Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [103]
SO I WENT back down Clinton Street to the Town Hall, to ponder this latest change in my career, that I was next to be a Warden.
There was a Rolls-Royce Corniche, a convertible coupe, parked out front. Whoever had a car like that had enough Yen or Marks or some other stable currency to buy himself or herself enough black-market gas for a trip from anywhere to anywhere.
My guess was that it was the chariot of some Tarkington student or parent who hoped to recover property left in a dorm suite at the start of the vacation period, a vacation which now, obviously, might never end.
The soldier who was supposed to be my receptionist was back on duty. He had returned to his post after General Florio told him to stop standing around with his thumb in his anus and start stringing barbed wire or erecting tents. He was waiting for me at the front door, and he told me I had a visitor.
So I asked him, “Who is the visitor?”
He said, “It’s your son, sir.”
I was thunderstruck. “Eugene is here?” I said. Eugene Jr. had told me that he never wanted to see me again as long as he lived. How is that for a life sentence? And he was driving a Rolls-Royce now? Eugene?
“No, sir,” he said. “Not Eugene.”
“Eugene is the only son I have,” I said. “What did he say his name was?”
“He told me, sir,” he said, “that he was your son Rob Roy.”
THAT WAS ALL the proof I needed that a son of mine did indeed await me in my office: that name, “Rob Roy.” “Rob” and “Roy,” and I was back in the Philippine Islands again, having just been kicked out of Vietnam. I was back in bed with a voluptuous female war correspondent from The Des Moines Register, whose lips were like sofa pillows, telling her that, if I had been a fighter plane, I would have had little pictures of people painted all over me.
I calculated how old he was. He was 23, making him the youngest of my children. He was the baby of the family.
HE WAS IN the reception room outside my office. He stood up when I came in. He was exactly as tall as myself. His hair was the same color and texture as mine. He needed a shave, and his potential beard was as black and thick as mine. His eyes were the same color as mine. All 4 of our eyes were greenish amber. We had the same big nose, my father’s nose. He was nervous and polite. He was expensively dressed in leisure clothes. If he had been learning-disabled or merely stupid, which he wasn’t, he might have had a happy 4 years at Tarkington, especially with that car of his.
I was giddy. I had taken off my overcoat on the way in, so that he could see my General’s stars. That was something, anyway. How many boys had a father who was a General?
“How can I help you?” I said.
“I hardly know how to begin,” he said.
“I think you’ve already begun by telling the guard that you were a son of mine,” I said. “Was that a joke?”
“Do you think it was a joke?” he asked.
“I don’t pretend I was a Saint when I was young and away from home so much,” I said. “But I never made love using an alias. I was always easy to find afterward, if somebody wanted to find me badly enough. So, if I did father a child out of wedlock somewhere along the line, that comes as a complete surprise to me. I would have thought the mother, the minute she found out she was pregnant, would have gotten in touch with me.”
“I know 1 mother who didn’t,” he said.
Before I could reply, he blurted words he must have rehearsed en route. “This is going to be a very brief visit,” he said. “I am going to be in and out of here before you know it. I’m on my way to Italy, and I never want to see this country ever again, and especially Dubuque.”
IT WOULD TURN out that he had been through an ordeal that lasted much, much longer than the siege of Scipio, and was probably harder on him than Vietnam had been on me. He had been tried for child molestation in Dubuque, Iowa, where he had founded and run a free child-care center at his own expense.