God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [3]
And Samuel begat Lister Ames Rosewater, who married Eunice Eliot Morgan. There was something to be said for Lister and Eunice: unlike Noah and Cleota and Samuel and Geraldine, they could laugh as though they meant it. As a curious footnote to history, Eunice became Woman's Chess Champion of the United States in 1927, and again in 1933.
Eunice also wrote an historical novel about a female gladiator, Ramba of Macedon, which was a best-seller in 1936. Eunice died in 1937, in a sailing accident in Cotuit, Massachusetts. She was a wise and amusing person, with very sincere anxieties about the condition of the poor. She was my mother.
Her husband, Lister, never was in business. From the moment of his birth to the time I am writing this, he has left the manipulation of his assets to lawyers and banks. He has spent nearly the whole of his adult life in the Congress of the United States, teaching morals, first as a Representative from the district whose heart is Rosewater County, and then as Senator from Indiana. That he is or ever was an Indiana person is a tenuous political fiction. And Lister begat Eliot.
Lister has thought about the effects and implications of his inherited wealth about as much as most men think about their left big toes. The fortune has never amused, worried, or tempted him. Giving ninety-five per cent of it to the Foundation you now control didn't cause him a twinge.
And Eliot married Sylvia DuVrais Zetterling, a Parisienne beauty who came to hate him. Her mother was a patroness of painters. Her father was the greatest living cellist. Her maternal grandparents were a Rothschild and a DuPont.
And Eliot became a drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool.
Begat he not a soul.
Bon voyage, dear Cousin or whoever you are. Be generous. Be kind. You can safely ignore the arts and sciences. They never helped anybody. Be a sincere, attentive friend of the poor.
The letter was signed,
The late Eliot Rosewater.
His heart going like a burglar alarm, Norman Mushari hired a large safe-deposit box, and he put the letter into it. That first piece of solid evidence would not be lonesome long.
Mushari went back to his cubicle, reflected that Sylvia was in the process of divorcing Eliot, with old McAllister representing the defendant. She was living in Paris, and Mushari wrote a letter to her, suggesting that it was customary in friendly, civilized divorce actions for litigants to return each other's letters. He asked her to send him any letters from Eliot that she might have saved.
He got fifty-three such letters by return mail.
2
ELIOT ROSEWATER was born in 1918, in Washington, D.C. Like his father, who claimed to represent the Hoosier State, Eliot was raised and educated and entertained on the Eastern Seaboard and in Europe. The family visited the so-called "home" in Rosewater County very briefly every year, just long enough to reinvigorate the lie that it was home.
Eliot had unremarkable academic careers at Loomis and Harvard. He became an expert sailor during summers in Cotuit, on Cape Cod, and an intermediate skier during winter vacations in Switzerland.
He left Harvard Law School on December 8, 1941, to volunteer for the Infantry of the Army of the United States. He served with distinction in many battles. He rose to the rank of captain, was a company commander. Near the end of the war in Europe, Eliot suffered what was diagnosed as combat fatigue. He was hospitalized in Paris, where he wooed and won Sylvia.
After the war, Eliot returned to Harvard with his stunning wife, took his law degree. He went on to specialize in international law, dreamed