A moment later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou, and brushed past him wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride.
Shocked, Lou didn't know what on earth to do. He couldn't let Cramps take the mousetrapped anti-gerasone; but if he warned Cramps about it, Cramps would certainly make life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing.
Lou glanced into the living room, and saw that the Schwartzes, Emerald among them, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that McGarveys had made of their lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, locked the door as well as he could, and began to pour the contents of Cramps' bottle down the drain. He was going to refill it with full-strength anti-gerasone from the twenty-two smaller bottles on the shelf. The bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almost imperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment through the keyhole and under the door.
"Gloog-gloog-gloog-gloog-," went the bottle monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living room, and there were murmurs and the scraping of chair legs on the floor. "Thus ends," said the television announcer, "the 29,1215* chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, the McGarveys." Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door.
"Just a sec," called Lou cheerily. Desperately, he shook the big bottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed to splinters on the tile floor.
The door sprung open, and Cramps, dumfounded, stared at the mess.
Lou grinned engagingly through his nausea, and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, he waited for Cramps to speak.
"Well, boy," said Cramps at last, "looks like you've got a little tidying up to do."
And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd, and locked himself in his bedroom.
The Schwartzes contemplated Lou in incredulous silence for a moment longer, and then hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he, too, went into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.
Tears streamed over her cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb—please don't look so awful. It was my fault. I put you up to this."
"No," said Lou, finding his voice, "really you didn't. Honest, Em, I was just—"
"You don't have to explain anything to me, hon. I'm on your side no matter what." She kissed him on his cheek, and whispered in his ear. "It wouldn't have been murder, hon. It wouldn't have killed him. It wasn't such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he'd be able to go any time God decided He wanted him."
"What's gonna happen next, Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's he gonna do?"
Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Cramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. At two hours before dawn, the pair dropped off to sleep.
At six o'clock they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son's generation.
Then, as was the custom for whomever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Cramps' breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine on which Cramps spent almost all of the income from his fortune.
"Well," said Emerald, "I'm not going to get all panicky until I'm sure there's something to be panicky about."
"Maybe he doesn't know what it was I busted," said Lou hopefully.
"Probably thinks it was your watch crystal," said Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.
"Don't get sarcastic with your father," said Em, "and don't talk with your mouth full, either."
"I'd like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something," said Eddie, who was seventy-three. He glanced at the clock. "It's time to take Cramps his breakfast, you know."
"Yeah, it is, isn't it," said Lou weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have the tray, Em."
"We'll both go."
Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semicircle of long-faced Schwartzes standing around the bedroom door.
Em knocked. "Cramps," she said brightly, "break-fast is rea-dy."
There was no reply, and she knocked again, harder.
The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Schwartz, was empty.
A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Schwartzes as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice and slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly under the furniture and behind the drapes for all that was mortal of Cramps, father of the race.
But Cramps had left not his earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the 2000 World's Fair. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:
"'Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I. once could. So, after last night's bitter experience, I say goodbye. The cares of this world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns, and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.'"
"Gosh," said Willy brokenly, "he didn't even get to see how the Five-Hundred-Mile Speedway Race was going to come out."
"Or the World's Series," said Eddie.
"Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back," said Morty.
"There's more," said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: "1, Harold D. Schwartz… do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all former will and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.'"
"No!" cried Willy. "Not another one!"
"'I do stipulate,'" read Lou, "'that all of my property, of whatsoever kind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to be held in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike.'"
"Issue?" said Emerald.
Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. "It means we all own the whole damn shootin' match.''
All eyes turned instantly to the bed.
"Share and share alike?" said Morty.
"Actually," said Willy, who was the oldest person present, "it's just like the old system, where the oldest people head up things with their headquarters in here, and—"
"I like that!" said Em. "Lou owns as much of it as you do, and I say it ought to be for the oldest one who's still working. You can snooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, and poor Lou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and—"
"How about letting somebody who's never had any privacy get a little crack at it?" said Eddie hotly. "Hell, you old people had plenty of privacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle of the goddam barracks in the hall! How about—"
"Yeah?" said Morty. "Sure, you've all had it pretty tough, and my heart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick."
