Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Mary Kathleen," I said, "you should know that I just got out of prison."

  "Of course you did!" she said. "All the good people go to prison all the time. Oh; thank God you're still alive! We will remake this country and then the world. I couldn't do it by myself, Walter."

  "No--I wouldn't think so," I said.

  "I've just been hanging on for dear life," she said. "I haven't been able to do anything but survive. That's how alone I've been. I don't need much help, but I do need some."

  "I know the problem," I said.

  "I can still see enough to write, if I write big," she said, "but I can't read the stories in newspapers anymore. My eyes--" She said she sneaked into bars and department stores and motel lobbies to listen to the news on television, but that the sets were almost never tuned to the news. Sometimes she would hear a snatch of news on somebody's portable radio, but the person owning it usually switched to music as soon as the news began.

  Remembering the news I had heard that morning, about the police dog that ate a baby, I told her that she wasn't really missing much.

  "How can I make sensible plans," she said, "if I don't know what's going on?"

  "You can't," I said.

  "How can you base a revolution on Lawrence Welk and Sesame Street and All in the Family?" she said. All these shows were sponsored by RAMJAC.

  "You can't," I said.

  "I need solid information," she said.

  "Of course you do," I said. "We all do."

  "It's all such crap," she said. "I find this magazine called People in garbage cans," she said, "but it isn't about people. It's about crap."

  This all seemed so pathetic to me: that a shopping-bag lady hoped to plan her scuttlings about the city and her snoozes among ash cans on the basis of what publications and radio and television could tell her about what was really going on.

  It seemed pathetic to her, too. "Jackie Onassis and Frank Sinatra and the Cookie Monster and Archie Bunker make their moves," she said, "and then I study what they have done, and then I decide what Mary Kathleen O'Looney had better do.

  "But now I have you," she said. "You can be my eyes--and my brains!"

  "Your eyes, maybe," I said. "I haven't distinguished myself in the brains department recently."

  "Oh--if only Kenneth Whistler were alive, too," she said.

  She might as well have said, "If only Donald Duck were alive, too." Kenneth Whistler was a labor organizer who had been my idol in the old days--but I felt nothing about him now, had not thought about him for years.

  "What a trio we would make," she went on. "You and me and Kenneth Whistler!"

  Whistler would have been a bum, too, by now, I supposed--if he hadn't died in a Kentucky mine disaster in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-one. He had insisted on being a worker as well as a labor organizer, and would have found modern union officials with their soft, pink palms intolerable. I had shaken hands with him. His palm had felt like the back of a crocodile. The lines in his face had had so much coal dust worked into them that they looked like black tattoos. Strangely enough this was a Harvard man--the class of Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-one.

  "Well," said Mary Kathleen, "at least there's still us--and now we can start to make our move."

  "I'm always open to suggestions," I said.

  "Or maybe it isn't worth it," she said.

  She was talking about rescuing the people of the United States from their economy, but I thought she was talking about life in general. So I said of life in general that it probably was worth it, but that it did seem to go on a little too long. My life would have been a masterpiece, for example, if I had died on a beach with a fascist bullet between my eyes.

  "Maybe people are just no good anymore," she said. "They all look so mean to me. They aren't like they were during the Depression. I don't see anybody being kind to anybody anymore. Nobody will even speak to me."

  She asked me if I had seen any acts of kindness anywhere. I reflected on this and I realized that I had encountered almost nothing but kindness since leaving prison. I told her so.

  "Then it's the way I look," she said. This was surely so. There was a limit to how much reproachful ugliness most people could bear to look at, and Mary Kathleen and all her shopping-bag sisters had exceeded that limit.

  She was eager to know about individual acts of kindness toward me, to have it confirmed that Americans could still be good-hearted. So I was glad to tell her about my first twenty-four hours as a free man, starting with the kindness shown to me by Clyde Carter, the guard, and then by Dr. Robert Fender, the supply clerk and science-fiction writer. After that, of course, I was given a ride in a limousine by Cleveland Lawes.

