Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [60]
I went right past him and in the opposite direction. I had nothing to say to him, and no wish to stand and listen to all the terrible things he was entitled to say to me.
When I gained the curb, though, and the lights changed, and we were separated by moving cars, I dared to look back at him.
Clewes was facing me. Plainly, he had not yet come up with a name for me. He pointed at me with his free hand, indicating that he knew I had figured in his life in some way. And then he made that finger twitch like a metronome, ticking off possible names for me. This was fun for him. His feet were apart, his knees were bent, and his expression said that he remembered this much, anyway: We had been involved years ago in some sort of wildness, in a boyish prank of some kind.
I was hypnotized.
As luck would have it, there were religious fanatics behind him, barefoot and chanting and dancing in saffron robes. Thus did he appear to be a leading man in a musical comedy.
Nor was I without my own supporting cast. Willy-nilly, I had placed myself between a man wearing sandwich boards and a top hat, and a little old woman who had no home, who carried all her possessions in shopping bags. She wore enormous purple-and-black basketball shoes. They were so out of scale with the rest of her that she looked like a kangaroo.
My companions were both speaking to passers-by. The man in the sandwich boards was saying such things as “Put women back in the kitchen,” and “God never meant women to be the equals of men,” and so on. The shopping-bag lady seemed to be scolding strangers for their obesity, calling them, as I understood her, “stuck-up fats,” and “rich Tats,” and “snooty fats,” and “fats” of a hundred other varieties.
The thing was: I had been away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, so long that I could no longer detect that she was calling people “farts” in the accent of the Cambridge working class.
And in the toe of one of her capacious basketball shoes, among other things, were hypocritical love letters from me. Small world!
Good God! What a reaper and binder life can be sometimes!
When Leland Clewes, on the other side of Fifth Avenue, realized who I was, he formed his mouth into a perfect “O.” I could not hear his saying “Oh,” but I could see his saying “Oh.” He was making fun of our encounter after all these years, overacting his surprise and dismay like an actor in a silent movie.
Plainly, he was going to come back across the street as soon as the lights changed. Meanwhile, all those fake Hindu imbeciles in saffron robes continued to chant and dance behind him.
There was still time for me to flee. What made me hold my ground, I think, was this: the need to prove myself a gentleman. During the bad old days, when I had testified against him, people who wrote about us, speculating as to who was telling the truth and who was not, concluded for the most part that he was a real gentleman, descended from a long line of gentlemen, and that I was a person of Slavic background only pretending to be a gentleman. Honor and bravery and truthfulness, then, would mean everything to him and very little to me.
Other contrasts were pointed out, certainly. With every new edition of the papers and newsmagazines, seemingly, I became shorter and he became taller. My poor wife became more gross and foreign, and his wife became more of an American golden girl. His friends became more numerous and respectable, and mine couldn’t even be found under damp rocks anymore. But what troubled me most in my very bones was the idea that he was honorable and I was not. Thus, twenty-six years later, did this little Slavic jailbird hold his ground.
Across the avenue he came, the former Anglo-Saxon champion, a happy, ramshackle scarecrow now.
I was bewildered by his happiness. “What,” I asked myself, “can this wreck have to be so happy about?”
So there we were reunited, with the shopping-bag lady looking on and listening. He put down his sample case and he extended his right hand. He made a joke, echoing the meeting of