Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition

by Kurt Vonnegut,Gregory D. Sumner

  “Keep it under the speed limit, Ben,” said Doctor Remenzel. “I don’t care how ridiculous any speed limit seems, stay under it. No reason to rush—we have plenty of time.”

  Ben eased off on the throttle. “Seems like in the springtime she wants to get up and go,” he said.

  “Do what you can to keep her down—O.K.?” said the doctor.

  “Yes, sir!” said Ben. He spoke in a lower voice to the thirteen-year-old boy who was riding beside him, to Eli Remenzel, the doctor’s son. “Ain’t just people and animals feel good in the springtime,” he said to Eli. “Motors feel good too.”

  “Um,” said Eli.

  “Everything feel good,” said Ben. “Don’t you feel good?”

  “Sure, sure I feel good,” said Eli emptily.

  “Should feel good—going to that wonderful school,” said Ben.

  The wonderful school was the Whitehill School for Boys, a private preparatory school in North Marston, Massachusetts. That was where the Rolls-Royce was bound. The plan was that Eli would enroll for the fall semester, while his father, a member of the class of 1939, attended a meeting of the Board of Overseers of the school.

  “Don’t believe this boy’s feeling so good, doctor,” said Ben. He wasn’t particularly serious about it. It was more genial springtime blather.

  “What’s the matter, Eli?” said the doctor absently. He was studying blueprints, plans for a thirty-room addition to the Eli Remenzel Memorial Dormitory—a building named in honor of his great-great-grandfather. Doctor Remenzel had the plans draped over a walnut table that folded out of the back of the front seat. He was a massive, dignified man, a physician, a healer for healing’s sake, since he had been born as rich as the Shah of Iran. “Worried about something?” he asked Eli without looking up from the plans.

  “Nope,” said Eli.

  Eli’s lovely mother, Sylvia, sat next to the doctor, reading the catalogue of the Whitehill School. “If I were you,” she said to Eli, “I’d be so excited I could hardly stand it. The best four years of your whole life are just about to begin.”

  “Sure,” said Eli. He didn’t show her his face. He gave her only the back of his head, a pinwheel of coarse brown hair above a stiff white collar, to talk to.

  “I wonder how many Remenzels have gone to Whitehill,” said Sylvia.

  “That’s like asking how many people are dead in a cemetery,” said the doctor. He gave the answer to the old joke, and to Sylvia’s question too. “All of ’em.”

  “If all the Remenzels who went to Whitehill were numbered, what number would Eli be?” said Sylvia. “That’s what I’m getting at.”

  The question annoyed Doctor Remenzel a little. It didn’t seem in very good taste. “It isn’t the sort of thing you keep score on,” he said.

  “Guess,” said his wife.

  “Oh,” he said, “you’d have to go back through all the records, all the way back to the end of the eighteenth century, even, to make any kind of a guess. And you’d have to decide whether to count the Schofields and the Haleys and the MacLellans as Remenzels.”

  “Please make a guess—” said Sylvia, “just people whose last names were Remenzel.”

  “Oh—” The doctor shrugged, rattled the plans. “Thirty maybe.”

  “So Eli is number thirty-one!” said Sylvia, delighted with the number. “You’re number thirty-one, dear,” she said to the back of Eli’s head.

  Doctor Remenzel rattled the plans again. “I don’t want him going around saying something asinine, like he’s number thirty-one,” he said.

  “Eli knows better than that,” said Sylvia. She was a game, ambitious woman, with no money of her own at all. She had been married for sixteen years, but was still openly curious and enthusiastic about the ways of families that had been rich for many generations.

  “Just for my own curiosity—not so Eli can go around saying what number he is,” said Sylvia, “I’m going to go wherever they keep the records and find out what number he is. That’s what I’ll do while you’re at the meeting and Eli’s doing whatever he has to do at the Admissions Office.”

  “All right,” said Doctor Remenzel, “you go ahead and do that.”

