Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [66]
“I never thought there was anything special about Harvard men,” I said.
“That makes two of us,” he said. He was being most unpleasant, and clearly wanted me out of there. “This is not the Salvation Army,” he said. This was a man born during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. Imagine that! He said to Mary Kathleen, “Really—I’m most disappointed in you, bringing somebody else along. Should we expect three tomorrow, and twenty the day after that? Christianity does have its limits, you know.”
I now made a blunder that would land me back in el calabozo before noon on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I’m here on business.”
“You wish to buy a harp?” he said. “They’re seven thousand dollars and up, you know. How about a kazoo instead?”
“I was hoping you could advise me,” I said, “as to where I could buy clarinet parts—not whole clarinets, but just clarinet parts.” I was not serious about this. I was extrapolating a business fantasy from the contents of my bottom drawer at the Arapahoe.
The old man was secretly electrified. Thumbtacked to the bulletin board in the gazebo was a circular that advised him to call the police in case anyone expressed interest in buying or selling clarinet parts. As he would tell me later, he had stuck it up there months before—“like a lottery ticket bought in a moment of folly.” He had never expected to win. His name was Delmar Peale.
Delmar was nice enough later on to make me a present of the circular, which I hung on my office wall at RAMJAC. I became his superior in the RAMJAC family, since American Harp was a subsidiary of my division.
I was certainly no superior of his the first time we met, though. He played cat-and-mouse with me. “Many clarinet parts, or a few?” he asked cunningly.
“Quite a few, actually,” I said. “I realize that you yourself don’t handle clarinets—”
“You’ve come to the right place all the same,” he hastened to assure me. “I know everyone in the business. If you and Madam X would like to make yourselves comfortable, I would be glad to make some telephone calls.”
“You’re too kind,” I said.
“Not at all,” he said.
“Madam X,” incidentally, was the only name he had for Mary Kathleen. That was what she had told him her name was. She had simply barged in one day, trying to escape from people she thought were after her. He had worried a lot about shopping-bag ladies, and he was a practicing Christian, so he had let her stay.
Meanwhile, the sobbing in the gazebo was abating some.
Delmar conducted us to a bench far from the gazebo, so we could not hear him call the police. He had us sit down. “Comfy?” he said.
“Yes, thank you,” I said.
He rubbed his hands. “How about some coffee?” he said.
“It makes me too nervous,” said Mary Kathleen.
“With sugar and cream, if it’s not too much trouble,” I said.
“No trouble at all,” he said.
“What’s the trouble with Doris?” said Mary Kathleen. That was the name of the secretary who was crying in the gazebo. Her full name was Doris Kramm. She herself eighty-seven years old.
At my suggestion, People magazine recently did a story on Delmar and Doris as being almost certainly the oldest boss-and-secretary team in the world, and perhaps in all history. It was a cute story. One picture showed Delmar with his Luger, and quoted him to the effect that anybody who tried to rob The American Harp Company “… would be one unhappy robber pretty quick.”
He told Mary Kathleen now that Doris wept because she had had two hard blows in rapid succession. She had been notified on the previous afternoon that she was going to have to retire immediately, now that RAMJAC had taken over. The retirement age for all RAMJAC employees everywhere, except for supervisory personnel, was sixty-five. And then that morning, while she was cleaning out her desk, she got a telegram saying that her great-grandniece had been killed in a head-on collision after a high-school senior prom in Sarasota, Florida. Doris had no descendents of her own, he explained, so her collateral relatives meant a lot to her.
Delmar and