Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [30]
I have just given this snap quiz to Celeste and her friends out by the tennis courts: “Identify the following persons in history: ‘W. C. Fields, the Empress Josephine, Booth Tarkington, and Al Jolson.’”
The only one they got was W. C. Fields, whose old movies are shown on TV.
And I say I never met Fields, but that first night I tiptoed out of my gilded cage and to the top of the spiral staircase to listen to the arrival of the famous guests. I heard the unmistakable bandsaw twang of Fields as he introduced the woman with him to Gregory with these words: “This, my child, is Dan Gregory, the love child of Leonardo da Vinci’s sister and a sawed-off Arapahoe.”
I complained to Slazinger and Mrs. Berman at supper last night that the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible. “They don’t even know anything about the Vietnam War or the Empress Josephine, or what a Gorgon is,” I said.
Mrs. Berman defended them. She said that it was a little late for them to do anything about the Vietnam War, and that they had more interesting ways of learning about vanity and the power of sex than studying a woman who had lived in another country one hundred and seventy-five years ago. “All that anybody needs to know about a Gorgon,” she said, “is that there is no such thing.”
Slazinger, who still believes her to be only semiliterate, patronized her most daintily with these words: “As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”
“Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.
“Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man.
And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”
I happened to see in The New York Times the other day a picture of a French Empire escritoire which was auctioned off to a Kuwaiti for three quarters of a million dollars, and I am almost certain it was in Gregory’s guest room back in 1933.
There were two anachronisms in that room, both pictures by Gregory. Over the fireplace was his illustration of the moment in Robinson Crusoe when the castaway narrator sees a human footprint on the beach of the island of which he had believed himself to be the sole resident. Over the escritoire was his illustration of the moment when Robin Hood and Little John, strangers who are about to become the best of friends, meet in the middle of a log crossing a stream, each armed with a quarterstaff, and neither one of them willing to back up so that the other one can get to where he would very much like to be.
Robin Hood winds up in the drink, of course.
11
I FELL ASLEEP on the floor of that room. I certainly wasn’t going to muss the bed or disturb anything. I dreamed I was back on the train, with its clickety-clack, clickety-clack, ding-ding-ding and whoo-ah. The ding-ding-ding wasn’t coming from the train, of course, but from signals at crossings, where anybody who didn’t give us the right-of-way would be ripped to smithereens. Serve ‘em right! They were nothing. We were everything.
A lot of the people who had to stop for us or be killed were farmers and their families, with all their possessions tied every which way on broken-down trucks. Windstorms or banks had taken away their farms, just as surely as the United States Cavalry had taken the same land from the Indians in their grandfathers’ time. The farms that were whisked away by the winds: where are they now? Growing fish food on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
These defeated white Indians at the crossings were nothing new to me. I had seen plenty of them passing through San Ignacio, asking the likes of me or my father, or even an emotionally opaque Luma Indian, if we knew of somebody who needed anybody to do work of any kind.
And I was awakened from my railroad dream