Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [49]
It was in fact a phrase used by a Harvard classmate who also took Sarah out, but only twice, as I recall. I asked him what he thought of her, and he replied with some bitterness: “nobody home!” He was Kyle Denny, a football player from Philadelphia. Somebody told me recently that Kyle died in a fall in his bathtub on the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He cracked his head open on a faucet.
So I can fix the date of Kyle Denny’s death with pinpoint accuracy: December the seventh, Nineteen-hundred and Forty-one.
“You do look nice, my dear,” said Mrs. Sutton to Sarah. She was pitifully ancient—about five years younger than I am now. I thought she might cry about Sarah’s beauty, and how that beauty was sure to fade in just a few years, and on and on. She was very wise.
“I feel so silly,” said Sarah.
“You don’t believe you’re beautiful?” said her grandmother.
“I know I’m beautiful,” said Sarah. “I look in a mirror, and I think, ‘I’m beautiful.’”
“What’s wrong, then?” said her grandmother.
“Beautiful is such a funny thing to be,” said Sarah. “Somebody else is ugly, but I’m beautiful. Walter says I’m beautiful. You say I’m beautiful. I say I’m beautiful. Everybody says, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,’ and you start wondering what it is, and what’s so wonderful about it.”
“You make people happy with your beauty,” said her grandmother.
“You certainly make me happy with it,” I said.
Sarah laughed. “It’s so silly,” she said. “It’s so dumb,” she said.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t think about it so much,” said her grandmother.
“That’s like telling a midget to stop thinking about being a midget,” said Sarah, and she laughed again.
“You should stop saying everything is silly and dumb,” said her grandmother.
“Everything is silly and dumb,” said Sarah.
“You will learn differently as you grow older,” her grandmother promised.
“I think everybody older just pretends to know what’s going on, and it’s all so serious and wonderful,” said Sarah. “Older people haven’t really found out anything new that I don’t know. Maybe if people didn’t get so serious when they got older, we wouldn’t have a depression now.”
“There’s nothing constructive in laughing all the time,” said her grandmother.
“I can cry, too,” said Sarah. “You want me to cry?”
“No,” said her grandmother. “I don’t want to hear any more about it. You just go out with this nice young man and have a lovely time.”
“I can’t laugh about those poor women who painted the clocks,” said Sarah. “That’s one thing I can’t laugh about.”
“Nobody wants you to,” said her grandmother. “You run along now.”
Sarah was referring to an industrial tragedy that was notorious at the time. Sarah’s family was in the middle of it, and sick about it. Sarah had already told me that she was sick about it, and so had her brother, my roommate, and so had their father and mother. The tragedy was a slow one that could not be stopped once it had begun, and it began in the family’s clock company, the Wyatt Clock Company, one of the oldest companies in the United States, in Brockton, Massachusetts. It was an avoidable tragedy. The Wyatts never tried to justify it, and would not hire lawyers to justify it. It could not be justified.
It went like this: In the nineteen twenties the United States Navy awarded Wyatt Clock a contract to produce several thousand standardized ships’ clocks that could be easily read in the dark. The dials were to be black. The hands and the numerals were to be hand-painted with white paint containing the radioactive element radium. About half a hundred Brockton women, most of them relatives of regular Wyatt Clock Company employees, were hired to paint the hands and numerals. It was a way to make pin money. Several of the women who had young children to look after were allowed to do the work at home.
Now all those women had died or were about to die most horribly with their bones crumbling, with their heads rotting off. The cause was radium poisoning. Every one of them had been told by a foreman, it had since come out in court, that