While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [70]
“Now he runs a grocery, and she’s his wife.”
“Lo! how the mighty are fallen. And here’s Nicky! I keep forgetting you two were classmates.”
Nicky Marino had come to study voice with Gino, an old friend of his father, after the war, and he’d found an apartment for me in the same building when I’d decided to get an engineering degree under the G.I. Bill. “Well,” I said, “the prediction for Nicky has held up beautifully.”
“A great tenor,” read Gino, “like his father.”
“Or like you, Maestro.”
Gino shook his head. “He was better. You can’t imagine. I could play you records, and as bad as recording was in those days, Nicky’s father’s voice comes through more thrilling than anything you’ll hear today. Generations can go by without knowing a miracle like that voice. And then he had to die at twenty-nine.”
“Thank God he left a son.”
In the small town in which Nicky and I’d grown up, everyone knew whose son Nicky was—and no one doubted that he’d make our town famous as soon as he was full grown. No civic occasion was complete without his singing whatever was appropriate. His mother, herself an unmusical businesswoman, spent most of her money on voice and language lessons for Nicky, recreating in him the image of her lost husband.
“Yes,” said Gino, “thank God he left a son. Will you have a farewell drink with me, or is it too soon after breakfast?”
“This isn’t quite farewell. We don’t move for two more days. I’ll take a rain check on the drink, thanks. Now I’ve got to return some books to Nicky.”
* * *
Nicky Marino was in the shower, singing with the volume of a steam calliope when I arrived. I sat down in the one-room apartment to wait.
The walls were covered with photographs of his father, and with old posters headed by his father’s name. On the table, beside a pot of coffee, a cracked cup in a cigarette-filled saucer, and a metronome, was a scrapbook, its edges festooned with the ragged ends of newspaper clippings about his father.
On the floor were his garish pajamas and the morning mail—a letter with a check and a snapshot clipped to it. It was from his mother, who never wrote without enclosing some memento of his father from a seemingly inexhaustible store of souvenirs. The check was from the earnings of her small gift shop, and, little as the check was, Nicky had to make it last, for he had no other income.
“How did that sound?” said Nicky, stepping from the bathroom, his big dark, slow body glistening wet.
“How should I know? All I can tell is the difference between loud and soft. It was very loud.” I’d lied to Gino about returning a book to Nicky. What I was after was ten dollars Nicky’d owed me for three months. “Look, about the ten bucks—”
“You’ll get it!” he said expansively. “Everybody who was good to Nicky as an unknown will be rich when Nicky is rich.”
He wasn’t joking. His mother talked the same way—without a trace of uncertainty about his future. He had been talking and hearing himself talked about in this way all his life. Sometimes, he behaved as though he’d already reached the top.
“That’s nice of you, Nicky, but I’ll let you off the hook now for ten dollars, and then you won’t have to make me rich later. You can keep it all yourself.”
“Are you being sarcastic?” said Nicky. He stopped grinning. “Are you trying to tell me that the day won’t come when—”
“No, no—hold on. It’ll come, I guess. How should I know? All I want is my ten dollars, so I can rent a truck to move my stuff.”
“Money!”
“What can you do without it? Ellen and I can’t move.”
“I’ve always done without it,” said Nicky. “First the war takes four years out of my life, pft! And now money troubles.”
“Then ten bucks would take years out of your life?”
“Ten, a hundred, a thousand.” He sat down dejectedly. “Gino says it’s showing up in my voice—the insecurity. I sing of happiness,