Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

  "We could use a little short-range planning for next month's grocery bill."

  "Please," Herbert said to me again.

  I shrugged and followed him into the bedroom. He closed the door behind me. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him open a little door in the wall, which bared the pipes servicing the bathroom. He slid his arm up into the wall, grunted, and pulled down an envelope.

  "Oho," I said apathetically, "so that's where we've got the bonds, eh? Very clever. You needn't have gone to that trouble, Mr. Foster. I have an idea what government bonds look like."

  "Alma," he called.

  "Yes, Herbert."

  "Will you start some coffee for us?"

  "I don't drink coffee at night," I said.

  "We have some from dinner," Alma said.

  "I can't sleep if I touch it after supper," I said.

  "Fresh—we want some fresh," Herbert said.

  The chair springs creaked, and her reluctant footsteps faded into the kitchen.

  "Here," said Herbert, putting the envelope in my lap. "I don't know anything about this business, and I guess I ought to have professional help."

  All right, so I'd give the poor guy a professional talk about his three hundred and fifty dollars in government bonds. "They're the most conservative investment you can make. They haven't the growth characteristics of many securities, and the return isn't great, but they're very safe. By all means hang onto them." I stood up. "And now, if you'll let me call a cab—"

  "You haven't looked at them."

  I sighed, and untwisted the red string holding the envelope shut. Nothing would do but that I admire the things. The bonds and a list of securities slid into my lap. I riffled through the bonds quickly, and then read the list of securities slowly.

  "Well?"

  I put the list down on the faded bedspread. I composed myself. "Mmmmm, uh-huh," I said. "Do you mind telling me where the securities listed here came from?"

  "Grandfather left them to me two years ago. The lawyers who handled the estate have them. They sent me that list."

  "Do you know what these stocks are worth?"

  "They were appraised when I inherited them." He told me the figure, and, to my bewilderment, he looked sheepish, even a little unhappy about it.

  "They've gone up a little since then."

  "How much?"

  "On today's market—maybe they're worth seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Foster. Sir."

  His expression didn't change. My news moved him about as much as if I'd told him it'd been a chilly winter. He raised his eyebrows as Alma's footsteps came back into the living room. "Shhhh!"

  "She doesn't know?"

  "Lord, no!" He seemed to have surprised himself with his vehemence. "I mean the time isn't ripe."

  "If you'll let me have this list of securities, I'll have our New York office give you a complete analysis and recommendations," I whispered. "May I call you Herbert, sir?"

  My client, Herbert Foster, hadn't had a new suit in three years; he had never owned more than one pair of shoes at a time. He worried about payments on his secondhand car, and ate tuna and cheese instead of meat, because meat was too expensive. His wife made her own clothes, and those of Herbert, Jr., and the curtains and slipcovers—all cut from the same bargain bolt. The Fosters were going through hell, trying to choose between new tires or retreads for the car; and television was something they had to go two doors down the street to watch. Determinedly, they kept within the small salary Herbert made as a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocery house.

  God knows it's no disgrace to live that way, which is better than the way I live, but it was pretty disturbing to watch, knowing Herbert had an income, after taxes, of perhaps twenty thousand a year.

  I had our securities analysts look over Foster's holdings, and report on the stocks' growth possibilities, prospective earnings, the effects of war and peace, inflation and deflation, and so on. The report ran to twenty pages, a record for any of my clients. Usually, the reports are bound in cardboard covers. Herbert's was done up in red leatherette.

  It arrived at my place on a Saturday afternoon, and I called up Herbert to ask if I could bring it out. I had exciting news for him. My by-eye estimate of the values had been off, and his portfolio, as of that day, was worth close to eight hundred and fifty thousand.

  "I've got the analysis and recommendations," I said, "and things look good, Mr. Foster—very good. You need a little diversification here and there, and maybe more emphasis on growth, but-"

  "Just go ahead and do whatever needs to be done," he said.

  "When could we talk about this? It's something we ought to go over together, certainly. Tonight would be fine with me."

  "I work tonight."

