Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Sarah Wyatt was the girl's name. She was all of eighteen, and so was I. She was attending a very easy two-year college for rich girls in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which was Pine Manor. Her family lived in Prides Crossing, north of Boston--toward Gloucester. While we were in New York City together she would be staying with her maternal grandmother, a stockbroker's widow, in a queerly irrelevant enclave of dead-end streets and vest-pocket parks and Elizabethan apartment-hotels called "Tudor City"--near the East River, and actually bridging Forty-second Street. As luck will have it, my son now lives in Tudor City. So do Mr. and Mrs. Leland Clewes.

  Small world.

  Tudor City was quite new, but already bankrupt and nearly empty when I arrived by taxicab--to take my Sarah to the Hotel Arapahoe in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. I was wearing a tuxedo made to my measure by the finest tailor in Cleveland. I had a silver cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case, both gifts from Mr. McCone. I had forty dollars in my billfold. I could have bought the whole state of Arkansas for forty dollars cash in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one.

  We come to the matter of physical size again: Sarah Wyatt was three inches taller than me. She did not mind. She was so far from minding that, when I fetched her in Tudor City, she was wearing high heels with her evening dress.

  A stronger proof that she was indifferent to our disparity in size: In seven years Sarah Wyatt would agree to marry me.

  She wasn't quite ready when I arrived, so I had to talk to her grandmother, Mrs. Sutton, for a while. Sarah had warned me at the football game that afternoon that I must not mention suicide to Mrs. Sutton--because Mr. Sutton had jumped out of his office window in Wall Street after the stock market crashed in Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine.

  "It is a nice place you have here, Mrs. Sutton," I said.

  "You're the only person who thinks so," she said. "It's crowded. Everything that goes on in the kitchen you can smell out here."

  It was only a two-bedroom apartment. She had certainly come down in the world. Sarah said she used to have a horse farm in Connecticut and a house on Fifth Avenue, and on and on.

  The walls of the little entrance hall were covered with blue ribbons from horse shows before the Crash. "I see you have won a lot of blue ribbons," I said.

  "No," she said, "it was the horse that won those."

  We were seated on folding chairs at a card table in the middle of the living room. There were no easy chairs, no couch. But the room was so jammed with breakfronts and escritoires and armoires and highboys and lowboys and Welsh dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks and so on, that I could not guess where the windows were. It turned out that she also stockpiled servants, all very old. A uniformed maid had let me in, and then exited sideways into a narrow fissure between two imposing examples of cabinetwork.

  Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in "the electric" that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.

  Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.

  "I suppose this all looks very temporary to you," Mrs. Sutton said to me.

  "No, ma'am," I said.

  "It's quite permanent," she said. "I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated."

  "Yes, ma'am," I said. escritoires and armoires and highboys and lowboys and Welsh dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks and so on, that I could not guess where the windows were. It turned out that she also stockpiled servants, all very old. A uniformed maid had let me in, and then exited sideways into a narrow fissure between two imposing examples of cabinetwork.

  Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in "the electric" that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.

  Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.

  "I suppose this all looks very temporary to you," Mrs. Sutton said to me.

  "No, ma'am," I said.

  "It's quite permanent," she said. "I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated."

  "Yes, ma'am," I said.

  "Men in tuxedos as beautifully made as yours is should never call anyone but the Queen of England 'ma'am,'" she said.

  "I'll try to remember that," I said.

  "You are only a child, of course," she said.

  "Yes, ma'am," I said.

  "Tell me again how you are related to the McCones," she said.

  I had never told anyone that I was related to the McCones. There was another lie I had told frequently, however--a lie, like everything else about me, devised by Mr. McCone. He said it would be perfectly acceptable, even fashionable, to admit that my father was penniless, but it would not do to have a household servant for a father.

  The lie went like this, and I told it to Mrs. Sutton: "My father works for Mr. McCone as curator of his art collection. He also advises Mr. McCone on what to buy."

  "A cultivated man," she said.

  "He studied art in Europe," I said. "He is no businessman."

  "A dreamer," she said.

  "Yes," I said. "If it weren't for Mr. McCone, I could not afford to go to Harvard."

  "'Starbuck--' "she mused. "I believe that's an old Nantucket name."

  I was ready for that one, too. "Yes," I said, "but my great-grandfather left Nantucket for the Gold Rush and never returned. I must go to Nantucket sometime and look at the old records, to see where we fit in."

  "A California family," she said.

  "Nomads, really," I said. "California, yes--but Oregon, too, and Wyoming, and Canada, and Europe. But they were always bookish people--teachers and so on."

  I was pure phlogiston, an imaginary element of long ago.

  "Descended from whaling captains," she said.

  "I imagine," I said. I was not at all uncomfortable with the lies.

  "And from Vikings before that," she said. I shrugged.

