Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [91]
She befriended a middle-aged American woman whom she found weeping on a bench in a park. The woman was from St. Louis. Her husband was a brewmaster in the Anheuser-Busch Division of RAMJAC. They had come to Nicaragua for a second honeymoon on the advice of a travel agent. The husband had died that morning of amoebic dysentery.
So Mary Kathleen took her back to the hotel and put her into one of the many unused suites she had, and told some of her Mormons to arrange to have the body and the widow flown to St. Louis on a RAMJAC plane.
When Mary Kathleen went to tell her about the arrangements, she found the woman strangled with a cord from the draperies. This was the really horrible part, though: Whoever had done it had obviously believed the woman was Mary Kathleen. Her hands were cut off. They were never found.
Mary Kathleen went to New York City soon after that. She began to watch shopping-bag ladies through field glasses from her suite in the Waldorf Towers. General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur lived on the floor above her, incidentally.
She never went out, never had visitors, never called anyone. No hotel people were allowed in. The Mormons brought the food from downstairs, and made the beds, and did all the cleaning. But one day she received a threatening note, anyway. It was in a pink, scented envelope atop her most intimate lingerie. It said that the author knew who she was and held her responsible for the overthrow of the legitimate government of Guatemala. He was going to blow up the hotel.
Mary Kathleen could take no more. She walked out on her Mormons, who were surely loyal, but unable to protect her. She began to protect herself with layers and layers of clothing she found in garbage cans.
“If your money made you so unhappy,” I said, “why didn’t you give it away?”
“I am!” she said. “After I die, you look in my left shoe, Walter. You will find my will in there. I leave The RAMJAC Corporation to its rightful owners, the American people.” She smiled. It was harrowing to see such cosmic happiness expressed by gums and a rotten tooth or two.
I thought she had died. She had not.
“Mary Kathleen—?” I said.
“I’m not dead yet,” she said.
“I really am going to get help now,” I said.
“If you do, I’ll die,” she said. “I can promise that now. I can die when I want to now. I can pick the time.”
“Nobody can do that,” I said.
“Shopping-bag ladies can,” she said. “It’s our special dispensation. We can’t say when we will start dying. But once we do start, Walter, we can pick the exact time. Would you like me to die right now, at the count of ten?”
“Not now, not ever,” I said.
“Then stay here,” she said.
So I did. What else could I do?
“I want to thank you for hugging me,” she said.
“Any time,” I said.
“Once a day is enough,” she said. “I’ve had my hug today.”
“You were the first woman I ever really made love to,” I said. “Do you remember that?”
“I remember the hugs,” she said. “I remember you said you loved me. No man had ever said that to me before. My mother used to say it to me a lot—before she died.”
I was starting to cry again.
“I know you never meant it,” she said.
“I did, I did,” I protested. “Oh, my God—I did.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “You couldn’t help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed—so you were a good man just the same.”
She stopped breathing. She stopping blinking. She was dead.
EPILOGUE
THERE WAS MORE. There is always more.
It was nine o’clock in the evening of my first full day of freedom. I still had three hours to go. I went upstairs and told a policeman that there was a dead shopping-bag lady in the basement.
His duties had made him cynical. He said to me, “So what else is new?”
So I stood by the body of my old friend in the basement until the ambulance attendants came, just as any other faithful animal would have done. It took a while, since it was known that she was dead. She was stiffening up when they