Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [63]
Now what was left of Mary Kathleen bowed her head, responded modestly to my having agreed that she had been a good circulation manager, and presented her pate to Leland Clewes and me. She had a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar. The tonsure that fringed it was sparse and white.
Leland Clewes would tell me later that he almost fainted. He had never seen a woman’s bald spot before.
It was too much for him. He closed his blue eyes and he turned away. When he manfully faced us again, he avoided looking directly at Mary Kathleen—-just as the mythological Perseus had avoided looking at the Gorgon’s head.
“We must get together soon,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’ll be hearing from me soon,” he said.
“I hope so,” I said.
“Must rush,” he said.
“I understand,” I said.
“Take care,” he said.
“I will,” I said.
He was gone.
Mary Kathleen’s shopping bags were still banked around my legs. I was as immobilized and eye-catching as Saint Joan of Arc at the stake. Mary Kathleen still grasped my wrist, and she would not lower her voice.
“Now that I’ve found you, Walter,” she cried, “I’ll never let you go again!”
Nowhere in the world was this sort of theater being done anymore. For what it may be worth to modern impresarios: I can testify from personal experience that great crowds can still be gathered by melodrama, provided that the female in the piece speaks loudly and clearly.
“You used to tell me all the time how much you loved me, Walter,” she cried. “But then you went away, and I never heard from you again. Were you just lying to me?”
I may have made some responsive sound. “Bluh,” perhaps, or “fluh.”
“Look at me in the eye, Walter,” she said.
Sociologically, of course, this melodrama was as gripping as Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O’Looney wasn’t the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentant murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time.
Good-hearted people were meanwhile as sick about all these tragic by-products of the economy as they would have been about human slavery a little more than a hundred years before. Mary Kathleen and I were a miracle that our audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.
Some people were crying. I myself was about to cry.
“Hug her,” said a woman in the crowd.
I did so.
I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that was wrapped in rags. That was when I myself began to cry. I was crying for the first time since I had found my wife dead in bed one morning—in my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
15
MY NOSE, THANK GOD, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn’t so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese—or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
It felt for a moment as though Mary Kathleen had died in my arms. To be perfectly frank, that would have been all right with me. Where, after all, could I take her from there? What could be better than her receiving a hug from a man who had known her when she was young and beautiful, and then going to heaven right away?
It would have been wonderful. Then again, I would never have become executive vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. I might at this very moment be sleeping off a wine binge in the Bowery, while a juvenile monster soaked me in gasoline and touched me off with his Cricket