  She had decided to like me a lot--and would continue to do so until the end. As Sarah would tell me, Mrs. Sutton often referred to me as her little Viking. She would not live long enough to see Sarah agree to marry me and then to jilt me. She died in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-seven or so--penniless in an apartment furnished with little more than a card table, two folding chairs, and her bed. She had sold off all her treasures in order to support herself and her old servants, who would have had no place to go and nothing to eat without her. She survived them all. The maid, who was Tillie, was the last of them to die. Two weeks after Tillie died, so did Mrs. Sutton depart from this world.

  Back there in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, while I was waiting for Sarah to complete her toilette, Mrs. Sutton told me that Mr. McCone's father, the founder of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, built the biggest house where she spent her girlhood summers--in Bar Harbor, Maine. When it was finished, he gave a grand ball with four orchestras, and
nobody came.

  "It seemed very beautiful and noble to snub him like that," she said. "I remember how happy I was the next day. I can't help wondering now if we weren't just a little insane. I don't mean that we were insane to miss a wonderful party or to hurt the feelings of Daniel McCone. Daniel McCone was a perfectly ghastly man. What was insane was the way we all imagined that God was watching, and simply adoring us, guaranteeing us all seats at His right hand for having snubbed Daniel McCone."

  I asked her what had become of the McCone mansion in Bar Harbor. My mentor had never mentioned it to me.

  "Mr. and Mrs. McCone vanished from Bar Harbor the next day," she said, "with their two young sons, I believe."

  "Yes," I said. One son became my mentor. The other son became chairman of the board and president of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron.

  "A month later," she said, "around Labor Day, although there was no Labor Day then--when summer was about to end--a special train arrived. There were perhaps eight freight cars and three cars of workmen, who had come all the way from Cleveland. They must have been from Mr. McCone's factory. How pale they looked! They were almost all foreigners, I remember--Germans, Poles, Italians, Hungarians. Who could tell? There had never been such people in Bar Harbor before. They slept on the train. They ate on the train. They allowed themselves to be herded like to her. They, too, had been the brainstorm of Alexander Hamilton McCone.

  "You are so beautiful!" I said, rising raptly from my folding chair. It was true, surely, for she was tall and slender and golden-haired--and blue-eyed. Her skin was like satin. Her teeth were like pearls. But she radiated about as much sexuality as her grandmother's card table.

  This would continue to be the case for the next seven years. Sarah Wyatt believed that sex was a sort of pratfall that was easily avoided. To avoid it, she had only to remind a would-be lover of the ridiculousness of what he proposed to do to her. The first time I kissed her, which was in Wellesley the week before, I suddenly found myself being played like a tuba, to speak. Sarah was convulsed by laughter, with her lips still pressed to mine. She tickled me. She pulled out my shirttails, leaving me in humiliating disarray. It was terrible. Nor was her laughter about sexuality girlish and nervous, something a man might be expected to modulate with tenderness and anatomical skill. It was the unbridled hee-hawing of somebody at a Marx Brothers film.

  A phrase keeps asking to be used at this point: "nobody home."

  It was in fact a phrase used by a Harvard classmate who also took Sarah out, but only twice, as I recall. I asked him what he thought of her, and he replied with some bitterness: "nobody home!" He was Kyle Denny, a football player from Philadelphia. Somebody told me recently that Kyle died in a fall in his bathtub on the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He cracked his head open on a faucet.

  So I can fix the date of Kyle Denny's death with pinpoint accuracy: December the seventh, Nineteen-hundred and Forty-one.

  "You do look nice, my dear," said Mrs. Sutton to Sarah. She was pitifully ancient--about five years younger than I am now. I thought she might cry about Sarah's beauty, and how that beauty was sure to fade in just a few years, and on and on. She was very wise.

  "I feel so silly," said Sarah.

  "You don't believe you're beautiful?" said her grandmother.

  "I know I'm beautiful," said Sarah. "I look in a mirror, and I think, 'I'm beautiful.'"

  "What's wrong, then?" said her grandmother.

  "Beautiful is such a funny thing to be," said Sarah. "Somebody else is ugly, but I'm beautiful. Walter says I'm beautiful. You say I'm beautiful. I say I'm beautiful. Everybody says, 'Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,' and you start wondering what it is, and what's so wonderful about it."

  "You make people happy with your beauty," said her grandmother.

  "You certainly make me happy with it," I said.

  Sarah laughed. "It's so silly," she said. "It's so dumb," she said.

  "Perhaps you shouldn't think about it so much," said her grandmother.

  "That's like telling a midget to stop thinking about being a midget," said Sarah, and she laughed again.

  "You should stop saying everything is silly and dumb," said her grandmother.

  "Everything is silly and dumb," said Sarah.

  "You will learn differently as you grow older," her grandmother promised.

  "I think everybody older just pretends to know what's going on, and it's all so serious and wonderful," said Sarah. "Older people haven't really found out anything new that I don't know. Maybe if people didn't get so serious when they got older, we wouldn't have a depression now."

  "There's nothing constructive in laughing all the time," said her grandmother.

  "I can cry, too," said Sarah. "You want me to cry?"

  "No," said her grandmother. "I don't want to hear any more about it. You just go out with this nice young man and have a lovely time."

