God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [66]
Trout glanced from face to face before speaking his last word on the subject. The last word was: "Joy."
"Poo-tee-weet?"
Eliot looked up into the tree again, wondered what his own ideas about Rosewater County had been, ideas he had somehow lost up there in the sycamore.
"If only there had been a child—" said the Senator.
"Well, if you really want grandchildren," said McAllister jocularly, "you have something like fifty-seven to choose from, at the most recent count."
Everybody but Eliot had a good laugh over that.
"What's this about fifty-seven grandchildren?"
"Your progeny, my boy," the Senator chuckled.
"My what?"
"Your wild oats."
Eliot sensed that this was a crucial mystery, risked showing how sick he was. "I don't understand."
"That's how many women in Rosewater County claim you're the father of their children."
"This is crazy."
"Of course it is," said the Senator.
Eliot stood, all tensed up. "This is—is impossible!"
"You act as though this was the first time you ever heard of it," said the Senator, and he gave Dr. Brown a glance of flickering unease.
Eliot covered his eyes. "I'm sorry, I—I seem to have drawn a complete blank on this particular subject."
"You're all right, aren't you, boy?"
"Yes." He uncovered his eyes. "I'm fine. There's just this little gap in my memory—and you can fill it up again. How—how did all these women come to say this thing about me?"
"We can't prove it," said McAllister, "but Mushari has been going around the county, bribing people to say bad things about you. The baby thing started with Mary Moody. One day after Mushari was in town, she announced that you were the father of her twins, Foxcroft and Melody. And that touched off a kind of female mania, apparently—"
Kilgore Trout nodded, appreciating the mania.
"So women all over the county started claiming their children were yours. At least half of them seem to believe it. There's one fifteen-year-old girl down there whose stepfather went to prison for getting her pregnant. Now she claims it was you."
"It isn't true!"
"Of course it isn't, Eliot," said his father. "Calm down, calm down. Mushari won't dare mention it in court. The whole scheme backfired and went out of control for him. It's so obviously a mania, no judge would listen. We ran blood tests on Foxcroft and Melody, and they couldn't possibly be yours. We have no intention of testing the other fifty-six claimants. They can go to hell."
"Poo-tee-weet?"
Eliot looked up into the tree, and the memory of all that had happened in the blackness came crashing back—the fight with the bus driver, the straitjacket, the shock treatments, the suicide attempts, all the tennis, all the strategy meetings about the sanity hearing.
And with that mighty inward crash of memories came the idea he had had for settling everything instantly, beautifully, and fairly.
"Tell me—" he said, "do you all swear I'm sane?"
They all swore to that passionately.
"And am I still head of the Foundation? Can I still write checks against its account?"
McAllister told him that he certainly could.
"How's the balance?"
"You haven't spent anything for a year—except for legal fees and what it costs to keep you here, and the three hundred thousand dollars you sent Harvard, and the fifty thousand you gave to Mr. Trout."
"At that, he spent more this year than last year," said the Senator. This was true. Eliot's Rosewater County operation had been cheaper than staying in a sanitarium.
McAllister told Eliot that he had a balance of about three and a half million dollars, and Eliot asked him for a pen and a check. He then wrote a check to his cousin Fred, in the amount of one million dollars.
The Senator and McAllister went through the roof, told him they had