God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

by Kurt Vonnegut

  It seemed unwise to me, Dr. Brown wrote and Norman Mushari read slaveringly, to set the noisy conscience of Mrs. Z at liberty again. Neither could I take much satisfaction in discharging her while she was as heartless as Ilse Koch. I made it the goal of my treatments, then, to keep her conscience imprisoned, but to lift the lid of the oubliette ever so slightly, so that the howls of the prisoner might be very faintly heard. Through trial and error with chemotherapy and electric shock, this I achieved. I was not proud, for I had calmed a deep woman by making her shallow. I had blocked the underground rivers that connected her to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, and made her content with being a splash pool three feet across, four inches deep, chlorinated, and painted blue.

  Some doctor!

  Some cure!

  And some models the doctor was obliged to choose in determining how much guilt and pity Mrs. Z might safely be allowed to feel! The models were persons with reputations for being normal. The therapist, after a deeply upsetting investigation of normality at this time and place, was bound to conclude that a normal person, functioning well on the upper levels of a prosperous, industrialized society, can hardly hear his conscience at all.

  So a logical person might conclude that I have been guilty of balderdash in announcing a new disease, samaritrophia, when it is virtually as common among healthy Americans as noses, say. I defend myself in this manner: samaritrophia is only a disease, and a violent one, too, when it attacks those exceedingly rare individuals who reach biological maturity still loving and wanting to help their fellow men.

  I have treated only one case. I have never heard of anyone's treating another. In looking about myself, I can see only one other person who has the potential for a samaritrophic collapse. That person, of course, is Mr. Z. And so deep is his commitment to compassion, that, were he to come down with samaritrophia, I sense that he would kill himself, or perhaps kill a hundred others and then be shot down like a mad dog, before we could treat him.

  Treat, treat, treat.

  Some treat!

  Mrs. Z, having been treated and cured in our health emporium, expressed a wish to, "... go out and have some fun for a change, to live it up ..." before her looks were gone. Her looks were still staggeringly attractive, were marked by lines of affection unlimited, which she no longer deserved.

  She wanted nothing more to do with Hometown or Mr. Z, announced that she was off to the gaiety of Paris, and to merry old friends there. She wished to buy new clothes, she said, and to dance and dance and dance until she fainted in the arms of a tall, dark stranger, into the arms, hopefully, of a double spy.

  She often referred to her husband as, "My dirty, drunk uncle down South," although never to his face. She was not a schizophrenic, but, whenever her husband visited her, which he did three times a week, she manifested all of the sick cutenesses of paranoia. Shades of Clara Bow! She would pluck his cheek, coax kisses from him, kisses she gigglingly declined to receive. She told him she wanted to go to Paris for just a little while, to see her dear family, and that she would be back before he knew it. She wanted him to say farewell and give her love to all her dear, underprivileged friends in Hometown.

  Mr. Z was not deceived. He saw her off to Paris at the Indianapolis Airport, and he told me when the plane was a speck in the sky that he would never see her again. "She certainly looked happy," he said to me. "She certainly will have a good time when she gets back there with the kind of company she deserves."

  He had used the word "certainly" twice. It grated. And I knew intuitively that he was about to grate me with it again. He did. "A lot of credit," he said, "certainly goes to you."

  I am informed by the woman's parents, who are understandably ungrateful to Mr. Z, that he writes and calls often. She does not open his letters. She will not come to the phone. And it is their satisfied opinion that, as Mr. Z had hoped, she is certainly happy.

  Prognosis: Another breakdown by-and-by.

  As for Mr. Z: He is certainly sick too, since he certainly isn't like any other man I ever knew. He will not leave Hometown, except for very short trips as far as Indianapolis and no farther. I suspect that he cannot leave Hometown. Why not?

  To be utterly unscientific, and science becomes nauseating to a therapist after a case such as this: His Destination is there.

  The good doctor's prognosis was correct. Sylvia became a popular and influential member of the international Jet Set, learned the many variations of the Twist. She became known as the Duchess of Rosewater. Many men proposed, but she was too happy to think of either marriage or divorce. And then she fell to pieces again in July of 1964.

