Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [29]
I ruined him in this way: Under oath, and in reply to a question by Congressman Nixon, I named a number of men who were known to have been communists during the Great Depression, but who had proved themselves to be outstanding patriots during World War Two. On that roll of honor I included the name of Leland Clewes. No particular comment was made about this at the time. It was only when I got home late that afternoon that I learned from my wife, who had been listening to me and then to every news program she could find on the radio, that Leland Clewes had never been connected with communism in any way before.
By the time Ruth put on supper—and we had to eat off a packing case since the bungalow wasn’t fully furnished yet—the radio was able to give us Leland Clewes’s reply. He wished to appear before Congress at the earliest opportunity, in order to swear under oath that he had never been a communist, had never sympathized with any communist cause. His boss, the secretary of state, another Yale man, was quoted as saying that Leland Clewes was the most patriotic American he had ever known, and that he had proved his loyalty beyond question in negotiations with representatives of the Soviet Union. According to him, Leland Clewes had bested the communists again and again. He suggested that I might still be a communist, and that I might have been given the job of ruining Leland Clewes by my masters.
Two horrible years later Leland Clewes was convicted on six counts of perjury. He became one of the first prisoners to serve his sentence in the then new Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility on the edge of Finletter Air Force Base—thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia.
Small world.
5
ALMOST TWENTY YEARS later Richard M. Nixon, having become President of the United States, would suddenly wonder what had become of me. He would almost certainly never have become President, of course, if he had not become a national figure as the discoverer and hounder of the mendacious Leland Clewes. His emissaries would find me, as I say, helping my wife with her decorating business, which she ran out of our little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Through them, he would offer me a job.
How did I feel about it? Proud and useful. Richard. M. Nixon wasn’t merely Richard M. Nixon, after all. He was also the President of the United States of America, a nation I ached to serve again. Should I have refused—on the grounds that America wasn’t really my kind of America just then?
Should I have persisted, as a point of honor, in being to all practical purposes a basket case in Chevy Chase instead?
No.
And now Clyde Carter, the prison guard I had been waiting for so long on my cot, came to get me at last. Emil Larkin had by then given up on me and limped away.
“I’m sure sorry, Walter,” said Clyde.
“Perfectly all right,” I told him. “I’m in no hurry to go anywhere, and there are buses every thirty minutes.” Since no one was coming to meet me, I would have to ride an Air Force bus to Atlanta. I would have to stand all the way, I thought, since the buses were always jammed long before they reached the prison stop.
Clyde knew about my son’s indifference to my sufferings. Everybody in the prison knew. They also knew he was a book reviewer. Half the inmates, it seemed, were writing memoirs or spy novels or romans à clef, or what have you, so there was a lot of talk about book reviewing, and especially in The New York Times.
And Clyde said to me, “Maybe I ain’t supposed to say this, but that son of yours ought to be shot for not coming down after his daddy.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“That’s what you say about everything,” Clyde complained. “No matter what it is, you say, ‘It’s all right.’”
“It usually is,” I said.
“Them was the last words of Caryl Chessman,” he said. “I guess they’ll be your last words, too.”
Caryl Chessman was a convicted kidnapper and rapist, but not