  Mary Kathleen exclaimed over these people, repeated their names to make sure she had them right. "They're saints!" she said. "So there are still saints around!"

  Thus encouraged, I embroidered on the hospitality offered to me by Dr. Israel Edel, the night clerk at the Arapahoe, and then by the employees at the Coffee Shop of the Hotel Royalton on the following morning. I was not able to give her the name of the owner of the shop, but only the physical detail that set him apart from the populace. "He had a French-fried hand," I said.

  "The saint with the French-fried hand," she said wonderingly.

  "Yes," I said, "and you yourself saw a man I thought was the worst enemy I had in the world. He was the tall, blue-eyed man with the sample case. You heard him say that he forgave me for everything I had done, and that I should have supper with him soon."

  "Tell me his name again," she said.

  "Leland Clewes," I said.

  "Saint Leland Clewes," she said reverently. "See how much you've helped me already? I never could have found out about all these good people for myself." Then she performed a minor mnemonic miracle, repeating all the names in chronological order. "Clyde Carter, Dr. Robert Fender, Cleveland Lawes, Israel Edel, the man with the French-fried hand, and Leland Clewes."

  Mary Kathleen took off one of her basketball shoes. It wasn't the one containing the inkpad and her pens and paper and her will and all that. The shoe she took off was crammed with memorabilia. There were hypocritical love letters from me, as I've said. But she was particularly eager for me to see a snapshot of what she called "... my two favorite men."

  It was a picture of my one-time idol, Kenneth Whistler, the Harvard-educated labor organizer, shaking hands with a small and goofy-looking college boy. The boy was myself. I had ears like a loving cup.

  That was when the police finally came clumping in to get me.

  "I'll rescue you, Walter," said Mary Kathleen. "Then we'll rescue the world together."

  I was relieved to be getting away from her, frankly. I tried to seem regretful about our parting. "Take care of yourself, Mary Kathleen," I said. "It looks like this is goodbye."

  17

  I HUNG THAT SNAPSHOT of Kenneth Whistler and myself, taken in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five, dead center in the Great Depression, on my office wall at RAMJAC--next to the circular about stolen clarinet parts. It was taken by Mary Kathleen, with my bellows camera, on the morning after we first heard Whistler speak. He had come all the way to Cambridge from Harlan County, Kentucky, where he was a miner and a union organizer, to address a rally whose purpose was to raise money and sympathy for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Abrasives and Adhesives Workers.

  The union was run by communists then. It is run by gangsters now. As a matter of fact, the start of my prison sentence overlapped with the end of one being served at Finletter by the lifetime president of the I.B.A.A.W. His twenty-three-year-old daughter was running the union from her villa in the Bahamas while he was away. He was on the telephone to her all the time. He told me that the membership was almost entirely black and Hispanic now. It was lily-white back in the thirties--Scandinavians mostly. I don't think a black or Hispanic would have been allowed to join back in the good old days.

  Times change.

  Whistler spoke at night. On
the afternoon before he spoke, I made love to Mary Kathleen O'Looney for the first time. It was mixed up in our young minds, somehow, with the prospect of hearing and perhaps even touching a genuine saint. How better to present ourselves to him or to any holy person, I suppose, than as Adam and Eve--smelling strongly of apple juice?

  Mary Kathleen and I made love in the apartment of an associate professor of anthropology named Arthur von Strelitz. His specialty was the headhunters of the Solomon Islands. He spoke their language and respected their taboos. They trusted him. He was unmarried. His bed was unmade. His apartment was on the third floor of a frame house on Brattle Street.

