God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [6]
Eliot lurched away from Milford, hitchhiked to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He went into a small bar there, announced that anyone who could produce a volunteer fireman's badge could drink with him free. He built gradually to a crying jag, during which he claimed to be deeply touched by the idea of an inhabited planet with an atmosphere that was eager to combine violently with almost everything the inhabitants held dear. He was speaking of Earth and the element oxygen.
"When you think about it, boys," he said brokenly, "that's what holds us together more than anything else, except maybe gravity. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers—joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen. I tell you, boys, I used to belong to a volunteer fire department, and I'd belong to one now, if there were such a human thing, such a humane thing, in New York City." This was bunk about Eliot's having been a fireman. The closest he had ever come to that was during his annual childhood visits to Rosewater County, to the family fief. Sycophants among the townies had flattered little Eliot by making him mascot of the Volunteer Fire Department of Rosewater. He had never fought a fire.
"I tell you, boys," he went on, "if those Russian landing barges come barging in some day, and there isn't any way to stop 'em, all the phony bastards who get all the good jobs in this country by kissing ass will be down to meet the conquerers with vodka and caviar, offering to do any kind of work the Russians have in mind. And you know who'll take to the woods with hunting knives and Springfields, who'll go on fighting for a hundred years, by God? The volunteer firemen, that's who."
Eliot was locked up in Swarthmore on a drunk and disorderly charge. When he awoke the next morning, the police called his wife. He apologized to her, slunk home.
But he was off again in a month, carousing with firemen in Clover Lick, West Virginia, one night, and in New Egypt, New Jersey, the next. And on that trip he traded clothes with another man, swapped a four-hundred-dollar suit for a 1939 double-breasted blue chalkstripe, with shoulders like Gibraltar, lapels like the wings of the Archangel Gabriel, and with the creases in the trousers permanently sewed in.
"You must be crazy," said the New Egypt fireman.
"I don't want to look like me," Eliot replied. "I want to look like you. You're the salt of the earth, by God. You're what's good about America, men in suits like that. You're the soul of the U.S. Infantry."
And Eliot eventually traded away everything in his wardrobe but his tails, his dinner jacket, and one gray flannel suit. His sixteen-foot closet became a depressing museum of coveralls, overalls, Robert Hall Easter specials, field jackets, Eisenhower jackets, sweatshirts and so on. Sylvia wanted to burn them, but Eliot told her, "Burn my tails, my dinner jacket and my gray flannel suit instead."
Eliot was a flamboyantly sick man, even then, but there was no one to hustle him off for treatment, and no one was as yet entranced by the profits to be made in proving him insane. Little Norman Mushari was only twelve in those troubled days, was assembling plastic model airplanes, masturbating, and papering his room with pictures of Senator Joe Mc-Carthy and Roy Cohn. Eliot Rosewater was the farthest thing from his mind.
Sylvia, raised among rich and charming eccentrics, was too European to have him put away. And the Senator was in the political fight of his life, rallying the Republican forces of reaction that had been shattered by the election of Dwight David Eisenhower. When told of his son's bizarre way of life, the Senator