Bagombo Snuff Box

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “You can sure be a snippy woman, on occasion,” I said.

  “That comes from reading books about what a mess men have made of the world,” she said.

  The upshot was, I read that book.

  What a book it was! It took me a week and a half to get through it, and the more I read, the more I felt as if I were wearing long burlap underwear.

  Herb White came into my showroom and caught me reading it. “Improving your mind, I see,” he said.

  “If something’s improved,” I said, “I don’t know what it is. You’ve read this, have you?”

  “That pleasure and satisfaction was mine,” he said. “Where are you now?”

  “I’ve just been through the worst five million years I ever expect to spend,” I said. “And some man has finally noticed that maybe things aren’t quite as good as they could be for women.”

  “Theodore Parker?” said Herb.

  “Right,” I said. Parker was a preacher in Boston about the time of the Civil War.

  “Read what he says,” said Herb.

  So I read out loud: “‘The domestic function of woman does not exhaust her powers. To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made.’”

  Herb had closed his eyes while I read. He kept them closed. “Do you realize how hard those words hit me, with the—with the wife I’ve got?”

  “Well,” I said, “we all knew you’d been hit by something. Nobody could figure out what it was.”

  “That book was around the house for weeks,” he said. “Sheila was reading it. I didn’t pay any attention to it at first. And then one night we were watching Channel Two.” Channel Two is the educational television station in Boston. “There was this discussion going on between some college professors about the different theories of how the solar system had been born. Sheila all of a sudden burst into tears, said her brains had turned to mush, said she didn’t know anything about anything anymore.”

  Herb opened his eyes. “There wasn’t anything I could say to comfort her. She went off to bed. That book was on the table next to where she’d been sitting. I picked it up and it fell open to the page you just read from.”

  “Herb,” I said, “this isn’t any of my business, but—”

  “It’s your business,” he said. “Aren’t you president of LA?”

  “You don’t think there really is such a thing!” I said.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “Lovers Anonymous is as real as the Veterans of Foreign Wars. How would you like it if there was a club whose sole purpose was to make sure you treated your wife right?”

  “Herb,” I said, “I give you my word of honor—”

  He didn’t let me finish. “I realize now, ten years too late,” he said, “that I’ve ruined that wonderful woman’s life, had her waste all her intelligence and talent—on what?” He shrugged and spread his hands. “On keeping house for a small-town bookkeeper who hardly even finished high school, who’s never going to be anything he wasn’t on his wedding day.”

  He hit the side of his head with the heel of his hand. I guess he was punishing himself, or maybe trying to make his brains work better. “Well,” he said, “I’m calling in all you anonymous lovers I can to help me put things right—not that I can ever give her back her ten wasted years. When we get the ell fixed up, at least I won’t be underfoot all the time, expecting her to cook for me and sew for me and do all the other stupid things a husband expects a housewife to do.

  “I’ll have a little house all my own,” he said, “and I’ll be my own little housewife. And anytime Sheila wants to, she can come knock on my door and find out I still love her. She can start studying books again, and become an oceanographer or whatever she wants. And any handyman jobs she needs done on that big old house of hers, her handy neighbor—which is me—will be more than glad to do.”

  With a very heavy heart I went out to Herb’s house early that afternoon to measure the windows of the ell. Herb was at his office. The twin girls were off at school. Sheila didn’t seem to be at home, either. I knocked on the kitchen door, and the only answer I got was from the automatic washing machine.

  “Whirr, gloop, rattle, slup,” it said.

  As long as I was there, I decided to make sure the Fleetwoods I’d already installed were working freely. That was how I happened to look in through the living room window and see Sheila lying on the couch. There were books on the floor around her. She was crying.

  When I got around to the ell I could see that Herb had certainly been playing house in there. He had a little kerosene range on top of the woodpile, along with pots and pans and canned goods.

