Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [51]
The story was this: The hotel and the restaurant, while sharing the same building, one minute from Times Square, were under separate ownerships. The hotel had given up—was no longer taking guests. The restaurant, on the other hand, had just been completely refurbished, its owner believing that the collapse of the economy would be brief, and was caused by nothing more substantial than a temporary loss of nerve by businessmen.
Sarah and I had come in through the wrong door. I told Sarah as much, and she replied, “That is the story of my life. I always go in the wrong door first.”
So Sarah and I went out into the night again and then in through the door to the place where food and drink awaited us. Mr. McCone had told me to order the meal in advance. That I had done. The owner himself received us. He was French. On the lapel of his tuxedo was a decoration that meant nothing to me, but which was familiar to Sarah, since her father had one, too. It meant, she would explain to me, that he was a chevalier in the Légion d’honneur.
Sarah had spent many summers in Europe. I had never been there. She was fluent in French, and she and the owner performed a madrigal in that most melodious of all languages. How would I ever have got through life without women to act as my interpreters? Of the four women I ever loved, only Mary Kathleen O’Looney spoke no language but English. But even Mary Kathleen was my interpreter when I was a Harvard communist, trying to communicate with members of the American working class.
The restaurant owner told Sarah in French, and then she told me, about the Great Depression’s being nothing but a loss of nerve. He said that alcoholic beverages would be legal again as soon as a Democrat was elected President, and that life would become fun again.
He led us to our table. The room could seat at least one hundred, I would guess, but there were only a dozen other patrons there. Somehow, they still had cash. And when I try to remember them now, and to guess what they were, I keep seeing the pictures by George Grosz of corrupt plutocrats amidst the misery of Germany after World War One. I had not seen those pictures in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. I had not seen anything.
There was a puffy old woman, I remember, eating alone and wearing a diamond necklace. She had a Pekingese dog in her lap. The dog had a diamond necklace, too.
There was a withered old man, I remember, hunched over his food, hiding it with his arms. Sarah whispered that he ate as though his meal were a royal flush. We would later learn that he was eating caviar.
“This must be a very expensive place,” said Sarah.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Money is so strange,” she said. “Does it make any sense to you?”
“No,” I said.
“The people who’ve got it, and the people who don’t—” she mused. “I don’t think anybody understands what’s really going on.”
“Some people must,” I said. I no longer believe that.
I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders what is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.
“Does Mr. McCone know how much longer the Depression will last?” she said.
“He doesn’t know anything about business,” I said.
“How can he still be so rich, if he doesn’t know anything about business?” she said.
“His brother runs everything,” I said.
“I wish my father had somebody to run everything for him,” she said.
I knew that things were going so badly for her father that her brother, my roommate, had decided to drop out of school at the end of the semester. He would never go back to school, either. He would take a job as an orderly in a tuberculosis sanitarium, and himself contract tuberculosis. That would keep him out of the armed forces in the Second World War. He would work as a welder in a Boston shipyard, instead. I would lose touch with him. Sarah,