"Silence!" shouted Willy imperiously. "The next person who opens his mouth spends the next six months by the bathroom. Now clear out of my room. I want to think."
A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head. In the next moment, a free-for-all was underway, with e
ach couple
battling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitions formed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tactical situation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organized others in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.
After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, the cops broke in.
For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Schwartzes, and then the apartment was still and spacious.
An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televised to 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.
In the stillness of the three-room Schwartz apartment on the 76th floor of Building 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air was filled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, coming harmlessly now from the loudspeaker.
The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in the police station, where the Schwartzes and their captors watched with professional interest.
Em and Lou were in adjacent four-by-eight cells, and were stretched out peacefully on their cots.
"Em—" called Lou through the partition, "you got a washbasin all your own too?"
"Sure. Washbasin, bed, light-the works. Ha! And we thought Cramps' room was something. How long's this been going on?" She held out her hand. "For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven't got the shakes."
"Cross your fingers," said Lou, "the lawyer'., going to try to get us a year."
"Gee," said Em dreamily, "I wonder what kind of wires you'd have to pull to get solitary?"
"All right, pipe down," said the turnkey, "or I'll toss the whole kit and caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybody outside how good jail is ain't never getting back in!"
The prisoners instantly fell silent.
The living room of the Schwartz apartment darkened for a moment, as the riot scenes faded, and then the face of the announcer appeared, like the sun coming from behind a cloud. "And now, friends," he said, "I have a special message from the makers of anti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over one hundred and fifty. Are you hampered socially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or loss of hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone was developed? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longer feel different and out of things.
"After years of research, medical science has now developed supei-anti-gerasone! In weeks, yes weeks, you can look, feel, and act as young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn't you pay $5,000 to be indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don't have to. Safe, tested super-anti-gerasone costs you only dollars a day. The average cost of regaining all the sparkle and attractiveness of youth is less than fifty dollars.
"Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address on a dollar postcard, and mail it to 'Super,' Box 500,000, Schenectady, N. Y. Have you got that? I'll repeat it. 'Super.' Box…" Underlining the announcer's words was the scratching of Cramps' fountain-pen, the one Willy had given him the night before. He had come in a few minutes previous from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building 257 across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, and had hired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction. Cramps had then moved the daybed before the television screen so that he could watch from a reclining position. It was something he'd dreamed of doing for years.
"Schen-ec-ta-dy," mouthed Cramps. "Got it." His face had changed remarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealing kindness and equanimity under what had been taut, bad-tempered lines. It was almost as though his trial package of Super-anti-gerasone had already arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiled easily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of his mouth a millimeter. Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happen next.
(1953)
PALM SUNDAY
An Autobiographical Collage
For my cousins the de St. Andrés everywhere.
Who has the castle now?
TABLE OF CONTENTS (BITS OF THE COLLAGE)
PALM SUNDAY
INTRODUCTION
I. THE FIRST AMENDMENT
"Dear Mr. McCarthy"—letter by KV to head of school committee in Drake, N.D., where his books were burned
"Un-American Nonsense"—essay for The New York Times by KV, about the banning of his books by the school committee of Island Trees, N. Y.
"God's Law"—speech by KV at a fund raiser for the American Civil Liberties Union in Sands Point, N. Y.
"Dear Felix"—letter by KV to a Russian friend about the harassment of writers in the USSR
II. ROOTS
"An Account of the Ancestry of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., by an Ancient Friend of His Family"—formal essay by the late John G. Rauch of Indianapolis
III. WHEN I LOST MY INNOCENCE
"What I Liked about Cornell"—speech by KV to an annual banquet o/The Cornell Daily Sun in Ithaca, N. Y.
"When I Lost My Innocence"—essay by KV for Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper
"I Am Embarrassed"—antinuke speech by KV at rally in Washington, D.C.
IV. TRIAGE
"How to Write with Style"—essay by KV for a campaign by the International Paper Company to encourage literacy
V. SELF-INTERVIEW
Replies by KV to questions put by himself for The Paris Review No.