  A footnote to history: Not only that house, but that very apartment would be used later as a set in a very popular motion picture called Love Story. It was released during my early days with the Nixon administration. My wife and I went to see it when it came to Chevy Chase. It was a made-up story about a wealthy Anglo-Saxon student who married a poor Italian student, much against his father's wishes. She died of cancer. The aristocratic father was played brilliantly by Ray Milland. He was the best thing in the movie. Ruth cried all through the movie. We sat in the back row of the theater for two reasons: so I could smoke and so there wouldn't be anybody behind her to marvel at how fat she was. But I could not really concentrate on the story, because I knew the apartment where so much of it was happening so well. I kept waiting for Arthur von Strelitz or Mary Kathleen O'Looney or even me to appear.

  Small world.

  Mary Kathleen and I had the place for a weekend. Von Strelitz had given me the key. He had then gone to visit some other German emigre friends on Cape Ann. He must have been about thirty then. He seemed old to me. He was born into an aristocratic family in Prussia. He was lecturing at Harvard when Hitler became dictator of Germany in the spring of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-three. He declined to go home. He applied for American citizenship instead. His father, who never communicated with him in any way, would command a corps of S.S. and die of pneumonia during the Siege of Leningrad. I know how his father died, since there was testimony about his father at the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg, where I was in charge of housekeeping.

  Again: small world.

  His father, acting on written orders from Martin Bormann, who was tried in absentia in Nuremberg, caused to be executed all persons, civilian and military, taken prisoner during the siege. The intent was to demoralize the defenders of Leningrad. Leningrad, incidentally, was younger than New York City. Imagine that! Imagine a famous European city, full of imperial treasures and worth besieging, and yet much younger than New York.

  Arthur von Strelitz would never learn how his father died. He himself would be rowed ashore from an American submarine in the Solomon Islands as a spy, while they were still occupied by the Japanese. He would never be heard of again.

  Peace.

  He thought it, was urgent, I remember, that mankind and womankind be defined. Otherwise, he was sure, they were doomed forever to be defined by the needs of institutions. He had mainly factories and armies in mind.

  He was the only man I ever knew who wore a monocle.

  Now Mary Kathleen O'Looney, age eighteen, lay in his bed. We had just made love. It would be very pretty to paint her as naked now--a pink little body. But I never saw her naked. She was modest. Never could I induce her to take off all her clothes.

  I myself stood stark naked at a window, with my private parts just below the sill. I felt like the great god Thor.

  "Do you love me, Walter?" Mary Kathleen asked my bare backside.

  What could I reply but this: "Of course I do."

  There Was a knock on the door. I had told my coeditor at The Bay State Progressive where I could be found in case of emergency, "Who is it?" I said.

  There was a sound like a little gasoline engine on the other side of the door. It was Alexander Hamilton McCone, my mentor, who had decided to come to Cambridge unannounced--to see what sort of life I was leading on his money. He sounded like a motor because of his stammer. He stammered because of the Cuyahoga Massacre in Eighteen-hundred and Ninety-four. He was trying to say his own name.

  18

  I HAD SOMEHOW NEGLECTED to tell him that I had become a communist.

  Now he had found out about that. He had come first to my room in Adams House, where he was told that I was most likely at The Progressive. He had gone to The Progressive and had ascertained what sort of publication it was and that I was its coeditor. Now he was outside the door with a copy folded under his arm.

  I remained calm. Such was the magic of having emptied my seminal vesicles so recently.

  Mary Kathleen, obeying my silent arm signals, hid herself in the bathroom. I slipped on a robe belonging to von Strelitz. He had brought it home from the Solomon Islands. It appeared to be made of shingles, with wreaths of feathers at its collar and cuffs.

  Thus was I clad when I opened the door and said to old Mr. McCone, who was in his early sixties then, "Come in, come in."

  He was so angry with me that he could only continue to make those motor sounds: "bup-bup-bup-bup-bup ..." But he meanwhile did a grotesque pantomime of how repulsed he was by the paper, whose front-page cartoon showed a bloated capitalist who looked just like him; by my costume; by the unmade bed; by the picture of Karl Marx on von Strelitz's wall.

  Out he went again, slamming the door behind him. He was through with me!

  Thus did my childhood end at last. I had become a man.