  “I will,” said Sylvia. “I think things like that are interesting, even if you don’t.” She waited for a rise on that, but didn’t get one. Sylvia enjoyed arguing with her husband about her lack of reserve and his excess of it, enjoyed saying, toward the end of arguments like that, “Well, I guess I’m just a simple-minded country girl at heart, and that’s all I’ll ever be, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to it.”

  But Doctor Remenzel didn’t want to play that game. He found the dormitory plans more interesting.

  “Will the new rooms have fireplaces?” said Sylvia. In the oldest part of the dormitory, several of the rooms had handsome fireplaces.

  “That would practically double the cost of construction,” said the doctor.

  “I want Eli to have a room with a fireplace, if that’s possible,” said Sylvia.

  “Those rooms are for seniors.”

  “I thought maybe through some fluke—” said Sylvia.

  “What kind of fluke do you have in mind?” said the doctor. “You mean I should demand that Eli be given a room with a fireplace?”

  “Not demand—” said Sylvia.

  “Request firmly?” said the doctor.

  “Maybe I’m just a simple-minded country girl at heart,” said Sylvia, “but I look through this catalogue, and I see all the buildings named after Remenzels, look through the back and see all the hundreds of thousands of dollars given by Remenzels for scholarships, and I just can’t help thinking people named Remenzel are entitled to ask for a little something extra.”

  “Let me tell you in no uncertain terms,” said Doctor Remenzel, “that you are not to ask for anything special for Eli—not anything.”

  “Of course I won’t,” said Sylvia. “Why do you always think I’m going to embarrass you?”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “But I can still think what I think, can’t I?” she said.

  “If you have to,” he said.

  “I have to,” she said cheerfully, utterly unrepentant. She leaned over the plans. “You think those people will like those rooms?”

  “What people?” he said.

  “The Africans,” she said. She was talking about thirty Africans who, at the request of the State Department, were being admitted to Whitehill in the coming semester. It was because of them that the dormitory was being expanded.

  “The rooms aren’t for them,” he said. “They aren’t going to be segregated.”

  “Oh,” said Sylvia. She thought about this awhile, and then she said, “Is there a chance Eli will have to have one of them for a roommate?”

  “Freshmen draw lots for roommates,” said the doctor. “That piece of information’s in the catalogue too.”

  “Eli?” said Sylvia.

  “H’m?” said Eli.

  “How would you feel about it if you had to room with one of those Africans?”

  Eli shrugged listlessly.

  “That’s all right?” said Sylvia.

  Eli shrugged again.

  “I guess it’s all right,” said Sylvia.

  “It had better be,” said the doctor.

  The Rolls-Royce pulled abreast of an old Chevrolet, a car in such bad repair that its back door was lashed shut with clothesline. Doctor Remenzel glanced casually at the driver, and then, with sudden excitement and pleasure, he told Ben Barkley to stay abreast of the car.

  The doctor leaned across Sylvia, rolled down his window, yelled to the driver of the old Chevrolet, “Tom! Tom!”

  The man was a Whitehill classmate of the doctor. He wore a Whitehill necktie, which he waved at Doctor Remenzel in gay recognition. And then he pointed to the fine young son who sat beside him, conveyed with proud smiles and nods that the boy was bound for Whitehill.

  Doctor Remenzel pointed to the chaos of the ba
ck of Eli’s head, beamed that his news was the same. In the wind blustering between the two cars they made a lunch date at the Holly House in North Marston, at the inn whose principal business was serving visitors to Whitehill.

  “All right,” said Doctor Remenzel to Ben Barkley, “drive on.”

  “You know,” said Sylvia, “somebody really ought to write an article—” And she turned to look through the back window at the old car now shuddering far behind. “Somebody really ought to.”

  “What about?” said the doctor. He noticed that Eli had slumped way down in the front seat. “Eli!” he said sharply. “Sit up straight!” He returned his attention to Sylvia.

  “Most people think prep schools are such snobbish things, just for people with money,” said Sylvia, “but that isn’t true.” She leafed through the catalogue and found the quotation she was after.