  She was treated in Switzerland. She was discharged six months later, silent and sad, almost unbearably deep again. Eliot and the pitiful people of Rosewater County again had a place in her consciousness. She wished to return to them, not out of yearning but out of a sense of duty. Her doctor warned her that a return might be fatal. He told her to remain in Europe, to divorce Eliot, and to build a quiet, meaningful life of her own.

  So, very civilized divorce proceedings were begun, stage-managed by McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee.

  Now it was time for Sylvia to fly to America for the divorce. And a meeting was held on a June evening in the Washington, D.C., apartment of Eliot's father, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater. Eliot was not there. He would not leave Rosewater County. Present were the Senator, Sylvia, Thurmond McAllister, the ancient lawyer, and his watchful young aide, Mushari.

  The tone of the meeting was frank, sentimental, forgiving, sometimes hilarious, and fundamentally tragic always. There was brandy.

  "In his heart," said the Senator, swirling his snifter, "Eliot doesn't love those awful people out there any more than I do. He couldn't possibly love them, if he weren't drunk all the time. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is basically a booze problem. If Eliot's booze were shut off, his compassion for the maggots in the slime on the bottom of the human garbage pail would vanish."

  He clapped his hands, shook his old head. "If only there had been a child!" He was a product of St. Paul's and Harvard, but it pleased him to speak with the split-banjo twang of a Rosewater County hog farmer. He tore off his steel-rimmed spectacles, stared at his daughter-in-law with suffering blue eyes. "If only! If only!" He put his spectacles back on, spread his hands in resignation. The hands were as speckled as boxturtles. "The end of the Rosewater family is now plainly in view."

  "There are other Rosewaters," McAllister suggested gently.

  Mushari squirmed, for he meant to represent those others soon.

  "I'm talking about real Rosewaters!" cried the Senator bitterly. "The hell with Pisquontuit!" Pisquontuit, Rhode Island, a seaside resort, was where the only other branch of the family lived.

  "A buzzard feast, a buzzard feast," the Senator moaned, writhing in a masochistic fantasy of how the Rhode Island Rosewaters would pick the Indiana Rosewaters' bones. He coughed hackingly. The cough embarrassed him. He was a chain-smoker, like his son.

  He went to the mantelpiece, glared at a colored photograph of Eliot there. The picture had been taken at the end of the Second World War. It showed a much-decorated captain of the Infantry. "So clean, so tall, so purposeful--so clean, so clean!" He gnashed his crockery teeth. "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown!"

  He scratched himself, though he did not itch. "How puffy and pasty he looks these days. I've seen healthier complexions on rhubarb pies! Sleeps in his underwear, eats a balanced diet of potato chips, Southern Comfort, and Rosewater Golden Lager Ambrosia Beer." He rattled his fingernails against the photograph. "Him! Him! Captain Eliot Rosewater--Silver Star, Bronze Star, Soldier's Medal, and Purple Heart with Cluster! Sailing champion! Ski champion! Him! Him! My God--the number of times life has said, 'Yes, yes, yes,' to him! Millions of dollars, hundreds of significant friends, the most beautiful, intelligent, talented, affectionate wife imaginable! A splendid education, an elegant mind in a big, clean, body--and what is his reply when life says nothing bu
t, 'Yes, yes, yes'?

  " 'No, no, no.'

  "Why? Will someone tell me why?"

  No one did.

  "I had a female cousin one time--a Rockefeller, as it happened--" said the Senator, "and she confessed to me that she spent the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth years of her life saying nothing but, 'No, thank you.' Which is all very well for a girl of that age and station. But it would have been a damned unattractive trait in a male Rockefeller, and an even more unsuitable one, if I may say so, in a male Rosewater."

  He shrugged. "Be that as it may, we do now have a male Rosewater who says 'No' to all the good things life would like to give him. He won't even live in the mansion any more." Eliot had moved out of the mansion and into an office when it became clear that Sylvia was never coming back to him.

  "He could have been Governor of Indiana by lifting an eyebrow, could have been President of the United States, even, at the price of a few beads of sweat. And what is he? I ask you, what is he?"

  The Senator coughed again, then answered his own question: "A notary public, friends and neighbors, whose commission is about to expire."