VI. THE PEOPLE ONE KNOWS
"Who in America Is Truly Happy?"—essay by KVon William F. Buckley, Jr., for Politics Today
"Something Happened"—review by KV for The New York Times Book Review of Joseph Heller's second novel
"The Rocky Graziano of American Letters" —speech by KV at banquet in honor of Irwin Shaw at the Players' Club, New York City
"The Best of Bob and Ray"—introduction by KV to book by the great comedians Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding
"James T. Farrell"—speech by KV at FarreWs funeral in New York City
VII. PLAYMATES
'Lavina Lyon"—speech by KV at the funeral of an old friend in Lexington, Ky.
The Class of '57"—-song by Don and Harold Reid of the Statler Brothers, a country-music quartet
"The Noodle factory"—speech by KV at the dedication of the new library at the University of Connecticut, New London
VIII. MARK TWAIN
"Mark Twain"—speech by KV at the one-hundredth anniversary celebration of the completion of Mark Twain's fanciful residence in Hartford, Conn.
IX. FUNNIER ON PAPER THAN MOST PEOPLE
"How Jokes Work"—commencement address by KV at Fredonia College, Fredonia, N.Y.
X. EMBARRASSMENT
XI. RELIGION
"Do Not Mourn!"—speech written by KVs great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, to be read at his own funeral
"Thoughts of a Free Thinker"—commencement address by KV at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, N. Y.
"William Ellery Channing"—speech by KV on the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Unitarian minister, First Parish Church, Cambridge, Mass.
XII. OBSCENITY
"The Big Space Fuck"—short story by KV
XIII. CHILDREN
"Fear and Loathing in Morristown, N.J."— speech by KV to the Mental Health Association of New Jersey
"Dear Mr. X"—letter by Nanette Vonnegut, waitress, to disgruntled restaurant customer
XIV. JONATHAN SWIFT MISPERCEIVED
"Jonathan Swift"—rejected introduction by KV to new edition of Gulliver's Travels
XV. JEKYLL AND HYDE UPDATED
The Chemistry Professor—treatment by KV for a musical comedy based on Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
XVI. A NAZI SYMPATHIZER DEFENDED AT SOME COST
"Louis-Ferdinand Céline"—introduction by KV to paperback editions of the controversial author's last three novels
XVII. A NAZI CITY MOURNED AT SO
ME PROFIT
"Dresden Revisited"—introduction by KV to new edition of Slaughterhouse-Five
XVIII. THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
"Flowers on the Wall"—song by Lew DeWitt of the Statler Brothers
XIX. IN THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
"Palm Sunday"—sermon delivered by KV at St. Clement's Church, New York City
INTRODUCTION
THIS is a very great book by an American genius. I have worked so hard on this masterpiece for the past six years. I have groaned and banged my head on radiators. I have walked through every hotel lobby in New York, thinking about this book and weeping, and driving my fist into the guts of grandfather clocks.
It is a marvelous new literary form. This book combines the tidal power of a major novel with the bone-rattling immediacy of front-line journalism—which is old stuff now, God knows, God knows. But I have also intertwined the flashy enthusiasms of musical theater, the lethal left jab of the short story, the sachet of personal letters, the oompah of American history, and oratory in the bow-wow style.
This book is so broad and deep that it reminds me of my brother Bernard's early experiments with radio. He built a transmitter of his own invention, and he hooked it up to a telegraph key, and he turned it on. He called up our cousin Richard, about two miles away, and he told Richard to listen to his radio, to tune it back and forth across the band, to see if he could pick up my brother's signals anywhere. They were both about fifteen.
My brother tapped out an easily recognizable message, sending it again and again and again. It was "SOS." This was in Indianapolis, the world's largest city not on a navigable waterway.
Cousin Richard telephoned back. He was thrilled. He said that Bernard's signals were loud and clear simply everywhere on the radio band, drowning out music or news or drama, or whatever the commercial stations were putting out at the time.
Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House Page 31
