Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [63]
So we had martinis out on the veranda. Only we didn’t sit on the most pleasant side, which looked out on the Yacht Club dock and the harbor. We sat on the side that looked out on all the poor tourists being shunted off toward Hyannis. The Commodore liked to talk about all those fools out there.
"Look at them!" he said. "They wanted glamour, and now they realize they’re not going to get it. They actually expected to be invited to play touch football with Eunice and Frank Sinatra and the Secretary of Health and Welfare. Glamour is what they voted for, and look at ’em now. They don’t even get to look at a Kennedy chimney up above the trees. All the glamour they’ll get out of this administration is an overpriced waffle named Caroline."
A helicopter went over, very low, and it landed somewhere inside the Kennedy fence. Clarice said she wondered who it was.
"Pope John the Sixth," said the Commodore.
The butler, whose name was John, came out with a big bowl. I thought it was peanuts or popcorn, but it turned out to be Goldwater buttons. The Commodore had John take the bowl out to the street, and offer buttons to the people in cars. A lot of people took them. Those people were disappointed. They were sore.
Some fifty-mile hikers, who’d actually hiked sixty-seven miles, all the way from Boston, asked if they could please lie down on the Rumfoord lawn for a while. They were burned up, too. They thought it was the duty of the President, or at least the Attorney General, to thank them for walking so far. The Commodore said they could not only lie down, but he would give them lemonade, if they would put on Goldwater buttons. They were glad to.
"Commodore," I said, "where’s that nice boy of yours, the one who talked to us up in New Hampshire."
"The one who talked to you is the only one I’ve got," he said.
"He certainly poured it on," I said.
"Chip off the old block," he said.
Clarice gave that faraway freight-whistle sigh of hers again.
"The boy went swimming just before you got here," said the Commodore. "He should be back at any time, unless he’s been decapitated by a member of the Irish Mafia on water skis."
We went around to the water side of the veranda to see if we could catch sight of young Robert Taft Rumfoord in swimming. There was a Coast Guard cutter out there, shooing tourists in motorboats away from the Kennedy beach. There was a sightseeing boat crammed with people gawking in our direction. The barker on the boat had a very loud loudspeaker, and we could hear practically everything he said.
"The white boat there is the Honey Fitz, the President’s personal yacht," said the barker. "Next to it is the Marlin, which belongs to the President’s father, Joseph C. Kennedy, former Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s."
"The President’s stinkpot, and the President’s father’s stinkpot," said the Commodore. He called all motorboats stinkpots. "This is a harbor that should be devoted exclusively to sail."
There was a chart of the harbor on the veranda wall. I studied it, and found a Rumfoord Point, a Rumfoord Rock, and a Rumfoord Shoal. The Commodore told me his family had been. in Hyannis Port since 1884.
"There doesn’t seem to be anything named after the Kennedys," I said.
"Why should there be?" he said. "They only got here day before yesterday."
"Day before yesterday?" I said.
And he asked me, "What would you call nineteen-twenty-one?"
"No, sir, " the barker said to one of his passengers, "that is not the President’s house. Everybody asks that. That great big ugly stucco house, folks, that’s the Rumfoord Cottage. I agree with you, it’s too big to be called a cottage, but you know how rich people are. "
"Demoralized and bankrupt by confiscatory taxation," said the Commodore. "You know," he said, "it isn’t as though Kennedy was the first President we ever had in Hyannis Port. Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were all guests of