  And it was as a man that I went that night, with Mary Kathleen on my arm, to hear Kenneth Whistler speak at the rally for my comrades in the International Brotherhood of Abrasives and Adhesives Workers.

  How could I be so serene, so confident? My tuition for the year had already been paid, so I would graduate. I was about to get a full scholarship to Oxford. I had a superb wardrobe in good repair. I had been saving most of my allowance, so that I had a small fortune in the bank.

  If I had to, I could always borrow money from Mother, God rest her soul.

  What a daring young man I was!

  What a treacherous young man I was! I already knew that I would abandon Mary Kathleen at the end of the academic year. I would write her a few love letters and then fall silent after that. She was too low class.

  Whistler had a big bandage over one temple and his right arm was in a plaster cast that night. This was a Harvard graduate, mind you, and from a good family in Cincinnati. He was a Buckeye, like me. Mary Kathleen and I supposed that he had been beat up by the forces of evil yet again--by the police or the National Guard, or by goons of organizers of yellow-dog unions.

  I held Mary Kathleen's hand.

  Nobody had ever told her he loved her before.

  I was wearing a suit and a necktie, and so were most of the men there. We wanted to show that we were as decent and sober citizens as anyone. Kenneth Whistler might have been a businessman. He had even found time to shine his shoes.

  Those used to be important symbols of self-respect: shined shoes.

  Whistler began his speech by making fun of his bandages. "The Spirit of Seventy-six," he said.

  Everybody laughed and laughed, although the occasion was surely not a happy one. All the members of the union had been fired about a month before--for joining a union. They were makers of grinding wheels, and there was only one company in the area that could use their skills. That was the Johannsen Grinder Company, and that was the company that had fired them. They were specialized potters, essentially, shaping soft materials and then firing them in kilns. The fathers or grandfathers of most of them had actually been potters in Scandinavia, who were brought to this country to learn this new specialty.

  The rally took place in a vacant store in Cambridge. Appropriately enough, the folding chairs had been contributed by a funeral home. Mary Kathleen and I were in the first row.

  Whistler, it turned out, had been injured in a routine mining accident. He said he had been working as "a robber," taking out supporting pillars of coal from a tunnel where
the seam had otherwise been exhausted. Something had fallen on him.

  And he went seamlessly from talk of such dangerous work in such a dark place to a recollection of a tea dance at the Ritz fifteen years before, where a Harvard classmate named Nils Johannsen had been caught using loaded dice in a crap game in the men's room. This was the same person who was now the president of Johannsen Grinder, who had fired all these workers. Johannsen's grandfather had started the company. He said that Johannsen had had his head stuck in a toilet bowl at the Ritz, and that the hope was that he would never use loaded dice again.

  "But here he is," said Whistler, "using loaded dice again."

  He said that Harvard could be held responsible for many atrocities, including the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, but that it was innocent of having produced Nils Johannsen. "He never attended a lecture, never wrote a paper, never read a book while he was there," he said. "He was asked to leave at the end of his sophomore year.

  "Oh, I pity him," he said. "I even understand him. How else could he ever amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the basic rights of workers--those are loaded dice. The policemen who will protect his property rights but not your human rights--those are loaded dice."

  Whistler asked the fired workers how much Johannsen actually knew or cared about grinding wheels. How shrewd this was! The way to befriend working people in those days, and to get them to criticize their society as brilliantly as any philosopher, was to get them to talk about the one subject on which they were almost arrogantly well-informed: their work.

  It was something to hear. Worker after worker testified that Johannsen's father and grandfather had been mean bastards, too, but that they at least knew how to run a factory. Raw materials of the highest quality arrived on time in their day--machinery was properly maintained, the heating plant and the toilets worked, bad workmanship was punished and good workmanship was rewarded, no defective grinding wheel ever reached a customer, and on and on.

  Whistler asked them if one of their own number could run the factory better than Nils Johannsen did. One man spoke for them all on that subject: "God, yes," he said, "anyone here."