Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition

by Kurt Vonnegut,Gregory D. Sumner

  “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’s.”

  “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 veranda 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, “I 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 Rumfoords, 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 purée.”

  “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 bandsaw 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.”

  “You’re an intelligent, charming, well-educated man, and you’re still quite young,” said Clarice.

  “I’ve got to find some kind of work,” he said.

  “We’ll both be so much happier,” she said. “I would love you, no matter what. But I can tell you now, darling—it’s awfully hard for a woman to admire a man who actually doesn’t do anything.”

  We were dazzled by the headlights of two cars coming out of the Kennedys’ driveway. The cars stopped right in front of the Rumfoord Cottage. Whoever was in them seemed to be giving the place a good looking-over.

  The Commodore went to that side of the veranda, to find out what was going on. And I heard the voice of the President of the United States coming from the car in front.

  “Commodore Rumfoord,” said the President, “may I ask what is wrong with your Goldwater sign?”

  “Nothing, Mr. President,” said the Commodore respectfully.

  “Then why isn’t it on?” asked the President.

  “I just didn’t feel like turning it on tonight, sir,” said the Commodore.

  “I have Mr. Khrushchev’s son-in-law with me,” said the President. “He would very much enjoy seeing it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Commodore. He was right by the switch. He turned it on. The whole neighborhood was bathed in flashing light.

  “Thank you,” said the President. “And leave it on, would you, please?”

  “Sir?” said the Commodore.

  The cars started to pull away slowly. “That way,” said the President, “I can find my way home.”

  (1963)

  D. P.

  EIGHTY-ONE small sparks of human life were kept in an orphanage set up by Catholic nuns in what had been the gamekeeper’s house on a large estate overlooking the Rhine. This was in the German village of Karlswald, in the American Zone of Occupation. Had the children not been kept there, not been given the warmth and food and clothes that could be begged for them, they might have wandered off the edges of the earth, searching for parents who had long ago stopped searching for them.

  Every mild afternoon the nuns marched the children, two by two, through the woods, into the village and back, for their ration of fresh air. The village carpenter, an old man who was given to thoughtful rests between strokes of his tools, always came out of his shop to watch the bobbing, chattering, cheerful, ragged parade, and to speculate, with idlers his shop attracted, as to the nationalities of the passing children’s parents.

  “See the little French girl,” he said one afternoon. “Look at the flash of those eyes!”

  “And look at that little Pole swing his arms. They love to march, the Poles,” said a young mechanic.

  “Pole? Where do you see any Pole?” said the carpenter.

  “There—the thin, sober-looking one in front,” the other replied.

  “Aaaaah. He’s too tall for a Pole,” said the carpenter. “And what Pole has flaxen hair like that? He’s a German.”

  The mechanic shrugged. “They’re all German now, so what difference does it make?” he said. “Who can prove what their parents were? If you had fought in Poland, you would know he was a very common type.”

  “Look—look who’s coming now,” said the carpenter, grinning. “Full of arguments as you are, you won’t argue with me about him. There we have an American!” He called out to the child. “Joe—when you going to win the championship back?”

  “Joe!” called the mechanic. “How is the Brown Bomber today?”

  At the very end of the parade, a lone, blue-eyed colored boy, six years old, turned and smiled with sweet uneasiness at those who called out to him every day. He nodded politely, murmuring a greeting in German, the only language he knew.

  His name, chosen arbitrarily by the nuns, was Karl Heinz. But the carpenter had given him a name that stuck, the name of the only colored man who had ever made an impression on the villagers’ minds, the former heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis.

  “Joe!” called the carpenter. “Cheer up! Let’s see those white teeth sparkle, Joe.”

  Joe obliged shyly.

  The carpenter clapped the mechanic on the back. “And if he isn’t a German too! Maybe it’s the only way we can get another heavyweight champion.”

  Joe turned a corner, shooed out of the carpenter’s sight by a nun bringing up the rear. She and Joe spent a great deal of time together, since Joe, no matter where he was placed in the parade, always drifted t
o the end.

  “Joe,” she said, “you are such a dreamer. Are all your people such dreamers?”

  “I’m sorry, sister,” said Joe. “I was thinking.”

  “Dreaming.”

  “Sister, am I the son of an American soldier?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Peter. Peter said my mother was a German, and my father was an American soldier who went away. He said she left me with you, and then went away too.” There was no sadness in his voice—only puzzlement.

  Peter was the oldest boy in the orphanage, an embittered old man of fourteen, a German boy who could remember his parents and brothers and sisters and home, and the war, and all sorts of food that Joe found impossible to imagine. Peter seemed superhuman to Joe, like a man who had been to heaven and hell and back many times, and knew exactly why they were where they were, how they had come there, and where they might have been.

  “You mustn’t worry about it, Joe,” said the nun. “No one knows who your mother and father were. But they must have been very good people, because you are so good.”

  “What is an American?” said Joe.

  “It’s a person from another country.”

  “Near here?”

  “There are some near here, but their homes are far, far away—across a great deal of water.”

  “Like the river.”

  “More water than that, Joe. More water than you have ever seen. You can’t even see the other side. You could get on a boat and go for days and days and still not get to the other side. I’ll show you a map sometime. But don’t pay any attention to Peter, Joe. He makes things up. He doesn’t really know anything about you. Now, catch up.”

  · · ·

  Joe hurried, and overtook the end of the line, where he marched purposefully and alertly for a few minutes. But then he began to dawdle again, chasing ghostlike words in his small mind: … soldier … German … American … your people … champion … Brown Bomber … more water than you’ve ever seen.

  “Sister,” said Joe, “are Americans like me? Are they brown?”