Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

Now all those women had died or were about to die most horribly with their bones crumbling, with their heads rotting off. The cause was radium poisoning. Every one of them had been told by a foreman, it had since come out in court, that she should keep a fine point on her brush by moistening it and shaping it with her lips from time to time.

And, as luck would have it, the daughter of one of those unfortunate women would become one of the four women I have ever loved in this Vale of Tears — a long with my mother, my wife, and Sarah Wyatt, Mary Kathleen O'Looney was her name.

I speak only of Ruth as "my wife." It would not surprise me, though, if on Judgment Day Sarah Wyatt and Mary Kathleen O'Looney were also certified as having been wives of mine. I surely paired off with both of them — with Mary Kathleen for about eleven months, and with Sarah, off and on, to be sure, for about seven years.

I can hear Saint Peter saying to me: "It would appear, Mr. Starbuck, that you were something of a Don Juan."

So there I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, sashaying into the wedding-cake lobby of the Hotel Arapahoe with beautiful Sarah Wyatt, the Yankee clock heiress, on my arm. Her family was nearly as broke as mine by then. What little they had salvaged from the crashing stock market and the failing banks would soon be dispersed among the survivors of the women who painted all those clocks for the Navy. This dispersal would be compelled in about a year by a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court as to the personal responsibility of employers for deaths in their places of work caused by criminal negligence.

Eighteen-year-old Sarah now said of the Arapahoe lobby, "It's so dirty — and there's nobody here." She laughed. "I love it," she said.

At that point in time, in the filthy lobby of the Arapahoe, Sarah Wyatt did not know that I was acting with all possible humorlessness on orders from Alexander Hamilton McCone. She would tell me later that she thought I was being witty when I said we should get all dressed up. She thought we were costumed like millionaires in the spirit of Halloween. We would laugh and laugh, she hoped. We would be people in a movie.

Not at all: I was a robot programmed to behave like a genuine aristocrat.

Oh, to be young again!

The dirt in the Arapahoe lobby might not have been so obvious, if somebody had not started to do something about it and then stopped. There was a tall stepladder set against one wall. There was a bucket at the base of it, filled with dirty water and with a brush floating on top. Someone had clearly scaled the ladder with the bucket. He had scrubbed as much of the wall as he could reach from the top. He had created a circle of cleanliness, dribbling filth at its bottom, to be sure, but as bright as a harvest moon.

I do not know who made the harvest moon. There was no one to ask. There had been no doorman to invite us in. There were no bellboys and no guests inside. There wasn't a soul behind the reception desk in the distance. The newsstand and the theater-ticket kiosk were shuttered. The doors of the unmanned elevators were propped open by chairs.

"I don't think they're in business anymore," said Sarah.

"Somebody accepted my reservation on the telephone," I said. "He called me 'monsieur.' "

"Anybody can call anybody 'monsieur' on the telephone," said Sarah.

But then we heard a Gypsy violin crying somewhere — sobbing as though its heart would break. And when I hear that violin's lamenting in my memory now, I am able to add this information: Hitler, not yet in power, would soon cause to be killed every Gypsy his soldiers and policemen could catch.

The music was coming from behind a folding screen in the lobby. Sarah and I dared to move the screen from the wall. We were confronted by a pair of French doors, which were held shut with a padlock and hasp. The panes in the doors were mirrors, showing us yet again how childish and rich we were. But Sarah discovered one pane that had a flaw in its silvering. She peeped through the flaw, then invited me to take a turn. I was flabbergasted. I might have been peering into the twinkling prisms of a time machine. On the other side of the French doors was the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe in pristine condition, complete with a Gypsy fiddler — almost atom for atom as it must have been in the time of Diamond Jim Brady. A thousand candles in the chandeliers and on the tables became billions of tiny stars because of all the silver and crystal and china and mirrors in there.

The story was this: The hotel and the restaurant, while sharing the same building, one minute from Times Square, were under separate ownerships. The hotel had given up — was no longer taking guests. The restaurant, on the other hand, had just been completely refurbished, its owner believing that the collapse of the economy would be brief, and was caused by nothing more substantial than a temporary loss of nerve by businessmen.

Sarah and I had come in through the wrong door. I told Sarah as much, and she replied, "That is the story of my life. I always go in the wrong door first."

So Sarah and I went out into the night again and then in through the door to the place where food and drink awaited us. Mr. McCone had told me to order the meal in advance. That I had done. The owner himself received us. He was French. On the lapel of his tuxedo was a decoration that meant nothing to me, but which was familiar to Sarah, since her father had one, too. It meant, she would explain to me, that he was a chevalier in the L?gion d'honneur.

Sarah had spent many summers in Europe. I had never been there. She was fluent in French, and she and the owner performed a madrigal in that most melodious of all languages. How would I ever have got through life without women to act as my interpreters? Of the four women I ever loved, only Mary Kathleen O'Looney spoke no language but English. But even Mary Kathleen was my interpreter when I was a Harvard communist, trying to communicate with members of the American working class.

The restaurant owner told Sarah in French, and then she told me, about the Great Depression's being nothing but a loss of nerve. He said that alcoholic beverages would be legal again as soon as a Democrat was elected President, and that life would become fun again.

He led us to our table. The room could seat at least one hundred, I would guess, but there were only a dozen other patrons there. Somehow, they still had cash. And when I try to remember them now, and to guess what they were, I keep seeing the pictures by George Grosz of corrupt plutocrats amidst the misery of Germany after World War One. I had not seen those pictures in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. I had not seen anything.

There was a puffy old woman, I remember, eating alone and wearing a diamond necklace. She had a Pekingese dog in her lap. The dog had a diamond necklace, too.

There was a withered old man, I remember, hunched over his food, hiding it with his arms Sarah whispered that he ate as though his meal were a royal flush. We would later learn that he was eating caviar.

"This must be a very expensive place," said Sarah.

"Don't worry about it," I said.

"Money is so strange," she said. "Does it make any sense to you?"

"No," I said.

"The people who've got it, and the people who don't — " she mused. "I don't think anybody understands what's really going on."

"Some people must," I said. I no longer believe that.

I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders what is really going on.

We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.

"Does Mr. McCone know how much longer the Depression will last?" she said.