  This was fairly true. The only official document that hung on the mildewed beaverboard wall of Eliot's busy office was his commission as a notary public. So many of the people who brought their troubles to him needed, among such a multitude of other things, someone to witness their signatures.

  Eliot's office was on Main Street, a block north-east of the brick Parthenon, across the street from the new firehouse, which the Rosewater Foundation had built. It was a shotgun attic that spanned a lunchroom and a liquor store. There were only two windows, in doghouse dormers. Outside of one was a sign that said, EATS. Outside the other was a sign that said, BEER. Both signs were electrified and equipped with blinkers. And, as Eliot's father ranted in Washington about him, him, him, Eliot slept like a baby, and the signs blinked off and on.

  Eliot made of his mouth a Cupid's bow, murmured something sweetly, turned over, snored. He was an athlete gone to lard, a big man, six-feet-three, two hundred thirty pounds, pale, balding on all sides of a wispy scalplock. He was swaddled in the elephant wrinkles of war-surplus long underwear. Written on gold letters on each of his windows, and on his street-level door, too, were these words:

  ROSEWATER FOUNDATION

  HOW CAN WE HELP

  YOU?

  5

  ELIOT SLEPT SWEETLY ON, although he had troubles in droves.

  It was the toilet in the foul little office lavatory that seemed to be having all the bad dreams. It sighed, it sobbed, it gurgled that it was drowning. Canned goods and tax forms and National Geographics were piled on the toilet tank. A bowl and a spoon were soaking in cold water in the washbasin. The medicine cabinet over the basin was wide open. It was crammed with vitamins and headache remedies and hemorrhoid salves and laxatives and sedatives. Eliot used them all regularly, but they weren't for him alone. They were for all the vaguely ill people who came to see him.

  Love and understanding and a little money were not enough for those people. They wanted medicine besides.

  Papers were stacked everywhere--tax forms, Veteran's Administration forms, pension forms, relief forms, Social Security forms, parole forms. Stacks had toppled here and there, forming dunes. And between the stacks and dunes lay paper cups and empty cans of Ambrosia and cigarette butts and empty bottles of Southern Comfort.

  Thumbtacked to the walls were pictures Eliot had clipped from Life and Look, pictures that now rustled in a light cool breeze running before a thunderstorm. Eliot found that certain pictures cheered people up, particularly pictures of baby animals. His visitors also enjoyed pictures of spectacular accidents. Astronauts bored them. They liked pictures of Elizabeth Taylor because they hated her so much, felt very superior to her. Their favorite person was Abraham Lincoln. Eliot tried to popularize Thomas Jefferson and Socrates, too, but people couldn't remember from one visit to the next who they were. "Which one is which?" they'd say.

  The office had once belonged to a dentist. There was no clue of this previous occupancy save for the staircase leading up from the street. The dentist had nailed tin signs to the risers, each sign praising some aspect of his services. The signs were still there, but Eliot had painted out the messages. He had written a new one, a poem by William Blake. This was it, as broken up so as to fit twelve risers:

  The Angel that presided o'er my birth said,

  "Little creature, form'd of Joy & Mirth,

  Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth."

  At the foot of the stairs, written in pencil on the wall, by the Senator himself, was the Senator's rebuttal, another poem by Blake:

  Love seeketh only Self to please, To bind another to Its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

  Back in Washington, Eliot's father was wishing out loud that he and Eliot were both dead.

  "I--I have a rather primitive idea," said McAllister.

  "The last primitive idea you had cost me control of eighty-seven million dollars."

  McAllister indicated with a tired smile that he wasn't about to apologize for the design of the Foundation. It had, after all, done exactly what it was meant to do, had handed the fortune from father to son, without the tax collector's getting a dime. McAllister could scarcely have guaranteed that the son would be conventional. "I should like to propose that Eliot and Sylvia make one last try for a reconciliation."

  Sylvia shook her head. "No," she whispered. "I'm sorry. No." She was curled in a great wingchair. She had taken off her shoes. Her face was a flawless blue-white oval, her hair raven black. There were circles under her eyes. "No."

