God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [46]
Fred would row out to his mooring in a little yacht club dinghy, scree-scraw, scree-scraw, with three inches of freeboard all around. And he would transfer his bulk to Rosebud II, and lie down in the cockpit, out of sight, with his head on an orange lifejacket. He would listen to the lapping of the water, the clinking and creaking of the rigging, put one hand on his genitals, feel at one with God, go to sleepy-bye. That much was lovely.
The Buntlines had a young upstairs maid named Selena Deal, who knew Fred's secret. One little window in her bedroom looked out on the fleet. When she sat on her narrow bed and wrote, as she was doing now, her window framed the Rosebud II. Her door was ajar, so she could hear the telephone ring. That was all she had to do during the afternoons, usually— answer the telephone in case it rang. It seldom rang, and, as Selena asked herself, "Why would it?"
She was eighteen years old. She was an orphan from an orphanage that had been founded by the Buntline family in Pawtucket in 1878. When it was founded, the Buntlines required three things: That all orphans be raised as Christians, regardless of race, color, or creed, that they take an oath once a week, before Sunday supper, and that, each year, an intelligent, clean female orphan enter domestic service in a Buntline home, ... in order to learn about the better things in life, and perhaps to be inspired to climb a few rungs of the ladder of culture and social grace.
The oath, which Selena had taken six hundred times, before six hundred very plain suppers, went like this, and was written by Castor Buntline, poor old Stewart's great-grandfather:
I do solemnly swear that I will respect the sacred private property of others, and that I will be content with whatever station in life God Almighty may assign me to. I will be grateful to those who employ me, and will never complain about wages and hours, but will ask myself instead, "What more can I do for my employer, my republic, and my God?" I understand that I have not been placed on Earth to be happy. I am here to be tested. If I am to pass the test, I must be always unselfish, always sober, always truthful, always chaste in mind, body, and deed, and always respectful to those to whom God has, in His Wisdom, placed above me. If I pass the test, I will go to joy everlasting in Heaven when I die. If I fail, I shall roast in hell while the Devil laughs and Jesus weeps.
Selena, a pretty girl who played the piano beautifully and wanted to be a nurse, was writing to the head of the orphanage, a man named Wilfred Parrot. Parrot was sixty. He had done a lot of interesting things in his life, such as fighting in Spain in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and, from 1933 until 1936, writing a radio serial called "Beyond the Blue Horizon." He ran a happy orphanage. All of the children called him "Daddy," and all of the children could cook and dance and play some musical instrument and paint.
Selena had been with the Buntlines a month. She was supposed to stay a year. This is what she wrote:
Dear Daddy Parrot: Maybe things will get better here, but I don't see how. Mrs. Buntline and I don't get along very well. She keeps saying I am ungrateful and impertinent. I don't mean to be, but I guess maybe I am. I just hope she doesn't get so mad at me she turns against the orphanage. That is the big thing I worry about. I am just going to have to try harder to obey the oath. What goes wrong all the time is things she sees in my eyes. I can't keep those things out of my eyes. She says something or does something I think is kind of dumb or pitiful or something, and I don't say anything about it, but she looks in my eyes and gets very mad. One time she told me that music was the most important thing in her life, next to her husband and her daughter. They have loudspeakers all over the house, all connected to a big phonograph in the front coat closet. There is music all day long,