Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [97]
At least I will have some real friends outside of prison this time.
There was a bowl of yellow tulips on the table for a centerpiece. It was April again.
It was raining outside. Nature sympathized.
• • •
I was seated at the place of honor—to the right of my hostess, of Sarah Clewes, the nurse. Of the four women I ever loved, she was always the easiest one to talk to. That may be because I had never promised her anything, and so had never let her down. Oh, Lord—the things I used to promise my mother and my poor wife and poor Mary Kathleen!
Young Israel Edel and his not-so-lovely wife, Norma, were there. I say that she was not-so-lovely for the simple reason that she has always hated me. I don’t know why. I have never insulted her, and she is certainly as pleased as Punch with the upturn her husband’s career has taken. He would still be a night clerk, if it weren’t for me. The Edels are renovating a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with all the money he makes. Still—every time she looks at me, I feel like something the cat dragged in. It is just one of those things. I think she may be slightly crazy. She miscarried twins about a year ago. That might have something to do with it. She may have some sort of chemical imbalance as a result of that. Who knows?
She wasn’t seated next to me anyway, thank God. Another black woman was. That was Eucharist Lawes, the lovely wife of Cleveland Lawes, the former RAMJAC chauffeur. He is a vice-president of the Transico Division now. That is really his wife’s name: Eucharist. It means happy gratitude, and I don’t know why more people don’t name their daughters that. Everybody calls her “Ukey.”
Ukey was homesick for the South. She said the people were friendlier and more relaxed and more natural down there. She was after Cleveland to retire in or near Atlanta, especially now that the Transico Division had been bought by Playgrounds International, which everybody knows is a front for the Mafia. It just can’t be proved.
My own division was being snapped up by I.G. Farben, a West German concern.
“It won’t be the same old RAMJAC,” I said to Ukey. “That’s for sure.”
There were presents—some silly, some not. Israel Edel gave me a rubber ice-cream cone with a squeaker in it—a plaything for my little dog, who is a female Lhasa apso, a golden dustmop without a handle. I could never have a dog when I was young, because Alexander Hamilton McCone hated dogs. So this is the only dog I have ever known at all well—and she sleeps with me. She snores. So did my wife.
I have never bred her, but now, according to the veterinarian, Dr. Howard Padwee, she is experiencing a false pregnancy and believes the rubber ice-cream cone to be a puppy. She hides it in closets. She carries it up and down the stairs of my duplex. She is even secreting milk for it. She is getting shots to make her stop doing that.
I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone—brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.
Clyde Carter and Leland Clewes chipped in on a far more expensive present, which is a chess-playing computer. It is about the size of a cigar box, but most of the space is taken up by a compartment for the playing pieces. The computer itself is not much bigger than a package of cigarettes. It is called “Boris.” Boris has a long narrow little window in which he announces his moves. He can even joke about the moves I make. “Really?” he will say; or, “Have you played this game before?” or, “Is this