Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [24]
And he said, “No. I like it very much. It’s a very good funeral suit.”
And I said, “What do you mean, “funeral suit”?” I had this vision of his going to other people’s funerals without any pants on—not that he had ever gone to anybody’s funeral but my mother’s, as far as I know.
And he said, “You don’t have to wear pants to your own funeral,” he said.
When I went back to San Ignacio for his funeral five years later, he was laid out in the coat of that suit at least, but the bottom half of the casket was closed, so I had to ask the mortician if Father had pants on.
It turned out that he did, and that the pants fit nicely. So Father had gone to the trouble of getting pants that fit from Sears, Roebuck.
But there were two unexpected fillips to the mortician’s answer. He wasn’t the one who had buried my mother, incidentally. The one who buried my mother had gone bankrupt and left town to seek his fortune elsewhere. The one who was burying my father had come to seek his fortune in San Ignacio, where the streets were paved with gold.
One surprising piece of news from him was that my father was going to be buried wearing a pair of his own cowboy boots, which he had been wearing when he died at the movies.
The other fillip was the undertaker’s assumption that Father was a Mohammedan. This was exciting to him. It was his biggest adventure in being uncritically pious in a madly pluralistic democracy.
“Your father is the first Mohammedan I’ve taken care of,” he said. “I hope I haven’t done anything wrong so far. There weren’t any other Mohammedans to advise me. I would have had to go all the way to Los Angeles.”
I didn’t want to spoil his good time, so I told him that everything looked perfect to me. “Just don’t eat pork too near the casket,” I said.
“That’s all?” he said.
“That—” I said, “and of course you say ‘Praise Allah’ when you close the lid.”
Which he did.
9
HOW GOOD were those pictures of mine which Dan Gregory looked at so briefly before he shoved Marilee down the stairs? Technically, if not spiritually, they were pretty darn good for a kid my age—a kid whose self-imposed lessons had consisted of copying, stroke by stroke, illustrations by Dan Gregory.
I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.
I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.
That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.
The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”
How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”
So when I became an apprentice to Dan Gregory, I was going into the ring with the world’s champion of commercial art.