While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [81]
“It’s invested all over the country,” said Rose.
Ben pointed into a corner with his cigar. “It’s sulking over there in the corner, where it belongs,” he said, “because I said everything it was gonna say.”
Rose looked into the corner, puzzled.
“The thing about money is,” said Ben, “you can’t be polite to it. Leave something suspicious to say, and it’ll say it.” He took his foot down from the windowsill. “Leave something greedy to say, and it’ll say it.” He put his cigar in an ashtray. “Leave something scary to say, and it’ll say it.
“Give it an inch,” said Ben, “and it’ll take a mile.” He took off his gloves, and laid them on the windowsill. “As near as I can tell, I love you, Rose,” he said. “I’d do my best to make you happy. If you love me, kiss me, and make me rich beyond my wildest dreams. Then, after that, we’ll steam these clams.”
Rose thought a moment, still looking into the corner. And then she did what Ben had asked her to do.
The Kilraine fortune seemed to speak once more. “At your service,” it said.
(illustration credit 13)
THE HUMBUGS
Life had been good to Durling Stedman. He drove a new Cadillac the color of lobster bisque. And on the back bumper of the Cadillac was a big trailer-hitch that hauled Stedman’s silver home on wheels to Cape Cod in the springtime and to Florida in the fall. Stedman was an artist—a picture painter. But he didn’t look like one. Part of his stock-in-trade was looking like a four-square businessman, like a no-nonsense free-enterpriser who knew what it was to meet a payroll, like a man’s man who thought most artists were dreamers, who thought most art was bunk. He was sixty years old, and he looked a good deal like George Washington.
The sign over his studio in the art colony of Seminole Highlands, Florida, said it all: “Durling Stedman—Art Without Bunk.” He set up shop right in the middle of struggling abstract painters. That was slick of him, because a majority of the tourists were confused and angered by the abstractionists. And then, in the middle of all the gibberish, the disgruntled tourists came upon Stedman and his work. Stedman’s paintings were as pretty as postcards. And Stedman himself looked like a friend from home.
“I am an oasis,” he liked to say.
Every night he did a demonstration painting on an easel in front of his studio. He did a painting in an hour flat with a crowd watching. He signified that he was done by putting a golden frame around the painting. The crowd knew then that it was all right to talk and applaud. A sudden noise couldn’t spoil the masterpiece now, because the masterpiece was done.
The price of the masterpiece was on a card tacked to the frame: “65.00, frame included. Ask about our lay-away plan.” The “our” on the card referred to Stedman and his wife Cornelia. Cornelia didn’t know much about art, but she thought her husband was another Leonardo da Vinci.
And Cornelia wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“I swear,” said a thunderstruck woman in the demonstration crowd one night, “when you was doing them birch trees, it looked like you was using some kind of birch-bark paint—like all a body had to do was gob it on and it’d come out birch bark. And the same with them clouds—like you was using cloud paint, and all a body had to do was scrootch it on up top without hardly thinking.”
Stedman offered her his palette and brush playfully. “Help yourself, Madam,” he said. He smiled serenely, but it was an empty smile—a case of the show’s going on. All was not well. When he had come out to do his demonstration on schedule, he had left his wife in tears.
Cornelia, he supposed, was still weeping in the trailer behind the studio—was still weeping over the evening paper. In the paper, an art critic had called Stedman an iridescent humbug.
“Land-a-mercy, no!” said the woman to whom Stedman had offered his palette and brush. “I couldn’t make nothing look like nothing.” She drew back, put her hands behind her.
And then Cornelia appeared, white and trembling—came out of the studio and stood beside her husband. “I want to say something