Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [104]
He wasn’t married, a strike against him in the eyes of most juries, a character flaw like having served in the Vietnam War.
“I GREW UP in Dubuque,” he would tell me, “and the money I inherited was made in Dubuque.” It was a meat-packing fortune.
“I wanted to give something back to Dubuque. With so many single parents raising children on minimum wage, and with so many married couples both working to make enough to feed and clothe their children halfway decently, I thought what Dubuque needed most was a child-care center that was nice and didn’t cost anything.”
Two weeks after he opened the center, he was arrested for child molestation because several of the children came home with inflamed genitalia.
HE WAS LATER to prove in court, after smears were taken from the children’s lesions, that a fungus was to blame. The fungus was closely related to jock itch, and may actually have been a new strain of jock which had learned how to rise above all the standard remedies for that affliction.
By then, though, he had been held in jail without bail for 3 months, and had to be protected from a lynch mob by the National Guard. Luckily for him, Dubuque, like so many communities, had backed up its police with Armor and Infantry.
After he was acquitted, he had to be transported out of town and deep into Illinois in a buttoned-up tank, or somebody would have killed him.
THE JUDGE WHO acquitted him was killed. He was of Italian ancestry. Somebody sent him a pipe bomb concealed in a huge salami.
BUT THAT SON of mine did not tell me about any of that until just before he said, “It’s time to say, ‘Good-bye.’ ” He prefaced the tale of how he had suffered so with these words: “I hope you understand, the last thing I wanted to do was make any demands on your emotions.”
“Try me,” I said.
THINKING ABOUT OUR meeting now fills me with a sort of sweetness. He had liked me enough, found me warm enough, to use me as though I were a really good father, if only for a little while.
IN THE BEGINNING, when we were feeling each other out very gingerly, and I hadn’t yet admitted that he was my son, I asked him if “Rob Roy” was the name on his birth certificate, or whether that was a nickname his mother had hung on him.
He said it was the name on his birth certificate.
“And the father on the birth certificate?” I asked.
“It was the name of a soldier who died in Vietnam,” he said.
“Do you remember what it was?” I said.
Here came a surprise. It was the name of my brother-in-law, Jack Patton, whom his mother had never met, I’m sure. I must have told her about Jack in Manila, and she’d remembered his name, and that he was unmarried and had died for his country.
I thought to myself, “Good old Jack, wherever you are, it’s time to laugh like hell again.”
“SO WHAT MAKES you think I’m your father instead of him?” I said. “Your mother finally told you?”
“She wrote me a letter,” he said.
“She didn’t tell you face to face?” I said.
“She couldn’t,” he said. “She died of cancer of the pancreas when I was 4 years old.”
That was a shock. She sure hadn’t lasted long after I made love to her. I’ve always enjoyed thinking of the women I have made love to as living on and on. I had imagined his mother, game and smart and sporty and funny, with lips like sofa pillows, living on and on.
“She wrote me a letter on her deathbed,” he continued, “which was put into the hands of a law firm in Dubuque, not to be opened until after the death of the good man who had married her and adopted me. He died only a year ago.”
“DID THE LETTER say why you were named Rob Roy?” I inquired.
“No,” he said. “I assumed it must be because she liked the novel by that name by Sir Walter Scott.”
“That sounds right,” I said. What good would it do him or anybody else to know that he was named for 2 shots of Scotch, 1 shot of sweet vermouth, cracked ice, and a twist of lemon peel?
“HOW DID YOU find me?” I said.
“At first I didn’t think I wanted to find you,” he said. “But then 2 weeks ago I thought that we were entitled to see each other once, at least.