Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [48]
“A California family,” she said.
“Nomads, really,” I said. “California, yes—but Oregon, too, and Wyoming, and Canada, and Europe. But they were always bookish people—teachers and so on.”
I was pure phlogiston, an imaginary element of long ago.
“Descended from whaling captains,” she said.
“I imagine,” I said. I was not at all uncomfortable with the lies.
“And from Vikings before that,” she said. I shrugged.
She had decided to like me a lot—and would continue to do so until the end. As Sarah would tell me, Mrs. Sutton often referred to me as her little Viking. She would not live long enough to see Sarah agree to marry me and then to jilt me. She died in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-seven or so—penniless in an apartment furnished with little more than a card table, two folding chairs, and her bed. She had sold off all her treasures in order to support herself and her old servants, who would have had no place to go and nothing to eat without her. She survived them all. The maid, who was Tillie, was the last of them to die. Two weeks after Tillie died, so did Mrs. Sutton depart from this world.
Back there in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, while I was waiting for Sarah to complete her toilette, Mrs. Sutton told me that Mr. McCone’s father, the founder of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, built the biggest house where she spent her girlhood summers—in Bar Harbor, Maine. When it was finished, he gave a grand ball with four orchestras, and nobody came.
“It seemed very beautiful and noble to snub him like that,” she said. “I remember how happy I was the next day. I can’t help wondering now if we weren’t just a little insane. I don’t mean that we were insane to miss a wonderful party or to hurt the feelings of Daniel McCone. Daniel McCone was a perfectly ghastly man. What was insane was the way we all imagined that God was watching, and simply adoring us, guaranteeing us all seats at His right hand for having snubbed Daniel McCone.”
I asked her what had become of the McCone mansion in Bar Harbor. My mentor had never mentioned it to me.
“Mr. and Mrs. McCone vanished from Bar Harbor the next day,” she said, “with their two young sons, I believe.”
“Yes,” I said. One son became my mentor. The other son became chairman of the board and president of Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron.
“A month later,” she said, “around Labor Day, although there was no Labor Day then—when summer was about to end—a special train arrived. There were perhaps eight freight cars and three cars of workmen, who had come all the way from Cleveland. They must have been from Mr. McCone’s factory. How pale they looked! They were almost all foreigners, I remember—Germans, Poles, Italians, Hungarians. Who could tell? There had never been such people in Bar Harbor before. They slept on the train. They ate on the train. They allowed themselves to be herded like to her. They, too, had been the brainstorm of Alexander Hamilton McCone.
“You are so beautiful!” I said, rising raptly from my folding chair. It was true, surely, for she was tall and slender and golden-haired—and blue-eyed. Her skin was like satin. Her teeth were like pearls. But she radiated about as much sexuality as her grandmother’s card table.
This would continue to be the case for the next seven years. Sarah Wyatt believed that sex was a sort of pratfall that was easily avoided. To avoid it, she had only to remind a would-be lover of the ridiculousness of what he proposed to do to her. The first time I kissed her, which was in Wellesley the week before, I suddenly found myself being played like a tuba, to speak. Sarah was convulsed by laughter, with her lips still pressed to mine. She tickled me. She pulled out my shirttails, leaving me in humiliating disarray. It was terrible. Nor was her laughter about sexuality girlish and nervous, something a man might be expected to modulate with tenderness and anatomical skill. It was the unbridled hee-hawing of somebody at a Marx Brothers film.
A phrase keeps asking