Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [38]
It may be that Ruth protected herself from dread of the gathering storm, or, more accurately, from dread of the gathering silence, by reverting during the daytime, when I was at work, to the Ophelia-like elation she had felt after her liberation—when she had thought of herself as a bird all alone with God. She did not neglect the boy, who was five when Leland Clewes went to prison. He was always clean and well-fed. She did not take to secret drinking. She did, however, start to eat a lot.
And this brings me to the subject of body sizes again, something I am very reluctant to discuss—because I don’t want to give them more importance than they deserve. Body sizes can be remarkable for their variations from accepted norms, but still explain almost nothing about the lives led inside those bodies. I am small enough to have been a coxswain, as I have already confessed. That explains nothing. And, by the time Leland Clewes came to trial for perjury, my wife, although only five feet tall, weighed one hundred and sixty pounds or so.
So be it.
Except for this: Our son very early on concluded that his notorious little father and his fat, foreign mother were such social handicaps to him that he actually told several playmates in the neighborhood that he was an adopted child. A neighbor woman invited my wife over for coffee during the daytime exactly once, and with this purpose: to discover if we knew who the boy’s real parents were.
Peace.
So a decent interval went by after Leland Clewes was sent to prison, two years, as I say—and then I was called into the office of Assistant Secretary of the Army Shelton Walker. We had never met. He had never been in government service before. He was my age. He had been in the war and had risen to the rank of major in the Field Artillery and had made the landings in North Africa and then, on D-Day, in France. But he was essentially an Oklahoma businessman. Someone would tell me later that he owned the largest tire distributorship in the state. More startling to me: He was a Republican, for General of the Armies Dwight David Eisenhower had now become President—the first Republican to hold that office in twenty years.
Mr. Walker wished to express, he said, the gratitude that the whole country should feel for my years of faithful service in both war and peace. He said that I had executive skills that would surely have been more lavishly rewarded if I had employed them in private industry. An economy drive was underway, he said, and the post I held was to be terminated. Many other posts were being terminated, so that he was unable to move me somewhere else, as much as he might have liked to do so. I was fired, in short. I am unable to say even now whether he was being unkind or not when he said to me, rising and extending his hand, “You can now sell your considerable skills, Mr. Starbuck, for their true value in the open marketplace of the Free Enterprise System. Happy hunting! Good luck!”
What did I know about Free Enterprise? I know a great deal about it now, but I knew nothing about it then. I knew so little about it then that I was able to imagine for several months that private industry really would pay a lot for an all-purpose executive like me. I told my poor wife during those first months of unemployment that, yes, that was certainly an option we held, in case all else failed: that I could at any time raise my arms like a man crucified, so to speak, and fall backward into General Motors or General Electric or some such thing. A measure of the kindness of this woman to me: She never asked me why I didn’t do that immediately if it was so easy—never asked me to explain why, exactly, I felt that there was something silly and not quite gentlemanly about