Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [98]
"Don’t believe this boy’s feeling so good, doctor," said Ben. He wasn’t particularly serious about it. It was more genial springtime blather.
"What’s the matter, Eli?" said the doctor absently. He was studying blueprints, plans for a thirty-room addition to the Eli Remenzel Memorial Dormitory—a building named in honor of his great-great-grandfather. Doctor Remenzel had the plans draped over a walnut table that folded out of the back of the front seat. He was a massive, dignified man, a physician, a healer for healing’s sake, since he had been born as rich as the Shah of Iran. "Worried about something?" he asked Eli without looking up from the plans.
"Nope," said Eli.
Eli’s lovely mother, Sylvia, sat next to the doctor, reading the catalogue of the Whitehill School. "If I were you," she said to Eli, "I’d be so excited I could hardly stand it. The best four years of your whole life are just about to begin."
"Sure," said Eli. He didn’t show her his face. He gave her only the back of his head, a pinwheel of coarse brown hair above a stiff white collar, to talk to.
"I wonder how many Remenzels have gone to Whitehill," said Sylvia.
"That’s like asking how many people are dead in a cemetery," said the doctor. He gave the answer to the old joke, and to Sylvia’s question too. "All of ’em."
"If all the Remenzels who went to Whitehill were numbered, what number would Eli be?" said Sylvia. "That’s what I’m getting at."
The question annoyed Doctor Remenzel a little. It didn’t seem in very good taste. "It isn’t the sort of thing you keep score on," he said.
"Guess," said his wife.
"Oh," he said, "you’d have to go back through all the records, all the way back to the end of the eighteenth century, even, to make any kind of a guess. And you’d have to decide whether to count the Schofields and the Haleys and the MacLellans as Remenzels."
"Please make a guess—" said Sylvia, ’Just people whose last names were Remenzel."
"Oh—" The doctor shrugged, rattled the plans. "Thirty maybe."
"So Eli is number thirty-one!" said Sylvia, delighted with the number. "You’re number thirty-one, dear," she said to the back of Eli’s head.
Doctor Remenzel rattled the plans again. "I don’t want him going around saying something asinine, like he’s number thirty-one," he said.
"Eli knows better than that," said Sylvia. She was a game, ambitious woman, with no money of her own at all. She had been married for sixteen years, but was still openly curious and enthusiastic about the ways of families that had been rich for many generations.
"Just for my own curiosity—not so Eli can go around saying what number he is," said Sylvia, "I’m going to go wherever they keep the records and find out what number he is. That’s what I’ll do while you’re at the meeting and Eli’s doing whatever he has to do at the Admissions Office."
"All right," said Doctor Remenzel, "you go ahead and do that. "
"I will," said Sylvia. "I think things like that are interesting, even if you don’t." She waited for a rise on that, but didn’t get one. Sylvia enjoyed arguing with her husband about her lack of reserve and his excess of it, enjoyed saying, toward the end of arguments like that, "Well, I guess I’m just a simple-minded country girl at heart, and that’s all I’ll ever be, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to it."
But Doctor Remenzel didn’t want to play that game. He found the dormitory plans more interesting.
"Will the new rooms have fireplaces?" said Sylvia. In the oldest part of the dormitory, several of the rooms had handsome fireplaces.
"That would practically double the cost of construction," said the doctor.
"I want Eli to have a room with a fireplace, if that’s possible," said Sylvia.
"Those rooms are for seniors."
"I thought maybe through some fluke—" said Sylvia.
"What kind of fluke do you have in mind?" said the doctor. "You mean I should demand that Eli be