Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [85]
Mother and Father told me to take another look at the sapphire, so I could see the beautiful star in there. So I did. But then, to get a better understanding of what was going on, I asked Mr. Swan how much the ring had cost him. That was when Father hit me. He hit me with an underhand blow to the seat of my pants. It lofted me in the direction of the staircase, and I just kept on going upstairs to my bedroom. I was mad.
Now then: As my parents would eventually discover, to their grief, the Swans were cat’s-paws for confidence men. They had been bankrolled by crooks to put on a show for friends of theirs who might still have a little money squirreled away somewhere. My parents would want to know where the Swans got all their easy money. My parents needed some easy money, too. If they didn’t find it somewhere, they would be bounced forever from the upper class. As I say, I myself had already sunk into the lower orders.
The Swans said that they had invested what little they had left after the crash of the securities market in a wonderful company which wanted to keep itself a secret. It was quietly putting together a coal monopoly which would be as rich and powerful as Standard Oil. It was buying mines and barge lines and controlling interest in coal-hauling railroads, was getting them for a minor fraction of their true value since it was paying cash. Almost nobody else had cash. The cash was coming from individuals like the Swans and my parents, who could keep a secret, and who could scrape up a little something from the bottoms of their barrels, if they really tried.
The value of the company would increase at least a hundred times, the instant prosperity returned to the world. Meanwhile, the company was already paying dividends because it was so efficient. It was the dividends which had bought the Marmon and the coat and the star sapphire ring.
My parents of course invested. They found buyers somewhere, I suppose, for some of their oil paintings or oriental rugs, or for some of Father’s fine guns. During the boom years, Father had been a collector of guns.
My parents had been taught such nice manners in childhood that it was actually impossible for them to suspect that these old friends of theirs were in league with crooks. They had no simple and practical vocabularies for the parts and functions of their excretory and reproductive systems, and no such vocabularies for treachery and hypocrisy, either. Good manners had made them defenseless against predatory members of their own class.
There we have our old friend peer pressure again, of course.
And there was no coal monopoly, of course. Whoever got my parents’ money spent most of it on racehorses and chorus girls, probably, except for maybe a quarter of it, which they sent to the Swans as dividends.
• • •
I had a telephone conversation recently with a young Indianapolis cousin, a married woman, during which I said that I dreaded coming out there, since I did not consider it possible that my older relatives could love me but hate my books so. She replied that I had to understand that they were all Victorians and too old to change. They could not help themselves when it came to loathing dirty books.
So I thought about Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Empress of India, who lived from 1819, long before my first ancestor arrived in this country, until 1901, when my father was a junior in Shortridge High School. And I asked myself why any mention of bodily functions should have pained this queen so.
I cannot believe that Victoria herself would have suffered a moment’s genuine dismay if I had shown her the picture of my asshole which I drew for my book Breakfast of Champions. My asshole looks like this:
I also feature my asshole in my signature, which looks like this:
What would Queen Victoria really