Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [46]
9
I HAD BEEN to the Arapahoe once before—in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. Fire had yet to be domesticated. Albert Einstein had predicted the invention of the wheel, but was unable to describe its probable shape and uses in the language of ordinary women and men. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer, was President. The sale of alcoholic beverages was against the law, and I was a Harvard freshman.
I was operating under instructions from my mentor, Alexander Hamilton McCone. He told me in a letter that I was to duplicate a folly he himself had committed when a freshman, which was to take a pretty girl to the Harvard-Columbia football game in New York, and then to spend a month’s allowance on a lobster dinner for two, with oysters and caviar and all that, in the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe. We were to go dancing afterward. “You must wear your tuxedo,” he said. “You must tip like a drunken sailor.” Diamond Jim Brady, he told me, had once eaten four dozen oysters, four lobsters, four chickens, four squabs, four T-bone steaks, four pork chops, and four lamb chops there—on a bet. Lillian Russell had looked on.
Mr. McCone may have been drunk when he wrote that letter. “All work and no play,” he wrote, “makes Jack a dull boy.”
And the girl I took there, the twin sister of my roommate, would become one of the four women I would ever truly love. The first was my mother. The last was my wife.
Sarah Wyatt was the girl’s name. She was all of eighteen, and so was I. She was attending a very easy two-year college for rich girls in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which was Pine Manor. Her family lived in Prides Crossing, north of Boston—toward Gloucester. While we were in New York City together she would be staying with her maternal grandmother, a stockbroker’s widow, in a queerly irrelevant enclave of dead-end streets and vest-pocket parks and Elizabethan apartment-hotels called “Tudor City”—near the East River, and actually bridging Forty-second Street. As luck will have it, my son now lives in Tudor City. So do Mr. and Mrs. Leland Clewes.
Small world.
Tudor City was quite new, but already bankrupt and nearly empty when I arrived by taxicab—to take my Sarah to the Hotel Arapahoe in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. I was wearing a tuxedo made to my measure by the finest tailor in Cleveland. I had a silver cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case, both gifts from Mr. McCone. I had forty dollars in my billfold. I could have bought the whole state of Arkansas for forty dollars cash in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one.
We come to the matter of physical size again: Sarah Wyatt was three inches taller than me. She did not mind. She was so far from minding that, when I fetched her in Tudor City, she was wearing high heels with her evening dress.
A stronger proof that she was indifferent to our disparity in size: In seven years Sarah Wyatt would agree to marry me.
She wasn’t quite ready when I arrived, so I had to talk to her grandmother, Mrs. Sutton, for a while. Sarah had warned me at the football game that afternoon that I must not mention suicide to Mrs. Sutton—because Mr. Sutton had jumped out of his office window in Wall Street after the stock market crashed in Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine.
“It is a nice place you have here, Mrs. Sutton,” I said.
“You’re the only person who thinks so,” she said. “It’s crowded. Everything that goes on in the kitchen you can smell out here.”
It was only a two-bedroom apartment. She had certainly come down in the world. Sarah said she used to have a horse farm in Connecticut and a house on Fifth Avenue, and on and on.
The walls of the little entrance hall were covered with blue ribbons from horse shows before the Crash. “I see you have won a lot of blue ribbons,” I said.
“No,” she said, “it was the horse that won those.”
We were seated on folding chairs at a card table in the middle of the living room. There were no easy