Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [65]
“I suppose that’s true,” I said.
“Look at this,” she said. She led me into a chamber that contained row on row of toilets.
“It’s good to know they’re here,” I said.
“You won’t tell anybody?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“I’m putting my life in your hands, telling you my secrets like this,” she said.
“I’m honored,” I said.
And then out of the catacombs we climbed. She led me through a tunnel under Lexington Avenue, and up a staircase into the lobby of the Chrysler Building. She skied across the floor to a waiting elevator, with me trotting behind. A guard shouted at us, but we got into the elevator before he could stop us. The doors shut in his angry face as Mary Kathleen punched the button for the topmost floor.
We had the car all to ourselves, and upward we flew. Within a trice the doors slithered open on a place of unearthly beauty and peace within the building’s stainless-steel crown. I had often wondered what was up there. Now I knew. The crown came to a point seventy feet above us. Between us and the point, as I looked upward in awe, there was nothing but a lattice of girders and air, air, air.
“What a glorious waste of space!” I thought. But then I saw that there were tenants after all. Myriads of bright yellow little birds were perched on the girders, or flitting through the prisms of light admitted by the bizarre windows, by the great triangles of glass that pierced the crown.
The vast floor at whose edge we stood was carpeted in grassy green. There was a fountain splashing at its center. There were garden benches and statues everywhere, and here and there a harp.
As I have already said, this was the showroom of The American Harp Company, which had recently become a subsidiary of The RAMJAC Corporation. The company had occupied this space since the building opened in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. All the birds I saw, which were prothonotary warblers, were descended from a single pair released back then.
There was a Victorian gazebo near the elevator, which contained the desks of the salesman and his secretary. A woman was sobbing in there. What a morning it was for tears! What a book this is for tears!
The oldest man I had ever seen came tottering out of the gazebo. He wore a swallowtail coat and striped trousers and spats. He was the sole salesman, and had been since Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was the man who had released from the hot cage of his hands and into this enchanted space the first two prothonotary warblers. He was ninety-two years old! He looked like John D. Rockefeller at the end of his life, or like a mummy. The only moisture left in him, seemingly, was faint dew on the surface of his eyes. He was not entirely defenseless, however. He was president of a pistol club that shot at targets shaped like men on weekends, and he had a loaded Luger the size of a Doberman pinscher in his desk. He had been looking forward to a robbery for quite some time.
“Oh—it’s you,” he said to Mary Kathleen, and she said that, yes, it was.
She was accustomed to coming here almost every day and sitting for several hours. The understanding was that she was to get out of sight with her shopping bags, in case a customer came in. There was a further understanding, which Mary Kathleen had now violated.
“I thought I told you,” he said to her, “that you were never to bring anybody else with you, or even to tell anybody else how nice it was up here.”
Since I was carrying three shopping bags, he concluded that I was another derelict, a shopping-bag man.
“He isn’t a bum,” said Mary Kathleen. “He’s a Harvard man.”
He did not believe this for a minute. “I see,” he said, and he looked me up and down. He himself had never even graduated from grammar school, incidentally. There had been no laws against child labor when he was a boy, and he had gone to work in the Chicago factory of The American Harp Company at the age of ten. “I’ve heard that you can always tell a Harvard man,” he said, “but you can’t tell him