Jailbird (29 page)

At least I will have some real friends outside of prison this time.

There was a bowl of yellow tulips on the table for a centerpiece. It was April again.

It was raining outside. Nature sympathized.

•   •  •

I was seated at the place of honor—to the right of my hostess, of Sarah Clewes, the nurse. Of the four women I ever loved, she was always the easiest one to talk to. That may be because I had never promised her anything, and so had never let her down. Oh, Lord—the things I used to promise my mother and my poor wife and poor Mary Kathleen!

Young Israel Edel and his not-so-lovely wife, Norma, were there. I say that she was not-so-lovely for the simple reason that she has always hated me. I don’t know why. I have never insulted her, and she is certainly as pleased as
Punch with the upturn her husband’s career has taken. He would still be a night clerk, if it weren’t for me. The Edels are renovating a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with all the money he makes. Still—every time she looks at me, I feel like something the cat dragged in. It is just one of those things. I think she may be slightly crazy. She miscarried twins about a year ago. That might have something to do with it. She may have some sort of chemical imbalance as a result of that. Who knows?

She wasn’t seated next to me anyway, thank God. Another black woman was. That was Eucharist Lawes, the lovely wife of Cleveland Lawes, the former RAM
JAC
chauffeur. He is a vice-president of the Transico Division now. That is really his wife’s name: Eucharist. It means
happy gratitude
, and I don’t know why more people don’t name their daughters that. Everybody calls her “Ukey.”

Ukey was homesick for the South. She said the people were friendlier and more relaxed and more natural down there. She was after Cleveland to retire in or near Atlanta, especially now that the Transico Division had been bought by Playgrounds International, which everybody knows is a front for the Mafia. It just can’t be proved.

My own division was being snapped up by I.G. Farben, a West German concern.

“It won’t be the same old RAMJAC,” I said to Ukey. “That’s for sure.”

There were presents—some silly, some not. Israel Edel gave me a rubber ice-cream cone with a squeaker in it—a
plaything for my little dog, who is a female Lhasa apso, a golden dustmop without a handle. I could never have a dog when I was young, because Alexander Hamilton McCone hated dogs. So this is the only dog I have ever known at all well—and she sleeps with me. She snores. So did my wife.

I have never bred her, but now, according to the veterinarian, Dr. Howard Padwee, she is experiencing a false pregnancy and believes the rubber ice-cream cone to be a puppy. She hides it in closets. She carries it up and down the stairs of my duplex. She is even secreting milk for it. She is getting shots to make her stop doing that.

I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone—brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.

Clyde Carter and Leland Clewes chipped in on a far more expensive present, which is a chess-playing computer. It is about the size of a cigar box, but most of the space is taken up by a compartment for the playing pieces. The computer itself is not much bigger than a package of cigarettes. It is called “Boris.” Boris has a long narrow little window in which he announces his moves. He can even joke about the moves I make. “Really?” he will say; or,
“Have you played this game before?” or, “Is this a trap?” or, “Spot me a queen.”

Those are standard chess jokes. Alexander Hamilton McCone and I exchanged those same tired jokes endlessly when, for the sake of a Harvard education in my future, I agreed to be his chess-playing machine. If Boris had existed in those days, I probably would have gone to Western Reserve, and then become a tax. assessor or an office manager in a lumberyard, or an insurance salesman, or some such thing. Instead, I am the most disreputable Harvard graduate since Putzi Hänfstaengl, who was Hitler’s favorite pianist.

At least I gave ten thousand dollars to Harvard before the lawyers came and took away all my money again.

•   •  •

It was time for me now at the party to respond to all the toasts that had been offered to me. I stood. I had not had a drop of alcohol.

“I am a recidivist,” I said. I defined the word as describing a person who habitually relapsed into crime or antisocial behavior.

“A good word to know,” said Leland Clewes.

There was laughter all around.

“Our lovely hostess has promised two more surprises before the evening is over,” I said. These would turn out to be the trooping in of my son and his little human family from upstairs, and the playing of a phonograph recording of part of my testimony before Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California and others so long ago. It had to be
played at seventy-eight revolutions per minute. Imagine that. “As though I hadn’t had surprises enough!” I said.