  There was a Morris chair with a gasoline lantern hanging over it, and a big chopping block next to the chair, and Herb had his pipes and his magazines and his tobacco laid out there. His bed was on the floor, but it was nicely made, with sheets and all. On the walls were photographs of Herb in the Army, Herb on the high school baseball team, and a tremendous print in color of Custer’s Last Stand.

  The door between the ell and the main house was closed, so I felt free to climb in through a window without feeling I was intruding on Sheila. What I wanted to see was the condition of the sash on the inside. I sat down in the Morris chair and made some notes.

  And then I leaned back and lit a cigarette. A Morris chair is a comfortable thing. Sheila came in without my even hearing her.

  “Cozy, isn’t it?” she said. “I think every man your age should have a hideaway. Herb’s ordered storm windows for his Shangrila, has he?”

  “Fleetwoods,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Heaven knows Fleetwoods are the best.” She looked at the underside of the rotten roof. Pinpricks of sky showed through. “I don’t suppose what’s happening to Herb and me is any secret,” she said.

  I didn’t know how to answer that.

  “You might tell Lovers Anonymous and their Ladies’ Auxiliary that Herb and I have never been this happy before,” she said.

  I couldn’t think of any answer for that, either. It was my understanding that Herb’s moving into the ell was a great tragedy of recent times.

  “And you might tell them,” she said, “that it was Herb who got happy first. We had a ridiculous argument about how my brains had turned to mush. And then I went upstairs and waited for him to come to bed—and he didn’t. The next morning I found he’d dragged a mattress out here and was sleeping like an angel.

  “I looked down on him, so happy out here, and I wept. I realized that he’d been a slave all his life, doing things he hated in order to support his mother, and then me, and then me and the girls. His first night out here was probably the first night in his life that he went to sleep wondering who he might be, what he might have become, what he still might be.”

  “I guess the reason the world seems so upside down so often,” I said, “is that everybody figures he’s doing things on account of somebody else. Herb figures this whole ell business is a favor to you.”

  “Anything that makes him happier is a favor to me,” she said.

  “I read that crazy red book—or I’m reading it,” I said.

  “Housewifery is a swindle, if a woman can do more,” she said.

  “You going to do more, Sheila?”

  “Yes,” she said. She had laid out a plan whereby she would get her degree in two years, with a combination of correspondence courses, extension courses, and a couple of summer sessions at Durham, where the state university is. After that she was going to teach.

  “I never would have made a plan like that,” she told me, “if Herb hadn’t called my bluff to the extent he did. Women are awful bluffers sometimes.

  “I’ve started studying,” she went on. “I know you looked through the window and saw me with all my books, crying on the couch.”

  “I didn’t think you’d seen me,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to mind somebody else’s b
usiness. Kennard Pelk and I both have to look through windows from time to time in the line of duty.”

  “I was crying because I was understanding what a bluffer I’d been in school,” she said. “I was only pretending to care about the things I was learning, back in those silly old days. Now I do care. That’s why I was crying. I’ve been crying a lot lately, but it’s good crying. It’s about discovery, it’s about grown-up joy.”

  I had to admit it was an interesting adjustment Sheila and Herb were making. One thing bothered me, though, and there wasn’t any polite way I could ask about it. I wondered if they were going to quit sleeping with each other forever.

  Sheila answered the question without my having to ask it.

  “Love laughs at locksmiths,” she said.

  About a week later I took the copy of Woman, the Wasted Sex, or, The Swindle of Housewifery to a luncheon meeting of LA at the drugstore. I was through with the thing, and I passed it around.

  “You didn’t let your wife read this, did you?” Hay Boyden asked.

  “Certainly,” I said.

  “She’ll walk out on you and the kids,” said Hay, “and become a rear admiral.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “You give a woman a book like this,” said Al Tedler, “and you’re gonna have a restless woman on your hands.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “When I gave my wife this book I gave her a magic bookmark to go with it.” I nodded. “That magic bookmark kept her under control all the way through.”