  “The Whitehill School operates on the assumption,” she read, “that no boy should be deterred from applying for admission because his family is unable to pay the full cost of a Whitehill education. With this in mind, the Admissions Committee selects each year from approximately 3000 candidates the 150 most promising and deserving boys, regardless of their parents’ ability to pay the full $2200 tuition. And those in need of financial aid are given it to the full extent of their need. In certain instances, the school will even pay for the clothing and transportation of a boy.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “I think that’s perfectly amazing. It’s something most people don’t realize at all. A truckdriver’s son can come to Whitehill.”

  “If he’s smart enough,” he said.

  “Thanks to the Remenzels,” said Sylvia with pride.

  “And a lot of other people too,” said the doctor.

  Sylvia read out loud again: “In 1799, Eli Remenzel laid the foundation for the present Scholarship Fund by donating to the school forty acres in Boston. The school still owns twelve of those acres, their current evaluation being $3,000,000.”

  “Eli!” said the doctor. “Sit up! What’s the matter with you?”

  Eli sat up again, but began to slump almost immediately, like a snowman in hell. Eli had good reason for slumping, for actually hoping to die or disappear. He could not bring himself to say what the reason was. He slumped because he knew he had been denied admission to Whitehill. He had failed the entrance examinations. Eli’s parents did not know this, because Eli had found the awful notice in the mail and had torn it up.

  Doctor Remenzel and his wife had no doubts whatsoever about their son’s getting into Whitehill. It was inconceivable to them that Eli could not go there, so they had no curiosity as to how Eli had done on the examinations, were not puzzled when no report ever came.

  “What all will Eli have to do to enroll?” said Sylvia, as the black Rolls-Royce crossed the Rhode Island border.

  “I don’t know,” said the doctor. “I suppose they’ve got it all complicated now with forms to be filled out in quadruplicate, and punch-card machines and bureaucrats. This business of entrance examinations is all new, too. In my day a boy simply had an interview with the headmaster. The headmaster would look him over, ask him a few questions, and then say, ‘There’s a Whitehill boy.’ ”

  “Did he ever say, ‘There isn’t a Whitehill boy’?” said Sylvia.

  “Oh, sure,” said Doctor Remenzel, “if a boy was impossibly stupid or something. There have to be standards. There have always been standards. The African boys have to meet the standards, just like anybody else. They aren’t getting in just because the State Department wants to make friends. We made that clear. Those boys had to meet the standards.”

  “And they did?” said Sylvia.

  “I suppose,” said Doctor Remenzel. “I heard they’re all in, and they all took the same examination Eli did.”

  “Was it a hard examination, dear?” Sylvia asked Eli. It was the first time she’d thought to ask.

  “Um,” said Eli.

  “What?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Eli.

  “I’m glad they’ve got high standards,” she said, and then she realized that this was a fairly silly statement. “Of course they’ve got high standards,” she said. “That’s why it’s such a famous school. That’s why people who go there do so well in later life.”

  Sylvia resumed her reading of the catalogue again, opened out a folding map of “The Sward,” as the campus of Whitehill was traditionally called. She read off the names of features that memorialized Remenzels—the Sanford Remenzel Bird Sanctuary, the George MacLellan Remenzel Skating Rink, the Eli Remenzel Memorial Dormitory, and then she read out loud a quatrain printed on one corner of the map:

  “When night falleth gently

  “Upon the green Sward,

  “It’s Whitehill, dear Whitehill,

  “Our thoughts all turn toward.”

  “You know,” said Sylvia, “school songs are so corny when you just read them. But when I hear the Glee Club sing those words, they sound like the most beautiful words ever written, and I want to cry.”

  “Um,” said Doctor Remenzel.

  “Did a Remenzel write them?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Doctor Remenzel. And then he said, “No—Wait. That’s the new song. A Remenzel didn’t write it. Tom Kilyer wrote it.”

  “The man in that old car we passed?”

  “Sure,” said Doctor Remenzel. “Tom wrote it. I remember when he wrote it.”

  “A scholarship boy wrote it?” said Sylvia. “I think that’s awfully nice. He was a scholarship boy, wasn’t he?”

