Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [99]
My daughter-in-law and my grandchildren found it natural and easy, seemingly, to accord me the honors due a grandfather who, when all was said and done, was a clean and dapper and kindly old man. The model for what the children found to love in me, I suppose, was Santa Claus.
My son was a shock. He was such a homely and unhealthy and unhappy-looking young man. He was short like me, and nearly as fat as his poor mother had become toward the end. I still had most of my hair, but he was bald. The baldness must have been inherited from the Jewish side of his family.
He was a chain-smoker of unfiltered cigarettes. He coughed a lot. His suit was riddled with cigarette holes. I glanced at him while the record was playing, and I saw that he was so nervous that he had three cigarettes all going at one time.
He had shaken my hand with the correct wretchedness of a German general surrendering at Stalingrad, say. I was still a monster to him. He had been cajoled into coming against his better judgment—by his wife and Sarah Clewes.
Too bad.
The record changed nothing. The children, kept up long after their bedtime, squirmed and dozed.
The record was meant to honor me, to let people who might not know about it hear for themselves what an idealistic young man I had been. The part in which I accidentally betrayed Leland Clewes as a former communist was on another record, I presume. It was not played.
Only my very last sentences were of much interest to me. I had forgotten them.
Congressman Nixon had asked me why, as the son of immigrants who had been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist, I had been so ungrateful to the American economic system.
The answer I gave him was not original. Nothing about me has ever been original. I repeated what my onetime hero, Kenneth Whistler, had said in reply to the same general sort of question long, long ago. Whistler had been a witness at a trial of strikers accused of violence. The judge had become curious about him, had asked him why such a well-educated man from such a good family would so immerse himself in the working class.
My stolen answer to Nixon was this: “Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir.”
There was polite applause when the people at the party realized that the phonograph record had ended.
Good-bye.
—W.F.S.
JAILBIRD
A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence hardcover edition published 1979
Delta Trade Paperback edition published January 1999
Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / June 2006
Published by
The Dial Press
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1979 by Kurt Vonnegut
The Dial Press and Dial Press Trade Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-12881
eISBN: 978-0-307-75746-3
www.dialpress.com
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Copyright