Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [62]
“Yes,” he said. “Sarah and I were very sorry.”
“I was let out only yesterday morning,” I said.
“You have some trying days ahead,” he said. “Is there somebody to look after you?”
“I’ll look after you, Walter,” said the shopping-bag lady. She leaned closer to me to say that so fervently, and I was nearly suffocated by her body odor and her awful breath. Her breath was laden not only with the smell of bad teeth but, as I would later realize, with finely divided droplets of peanut oil. She had been eating nothing but peanut butter for years.
“You can’t take care of anybody!” I said to her.
“Oh—you’d be surprised what all I could do for you,” she said.
“Leland,” I said, “all I want to say to you is that I know what jail is now, and, God damn it, the thing I’m sorriest about in my whole life is that I had anything to do with sending you to jail.”
“Well,” he said, “Sarah and I have often talked about what we would like to say most to you.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“And it’s this:” he said, “Thank you very much, Walter. My going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to Sarah and me.’ I’m not joking. Word of honor: It’s true.”
I was amazed. “How can that be?” I said.
“Because life is supposed to be a test,” he said. “If my life had kept going the way it was going, I would have arrived in heaven never having faced any problem that wasn’t as easy as pie to solve. Saint Peter would have had to say to me, ‘You never lived, my boy. Who can say what you are?’”
“I see,” I said.
“Sarah and I not only have love,” he said, “but we have love that has stood up to the hardest tests.”
“It sounds very beautiful,” I said.
“We would be proud to have you see it,” he said. “Could you come to supper sometime?”
“Yes—I suppose,” I said.
“Where are you staying?” he said.
“The Hotel Arapahoe,” I said.
“I thought they’d torn that down years ago,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“You’ll hear from us,” he said.
“I look forward to it,” I said.
“As you’ll see,” he said, “we have nothing in the way of material wealth; but we need nothing in the way of material wealth.”
“That’s intelligent,” I said.
“I’ll say this though:” he said, “The food is good. As you may remember, Sarah is a wonderful cook.”
“I remember,” I said.
And now the shopping-bag lady offered the first proof that she really did know a lot about me. “You’re talking about that Sarah Wyatt, aren’t you?” she said.
There was a silence among us, although the uproar of the metropolis went on and on. Neither Clewes nor I had mentioned Sarah’s maiden name.
I finally managed to ask her, woozy with shapeless misgivings, “How do you know that name?”
She became foxy and coquettish. “You think I don’t know you were two-timing me with her the whole time?” she said.
Given that much information, I no longer needed to guess who she was. I had slept with her during my senior year at Harvard, while still squiring the virginal Sarah Wyatt to parties and concerts and athletic events.
She was one of the four women I had ever loved. She was the first woman with whom I had had anything like a mature sexual experience.
She was the remains of Mary Kathleen O’Looney!
14
“I WAS HIS CIRCULATION MANAGER,” said Mary Kathleen to Leland Clewes very loudly. “Wasn’t I a good circulation manager, Walter?”
“Yes—you certainly were,” I said. That was how we met: She presented herself at the tiny office of The Bay State Progressive in Cambridge at the start of my senior year, saying that she would do absolutely anything I told her to do, as long as it would improve the condition of the working class. I made her circulation manager, put her in charge of handing out the paper at factory gates and along breadlines and so on. She had been a scrawny little thing back then, but tough and cheerful and highly visible because of her bright red hair. She was such a hater of capitalism, because her mother was one of the women who died of radium poisoning after working for the Wyatt Clock Company. Her father had gone blind after drinking wood alcohol while a night watchman