  "Overtime at the wholesale house?"

  "Another job—in a restaurant. Work Friday, Saturday, and

  Sunday nights."

  I winced. The man had maybe seventy-five dollars a day coming in from his securities, and he worked three nights a week to make ends meet! "Monday?"

  "Play organ for choir practice at the church."

  "Tuesday?"

  "Volunteer Fire Department drill."

  "Wednesday?"

  "Play piano for folk dancing at the church."

  "Thursday?"

  "Movie night for Alma and me."

  "When, then?"

  "You go ahead and do whatever needs to be done."

  "Don't you want to be in on what I'm doing?"

  "Do I have to be?"

  "I'd feel better if you were."

  "All right, Tuesday noon, lunch."

  "Fine with me. Maybe you'd better have a good look at this report before then, so you can have questions ready."

  He sounded annoyed. "Okay, okay, okay. I'll be here tonight until nine. Drop it off before then."

  "One more thing, Herbert." I'd saved the kicker for last. "I was way off about what the stocks are worth. They're now up to about eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

  "Urn."

  "I said, you're about a hundred thousand dollars richer than you thought!"

  "Uh-huh. Well, you just go ahead and do whatever needs to be done."

  "Yes, sir." The phone was dead.

  I was delayed by other business, and I didn't get out to the Fosters' until quarter of ten. Herbert was gone. Alma answered the door, and, to my surprise, she asked for the report, which I was hiding under my coat.

  "Herbert said I wasn't supposed to look at it," she said, "so you don't need to worry about me peeking."

  "Herbert told you about this?" I said carefully.

  "Yes. He said it's confidential reports on stocks you want to sell him."

  "Yes, uh-huh—well, if he said to leave it with you, here it is."

  "He told me he had to promise you not to let anybody look at it."

  "Mmm? Oh, yes, yes. Sorry, company rules."

  She was a shade hostile. "I'll tell you one thing without looking at any reports, and that is he's not going to cash those bonds to buy any stocks with."

  "I'd be the last one to recommend that, Mrs. Foster."

  "Then why do you keep after him?"

  "He may be a good customer at a later date." I looked at my hands, which I realized had become inkstained on the earlier call. "I wonder if I might wash up?"

  Reluctantly, she let me in, keeping as far away from me as the modest floor plan would permit.

  As I washed up, I thought of the list of securities Herbert had taken from between the plasterboard walls. Those securities meant winters in Florida, filet mignon and twelve-year-old bourbon, Jaguars, silk underwear and handmade shoes, a trip around the world… Name it; Herbert Foster could have it. I sighed heavily. The soap in the Foster soap dish was mottled and dingy —a dozen little chips moistened and pressed together to make a new bar.

  I thanked Alma, and started to leave. On my way out, I paused by the mantel to look at a small tinted photograph. "Good picture of you," I said. A feeble effort a
t public relations. "I like that."

  "Everybody says that. It isn't me; it's Herbert's mother."

  "Amazing likeness." And it was. Herbert had married a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad. "And this picture is his father?"

  "My father. We don't want a picture of his father."

  This looked like a sore point that might prove informative. "Herbert is such a wonderful person, his father must have been wonderful, too, eh?"

  "He deserted his wife and child. That's how wonderful he was. You'll be smart not to mention him to Herbert."

  "Sorry. Everything good about Herbert comes from his mother?"

  "She was a saint. She taught Herbert to be decent and respectable and God-fearing." Alma was grim about it.

  "Was she musical, too?"

  "He gets that from his father. But what he does with it is something quite different. His taste in music is his mother's—the classics."

  "His father was a jazz man, I take it?" I hinted.

  "He preferred playing piano in dives, and breathing smoke and drinking gin, to his wife and child and home and job. Herbert's mother finally said he had to choose one life or the other."

  I nodded sympathetically. Maybe Herbert looked on his fortune as filthy, untouchable, since it came from his father's side of the family. "This grandfather of Herbert's, who died two years ago-?"

  "He supported Herbert and his mother after his son deserted them/Herbert worshipped him." She shook her head sadly. "He was penniless when he died."

