Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

"Look at me in the eye, Walter," she said.

Sociologically, of course, this melodrama was as gripping as Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O'Looney wasn't the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentent murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time.

Good-hearted people were meanwhile as sick about all these tragic by-products of the economy as they would have been about human slavery a little more than a hundred years before. Mary Kathleen and I were a miracle that our audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.

Some people were crying. I myself was about to cry.

"Hug her," said a woman in the crowd.

I did so.

I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that was wrapped in rags. That was when I mysellf began to cry. I was crying for the first time since I had found my wife dead in bed one morning — in my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

My nose, thank God, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn't so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese — or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.

It felt for a moment as though Mary Kathleen had died in my arms. To be perfectly frank, that would have been all right with me. Where, after all, could I take her from there? What could be better than her receiving a hug from a man who had known her when she was young and beautiful, and then going to heaven right away?

It would have been wonderful. Then again, I would never have become executive vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. I might at this very moment be sleeping off a wine binge in the Bowery, while a juvenile monster soaked me in gasoline and touched me off with his Cricket lighter.

Mary Kathleen now spoke very softly. "God must have sent you," she said.

"There, there," I said. I went on hugging her.

"There's nobody I can trust anymore," she said.

"Now, now," I said.

"Everybody's after me," she said. "They want to cut off my hands."

"There, there," I said,

"I thought you were dead," she said.

"No, no," I said.

"I thought everybody was dead but me," she said.

"There, there," I said.

"I still believe in the revolution, Walter," she said.

"I'm glad," I said.

"Everybody else lost heart," she said. "I never lost heart."

"Good for you," I said.

"I've been working for the revolution every day," she said.

"I'm sure," I said.

"You'd be surprised," she said.

"Get her a hot bath," said somebody in the crowd.

"Get some food in her," said somebody else.

"The revolution is coming, Walter — sooner than you know," said Mary Kathleen.

"I have a hotel room where you can rest awhile," I said. "I have a little money. Not much, but some."

"Money," she said, and she laughed. Her scornful laughter about money had not changed. It was exactly as it had been forty years before.

"Shall we go?" I said. "My room isn't far from here."

"I know a better place," she said.

"Get her some One-a-Day vitamins," said somebody in the crowd.

"Follow me, Walter," said Mary Kathleen. She was growing strong again. It was Mary Kathleen who now separated herself from me, and not the other way around. She became raucous again. I picked up three of her bags, and she picked up the other three. Our ultimate destination, it would turn out, was the very top of the Chrysler Building, the quiet showroom of The American Harp Company up there. But first we had to get the crowd to part for us, and she began to call people in our way "capitalist fats" and "bloated plutocrats" and "bloodsuckers" and all that again.

Her means of locomotion in her gargantuan basketball shoes was this: She barely lifted the shoes from the ground, shoving one forward and then the other, like cross-country skis, while her upper body and shopping bags swiveled wildly from side to side. But that oscillating old woman could go like the wind! I panted to keep up with her, once we got clear of the crowd. We were surely the cynosure of all eyes. Nobody had ever seen a shopping-bag lady with an assistant before.

When we got to Grand Central Station, Mary Kathleen said that we had to make sure we weren't being followed. She led me up and down escalators, ramps, and stairways, looking over her shoulders for pursuers all the time. We scampered through the Oyster Bar three times. She brought us at last to an iron door at the end of a dimly lit corridor. We surely were all alone. Our hearts were beating hard.

When we had recovered our breaths, she said to me, "I am going to show you something you mustn't tell anybody about."

"I promise," I said.

"This is our secret," she said.

"Yes," I said.

I had assumed that we were as deep in the station as anyone could go. How wrong I was! Mary Kathleen opened the iron door on an iron staircase going down, down, down. There was a secret world as vast as Carlsbad Caverns below. It was used for nothing anymore. It might have been a sanctuary for dinosaurs. It had in fact been a repair shop for another family of extinct monsters — locomotives driven by steam.

Down the steps we went.

My God — what majestic machinery there must have been down there at one time! What admirable craftsmen must have worked there! In conformance with fire laws, I suppose, there were lightbulbs burning here and there. And there were little dishes of rat poison set around. But there were no other signs that anyone had been down there for years.

"This is my home, Walter," she said

"Your what?" I said.

"You wouldn't want me sleeping outdoors, would you?" she said.

"No," I said.

"Be glad, then," she said, "that I have such a nice and private home."

"I am," I said.

"You not only talked to me — you hugged me," she said. "That's how I knew I could trust you."

"Um," I said.

"You're not after my hands," she said.

"No," I said.

"You know there are millions of poor souls out on the street, looking for a toilet somebody will let them use?" she said.

"I suppose that's true," I said.

"Look at this," she said. She led me into a chamber that contained row on row of toilets.

"It's good to know they're here," I said.

"You won't tell anybody?" she said.

"No," I said.

"I'm putting my life in your hands, telling you my secrets like this," she said.

"I'm honored," I said.

And then out of the catacombs we climbed. She led me through a tunnel under Lexington Avenue, and up a staircase into the lobby of the Chrysler Building. She skied across the floor to a waiting elevator, with me trotting behind. A guard shouted at us, but we got into the elevator before he could stop us. The doors shut in his angry face as Mary Kathleen punched the button for the topmost floor.

We had the car all to ourselves and upward we flew. Within a trice the doors slithered open on a place of unearthly beauty and peace within the building's stainless-steel crown. I had often wondered what was up there. Now I knew. The crown came to a point seventy feet above us. Between us and the point, as I looked upward in awe, there was nothing but a lattice of girders and air, air, air.