few, actually," I said. "I realize that you yourself don't handle clarinets--"

  "You've come to the right place all the same," he hastened to assure me. "I know everyone in the business. If you and Madam X would like to make yourselves comfortable, I would be glad to make some telephone calls."

  "You're too kind," I said.

  "Not at all," he said.

  "Madam X," incidentally, was the only name he had for Mary Kathleen. That was what she had told him her name was. She had simply barged in one day, trying to escape from people she thought were after her. He had worried a lot about shopping-bag ladies, and he was a practicing Christian, so he had let her stay.

  Meanwhile, the sobbing in the gazebo was abating some.

  Delmar conducted us to a bench far from the gazebo, so we could not hear him call the police. He had us sit down. "Comfy?" he said.

  "Yes, thank you," I said.

  He rubbed his hands. "How about some coffee?" he said.

  "It makes
me too nervous," said Mary Kathleen.

  "With sugar and cream, if it's not too much trouble," I said.

  "No trouble at all," he said.

  "What's the trouble with Doris?" said Mary Kathleen. That was the name of the secretary who was crying in the gazebo. Her full name was Doris Kramm. She herself eighty-seven years old.

  At my suggestion, People magazine recently did a story on Delmar and Doris as being almost certainly the oldest boss-and-secretary team in the world, and perhaps in all history. It was a cute story. One picture showed Delmar with his Luger, and quoted him to the effect that anybody who tried to rob The American Harp Company "... would be one unhappy robber pretty quick."

  He told Mary Kathleen now that Doris wept because she had had two hard blows in rapid succession. She had been notified on the previous afternoon that she was going to have to retire immediately, now that RAMJAC had taken over. The retirement age for all RAMJAC employees everywhere, except for supervisory personnel, was sixty-five. And then that morning, while she was cleaning out her desk, she got a telegram saying that her great-grandniece had been killed in a head-on collision after a high-school senior prom in Sarasota, Florida. Doris had no descendents of her own, he explained, so her collateral relatives meant a lot to her.

  Delmar and Doris, incidentally, did almost no business up there, and continue to do almost no business up there. I was proud, when I became a RAMJAC executive, that American Harp Company harps were the finest harps in the world. You would have thought that the best harps would come from Italy or Japan or West Germany by now, with American craftsmanship having become virtually extinct. But no--musicians even in those countries and even in the Soviet Union agreed: Only an American Harp Company harp can cut the mustard. But the harp business is not and can never be a volume business, except in heaven, perhaps. So the profit picture, the bottom line, was ridiculous. It is so ridiculous that I recently undertook an investigation of why RAMJAC had ever acquired American Harp. I learned that it was in order to capture the incredible lease on the top of the Chrysler Building. The lease ran until the year Two-thousand and Thirty-one, at a rent of two hundred dollars a month! Arpad Leen wanted to turn the place into a restaurant.

  That the company also owned a factory in Chicago with sixty-five, employees was a mere detail. If it could not be made to show a substantial profit within a year or two, RAMJAC would close it down.

  Peace.

  16

  MARY KATHLEEN O'LOONEY was, of course, the legendary Mrs. Jack Graham, the majority stockholder in The RAMJAC Corporation. She had her inkpad and pens and writing paper in her basketball shoes. Those shoes were her bank vaults. Nobody could take them off of her without waking her up.

  She would claim later that she had told me who she really was on the elevator.

  I could only reply, "If I had heard you say that, Mary Kathleen, I surely would have remembered it."

  If I had known who she really was, all her talk about people who wanted to cut off her hands would have made a lot more sense. Whoever got her hands could pickle them and throw away the rest of her, and control The RAMJAC Corporation with just her fingertips. No wonder she was on the run. No wonder she dared not reveal her true identity anywhere.

  No wonder she dared not-trust anybody. On this particular planet, where money mattered more than anything, the nicest person imaginable might suddenly get the idea of wringing her neck so that their loved ones might live in comfort. It would be the work of the moment--and easily forgotten as the years went by. Time flies.

  She was so tiny and weak. Killing her and cutting off her hands would have been little more horrifying than what went on ten thousand times a day at a mechanized chicken farm. RAMJAC owns Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken, of course. I have seen that operation as it looks backstage.

  About my not having heard her say she was Mrs. Jack Graham on the elevator:

  I do remember that I had trouble with my ears toward the top of the elevator ride, because of the sudden change in altitude. We shot up about a thousand feet, with no stops on the way. Also: Temporarily deaf or not, I had my conversational automatic pilot on. I was not thinking about what she was saying, or what I was saying, either. I thought that we were both so far outside the mainstream of human affairs that all we could do was comfort each other with animal sounds. I remember her saying at one point that she owned the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and I thought I had not heard her right.

  "I'm glad," I said.