  Everybody wanted to know what the bookmark was.

  “One of her old report cards,” I said.

  Hal Irwin’s

  Magic Lamp

  Hal Irwin built his magic lamp in his basement in Indianapolis, in the summer of 1929. It was supposed to look like Aladdin’s lamp. It was an old tin teapot with a piece of cotton stuck in the spout for a wick. Hal bored a hole in it for a doorbell button, which he hooked up to two flashlight batteries and a buzzer inside. Like many husbands back then, he had a workshop in the basement.

  The idea was, it was a cute way to call servants. You’d rub the teapot as if it were a magic lamp, and you’d push the button on the side. The buzzer’d go off, and a servant, if you had one, would come and ask you what you wished.

  Hal didn’t have a servant, but he was going to borrow one from a friend. Hal was a customers’ man in a brokerage house, and he knew his business inside out. He’d made half a million dollars on the stock market, and nobody knew it. Not even his wife.

  He made the magic lamp as a surprise for his wife. He was going to tell her it was a magic lamp. And then he was going to rub it and wish for a big new house. And then he was going to prove to her that it really was a magic lamp, because every wish was going to come true.

  When he made the lamp, the interior decorator was finishing up the insides of a big new French chateau Hal had ordered built out on North Meridian Street.

  When Hal made that lamp, he and Mary were living in a shotgun house down in all the soot at Seventeenth and Illinois Street. They’d been married two years, and Hal hadn’t had her out more than five or six times. He wasn’t being stingy. He was saving up to buy her all the happiness a girl could ever ask for, and he was going to hand it to her in one fell swoop.

  Hal was ten years older than Mary, so it was easy for him to buffalo her about a lot of things, and one of the things was money. He wouldn’t talk money with her, never let her see a bill or a bank statement, never told her how much he made or what he was doing with it. All Mary had to go by was the piddling allowance he gave her to run the house, so she guessed they were poor as Job’s turkey.

  Mary didn’t mind that. That girl was as wholesome as a peach and a glass of milk. Being poor gave her room to swing her religion around. When the end of the month came, and they’d eaten pretty well, and she hadn’t asked Hal for an extra dime, she felt like a little white lamb. And she thought Hal was happy, even though he was broke, because she was giving him a hundred million dollars’ worth of love.

  There was only one thing about being poor that really bothered Mary, and that was the way Hal always seemed to think she wanted to be rich. She did her best to convince him that wasn’t true.

  When Hal would carry on about how well other folks were doing—about the high life at the country clubs and the lakes—Mary’d talk about the millions of folks in China who didn’t have a roof over their heads or anything to eat.

  “Me doing velly well for Chinaman,” Hal said one night.

  “You’re doing very well for an American or for an anything!” Mary said. She hugged him, so he’d be proud and strong and happy.

  “Well, your successful Chinaman’s got a piece of news for you,” Hal said. “Tomorrow you’re gonna get a cook. I told an employment agency to send one out.”

  Actually, the person arriving the next day, whose name was Ella Rice, wouldn’t be coming to cook, and wasn’t from an employment agency. She already had a job with a friend of Hal’s whom Mary didn’t know. The friend would give her the day off so she could play the part of a jinni.

  Hal had rehearsed her at the friend’s house, and he would pay her well. She needed the extra money. She was going to have a baby in about six weeks, she thought. All she had to do was put on a turban when the time came, when Hal showed Mary his magic lamp, and rubbed it and rang its buzzer. Then she would say, “I am the jinni. What do you want?”

  After that, Hal would start wishing for expensive things he already owned, which Mary hadn’t seen yet. His first wish would be for a Marmon town car. It would already be parked out front. Every time he made a wish, starting with that one, Ella Rice would say, “You got it.”

  But that was tomorrow, and today was today, and Mary thought Hal didn’t like her cooking. She was a wonderful cook. “Honey,” she said, “are my meals that bad?”

