Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [47]
I wasn’t an uncle. I was a member of the Servant Class.
They were letting me go.
Soldiers are discharged. People in the workplace are fired. Servants are let go.
“Am I being fired?” I asked the Chairman of the Board incredulously.
“I’m sorry, Gene,” he said, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”
THE PRESIDENT OF the college, Tex Johnson, sitting two chairs away from me, hadn’t let out a peep. He looked sick. I surmised mistakenly that he had been scolded for having let me stay on the faculty long enough to get tenure. He was sick about something more personal, which still had a lot to do with Professor Eugene Debs Hartke.
He had been brought in as President from Rollins College down in Winter Park, Florida, where he had been Provost, after Sam Wakefield did the big trick of suicide. Henry “Tex” Johnson held a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Texas Tech in Lubbock, and claimed to be a descendant of a man who had died in the Alamo. Damon Stern, who was always turning up little-known facts of history, told me, incidentally, that the Battle of the Alamo was about slavery. The brave men who died there wanted to secede from Mexico because it was against the law to own slaves in Mexico. They were fighting for the right to own slaves.
Since Tex’s wife and I had been lovers, I knew that his ancestors weren’t Texans, but Lithuanians. His father, whose name certainly wasn’t Johnson, was a Lithuanian second mate on a Russian freighter who jumped ship when it put in for emergency repairs at Corpus Christi. Zuzu told me that Tex’s father was not only an illegal immigrant but the nephew of the former Communist boss of Lithuania.
So much for the Alamo.
I TURNED TO him at the Board meeting, and I said, “Tex—for pity sakes, say something! You know darn good and well I’m the best teacher you’ve got! I don’t say that. The students do! Is the whole faculty going to be brought before this Board, or am I the only one? Tex?”
He stared straight ahead. He seemed to have turned to cement. “Tex?” Some leadership!
I put the same question to the Chairman, who had been pauperized by Microsecond Arbitrage but didn’t know it yet. “Bob—” I began.
He winced.
I began again, having gotten the message in spades that I was a servant and not a relative: “Mr. Moellenkamp, sir—” I said, “you know darn well, and so does everybody else here, that you can follow the most patriotic, deeply religious American who ever lived with a tape recorder for a year, and then prove that he’s a worse traitor than Benedict Arnold, and a worshipper of the Devil. Who doesn’t say things in a moment of passion or absentmindedness that he doesn’t wish he could take back? So I ask again, am I the only one this was done to, and if so, why?”
He froze.
“Madelaine?” I said to Madelaine Astor, who would later write me such a dumb letter.
She said she did not like it that I had told students that a new Ice Age was on its way, even if I had read it in The New York Times. That was another thing I’d said that Wilder had on tape. At least it had something to do with science, and at least it wasn’t something I had picked up from Slazinger or Grandfather Wills or Damon Stern. At least it was the real me.
“The students here have enough to worry about,” she said. “I know I did.”
She went on to say that there had always been people who had tried to become famous by saying that the World was going to end, but the World hadn’t ended.
There were nods of agreement all around the table. I don’t think there was a soul there who knew anything about science.
“When I was here you were predicting the end of the World,” she said, “only it was atomic waste and acid rain that were going to kill us. But here we are. I feel fine. Doesn’t everybody else feel fine? So pooh.”
She shrugged. “About the rest of it,” she said, “I’m sorry I heard about it. It made me sick. If we have to go over it again, I think I’ll just leave the room.”
Heavens to Betsy! What could she have meant by