Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [59]
She is buried next to her husband in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The glacier could still shove the 2 of them into West Virginia or Maryland. Bon Voyage!
ANDREA WAKEFIELD WAS the 2nd person I spoke to after Tarkington fired me. Damon Stern was the first. I am talking about 1991 again. Practically everybody else was eating lobsters. Andrea came up to me after meeting Stern farther down on the Senior Walk.
“I thought you would be in the Pavilion eating lobster,” she said.
“Not hungry,” I said.
“I can’t stand it that they’re boiled alive,” she said. “You know what Damon Stern just told me?”
“I’m sure it was interesting,” I said.
“During the reign of Henry the 8th of England,” she said, “counterfeiters were boiled alive.”
“Show biz,” I said. “Were they boiled alive in public?”
“He didn’t say,” she said. “And what are you doing here?”
“Enjoying the sunshine,” I said.
She believed me. She sat down next to me. She was already wearing her academic gown for the faculty parade to graduation. Her cowl identified her as a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, France. In addition to her duties as Dean, dealing with unwanted pregnancies and drug addiction and the like, she also taught French and Italian and oil painting. She was from a genuinely distinguished old Philadelphia family, which had given civilization a remarkable number of educators and lawyers and physicians and artists. She actually may have been what Jason Wilder and several of Tarkington’s Trustees believed themselves to be, obviously the most highly evolved creatures on the planet.
She was a lot smarter than her husband.
I always meant to ask her how a Quaker came to marry a professional soldier, but I never did.
Too late now.
EVEN AT HER age then, which was about 60, 10 years older than me, Andrea was the best figure skater on the faculty. I think figure skating, if Andrea Wakefield could find the right partner, was eroticism enough for her. General Wakefield couldn’t skate for sour apples. The best partner she had on ice at Tarkington, probably, was Bruce Bergeron—the boy who was trapped in an elevator at Bloomingdale’s, who became the youth who couldn’t get into any college but Tarkington, who became the man who joined the chorus of an ice show and then was murdered by somebody who presumably hated homosexuals, or loved one too much.
Andrea and I had never been lovers. She was too contented and old for me.
“I WANT YOU to know I think you’re a Saint,” said Andrea.
“How so?” I said.
“You’re so nice to your wife and mother-in-law.”
“It’s easier than what I did for Presidents and Generals and Henry Kissinger,” I said.
“But this is voluntary,” she said.
“So was that,” I said. “I was real gung-ho.”
“WHEN YOU REALIZE how many men nowadays dissolve their marriages when they become the least little bit inconvenient or uncomfortable,” she said, “all I can think is that you’re a Saint.”
“They didn’t want to come up here, you know,” I said. “They were very happy in Baltimore, and Margaret would have become a physical therapist.”
“It isn’t this valley that made them sick, is it?” she said. “It isn’t this valley that made my husband sick.”
“It’s a clock that made them sick,” I said. “It would have struck midnight for both of them, no matter where they were.”
“That’s how I feel about Sam,” she said. “I can’t feel guilty.”
“Shouldn’t,” I said.
“When he resigned from the Army and went over to the peace movement,” she said, “I think he was trying to stop the clock. Didn’t work.”
“I miss him,” I said.
“Don’t let the war kill you, too,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” I said.
“YOU STILL HAVEN’T found the money?” she said.
She was talking about the money Mildred had gotten for the house in Baltimore. While Mildred was still fairly sane, she deposited it in the Scipio branch of the First National Bank of Rochester. But then