  So, as I sat beside her on the bench in the harp showroom, she thought I had a piece of key information about her, which I did not have. And Delmar Peale had meanwhile called the police and had also sent Doris Kramm out, supposedly for coffee, but really to find a policeman out on the street somewhere.

  As it happened, there was a small riot going on in the park adjacent to the United Nations, only three blocks away. Every available policeman was over there. Out-of-work white youths armed with baseball bats were braining men they thought were homosexuals. They threw one of them into the East River, who turned out to be the finance minister of Sri Lanka.

  I would meet some of those youths later at the police station, and they would assume that I, too, was a homosexual. One of them exposed his private parts to me and said, "Hey, Pops--you want some of this? Come and get it. Yum, yum, yum," and so on.

  But my point is that the police could not come and get me for nearly an hour. So Mary Kathleen and I had a nice long talk. She felt safe in this place. She dared to be sane.

  It was most touching. Only her body was decrepit. Her voice and the soul it implied might well have belonged still to what she used to be, an angrily optimistic eighteen-year-old.

  "Everyone is going to be all right now," she said to me in the showroom of The American Harp Company. "Something always told me that it would turn out this way. All's well that ends well," she said.

  What a fine mind she had! What fine minds all of the four women I've loved have had! During the months I more or less lived with Mary Kathleen, she read all the books I had read or pretended to have read as a Harvard student. Those volumes had been chores to me, but they were a cannibal feast to Mary Kathleen. She read my books the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave old enemies. Their magic would become hers. She said of my little library one time: "the greatest books in the world, taught by the wisest men in the world at the greatest university in the world to the smartest students in the world."

  Peace.

  And contrast Mary Kathleen, if you will, with my wife Ruth, the Ophelia of the death camps, who believed that even the most intelligent human beings were so stupid that they could only make things worse by speaking their minds. It was thinkers, after all, who had set up the death camps. Setting up a death camp, with its railroad sidings and its around-the-clock crematoria, was not something a moron could do. Neither could a moron explain why a death camp was ultimately humane.

  Again: peace.

  So there Mary Kathleen and I were--among all those harps. They are very strange-looking instruments, now that I think about them, and not very far from poor Ruth's idea of civilization even in peace-time--impossible marriages between Greek columns and Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines.

  Harps are self-destructive, incidentally. When I found myself in the harp business at RAMJAC, I had hoped that American Harp had among its assets some wonderful old harps that would turn out to be as valuable as Stradivari's and the Amatis' violins. There was zero chance for this dream's coming true. The tensions in a harp are so tremendous and unrelenting that it becomes unplayable after fifty years and belongs on a dump or in a museum.

  I discovered something fascinating about prothonotary warblers, too. They are the only birds that are housebroken in captivity. You would think that the harps would have to be protected from bird droppings by canopies--but not at all! The warblers deposit their droppings in teacups that are set around. In a state of nature, evidently, they deposit their droppings in other birds' nests. That is what they
think the teacups are.

  Live and learn!

  But back to Mary Kathleen and me among all those harps--with the prothonotary warblers overhead and the police on their way:

  "After my husband died, Walter," she said, "I became so unhappy and lost that I turned to alcohol." That husband would have been Jack Graham, the reclusive engineer who had founded The RAMJAC Corporation. He had not built the company from scratch. He had been born a multimillionaire. So far as I knew, of course, she might have been talking about a plumber or a truck driver or a college professor or anyone.

  She told about going to a private sanitarium in Louisville, Kentucky, where she was given shock treatments. These blasted all her memories from Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five until Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-five. That would explain why she thought she could still trust me now. Her memories of how callously I had left her, and of my later betrayal of Leland Clewes and all that, had been burned away. She was able to believe that I was still the fiery idealist I had been in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five. She had missed my part in Watergate. Everybody had missed my part in Watergate.

  "I had to make up a lot of memories," she went on, "just to fill up all the empty spaces. There had been a war, I knew, and I remembered how much you hated fascism. I saw you on a beach somewhere--on your back, in a uniform, with a rifle, and with the water washing gently around you. Your eyes were wide open, Walter, because you were dead. You were staring straight up at the sun."

  We were silent for a moment. A yellow bird far above us warbled as though its heart would break. The song of a prothonotary warbler is notoriously monotonous, as I am the first to admit. I am not about to risk the credibility of my entire tale by claiming that prothonotary warblers rival the Boston Pops Orchestra with their songs. Still--they are capable of expressing heartbreak--within strict limits, of course.

  "I've had the same dream of myself," I said. "Many's the time, Mary Kathleen, that I've wished it were true."

  "No! No! No!" she protested. "Thank God you're still alive! Thank God there's somebody still alive who cares what happens to this country. I thought maybe I was the last one. I've wandered this city for years now, Walter, saying to myself, 'They've all died off, the ones who cared.' And then there you were."