  “His father was an ordinary automobile mechanic in North Marston.”

  “You hear what a democratic school you’re going to, Eli?” said Sylvia.

  · · ·

  Half an hour later Ben Barkley brought the limousine to a stop before the Holly House, a rambling country inn twenty years older than the Republic. The inn was on the edge of the Whitehill Sward, glimpsing the school’s rooftops and spires over the innocent wilderness of the Sanford Remenzel Bird Sanctuary.

  Ben Barkley was sent away with the car for an hour and a half Doctor Remenzel shepherded Sylvia and Eli into a familiar, low-ceilinged world of pewter, clocks, lovely old woods, agreeable servants, elegant food and drink.

  Eli, clumsy with horror of what was surely to come, banged a grandmother clock with his elbow as he passed, made the clock cry.

  Sylvia excused herself. Doctor Remenzel and Eli went to the threshold of the dining room, where a hostess welcomed them both by name. They were given a table beneath an oil portrait of one of the three Whitehill boys who had gone on to become President of the United States.

  The dining room was filling quickly with families. What every family had was at least one boy about Eli’s age. Most of the boys wore Whitehill blazers—black, with pale-blue piping, with Whitehill seals on their breast pockets. A few, like Eli, were not yet entitled to wear blazers, were simply hoping to get in.

  The doctor ordered a Martini, then turned to his son and said, “Your mother has the idea that you’re entitled to special privileges around here. I hope you don’t have that idea too.”

  “No, sir,” said Eli.

  “It would be a source of the greatest embarrassment to me,” said Doctor Remenzel with considerable grandeur, “if I were ever to hear that you had used the name Remenzel as though you thought Remenzels were something special.”

  “I know,” said Eli wretchedly.

  “That settles it,” said the doctor. He had nothing more to say about it. He gave abbreviated salutes to several people he knew in the room, speculated as to what sort of party had reserved a long banquet table that was set up along one wall. He decided that it was for a visiting athletic team. Sylvia arrived, and Eli had to be told in a sharp whisper to stand when a woman came to a table.

  Sylvia was full of news. The long table, she related, was for the thirty boys from Africa. “I’ll bet that’s more colored people than have eaten here since this place was founded,” she
said softly. “How fast things change these days!”

  “You’re right about how fast things change,” said Doctor Remenzel. “You’re wrong about the colored people who’ve eaten here. This used to be a busy part of the Underground Railroad.”

  “Really?” said Sylvia. “How exciting.” She looked all about herself in a birdlike way. “I think everything’s exciting here. I only wish Eli had a blazer on.”

  Doctor Remenzel reddened. “He isn’t entitled to one,” he said.

  “I know that,” said Sylvia.

  “I thought you were going to ask somebody for permission to put a blazer on Eli right away,” said the doctor.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” said Sylvia, a little offended now. “Why are you always afraid I’ll embarrass you?”

  “Never mind. Excuse me. Forget it,” said Doctor Remenzel.

  Sylvia brightened again, put her hand on Eli’s arm, and looked radiantly at a man in the dining-room doorway. “There’s my favorite person in all the world, next to my son and husband,” she said. She meant Dr. Donald Warren, headmaster of the Whitehill School. A thin gentleman in his early sixties, Doctor Warren was in the doorway with the manager of the inn, looking over the arrangements for the Africans.

  It was then that Eli got up abruptly, fled the dining room, fled as much of the nightmare as he could possibly leave behind. He brushed past Doctor Warren rudely, though he knew him well, though Doctor Warren spoke his name. Doctor Warren looked after him sadly.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Doctor Remenzel. “What brought that on?”

  “Maybe he really is sick,” said Sylvia.

  The Remenzels had no time to react more elaborately, because Doctor Warren spotted them and crossed quickly to their table. He greeted them, some of his perplexity about Eli showing in his greeting. He asked if he might sit down.

  “Certainly, of course,” said Doctor Remenzel expansively. “We’d be honored if you did. Heavens.”