Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [28]
Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine: Will young people of today doubt me if I aver with a straight face that congressional committees convened in treetops then, since saber-toothed tigers still dominated the ground? No. Winston Churchill was still alive. Joseph Stalin was still alive. Think of that. Harry S. Truman was President. And the Defense Department had told me, a former communist, to form and head a task force of scientists and military men. Its mission was to propose tactics for ground forces when, as seemed inevitable, small nuclear weapons became available on the battlefield.
The committee wished to know, and especially Mr. Nixon, if a man with my political past was to be trusted with such a sensitive job. Might I hand over our tactical schemes to the Soviet Union? Might I rig the schemes to make them impractical, so that in any battle with the Soviet Union the Soviet Union would surely win?
“You know what I heard on that radio?” said Emil Larkin.
“No,” I said—ever so emptily.
“I heard a man do the one thing nobody can ever forgive him for—and I don’t care what their politics are. I heard him do the one thing he can’t ever forgive himself for, and that was to betray his best friend.”
I could not smile then at his description of what he thought he had heard, and I cannot smile at it now—but it was ludicrous all the same. It was an impossibly chowder-headed abridgement of congressional hearings and civil suits and finally a criminal trial, which were spread out over two years. As a little boy listening to the radio, he could only have heard a lot of tedious talk, not much more interesting than static. It was only as a grownup, with a set of ethics based on cowboy movies, that Larkin could have decided that he had heard with utmost clarity the betrayal of a man by his best friend.
“Leland Clewes was never my best friend,” I said. This was the name of the man who was ruined by my testimony, and for a while there our last names would be paired in conversations: “Starbuck and Clewes”—like “Gilbert and Sullivan;” like “Sacco and Vanzetti;” like “Laurel and Hardy;” like “Leopold and Loeb.”
I don’t hear much about us anymore.
Clewes was a Yale man—my age. We first met at Oxford, where I was the coxswain and he was the bowman of a winning crew at Henley. I was short. He was tall. I am still short. He is still tall. We went to work for the Department of Agriculture at the same time and were assigned adjacent cubicles. We played tennis every Sunday morning, when the weather was clement. Those were our salad days, when we were green in judgment.
For a while there we were joint owners of a secondhand Ford Phaeton and often went out together with our girls. Phaeton was the son of Helios, the sun. He borrowed his father’s flaming chariot one day and drove it so irresponsibly that parts of northern Africa were turned into deserts. In order to keep the whole planet from being desolated, Zeus had to kill him with a thunderbolt. “Good for Zeus,” I say. What choice did he have?
But my friendship with Clewes was never deep and it ended when he took a girl away from me and married her. She was a member of a fine old New England family, which owned the Wyatt Clock Company in Brockton, Massachusetts, among other things. Her brother was my roommate at Harvard in my freshman year, which was how I got to know her. She was one of the four women I have ever truly loved. Sarah Wyatt was her maiden name.
When I accidentally ruined him, Leland Clewes and I had not exchanged any sort of greeting for ten years or more. He and his Sarah had a child, a daughter, three years older than mine. He had become the brightest meteor in the State Department, and it was widely conceded