  "What a shame."

  "I'd so hoped he would leave us a little something, so Herbert wouldn't have to work weekends."

  We were trying to talk above the clatter, tinkle, and crash* of the cafeteria where Herbert ate every day. Lunch was on me— or on my expense account—and I'd picked up his check for eighty-seven cents. I said, "Now, Herbert, before we go any further, we'd better decide what you want from your investments: growth or income." It was a cliché of the counseling business. God knows what he wanted from the securities. It didn't seem to be what everybody else wanted—money.

  "Whatever you say," Herbert said absently. He was upset about something, and not paying much attention to me.

  "Herbert—look, you've got to face this thing. You're a rich man. You've got to concentrate on making the most of your holdings."

  "That's why I called you. I want you to concentrate. I want you to run things for me, so I won't have to bother with the deposits and proxies and taxes. Don't trouble me with it at all."

  "Your lawyers have been banking the dividends, eh?"

  "Most of them. Took out thirty-two dollars for Christmas, and gave a hundred to the church."

  "So what's your balance?"

  He handed me the deposit book.

  "Not bad," I said. Despite his Christmas splurge and largess toward the church, he'd managed to salt away $50,227.33. "May I ask what a man with a balance like that can be blue about?"

  "Got bawled out at work again."

  "Buy the place and burn it down," I suggested.

  "I could, couldn't I?" A wild look came into his eyes, then disappeared.

  "Herbert, you can do anything your heart desires."

  "Oh, I suppose so. It's all in the way you look at it."

  I leaned forward. "How do you look at it, Herbert?"

  "I think every man, for his own self-respect, should earn what he lives on."

  "But, Herbert-"

  "I have a wonderful wife and child, a nice house for them, and a car. And I've earned every penny of the way. I'm living up to the full measure of my responsibilities. I'm proud to say I'm everything my mother wanted me to be, and nothing my father was."

  "Do you mind my asking what your father was?"

  "I don't enjoy talking about him. Home and family meant nothing to him. His real love was for low-down music and honky-tonks, and for the trash in them."

  "Was he a good musician, do you think?"

  "Good?" For an instant, there was excitement in his voice, and he tensed, as though he were going to make an important point. But he relaxed again. "Good?" he repeated, flatly this time. "Yes, in a crude way, I suppose he was passable—technically, that is."

  "And that much you inherited from him."

  "His wrists and hands, maybe. God help me if there's any more of him in me."

  "You've got his love of music, too."

  "I love music, but I'd never let it get like dope to me!" he said, with more force than seemed necessary. "Uh-huh. Well-"

  "Never!"

  "Beg your pardon?"

  His eyes were wide. "I said I'll never let music get like dope to me. It's important to me, but I'm master of it, and not the other way around."

  Apparently it was a treacherous subject, so I switched back to the matter of his finances. "Yes, well, now about your portfolio again: just what use do you expect to make of it?"

  "Use some of it for Alma's and my old age; leave most of it to the boy."

  "The least you can do is take enough out of the kitty to let you out of working weekends."

  He stood up suddenly. "Look. I want you to handle my securities, not my life. If you can't do one without the other, I'll find someone who can."

  "Please, Herbert, Mr. Foster. I'm sorry, sir. I was only trying to get the whole picture for planning."

  He sat down, red-faced. "All right then, respect my convictions. I want to make my own way. If I have to hold a second job to make ends meet, then that's my cross to bear."

  "Sure, sure, certainly. And you're dead right, Herbert. I respect you for it." I thought he belonged in the bughouse for it. "You leave everything to me from now on. I’ll invest those dividends and run the whole show." As I puzzled over Herbert, I glanced at a passing blonde. Herbert said something I missed. "What was that, Herbert?"

  "I said, 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.'"

  I laughed appreciatively, then cut it short. Herbert was deadly serious. "Well, pretty soon you'll have the car paid for, and then you can take a well-earned rest on the weekends. And you'll really have something to be proud of, eh? Earned the whole car by the sweat of your brow, right down to the tip of the exhaust pipe."

