Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [47]
Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in “the electric” that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.
Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.
“I suppose this all looks very temporary to you,” Mrs. Sutton said to me.
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“It’s quite permanent,” she said. “I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. escritoires and armoires and highboys and lowboys and Welsh dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks and so on, that I could not guess where the windows were. It turned out that she also stockpiled servants, all very old. A uniformed maid had let me in, and then exited sideways into a narrow fissure between two imposing examples of cabinetwork.
Now a uniformed chauffeur emerged from the same fissure to ask Mrs. Sutton if she would be going anywhere in “the electric” that night. Many people, especially old ladies, seemingly, had electric cars in those days. They looked like telephone booths on wheels. Under the floor were terribly heavy storage batteries. They had a stop speed of about eleven miles an hour and needed to be recharged every thirty miles or so. They had tillers, like sailboats, instead of steering wheels.
Mrs. Sutton said she would not be going anywhere in the electric, so the old chauffeur said that he would be going to the hotel, then. There were two other servants besides, whom I never saw. They were all going to spend the night at a hotel so that Sarah could have the second bedroom, where they ordinarily slept.
“I suppose this all looks very temporary to you,” Mrs. Sutton said to me.
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“It’s quite permanent,” she said. “I am utterly helpless to improve my condition without a man. It was the way I was brought up. It was the way I was educated.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Men in tuxedos as beautifully made as yours is should never call anyone but the Queen of England ‘ma’am,’” she said.
“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.
“You are only a child, of course,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Tell me again how you are related to the McCones,” she said.
I had never told anyone that I was related to the McCones. There was another lie I had told frequently, however—a lie, like everything else about me, devised by Mr. McCone. He said it would be perfectly acceptable, even fashionable, to admit that my father was penniless, but it would not do to have a household servant for a father.
The lie went like this, and I told it to Mrs. Sutton: “My father works for Mr. McCone as curator of his art collection. He also advises Mr. McCone on what to buy.”
“A cultivated man,” she said.
“He studied art in Europe,” I said. “He is no businessman.”
“A dreamer,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “If it weren’t for Mr. McCone, I could not afford to go to Harvard.”
“‘Starbuck—’ “she mused. “I believe that’s an old Nantucket name.”
I was ready for that one, too. “Yes,” I said, “but my great-grandfather left Nantucket for the Gold Rush