Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [94]
I have tried to explain to my little dog that her master must go away for a while—because he violated Section 190.30. I have told her that laws are written to be obeyed. She understands nothing. She loves my voice. All news from me is good news. She wags her tail.
• • •
I lived very high. I bought a duplex with a low-interest company loan. I cashed stock options for clothes and furniture. I became a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Ballet, coming and going by limousine.
I gave intimate parties at my home for RAMJAC authors and recording artists and movie actors and circus performers—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mick Jagger, Jane Fonda, Günther Gebel Williams, and the like. It was fun. After RAMJAC acquired the Marlborough Gallery and Associated American Artists, I had painters and sculptors to my parties, too.
How well did I do at RAMJAC? During my incumbency, my division, including subsidiaries under its control, both covert and overt, won eleven platinum records, forty-two gold records, twenty-two Oscars, eleven National Book Awards, two American League pennants, two National League pennants, two World Series, and fifty-three Grammies—and we never failed to show a return on capital of less than 23 percent. I even engaged in corporate in-fighting, preventing the transfer of the catfood company from my division to General Foods. It was exciting. I got really mad.
We just missed getting another Nobel prize in literature several times. But then we already had two: Saul Bellow and Mr. Singer.
I myself have made Who’s Who for the first time in my life. This is a slightly tarnished triumph, admittedly, since my own division controls Gulf & Western, which controls Who’s Who. I put it all in there, except for the prison term and the name of my son: where I was born, where I went to college, various jobs I’ve held, my wife’s maiden name.
• • •
Did I invite my own son to my parties—to chat with so many heroes and heroines of his? No. Did he quit the Times when I became his superior there? No. Did he write or telephone greetings of any sort? No. Did I try to get in touch with him? Only once. I was in the basement apartment of Leland and Sarah Clewes. I had been drinking, something I don’t enjoy and rarely do. And I was physically so close to my son. His apartment was only thirty feet above my head.
It was Sarah who had made me telephone him.
So I dialed my son’s number. It was about eight o’clock at night. One of my little grandchildren answered, and I asked him his name.
“Juan,” he said.
“And your last name?” I said.
“Stankiewicz,” he said. In accordance with my wife’s will, incidentally, Juan and his brother, Geraldo, were receiving reparations from West Germany for the confiscation of my wife’s father’s bookstore in Vienna by the Nazis after the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-eight. My wife’s will was an old one, written when Walter was a little boy. The lawyer had advised her to leave the money to her grandchildren so as to avoid one generation of taxes. She was trying to be smart about money. I was out of work at the time.
“Is your daddy home?” I said.
“He’s at the movies,” he said.
I was so relieved. I did not leave my name. I said I would call back later.
• • •
As for what Arpad Leen suspected about me: Like anyone else, he was free to suspect as much or as little as he pleased. There were no more fingerprinted messages from Mrs. Graham. The last one confirmed in writing that Clewes and I and Ubriaco and Edel and Lawes and Carter and Fender were to be made vice-presidents.
There was a deathly silence after that—but there had been deathly silences before. One lasted two years. Leen meanwhile operated under the mandate of a letter Mary Kathleen had sent him in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-one, which said only this: “acquire, acquire, acquire.”
She had certainly picked the right man for the job. Arpad Leen was born to acquire and acquire and acquire.
What was