Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [39]
“We may have to be rich, even though we don’t want to be,” I remember telling her somewhere in there. My son was six by then, and listening—and old enough, surely, to ponder such a paradox. Could it have made any sense to him? No.
Meanwhile, I visited and telephoned acquaintances in other departments, making light of being “temporarily at liberty,” as out-of-work actors say. I might have been a man with a comical injury, like a black eye or a broken big toe. Also: All my old acquaintances were Democrats like myself, allowing me to present myself as a victim of Republican stupidity and vengefulness.
But, alas, whereas life for me had been so long a sort of Virginia reel, as friends handed me on from job to job, no one could now think of a vacant post anywhere. Vacancies had suddenly become as extinct as dodo birds.
Too bad.
But the old comrades behaved so naturally and politely toward me that I could not say even now that I was being punished for what I had done to Leland Clewes—if I had not at last appealed for help to an arrogant old man outside of government, who, to my shock, was perfectly willing to show the disgust he felt for me, and to explain it in detail. He was Timothy Beame. He had been an assistant secretary of agriculture under Roosevelt before the war. He had offered me my first job in government. He, too, was a Harvard man and former Rhodes Scholar. Now he was seventy-four years old and the active head of Beame, Mearns, Weld and Weld, the most prestigious law firm in Washington.
I asked him on the telephone if he would have lunch with me. He declined. Most people declined to have lunch with me. He said he could see me for half an hour late that afternoon, but that he could not imagine what we might have to talk about.
“Frankly, sir,” I said, “I’m looking for work—possibly with a foundation or a museum. Something like that.”
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh—looking for work, are we?” he said. “Yes—that we should talk about. Come in, by all means. How many years is it now since we’ve had a good talk?”
“Thirteen years, sir,” I said.
“A lot of water goes over the old dam in thirteen years.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Ta-ta,” he said.
I was fool enough to keep the appointment.
His reception of me was elaborately hearty and false from the first. He introduced me to his young male secretary, told him what a promising young man I had been, clapping me on the back all the time. This was a man who may never have clapped anyone on the back in his life before.
When we got into his paneled office, Timothy Beame directed me to a leather club chair, saying, “Sit thee doon, sit thee doon.” I have recently come across that same supposedly humorous expression, of course, in Dr. Bob Fender’s science-fiction story about the judge from Vicuna, who got stuck forever to me and my destiny. Again: I doubt if Timothy Beame had ever addressed such an inane locution to anyone ever before. This was a bunchy, shaggy old man, incidentally—accidentally majestic as I was accidentally small. His great hands suggested that he had swung a mighty broadsword long ago, and that they were fumbling for truth and justice now. His white brows were an unbroken thicket from one side to the other, and after he had seated himself at his desk, he dipped his head forward so as to peer at me and speak to me through that hedge.
“I needn’t ask what you’ve been up to lately,” he said.
“No, sir—I guess not,” I said.
“You and young Clewes have managed to make yourselves as famous as Mutt and Jeff,” he said. “To our sorrow,” I said.
“I would hope so. I would certainly hope that there was much sorrow there,” he said.
This was a man who, as it turned out, had only about two more months to live. He had had no hint of that, so far as I know. It was said, after he died, that he would surely have been named to the Supreme Court, if only he had managed to live until the election of another Democrat to the presidency.
“If you are truly sorrowful,” he went on, “I hope you know what it is you are mourning, exactly.”
“Sir—?” I said.
“You thought only you