While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [39]
Ruth relived her bitter, humiliating few hours with the woman, the bullying and wheedling in the name of a nightmarish notion of motherhood and an armful of trinkets. Disgust and the urge to get away came back full strength. Ruth leaned against a jewelry counter, and came face-to-face with herself in a mirror.
“Can I help you, madam?” said a salesgirl.
“What? Oh—no, thank you,” said Ruth. The face in the mirror was vindictive, smug. The eyes had the same cold glaze as the eyes that had looked at the old man in the station and seen nothing.
“You look a little ill. Would you like to sit down for a moment?”
“No, really—there’s nothing wrong,” said Ruth absently.
“There’s a doctor on duty in the store.”
Ruth looked away from the mirror. “This is silly of me. I felt unsteady there for just a minute. It’s passed now.” She smiled uncertainly. “Thanks very much. I’ve got to be on my way.”
“A train?”
“No,” said Ruth wearily. “A terribly sick old woman needs my help.”
(illustration credit 8)
WHILE MORTALS SLEEP
If Fred Hackleman and Christmas could have avoided each other, they would have. He was a bachelor, a city editor, and a newspaper genius, and I worked for him as a reporter for three insufferable years. As nearly as I could tell, he and the Spirit of Christmas had as little in common as a farm cat and the Audubon Society.
And he was like a farm cat in a lot of ways. He was solitary, deceptively complacent and lazy, and quick with the sharp claws of his authority and wit.
He was in his middle forties when I worked for him, and he had seemingly lost respect not just for Christmas but for government, matrimony, business, patriotism, and just about any other important institution you could name. The only ideals I ever heard him mention were terse leads, good spelling, accuracy, and speed in reporting the stupidity of mankind.
I can remember only one Christmas during which he radiated, faintly, anything like joy and goodwill. But that was a coincidence. A jailbreak happened to take place on December twenty-fifth.
I can remember another Christmas when he badgered a rewrite girl until she cried, because she’d said in a story that a man had passed on after having been hit by a freight train.
“Did he get up, dust himself off, giggle, and pass on to wherever he was headed before his little misunderstanding with the locomotive?” Hackleman wanted to know.
“No.” She bit her lip. “He died, and—”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? He died. After the locomotive, the tender, fifty-eight loaded freight cars and the caboose rolled over him, he died. That we can tell our readers without fear of contradiction. First-rate reporting—he died. Did he go to Heaven? Is that where he passed on to?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Well, your story says we do know. Did the reporter say he had definite information that the dead man is now in Heaven—or en route? Did you check with the man’s minister to see if he had a ghost of a chance of getting in?”
She burst into tears. “I hope he did!” she said furiously. “I tried to say I hoped he did, and I’m not sorry!” She walked away, blowing her nose, and paused by the door to glare at Hackleman. “Because it’s Christmas!” she cried, and she left the newspaper world forever.
“Christmas?” said Hackleman. He seemed baffled, and looked around the room as though hoping someone would translate the strange word for him. “Christmas.” He walked over to the calendar on the wall, and ran his finger along the dates until he came to the twenty-fifth. “Oh—that’s the one with the red numbers. Huh.”
But the Christmas season I remember best is the last one I spent with Hackleman—the season in which the great crime was committed, the robbery proclaimed by Hackleman, gleefully, as the most infamous crime