Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition

by Kurt Vonnegut,Gregory D. Sumner

“Not that leaky thing,” he said, brushing Lou’s pen aside. “Ah, there’s a nice one. Good boy, Willy.” He accepted Willy’s pen. That was the tip they’d all been waiting for. Willy, then, Lou’s father, was the new favorite.

  Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though one hundred and forty-two, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.

  Gramps missed none of the high drama he’d authored, and he gave his own familiar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep, portentous monotone, like a bass tone on a cathedral organ:

  “I, Harold D. Schwartz, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New York City, do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.” He blew his nose importantly, and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many for emphasis—repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.

  At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought he might forget why he’d gotten out the will in the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control, and, after erasing for a full minute, he began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he’d heard them so often.

  “I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better land,” Gramps said and wrote. “But the deepest hurt of all has been dealt me by—” He looked around the group, trying to remember who the malefactor was.

  Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly.

  Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence: “my great-grandson, Louis J. Schwartz.”

  “Grandson, sir,” said Lou.

  “Don’t quibble. You’re in deep enough now, young man,” said Gramps, but he changed the trifle. And from there he went without a misstep through the phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.

  In the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room at one time or another, Lou’s name was scratched out and Willy’s substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom. “So!” said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will, and substituted a new one, including the time of day. “Well—time to watch the McGarvey Family.” The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was sixty, or for one hundred and twelve years. “I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next,” he said.

  Lou detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom door. He wished Em would join him, and he wondered where she was.

  He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone’s stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, and that she was in there doing something drastic about Gramps.

  “Em—?” he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward.

  “Morty!” gasped Lou.

  Lou’s great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to the Schwartz menage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand—Gramps’ enormous economy-size bottle of anti-gerasone, which had been half-emptied, and which Morty was refilling to the top with tap water.

  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 Gramps take the mousetrapped anti-gerasone; but if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps 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 Gramps’ 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 29,121st 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 Gramps, dumfounded, stared at the mess.

  Lou grinned engagingly through his nausea, and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, he waited for Gramps to speak.

  “Well, boy,” said Gramps 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 Gramps 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 Gramps’ 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 Gramps 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 Gramps 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. “Gramps,” 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 Gramps, father of the race.

  But Gramps 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: “ ‘I, 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 each 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 Gramps’ 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’s 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 super-anti-gerosone! 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 Gramps’ 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. Gramps 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 Gramps. “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 arri
ved. 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)

  BUILDING THE MONKEY HOUSE

  AT KURT VONNEGUT’S WRITING TABLE

  BY GREGORY D. SUMNER

  1. THE BASHER

  Kurt Vonnegut liked to tell the story of the handyman he hired to build an addition to his old farmhouse in West Barnstable, on Cape Cod. This was the home where Vonnegut lived for twenty years, struggling to support his family as an author. The addition was to be a study, a place where he could work in relative peace and quiet, away from the bustle of his six children. The son of an architect, and a tinkerer and draftsman and woodworker himself, Vonnegut was naturally curious about the project, and he took regular breaks from his writing table to watch as it unfolded. Over several days the contractor went about his tasks, focusing on one part of the job at a time, one board and nail and section of sheetrock in turn, from foundation to sidewalls to roof, making adjustments as he moved toward the goal for which he had been hired. When it was done, the contractor stood back to admire the finished product. “How the hell did I ever do that?” he exclaimed in astonishment.

  Vonnegut used this homily to convey the irreducible mystery of all creative acts, whether they involved framing wooden structures, laying paint on canvas, or pecking out sentences and paragraphs on a typewriter. Before he broke through to success and celebrity in 1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five, he was happy to consider himself one more neighborhood artisan, taking pride in standards and attention to craft despite the meager pay. Vonnegut was not a member of the Cape’s moneyed elite, and he preferred to compare himself to the plumbers and mechanics and electricians he knew.

  “Mechanics fix automobiles,” he once observed. “Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted.”