Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [36]
I was incurious about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse. His arrival, like the arrival of any new prisoner, would be a public execution of sorts. I did not want to watch him or anybody become less than a man. So I was all alone in the supply room. I was grateful for the accident of privacy. I took advantage of it. I performed what was perhaps the most obscenely intimate physical act of my life. I gave birth to a broken, querulous little old man by doing this: by putting on my civilian clothes.
There were white broadcloth underpants and calf-length, ribbed black socks from the Tally-ho Gentleman’s Shop in Chevy Chase. There was a white Arrow shirt from Garfinckel’s Department Store in Washington. There was the Brooks Brothers suit from New York City, and a regimental-stripe tie and black shoes from there, too. The laces on both shoes were broken and mended with square knots. Fender obviously had not taken a close look at them, or there would have been new laces in those shoes.
The necktie was the most antique item. I had actually worn it during the Second World War. Imagine that. An Englishman I was working with on medical supply schemes for the D-Day landings told me that the tie identified me as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
“You were wiped out in the Second Battle of the Somme in the First World War,” he said, “and now, in this show, you’ve been wiped out again at E1 Alamein. You might say, ‘Not the luckiest regiment in the world.’”
The stripe scheme is this: A broad band of pale blue is bordered by a narrow band of forest-green above and orange below. I am wearing that tie on this very day, as I sit here in my office in the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation.
When Clyde Carter and Dr. Fender returned to the supply room, I was a civilian again. I felt as dazed and shy and tremble-legged as any other newborn creature. I did not yet know what I looked like. There was one full-length mirror in the supply room, but its face was turned to the wall. Fender always turned it to the wall when a new arrival was expected. This was another example of Fender’s delicacy. The new arrival, if he did not wish to, did not have to see at once how he had been transformed by a prison uniform.
Clyde’s and Fender’s faces, however, were mirrors enough to tell me that I was something less than a gay boulevardier on the order of, say, the late Maurice Chevalier. They were quick to cover their pity with horseplay; but not quick enough.
Fender pretended to be my valet in an embassy somewhere. “Good morning, Mr. Ambassador. Another crisp and bright day,” he said. “The queen is expecting you for lunch at one.”
Clyde said that it sure was easy to spot a Harvard man, that they all had that certain something. But neither friend made a move to turn the mirror around, so I did it myself.
Here is who I saw reflected: a scrawny old janitor of Slavic extraction. He was unused to wearing a suit and a tie. His shirt collar much too large for him, and so was his suit, which fit him like a circus tent. He looked unhappy—on his way to a relative’s funeral, perhaps. At no point was there any harmony between himself and the suit. He may have found his clothes in a rich man’s ash can.
Peace.
7
I SAT NOW on an unsheltered park bench by the highway in front of the prison. I was waiting for the bus. I had beside me a tan canvas-and-leather suitcase designed for Army officers. It had been my constant companion in Europe during my glory days. Draped over it was an old trenchcoat, also from my glory days. I was all alone. The bus was late. Every so often I would pat the pockets of my suitcoat, making sure that I had my release papers, my government voucher for a one-way, tourist-class flight from Atlanta to New York City, my money, and my Doctor of Mixology degree. The sun beat down on me.
I had three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents. Two hundred and fifty of that was in the form of a government check, which could not easily be stolen from me. It was all my own money. After all