Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [40]
“Whatever it is, sir,” I said, “let’s hear it. Shoot.”
So he did. He said that several of his friends had attended Tarkington or sent their children here, so that he was favorably impressed with the institution’s successes with the learning-disabled long before he entrusted his own daughter to us. An usher and a bridesmaid at his wedding, he said, had earned Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degrees in Scipio. The usher had gone on to be Ambassador to Iceland. The bridesmaid was on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
He felt that Tarkington’s highly unconventional techniques would be useful if applied to the country’s notoriously beleaguered inner-city schools, and he planned to say so after he had learned more about them. The ratio of teachers to students at Tarkington, incidentally, was then 1 to 6. In inner-city schools, that ratio was then 1 to 65.
There was a big campaign back then, I remember, to get the Japanese to buy up inner-city public schools the way they were buying up prisons and hospitals. But they were too smart. They wouldn’t touch schools for unwelcome children of unwelcome parents with a 10-foot pole.
HE SAID HE hoped to write a book about Tarkington called “Little Miracle on Lake Mohiga” or “Teaching the Unteachable.” So he wired his daughter for sound and told her to follow the best teachers in order to record what they said and how they said it. “I wanted to learn what it was that made them good, Professor Hartke, without their knowing they were being studied,” he said. “I wanted them to go on being whatever they were, warts and all, without any self-consciousness.”
This was the first I heard of the tapes. That chilling news explained Kimberley’s lurking, lurking, lurking all the time. Wilder spared me the suspense, at least, of wondering what all of Kimberley’s apparatus might have overheard. He punched the playback button on the recorder before him, and I heard myself telling Paul Slazinger, privately, I’d thought, that the two principal currencies of the planet were the Yen and fellatio. This was so early in the academic year that classes hadn’t begun yet! This was during Freshman Orientation Week, and I had just told the incoming Class of 1994 that merchants and tradespeople in the town below preferred to be paid in Japanese Yen rather than dollars, so that the freshmen might want their parents to give them their allowances in Yen.
I had told them, too, that they were never to go into the Black Cat Café, which the townspeople considered their private club. It was one place they could go and not be reminded of how dependent they were on the rich kids on the hill, but I didn’t say that. Neither did I say that free-lance prostitutes were sometimes found there, and in the past had been the cause of outbreaks of venereal disease on campus.
I had kept it simple for the freshmen: “Tarkingtonians are more than welcome anywhere in town but the Black Cat Café.”
IF KIMBERLEY RECORDED that good advice, her father did not play it back for me. He didn’t even play back what Slazinger had said to me, and it was during a coffee break, that stimulated me to name the planet’s two most acceptable currencies. He was the agent provocateur.
What he said, as I recall, was, “They want to get paid in Yen?” He was as new to Scipio as any freshman, and we had just met. I hadn’t read any of his books, and so far as I knew, neither had anybody else on the faculty. He was a last-minute choice for Writer in Residence, and had come to orientation because he was lonesome and had nothing else to do. He wasn’t supposed to be there, and he was so old, so old! He had been sitting among