God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
"My mother was a Moon. My father was a Glampers."
This cross between a Glampers and a Moon was a domestic servant in the tapestry-brick Rosewater Mansion, the legal residence of the Senator, a house he actually occupied no more than ten days out of any year. During the remaining 355 days of each year, Diana had the twenty-six rooms all to herself. She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned alone, without even the luxury of having someone to blame for making dirt.
When Diana was through for the day, she would retire to a room over the Rosewater's six-car garage. The only vehicles in the garage were a 1936 Ford Phaeton, which was up on blocks, and a red tricycle with a fire bell hanging from the handlebars. The tricycle had belonged to Eliot as a child.
After work, Diana would sit in her room and listen to her cracked green plastic radio, or she would fumble with her Bible. She could not read. Her Bible was a frazzled wreck. On the table beside her bed was a white telephone, a so-called Princess telephone, which she rented from the Indiana Bell Telephone Company for seventy-five cents a month, over and above ordinary service charges.
There was a thunderclap.
Diana yelled for help. She should have yelled. Lightning had killed her mother and father at a Rosewater Lumber Company picnic in 1916. She was sure lightning was going to kill her, too. And, because her kidneys hurt all the time, she was sure the lightning would hit her in the kidneys.
She snatched her Princess phone from its cradle. She dialed the only number she ever dialed. She whimpered and moaned, waiting for the person at the other end to answer.
It was Eliot. His voice was sweet, vastly paternal—as humane as the lowest note of a cello. "This is the Rosewater Foundation," he said. "How can we help you?"
"The electricity is after me again, Mr. Rosewater. I had to call! I'm so scared!"
"Call any time you want, dear. That's what I'm here for."
"The electricity is really gonna get me this time."
"Oh, darn that electricity." Eliot's anger was sincere. "That electricity makes me so mad, the way it torments you all the time. It isn't fair."
"I wish it would come ahead and kill me, instead of just talk about it all the time."
"This would be a mighty sad town, dear, if that ever happened."
"Who'd care?"
"I'd care."
"You care about everybody. I mean who else?"
"Many, many, many people, dear."
"Dumb old woman—sixty-eight years old."
"Sixty-eight is a wonderful age."
"Sixty-eight years is a long time for a body to live without having one nice thing ever happen to the body. Nothing nice ever happened to me. How could it? I was behind the door when the good Lord passed out the brains."
"That is not true!"
"I was behind the door when the good Lord passed out the strong, beautiful bodies. Even when I was young, I couldn't run fast, couldn't jump. I have never felt real good—not once. I have had gas and swole ankles and kiddley pains since I was a baby. And I was behind the door when the good Lord passed out the money and the good luck, too. And when I got nerve enough to come out from behind the door and whisper, 'Lord, Lord—dear, sweet Lord—here's little old me—' wasn't one nice thing left. He had to give me an old potato for a nose. He had to give me hair like steel wool, and had to give me a voice like a bullfrog."
"It isn't a bullfrog voice at all, Diana. It's a lovely voice."
"Bullfrog voice," she insisted. "There was this bullfrog up there in Heaven, Mr. Rosewater. The good Lord was going to send it down to this sad world to be born, but that old bullfrog was smart. 'Sweet Lord,' that smart old bullfrog said, 'if it's all the same to you, Sweet Lord, I'd just as soon not be born. It don't look like much fun for a frog down there.' So the Lord let that bullfrog hop around in Heaven up there, where nobody'd use