Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [50]
And, as luck would have it, the daughter of one of those unfortunate women would become one of the four women I have ever loved in this Vale of Tears—along with my mother, my wife, and Sarah Wyatt. Mary Kathleen O’Looney was her name.
10
I SPEAK ONLY OF RUTH as “my wife.” It would not surprise me, though, if on Judgment Day Sarah Wyatt and Mary Kathleen O’Looney were also certified as having been wives of mine. I surely paired off with both of them—with Mary Kathleen for about eleven months, and with Sarah, off and on, to be sure, for about seven years.
I can hear Saint Peter saying to me: “It would appear, Mr. Starbuck, that you were something of a Don Juan.”
So there I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, sashaying into the wedding-cake lobby of the Hotel Arapahoe with beautiful Sarah Wyatt, the Yankee clock heiress, on my arm. Her family was nearly as broke as mine by then. What little they had salvaged would soon be dispersed among the survivors of the women who painted all those clocks for the Navy. This dispersal would be compelled in about a year by a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court as to the personal responsibility of employers for deaths in their places of work caused by criminal negligence.
Eighteen-year-old Sarah now said of the Arapahoe lobby, “It’s so dirty—and there’s nobody here.” She laughed. “I love it,” she said.
At that point in time, in the filthy lobby of the Arapahoe, Sarah Wyatt did not know that I was acting with all possible humorlessness on orders from Alexander Hamilton McCone. She would tell me later that she thought I was being witty when I said we should get all dressed up. She thought we were costumed like millionaires in the spirit of Halloween. We would laugh and laugh, she hoped. We would be people in a movie.
Not at all: I was a robot programmed to behave like a genuine aristocrat.
Oh, to be young again!
The dirt in the Arapahoe lobby might not have been so obvious, if somebody had not started to do something about it and then stopped. There was a tall stepladder set against one wall. There was a bucket at the base of it, filled with dirty water and with a brush floating on top. Someone had clearly scaled the ladder with the bucket. He had scrubbed as much of the wall as he could reach from the top. He had created a circle of cleanliness, dribbling filth at its bottom, to be sure, but as bright as a harvest moon.
I do not know who made the harvest moon. There was no one to ask. There had been no doorman to invite us in. There were no bellboys and no guests inside. There wasn’t a soul behind the reception desk in the distance. The newsstand and the theater-ticket kiosk were shuttered. The doors of the unmanned elevators were propped open by chairs.
“I don’t think they’re in business anymore,” said Sarah.
“Somebody accepted my reservation on the telephone,” I said. “He called me ‘monsieur.’”
“Anybody can call anybody ‘monsieur’ on the telephone,” said Sarah.
But then we heard a Gypsy violin crying somewhere—sobbing as though its heart would break. And when I hear that violin’s lamenting in my memory now, I am able to add this information: Hitler, not yet in power, would soon cause to be killed every Gypsy his soldiers and policemen could catch.
The music was coming from behind a folding screen in the lobby. Sarah and I dared to move the screen from the wall. We were confronted by a pair of French doors, which were held shut with a padlock and hasp. The panes in the doors were mirrors, showing us yet again how childish and rich we were. But Sarah discovered one pane that had a flaw in its silvering. She peeped through the flaw, then invited me to take a turn. I was flabbergasted. I might have been peering into the twinkling prisms of a time machine. On the other side of the French doors was the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe in pristine condition, complete with a Gypsy fiddler—almost atom for atom as it must have been in the time