Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
Most of the other prisoners, all of them convicted of nonviolent, white-collar crimes, had been trundled away in purple schoolbuses to work details around the base. Only a small housekeeping crew had been left behind—to wash windows, to mop floors. There were a few others around, writing or reading or napping—too sick, with heart trouble or back trouble, usually, to do manual work of any kind. I myself would have been feeding a mangle in the laundry at the base hospital if it had been a day like any other day. My health was excellent, as they say.
Was I shown no special respect in prison as a Harvard man? It was no distinction, actually. I had met or heard of at least seven others. And no sooner would I leave than my cot would be taken by Virgil Greathouse, former secretary of health, education, and welfare, who was also a Harvard man. I was quite low on the educational ladder at Finletter, with nothing but a poor bachelor’s degree. I was not even a Phi Beta Kappa. We must have had twenty or more Phi Beta Kappas, a dozen or more medical doctors, an equal number of dentists, a veterinarian, a Doctor of Divinity, a Doctor of Economics, a Doctor of Philosophy in chemistry, and simply shoals of disbarred lawyers. Lawyers were so common that we had a joke for newcomers that went like this: “If you find yourself talking to somebody who hasn’t been to law school, watch your step. He’s either the warden or a guard.”
My own poor degree was in the liberal arts, with some emphasis on history and economics. It was my plan when I entered Harvard to become a public servant, an employee rather than an elected official. I believed that there could be no higher calling in a democracy than to a lifetime in government. Since I did not know what branch of government might take me on, whether the State Department or the Bureau of Indian Affairs or whatever, I would make my wisdom as widely applicable as possible. For this reason did I take a liberal arts degree.
And I speak now of my plans and my beliefs—but, being so new to the planet in those days, I had been glad to adopt as my own the plans and beliefs of a much older man. He was a Cleveland multimillionaire named Alexander Hamilton McCone, a member of the Harvard class of Eighteen-hundred and Ninety-four. He was the reclusive, stammering son of Daniel McCone. Daniel McCone was a brilliant and brutal Scottish engineer and metallurgist, who founded the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company, the largest single employer in Cleveland when I was born. Imagine being born as long ago as Nineteen-hundred and Thirteen! Will young people of today doubt me if I aver with a straight face that the Ohio skies back then were often darkened by flocks of hooting pterodactyls, and that forty-ton brontosaurs basked and crooned in the Cuyahoga River’s ooze? No.
Alexander Hamilton McCone was forty-one years old when I was born into his mansion on Euclid Avenue. He was married to the former Alice Rockefeller, who was even richer than he was, and who spent most of her time in Europe with their one child, a daughter named Clara. Mother and daughter, no doubt embarrassed by Mr. McCone’s terrible speech impediment, and even more dismayed, perhaps, by his wanting to do nothing with his life but read books all day long, were seldom home. Divorce was unthinkable back then.
Clara—are you still alive? She hated me. Some people did and do.
That’s life.
And what was I to Mr. McCone, that I should have been born into the unhappy stillness of his mansion? My mother, born Anna Kairys in Russian Lithuania, was his cook. My father, born Stanislaus Stankiewicz in Russian Poland, was his bodyguard and chauffeur. They genuinely loved him.
Mr. McCone built a handsome apartment for them, and for me, too, on the second floor of his carriage house. And, as I grew older, I became his playmate, always indoors. He taught me hearts and old maid, checkers and dominoes—and