  This was, of course, a medical decision, and a wise one, too. Her second breakdown and recovery had not turned her back into the old Sylvia of the early Rosewater County days. It had given her a distinctly new personality, the third since her marriage to Eliot. The core of this third personality was a feeling of worthlessness, of shame at being revolted by the poor and by Eliot's personal hygiene, and a suicidal wish to ignore her revulsions, to get back to Rosewater, to very soon die in a good cause.

  So it was with self-conscious, medically-prescribed, superficial opposition to total sacrifice that she said again, "No."

  The Senator swept Eliot's picture from the mantelpiece. "Who can blame her? One more roll in the hay with that drunk gypsy I call son?" He apologized for the coarseness of this last image. "Old men without hope have a tendency to be both crude and accurate. I beg your pardon."

  Sylvia put her lovely head down, raised it again. "I don't think of him as that--as a drunk gypsy."

  "I do, by God. Every time I'm forced to look at him I think to myself, 'What a staging area for a typhoid epidemic!' Don't try to spare my feelings, Sylvia. My son doesn't deserve a decent woman. He deserves what he's got, the sniveling camaraderie of whores, malingerers, pimps, and thieves."

  "They're not that bad, Father Rosewater."

  "As I understand it, that's their chief appeal to Eliot, that there's absolutely nothing good about them."

  Sylvia, with two nervous breakdowns behind her, and with no well-formed dreams before her, said quietly, just as her doctor would have wanted her to, "I don't want to argue."

  "You still could argue on Eliot's behalf?"

  "Yes. If I don't make anything else clear tonight, at least let me make that clear: Eliot is right to do what he's doing. It's beautiful what he's doing. I'm simply not strong enough or good enough to be by his side any more. The fault is mine."

  Pained mystification, and then helplessness, suffused the Senator's face. "Tell me one good thing about those people Eliot helps."

  "I can't."

  "I thought not."

  "It's a secret thing," she said, forced to argue, pleading for the argument to stop right there.

  Without any notion of how merciless he was being, the Senator pressed on. "You're among friends now--suppose you tell us what this great secret is."

/>   "The secret is that they're human," said Sylvia. She looked from face to face for some flicker of understanding. There was none. The last face into which she peered was Norman Mushari's. Mushari gave her a hideously inappropriate smile of greed and fornication.

  Sylvia excused herself abruptly, went into the bathroom and wept.

  Thunder was heard in Rosewater now, caused a brindle dog to come scrambling out of the firehouse with psychosomatic rabies. The dog stopped in the middle of the street, shivering. The street lights were faint and far apart. The only other illumination came from a blue bulb in front of the police station in the courthouse basement, a red bulb in front of the firehouse, and a white bulb in the telephone booth across the street from the Saw City Kandy Kitchen, which was the bus depot, too.

  There was a crash. Lightning turned everything to blue-white diamonds.

  The dog ran to the door of the Rosewater Foundation, scratched and howled. Upstairs, Eliot slept on. His sickly translucent drip-dry shirt, which hung from a ceiling fixture, swayed like a ghost.

  Eliot had only one shirt. He had only one suit--a frowzy, blue, double-breasted chalkstripe now hanging on the knob of the lavatory door. It was a wonderfully made suit, for it still held together, though it was very old. Eliot had gotten it in trade from a volunteer fireman in New Egypt, New Jersey, way back in 1952.

  Eliot had only one pair of shoes, black ones. They had a crackle finish as a result of an experiment. Eliot once tried to polish them with Johnson's Glo-Coat, which was a floorwax, not intended for shoes. One shoe was on his desk. The other was in the lavatory, on the rim of the washbasin. A maroon nylon sock, with garter attached, was in each shoe. One end of the garter of the sock in the shoe on the washbasin was in the water. It had saturated itself and its sock, too, through the magic of capillary action.

  The only colorful, new articles in the office, other than the magazine pictures, were a family-size box of Tide, the washday miracle, and the yellow slicker and red helmet of a volunteer fireman, which hung on pegs by the office door. Eliot was a Fire Lieutenant. He could easily have been Captain or Chief, since he was a devoted and skilful fireman, and had given the Fire Department six new engines besides. It was at his own insistence that he held a rank no higher than Lieutenant.