Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [64]
"No, mam, " said the barker, "I don’t know where the Rumfoords get their money, but they don’t have to work at all, I know that. They just sit on that porch there, and drink martinis, and let the old mazooma roll in."
The Commodore blew up. He said he was going to sue the owners of the sight-seeing boat for a blue million. His wife tried to calm him down, but he made me come into his study with him while he called up his lawyers.
"You’re a witness," he said.
But his telephone rang before he could call his lawyers. The person who was calling him was a Secret Service Agent named Raymond Boyle. I found out later that Boyle was known around the Kennedy household as the Rumfoord Specialist or the Ambassador to Rumfoordiana. Whenever anything came up that had to do with the Rumfoords, Boyle had to handle it.
The Commodore told me to go upstairs and listen in on the extension in the hall. "This will give you an idea of how arrogant civil servants have become these days," he said.
So I went upstairs.
"The Secret Service is one of the least secret services I’ve ever come in contact with," the Commodore was saying when I picked up the phone. "I’ve seen drum and bugle corps that were less obtrusive. Did I ever tell you about the time Calvin Coolidge, who was also a President, as it happened, went fishing for scup with my father and me off the end of the Yacht Club dock?"
"Yessir, you have, many times," said Boyle. "It’s a good story, and I want to hear it again sometime. But right now I’m calling about your son."
The Commodore went right ahead with the story anyway. "President Coolidge," he said, "insisted on baiting his own hook, and the combined Atlantic and Pacific Fleets were not anchored offshore, and the sky was not black with airplanes, and brigades of Secret Service Agents were not trampling the neighbors’ flowerbeds to purée."
"Sir—" said Boyle patiently, "your son Robert was apprehended in the act of boarding the President’s father’s boat, the Marlin."
"Back in the days of Coolidge, there were no stinkpots like that in this village, dribbling petroleum products, belching fumes, killing the fish, turning the beaches a gummy black."
"Commodore Rumfoord, sir," said Boyle, "did you hear what I just said about your son?"
"Of course," said the Commodore. "You said Robert, a member of the Hyannis Port Yacht Club, was caught touching a vessel belonging to another member of the club. This may seem a very terrible crime to a landlubber like yourself; but it has long been a custom of the sea, Mr. Boyle, that a swimmer, momentarily fatigued, may, upon coming to a vessel not his own, grasp that vessel and rest, without fear of being fired upon by the Coast Guard, or of having his fingers smashed by members of the Secret Service, or, as I prefer to call them, the Kennedy Palace Dragoons."
"There has been no shooting, and no smashing, sir," said Boyle. "There has also been no evidence of swimmer’s fatigue. Your Robert went up the anchor line of the Marlin like a chimpanzee. He swarmed up that rope, Commodore. I believe that’s the proper nautical term. And I remind you, as I tried to remind him, that persons moving, uninvited, unannounced, with such speed and purposefulness within the vicinity of a President are, as a matter of time-honored policy, to be turned back at all costs—to be turned back, if need be, violently."
"Was it a Kennedy who gave the order that the boarder be repelled?" the Commodore wanted to know.
"There was no Kennedy on board, sir."
"The stinkpot was unoccupied?"
"Adlai Stevenson and Walter Reuther and one of my men were on board, sir," said Boyle. "They were all below, until they heard Robert’s feet hit the deck."
"Stevenson and Reuther?" said the Commodore. "That’s the last time I let my son go swimming without a dagger in his teeth. I hope he was opening the seacocks when beaten insensible by truncheons."
"Very funny, sir," said Boyle, his voice developing