  “They’re great. I have no complaints whatsoever.”

  “Then why should we get a cook?”

  He looked at her as though she were deaf, dumb, and blind. “Don’t you ever think of my pride?” he asked her. He put his hand over her mouth. “Honeybunch, don’t tell me again about people dying like flies in China. I am who I am where I am, and I’ve got pride.”

  Mary wanted to cry. Here she thought she’d been making Hal feel better, and she’d been making him feel worse instead.

  “What do you think I think when I see Bea Muller or Nancy Gossett downtown in their fur coats, buying out the department stores?” Hal said. “I think about you, stuck in this house. I think, Well, for crying out loud, I used to be president of their husbands’ fraternity house! For crying out loud, me and Harve Muller and George Gossett used to be the Grand Triumvirate. That’s what they used to call the three of us in college—the Grand Triumvirate! We used to run the college, and I’m not kidding. We founded the Owl’s Club, and I was president.

  “Look where they live, and look where we live,” Hal went on. “We oughta be right out there with ’em at Fifty-seventh and North Meridian! We oughta have a cottage right next to ’em at Lake Maxinkuckee! Least I can do is get my wife a cook.”

  Ella Rice arrived at the house the next day at three o’clock as planned. In a paper bag she had the turban Hal had given her. Hal wasn’t home yet. Ella was supposed to pretend to be the new cook instead of a jinni until Hal arrived at three-thirty. Which she did.

  What Hal hadn’t counted on, though, was that Mary would find Ella so likable, but so pitiful, not a cook, but a fellow human being in awful trouble. He had expected them to go to the kitchen to talk about this and that, what Hal liked to eat, and so on. But Mary asked Ella about her pregnancy, which was obvious. Ella, who was no actress, and at the end of her rope in any case, burst into tears. The two women, one white, one black, stayed in the living room and talked about their lives instead.

  Ella wasn’t married. The father of her child had beaten her up when he found out she was pregnant, and then taken off for parts unknown. She had aches and pains in
many places, and no relatives, and didn’t know how much longer she could do housework. She repeated what she had told Hal, that her pregnancy still had six weeks to go, she thought. Mary said she wished she could have a baby, but couldn’t. That didn’t help.

  When Hal parked the new Marmon out front and entered the house, neither woman was in any condition to enjoy the show he had planned. They were a mess! But he imagined his magic lamp would cheer them up. He went to get it from the closet where he had hidden it upstairs, then brought it into the living room and said, “My goodness! Look what I just found. I do believe it’s a magic lamp. Maybe if I rub it a jinni will appear, and she will make a wish come true.” He hadn’t considered hiring a black man to play the jinni. He was scared of black men.

  Ella Rice recognized her cue, and got off the couch to do the crazy thing the white man was going to pay for. Anything for money. It hurt her a lot to stand, after sitting still for a half-hour. Even Hal could see that.

  Hal wished for a Marmon, and the jinni said, “You got it.” The three went out to the car, and Hal told them to get in, that it was his, paid for in full. The women sat in the backseat, and Mary said to Ella, not to Hal, “Thanks a lot. This is wonderful. I think I’m going nuts.”

  Hal drove up North Meridian Street, pointing out grand houses left and right. Every time he did that, Mary said that she wouldn’t want it, that Hal could throw his magic lamp out the window, as far as she was concerned. What she was really upset about was the humiliating use he was making of her new friend Ella.

  Hal stopped in front of a French chateau on which workmen were putting finishing touches. He turned off the motor, rubbed the lamp, buzzed the buzzer, and said, “Jinni, give me a new house at 5644 North Meridian Street.”

  Mary said to Ella, “You don’t have to do this. Don’t answer him.”

  Ella got mad at Mary now. “I’m getting paid!” Everything Ella said was in a dialect typical of a person of her race and class and degree of education back then. Now she groaned. She was going into labor.