Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [70]
“Well,” said Mary Kathleen, “at least there’s still us—and now we can start to make our move.”
“I’m always open to suggestions,” I said.
“Or maybe it isn’t worth it,” she said.
She was talking about rescuing the people of the United States from their economy, but I thought she was talking about life in general. So I said of life in general that it probably was worth it, but that it did seem to go on a little too long. My life would have been a masterpiece, for example, if I had died on a beach with a fascist bullet between my eyes.
“Maybe people are just no good anymore,” she said. “They all look so mean to me. They aren’t like they were during the Depression. I don’t see anybody being kind to anybody anymore. Nobody will even speak to me.”
She asked me if I had seen any acts of kindness anywhere. I reflected on this and I realized that I had encountered almost nothing but kindness since leaving prison. I told her so.
“Then it’s the way I look,” she said. This was surely so. There was a limit to how much reproachful ugliness most people could bear to look at, and Mary Kathleen and all her shopping-bag sisters had exceeded that limit.
She was eager to know about individual acts of kindness toward me, to have it confirmed that Americans could still be good-hearted. So I was glad to tell her about my first twenty-four hours as a free man, starting with the kindness shown to me by Clyde Carter, the guard, and then by Dr. Robert Fender, the supply clerk and science-fiction writer. After that, of course, I was given a ride in a limousine by Cleveland Lawes.
Mary Kathleen exclaimed over these people, repeated their names to make sure she had them right. “They’re saints!” she said. “So there are still saints around!”
Thus encouraged, I embroidered on the hospitality offered to me by Dr. Israel Edel, the night clerk at the Arapahoe, and then by the employees at the Coffee Shop of the Hotel Royalton on the following morning. I was not able to give her the name of the owner of the shop, but only the physical detail that set him apart from the populace. “He had a French-fried hand,” I said.
“The saint with the French-fried hand,” she said wonderingly.
“Yes,” I said, “and you yourself saw a man I thought was the worst enemy I had in the world. He was the tall, blue-eyed man with the sample case. You heard him say that he forgave me for everything I had done, and that I should have supper with him soon.”
“Tell me his name again,” she said.
“Leland Clewes,” I said.
“Saint Leland Clewes,” she said reverently. “See how much you’ve helped me already? I never could have found out about all these good people for myself.” Then she performed a minor mnemonic miracle, repeating all the names in chronological order. “Clyde Carter, Dr. Robert Fender, Cleveland Lawes, Israel Edel, the man with the French-fried hand, and Leland Clewes.”
Mary Kathleen took off one of her basketball shoes. It wasn’t the one containing the inkpad and her pens and paper and her will and all that. The shoe she took off was crammed with memorabilia. There were hypocritical love letters from me, as I’ve said. But she was particularly eager for me to see a snapshot of what she called “… my two favorite men.”
It was a picture of my one-time idol, Kenneth Whistler, the Harvard-educated labor organizer, shaking hands with a small and goofy-looking college boy. The boy was myself. I had ears like a loving cup.
That was when the police finally came clumping in to get me.
“I’ll rescue you, Walter,” said Mary Kathleen. “Then we’ll rescue the world together.”
I was relieved to be getting away from her, frankly. I tried to seem regretful about our parting. “Take care of yourself, Mary Kathleen,” I said. “It looks like this is goodbye.”
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