  "One more payment."

  "Then by-by, restaurant."

  "There'll still be Alma's birthday present to pay for. I'm getting her television."

  "Going to earn that, too, are you?"

  "Think how much more meaningful it will be as a gift, if I do."

  "Yes, sir, and it'll give her something to do on weekends, too."

  "If I have to work weekends for twenty-eight more months, God knows it's little enough to do for her."

  If the stock market kept doing what it had been doing for the past three years, Herbert would be a millionaire just about the time he made the last payment on Alma's birthday present. "Fine."

  "I love my family," Herbert said earnestly.

  "I'm sure you do."

  "And I wouldn't trade the life I've got for anything."

  "I can certainly see why," I said. I had the impression that he was arguing with me, that it was important to him that I be convinced.

  "When I consider what my father was, and then see the life I've made for myself, it's the biggest thrill in all my experience."

  A very small thrill could qualify for the biggest in Herbert's experience, I thought. "I envy you. It must be gratifying."

  "Gratifying," he repeated determinedly. "It is, it is, it is."

  My firm began managing Herbert's portfolio, converting some of the slower-moving securities into more lucrative ones, investing the accumulated dividends, diversifying his holdings so he'd be in better shape to weather economic shifts—and in general making his fortune altogether shipshape. A sound portfolio is a thing of beauty in its way, aside from its cash value. Putting one together is a creative act, if done right, with solid major themes of industrials, rails, and utilities, and with the lighter, more exciting themes of electronics, frozen foods,
magic drugs, oil and gas, aviation, and other more speculative items. Herbert's portfolio was our masterpiece. I was thrilled and proud of what the firm had done, and not being able to show it off, even to him, was depressing.

  It was too much for me, and I decided to engineer a coincidence. I would find out in which restaurant Herbert worked, and then drop in, like any other citizen, for something to eat. I would happen to have a report on his overhauled portfolio with me.

  I telephoned Alma, who told me the name of the place, one I'd never heard of. Herbert hadn't wanted to talk about the place, so I gathered that it was pretty grim—as he said, his cross to bear.

  It was worse than I'd expected: tough, brassy, dark, and noisy. Herbert had picked one hell of a place, indeed, to do penance for a wayward father, or to demonstrate his gratitude to his wife, or to maintain his self-respect by earning his own way—or to do whatever it was he was doing there.

  I elbowed my way between bored-looking women and racetrack types to the bar. I had to shout at the bartender to be heard. When I did get through to him, he yelled back that he'd never heard of no Herbert Foster. Herbert, then, was about as minor an employee as there was in the establishment. He was probably doing something greasy in the kitchen or basement. Typical.

  In the kitchen, a crone was making questionable-looking hamburgers, and nipping at a quart of beer.

  "I'm looking for Herbert Foster."

  "Ain' no damn' Herbert Foster in here."

  "In the basement?"

  "Ain' no damn' basement."

  "Ever hear of Herbert Foster?"

  "Ain't never heard of no damn' Herbert Foster."

  "Thanks."

  I sat in a booth to think it over. Herbert had apparently picked the joint out of a telephone book, and told Alma it was where he spent his weekend evenings. In a way, it made me feel better, because it began to look as though Herbert maybe had better reasons than he'd given me for letting eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars get musty. I remembered that every time I'd mentioned his giving up the weekend job, he'd reacted like a man hearing a dentist tune up his drill. I saw it now: the minute he let Alma know he was rich, he'd lose his excuse for getting away from her on weekends.

  But what was it that was worth more to Herbert than eight hundred and fifty thousand? Binges? Dope? Women? I sighed, and admitted I was kidding myself, that I was no closer to the answer than I'd ever been. Moral turpitude on Herbert's part was inconceivable. Whatever he was up to, it had to be for a good cause. His mother had done such a thorough job on him, and he was so awfully ashamed of his father's failings, that I was sure he couldn't operate any other way but righteously. I gave up on the puzzle, and ordered a nightcap.