  "I can't laugh about those poor women who painted the clocks," said Sarah. "That's one thing I can't laugh about."

  "Nobody wants you to," said her grandmother. "You run along now."

  Sarah was referring to an industrial tragedy that was notorious at the time. Sarah's family was in the middle of it, and sick about it. Sarah had already told me that she was sick about it, and so had her brother, my roommate, and so had their father and mother. The tragedy was a slow one that could not be stopped once it had begun, and it began in the family's clock company, the Wyatt Clock Company, one of the oldest companies in the United States, in Brockton, Massachusetts. It was an avoidable tragedy. The Wyatts never tried to justify it, and would not hire lawyers to justify it. It could not be justified.

  It went like this: In the nineteen twenties the United States Navy awarded Wyatt Clock a contract to produce several thousand standardized ships' clocks that could be easily read in the dark. The dials were to be black. The hands and the numerals were to be hand-painted with white paint containing the radioactive element radium. About half a hundred Brockton women, most of them relatives of regular Wyatt Clock Company employees, were hired to paint the hands and numerals. It was a way to make pin money. Several of the women who had young children to look after were allowed to do the work at home.

  Now all those women had died or were about to die most horribly with their bones crumbling, with their heads rotting off. The cause was radium poisoning. Every one of them had been told by a foreman, it had since come out in court, that she should keep a fine point on her brush by moistening it and shaping it with her lips from time to time.

  And, as luck would have it, the daughter of one of those unfortunate women would become one of the four women I have ever loved in this Vale of Tears--along with my mother, my wife, and Sarah Wyatt. Mary Kathleen O'Looney was her name.

  10

  I SPEAK ONLY OF RUTH as "my wife." It would not surprise me, though, if on Judgment Day Sarah Wyatt and Mary Kathleen O'Looney were also certified as having been wives of mine. I surely paired off with both of them--with Mary Kathleen for about eleven months, and with Sarah, off and on, to be sure, for about seven years.

  I can hear Saint Peter saying to me: "It would appear, Mr. Starbuck, that you were something of a Don Juan."

  So there I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, sashaying into the wedding-cake lobby of the Hotel Arapahoe with beautiful Sarah Wyatt, the Yankee clock heiress, on my arm. Her family was nearly as broke as mine by then. What little they had salvaged would soon be dispersed among the survivors of the women who painted all those clocks for the Navy. This dispersal would be compelled in about a year by a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court as to the personal responsibility of employers for deaths in their places of work caused by criminal negligence.

  Eighteen-year-old Sarah now said of the Arapahoe lobby, "It's so dirty--and there's nobody here." She laughed. "I love it," she said.

  At that point in time, in the filthy lobby of the Arapahoe, Sarah Wyatt did not know that I was acting with all possible humorlessness on orders fr
om Alexander Hamilton McCone. She would tell me later that she thought I was being witty when I said we should get all dressed up. She thought we were costumed like millionaires in the spirit of Halloween. We would laugh and laugh, she hoped. We would be people in a movie.

  Not at all: I was a robot programmed to behave like a genuine aristocrat.

  Oh, to be young again!

  The dirt in the Arapahoe lobby might not have been so obvious, if somebody had not started to do something about it and then stopped. There was a tall stepladder set against one wall. There was a bucket at the base of it, filled with dirty water and with a brush floating on top. Someone had clearly scaled the ladder with the bucket. He had scrubbed as much of the wall as he could reach from the top. He had created a circle of cleanliness, dribbling filth at its bottom, to be sure, but as bright as a harvest moon.

  I do not know who made the harvest moon. There was no one to ask. There had been no doorman to invite us in. There were no bellboys and no guests inside. There wasn't a soul behind the reception desk in the distance. The newsstand and the theater-ticket kiosk were shuttered. The doors of the unmanned elevators were propped open by chairs.

  "I don't think they're in business anymore," said Sarah.

  "Somebody accepted my reservation on the telephone," I said. "He called me 'monsieur.'"

  "Anybody can call anybody 'monsieur' on the telephone," said Sarah.

  But then we heard a Gypsy violin crying somewhere--sobbing as though its heart would break. And when I hear that violin's lamenting in my memory now, I am able to add this information: Hitler, not yet in power, would soon cause to be killed every Gypsy his soldiers and policemen could catch.

  The music was coming from behind a folding screen in the lobby. Sarah and I dared to move the screen from the wall. We were confronted by a pair of French doors, which were held shut with a padlock and hasp. The panes in the doors were mirrors, showing us yet again how childish and rich we were. But Sarah discovered one pane that had a flaw in its silvering. She peeped through the flaw, then invited me to take a turn. I was flabbergasted. I might have been peering into the twinkling prisms of a time machine. On the other side of the French doors was the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe in pristine condition, complete with a Gypsy fiddler--almost atom for atom as it must have been in the time of Diamond Jim Brady. A thousand candles in the chandeliers and on the tables became billions of tiny stars because of all the silver and crystal and china and mirrors in there.