Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [72]
Peace.
He thought it, was urgent, I remember, that mankind and womankind be defined. Otherwise, he was sure, they were doomed forever to be defined by the needs of institutions. He had mainly factories and armies in mind.
He was the only man I ever knew who wore a monocle.
Now Mary Kathleen O’Looney, age eighteen, lay in his bed. We had just made love. It would be very pretty to paint her as naked now—a pink little body. But I never saw her naked. She was modest. Never could I induce her to take off all her clothes.
I myself stood stark naked at a window, with my private parts just below the sill. I felt like the great god Thor.
“Do you love me, Walter?” Mary Kathleen asked my bare backside.
What could I reply but this: “Of course I do.”
There Was a knock on the door. I had told my coeditor at The Bay State Progressive where I could be found in case of emergency, “Who is it?” I said.
There was a sound like a little gasoline engine on the other side of the door. It was Alexander Hamilton McCone, my mentor, who had decided to come to Cambridge unannounced—to see what sort of life I was leading on his money. He sounded like a motor because of his stammer. He stammered because of the Cuyahoga Massacre in Eighteen-hundred and Ninety-four. He was trying to say his own name.
18
I HAD SOMEHOW NEGLECTED to tell him that I had become a communist.
Now he had found out about that. He had come first to my room in Adams House, where he was told that I was most likely at The Progressive. He had gone to The Progressive and had ascertained what sort of publication it was and that I was its coeditor. Now he was outside the door with a copy folded under his arm.
I remained calm. Such was the magic of having emptied my seminal vesicles so recently.
Mary Kathleen, obeying my silent arm signals, hid herself in the bathroom. I slipped on a robe belonging to von Strelitz. He had brought it home from the Solomon Islands. It appeared to be made of shingles, with wreaths of feathers at its collar and cuffs.
Thus was I clad when I opened the door and said to old Mr. McCone, who was in his early sixties then, “Come in, come in.”
He was so angry with me that he could only continue to make those motor sounds: “bup-bup-bup-bup-bup …” But he meanwhile did a grotesque pantomime of how repulsed he was by the paper, whose front-page cartoon showed a bloated capitalist who looked just like him; by my costume; by the unmade bed; by the picture of Karl Marx on von Strelitz’s wall.
Out he went again, slamming the door behind him. He was through with me!
Thus did my childhood end at last. I had become a man.
And it was as a man that I went that night, with Mary Kathleen on my arm, to hear Kenneth Whistler speak at the rally for my comrades in the International Brotherhood of Abrasives and Adhesives Workers.
How could I be so serene, so confident? My tuition for the year had already been paid, so I would graduate. I was about to get a full scholarship to Oxford. I had a superb wardrobe in good repair. I had been saving most of my allowance, so that I had a small fortune in the bank.
If I had to, I could always borrow money from Mother, God rest her soul.
What a daring young man I was!
What a treacherous young man I was! I already knew that I would abandon Mary Kathleen at the end of the academic year. I would write her a few love letters and then fall silent after that. She was too low class.
Whistler had a big bandage over one temple and his right arm was in a plaster cast that night. This was a Harvard graduate, mind you, and from a good family in Cincinnati. He was a Buckeye, like me. Mary Kathleen and I supposed that he had been beat up by the forces of evil yet again—by the police or the National Guard, or by goons of organizers of yellow-dog unions.
I held Mary Kathleen’s hand.
Nobody had ever told her he loved her before.
I was