“Not enough nice ones, old man,” said Cleveland Lawes.

“Say it in Chinese,” I said. He had, of course, been a prisoner of war of the Chinese for a while.

Lawes said something that certainly sounded like Chinese.

“How do we know he wasn’t ordering sweet-and-sour pork?” said Sarah.

“You don’t,” said Lawes.

We had begun our feast with oysters, so I announced that oysters were not the aphrodisiacs many people imagined them to be.

There were boos, and then Sarah Clewes beat me to the punch line of that particular joke. “Walter ate twelve of them the other night,” she said, “and only four of them worked!”

She had lost another patient the day before.

There was more laughter all around.

And I was suddenly offended and depressed by how silly we were. The news, after all, could hardly have been worse. Foreigners and criminals and other endlessly greedy conglomerates were gobbling up RAMJAC. Mary Kathleen’s legacy to the people was being converted to mountains of rapidly deteriorating currency, which were being squandered in turn on a huge new bureaucracy and on legal fees and consultants’ fees, and on and on. What was left, it was said by the politicians, would help to pay the interest on
the people’s national debt, and would buy them more of the highways and public buildings and advanced weaponry they so richly deserved.

Also: I was about to go to jail again.

So I elected to complain about our levity. “You know what is finally going to kill this planet?” I said.

“Cholesterol!” said Frank Ubriaco.

“A total lack of seriousness,” I said. “Nobody gives a damn anymore about what’s really going on, what’s going to happen next, or how we ever got into such a mess in the first place.”

Israel Edel, with his doctor’s degree in history, took this to be a suggestion that we become even sillier, if possible. So he began to make booping and beeping sounds. Others chimed in with their own
beeps
and
boops
. They were all imitating supposedly intelligent signals from outer space, which had been received by radio telescopes only the week before. They were the latest news sensation, and had in fact driven the RAMJAC story off the front pages. People were beeping and booping and laughing, not just at my party, but everywhere.

Nobody was prepared to guess what the signals meant. Scientists did say, though, that if the signals were coming from whence they appeared to come, they had to be a million years old or more. If Earth were to make a reply, it would be the start of a very slow conversation, indeed.

•   •  •

So I gave up on saying anything serious. I told another joke, and I sat down.

The party ended, as I say, with the arrival of my son and daughter-in-law and their two children, and with the playing of a phonograph recording of the closing minutes of my testimony before a congressional committee in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine.

My daughter-in-law and my grandchildren found it natural and easy, seemingly, to accord me the honors due a grandfather who, when all was said and done, was a clean and dapper and kindly old man. The model for what the children found to love in me, I suppose, was Santa Claus.

My son was a shock. He was such a homely and unhealthy and unhappy-looking young man. He was short like me, and nearly as fat as his poor mother had become toward the end. I still had most of my hair, but he was bald. The baldness must have been inherited from the Jewish side of his family.

He was a chain-smoker of unfiltered cigarettes. He coughed a lot. His suit was riddled with cigarette holes. I glanced at him while the record was playing, and I saw that he was so nervous that he had three cigarettes all going at one time.

He had shaken my hand with the correct wretchedness of a German general surrendering at Stalingrad, say. I was still a monster to him. He had been cajoled into coming against his better judgment—by his wife and Sarah Clewes.

Too bad.

The record changed nothing. The children, kept up long after their bedtime, squirmed and dozed.

The record was meant to honor me, to let people who might not know about it hear for themselves what an idealistic young man I had been. The part in which I accidentally betrayed Leland Clewes as a former communist was on another record, I presume. It was not played.

Only my very last sentences were of much interest to me. I had forgotten them.

Congressman Nixon had asked me why, as the son of immigrants who had been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist, I had been so ungrateful to the American economic system.

The answer I gave him was not original. Nothing about me has ever been original. I repeated what my onetime hero, Kenneth Whistler, had said in reply to the same general sort of question long, long ago. Whistler had been a witness at a trial of strikers accused of violence. The judge had become curious about him, had asked him why such a well-educated man from such a good family would so immerse himself in the working class.

My stolen answer to Nixon was this: “Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

There was polite applause when the people at the party realized that the phonograph record had ended.

Good-bye.

—W.F.S.