Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [23]
I returned to the United States with my little human family, to Washington, D.C., again, in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. My optimism became bricks and mortar and wood and nails. We bought the only house we would ever own, which was the little bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Ruth put on the mantelpiece the woodcarving of the praying hands by Albrecht Dürer. There were two things that had made her want to buy that house and no other, she said. One was that it had a perfect resting place for the hands. The other was a gnarled old tree that shaded the walk to our doorstep. It was a flowering crab apple tree.
Was she religious? No. She was from a family that was skeptical about all formal forms of worship, which was classified as Jewish by the Nazis. Its members would not have so classified themselves. I asked her once if she had ever sought the consolations of religion in the concentration camp.
“No,” she said. “I knew God would never come near such a place. So did the Nazis. That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis,” she said. “They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.”
I still ponder a toast Ruth gave one Christmas Eve, in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four or so. I was the only person to hear it—the only other person in the bungalow. Our son had not sent us so much as a Christmas card. The toast was this, and I suppose she might just as logically have given it on the day I met her in Nuremberg: “Here’s to God Almighty, the laziest man in town.”
Strong stuff.
Yes—and my speckled old hands were like the Albrecht Dürer hands atop my folded bedding, as I sat on my prison cot in Georgia, waiting for freedom to begin again.
I was a pauper.
I had emptied my savings account and cashed in my life-insurance policies and sold my Volkswagen and my brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in order to pay for my futile defense.
My lawyers said that I still owed them one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Maybe so. Anything was possible.
Nor did I have glamor to sell. I was the oldest and least celebrated of all the Watergate coconspirators. What made me so uninteresting, I suppose, was that I had so little power and wealth to lose. Other coconspirators had taken belly-whoppers from the tops of church steeples, so to speak. When I was arrested, I was a man sitting on a three-legged stool in the bottom of a well. All they could do to me was to saw off the legs of my little stool.
Not even I cared. My wife had died two weeks before they took me away, and my son no longer spoke to me. Still—they had to put handcuffs on me. It was the custom.
“Your name?” the police sergeant who booked me had asked.
I was impudent with him. Why not? “Harry Houdini,” I replied.
A fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. It happened all the time.
“At least I don’t smoke anymore,” I thought.
President Nixon himself commented one time on how much I smoked. It was soon after I came to work for him—in the spring of Nineteen-hundred and Seventy. I was summoned to an emergency meeting about the shooting to death of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard. There were about forty other people at the meeting. President Nixon was at the head of the huge oval table, and I was at the foot. This was the first time I had seen him in person since he was a mere congressman—twenty years before. Until now he had no wish to see his special advisor on youth affairs. As things turned out, he would never want to see me again.
Virgil Greathouse, the secretary of health, education, and welfare, and reputedly one of the President’s closest friends, was there. He would begin serving his prison term on the same day I completed mine. Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew was there. He would eventually plead nolo contendere to charges of accepting