Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [30]
He was a fraud. He was not a bellboy at all.
• • •
Deeper and deeper we went into the trees. And in every clearing we came to, I expected to see my Rolls-Royce.
But he brought me to a statue instead. It depicted an old-fashioned doctor, dressed much as it amused me to dress. He was melancholy but proud. He held a sleeping youth in his arms.
As the inscription in the moonlight told me, this was a monument to the first use of anaesthetics in surgery in the United States, which took place in Boston.
• • •
I had been aware of a clattering whir somewhere in the city, over Commonwealth Avenue perhaps. But I had not identified it as a hovering helicopter.
But now the bogus bellhop, who was really an Inca servant of Eliza’s, fired a magnesium flare into the air.
Everything touched by that unnatural dazzle became statuary—lifeless and exemplary, and weighing tons.
The helicopter materialized directly over us, itself made allegorical, transformed into a terrible mechanical angel by the glare of the flare.
Eliza was up there with a bullhorn.
• • •
It seemed possible to me that she might shoot me from there, or hit me with a bag of excrement. She had traveled all the way from Peru to deliver one-half of a Shakespearean sonnet.
“Listen!” she said. “Listen!” she said. And then she said, “Listen!” again.
The flare was meanwhile dying nearby—its parachute snagged in a treetop.
Here is what Eliza said to me, and to the neighborhood:
“O! how thy worth with manners may I sing,
“When thou art all the better part of me?
“What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
“And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?
“Even for this let us divided live,
“And our dear love lose name of single one,
“That by this separation I may give
“That due to thee, which thou deserv’st alone.”
• • •
I called up to her through my cupped hands. “Eliza!” I said. And then I shouted something daring, and something I genuinely felt for the first time in my life.
“Eliza! I love you!” I said.
All was darkness now.
“Did you hear me, Eliza?” I said. “I love you! I really love you!”
“I heard you,” she said. “Nobody should ever say that to anybody.”
“I mean it,” I said.
“Then I will say in turn something that I really mean, my brother—my twin.”
“What is it?” I said.
She said this: “God guide the hand and mind of Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller Swain.”
• • •
And then the helicopter flew away.
Hi ho.
28
I RETURNED TO THE RITZ, laughing and crying—a two-meter Neanderthaler in a ruffled shirt and a robin’s-egg blue velvet tuxedo.
There was a crowd of people who were curious about the brief supernova in the east, and about the voice which had spoken from Heaven of separation and love. I pressed past them and into the ballroom, leaving it to private detectives stationed at the door to turn back the following crowd.
The guests at my party were only now beginning to hear hints that something marvelous had happened outside. I went to Mother, to tell her what Eliza had done. I was puzzled to find her talking to a nondescript, middle-aged stranger, dressed, like the detectives, in a cheap business suit.
Mother introduced him as “Dr. Mott.” He was, of course, the doctor who had looked after Eliza and me for so long in Vermont. He was in Boston on business, and, as luck would have it, staying at the Ritz.
I was so full of news and champagne, though, that I did not know or care who he was. And, having said my bit to Mother, I told Dr. Mott that it had been nice to meet him, and I hurried on to other parts of the room.
• • •
When I got back to Mother in about an hour, Dr. Mott had departed. She told me again who he was. I expressed pro forma regrets at not having spent more time with him. She gave me a note from him, which she said was his graduation present to me.
It was written on Ritz stationery. It said simply this:
“‘If you can do no good, at least