God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [12]
The town of Rosewater was in the dead center of the county. In the dead center of town was a Parthenon built of honest red brick, columns and all. Its roof was green copper. The canal ran through it, and so, in the bustling past, had the New York Central, Monon, and Nickel Plate Railroads. When Eliot and Sylvia took up residence, only the canal and the Monon tracks remained, and the Monon was bankrupt, and its tracks were brown.
To the west of the Parthenon was the old Rosewater Saw Company, red brick, too, green-roofed, too. The spine of its roof was broken, its windows unglazed. It was a New Ambrosia for barn swallows and bats. Its four tower clocks were handless. Its big brass whistle was choked with nests.
To the east of the Parthenon was the County Courthouse, red brick, too, green-roofed, too. Its tower was identical with that of the old saw company. Three of its four clocks still had their hands, but they did not run. Like an abscess at the base of a dead tooth, a private business had somehow managed to establish itself in the cellar of the public building. It had a little red neon sign. "Bella's Beauty Nook," it said. Bella weighed three hundred fourteen pounds.
To the east of the courthouse was the Samuel Rosewater Veterans' Memorial Park. It had a flagpole and an honor roll. The honor roll was a four-by-eight sheet of exterior plywood painted black. It was hung on pipe, sheltered by a gable that was only two inches wide. It had all the names of Rosewater County people who had laid down their lives for their country.
The only other masonry structures were the Rosewater Mansion and its carriage house, set on an artificial elevation at the east end of the park and surrounded by a rank of iron spikes, and the Noah Rosewater Memorial High School, home of the Fighting Sawmakers, which bounded the park on the south. To the north of the park was the old Rosewater Opera House, a terrifyingly combustible frame wedding cake which had been converted to a firehouse. All else was shithouses, shacks, alcoholism, ignorance, idiocy and perversion, for all that was healthy and busy and intelligent in Rosewater County shunned the county seat.
The new Rosewater Saw Company, all yellow brick and no windows, was set in a cornfield midway between Rosewater and New Ambrosia. It was served by a gleaming new spur of the New York Central, and by a sizzling double-barreled highway that missed the county seat by eleven miles. Near it were the Rosewater Motel and the Rosewater Bowl-A-Rama, and the great grain elevators and animal pens that were shipping points for fruits of the Rosewater Farms. And the few highly paid agronomists, engineers, brewers, accountants and administrators who did all that needed doing lived in a defensive circle of expensive ranch homes in another cornfield near New Ambrosia, a community named, for no reason whatsoever, "Avondale." All had gas-lit patios framed and terraced with railroad ties from the old Nickel Plate right-of-way.
Eliot stood in relation to the clean people of Avondale as a constitutional monarch. They were employees of the Rosewater Corporation, and the properties they managed were owned by the Rosewater Foundation. Eliot could not tell them what to do—but he was surely the King, and Avondale knew it.
So, when King Eliot and Queen Sylvia took up residence in the Rosewater Mansion, they were showered by figs from Avondale—invitations, visits, flattering notes and calls. All were deflected. Eliot required Sylvia to receive all prosperous visitors with an air of shallow, absent-minded cordiality. Every Avondale woman left the mansion stiffly, as though, as Eliot observed gleefully, she had a pickle up her ass.
Interestingly, the social-climbing technocrats of Avondale were able to bear the theory that the Rosewaters snubbed them because the Rosewaters felt superior to them. They even enjoyed the theory as they discussed it again and again. They were avid for lessons