Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

"What a glorious waste of space!" I thought. But then I saw that there were tenants after all. Myriads of bright yellow little birds were perched on the girders, or flitting through the prisms of light admitted by the bizarre windows, by the great triangles of glass that pierced the crown.

The vast floor at whose edge we stood was carpeted in grassy green. There was a fountain splashing at its center. There were garden benches and statues everywhere, and here and there a harp.

As I have already said, this was the showroom of The American Harp Company, which had recently become a subsidiary of The RAMJAC Corporation. The company had occupied this space since the building opened in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. All the birds I saw, which were prothonotary warblers, were descended from a single pair released back then.

There was a Victorian gazebo near the elevator, which contained the desks of the salesman and his secretary. A woman was sobbing in there. What a morning it was for tears! What a book this is for tears!

The oldest man I had ever seen came tottering out of the gazebo. He wore a swallowtail coat and striped trousers and spats. He was the sole salesman, and had been since Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one, He was the man who had released from the hot cage of his hands and into this enchanted space the first two prothonotary warblers. He was ninety-two years old! He looked like John D. Rockefeller at the end of his life, or like a mummy. The only moisture left in him, seemingly, was faint dew on the surface of his eyes. He was not entirely defenseless, however. He was president of a pistol club that shot at targets shaped like men on weekends, and he had a loaded Luger the size of a Doberman pinscher in his desk. He had been looking forward to a robbery for quite some time.

"Oh — it's you," he said to Mary Kathleen, and she said that, yes, it was.

She was accustomed to coming here almost every day and sitting for several hours. The understanding was that she was to get out of sight with her shopping bags, in case a customer came in. There was a further understanding, which Mary Kathleen had now violated.

"I thought I told you," he said to her, "that you were never to bring anybody else with you, or even to tell anybody else how nice it was up here."

Since I was carrying three shopping bags, he concluded that I was another derelict, a shopping-bag man.

"He isn't a bum," said Mary Kathleen. "He's a Harvard man."

He did not believe this for a minute. "I see," he said, and he looked me up and down. He himself had never even graduated from grammar school, incidentally. There had been no laws against child labor when he was a boy, and he had gone to work in the Chicago factory of The American Harp Company at the age of ten. "I've heard that you can always tell a Harvard man," he said, "but you can't tell him much."

"I never thought there was anything special about Harvard men," I said.

"That makes two of us," he said. He was being most unpleasant, and clearly wanted me out of there. "This is not the Salvation Army," he said. This was a man born during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. Imagine that! He said to Mary Kathleen, "Really — I'm most disappointed in you, bringing somebody else along. Should we expect three tomorrow, and twenty the day after that? Christianity does have its limits, you know."

I now made a blunder that would land me back in el calabozo before noon on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. "As a matter of fact," I said, "I'm here on business."

"You wish to buy a harp?" he said. "They're seven thousand dollars and up, you know. How about a kazoo instead?"

"I was hoping you could advise me," I said, "as to where I could buy clarinet parts — not whole clarinets, but just clarinet parts." I was not serious about this. I was extrapolating a business fantasy from the contents of my bottom drawer at the Arapahoe.

The old man was secretly electrified. Thumbtacked to the bulletin board in the gazebo was a circular that advised him to call the police in case anyone expressed interest in buying or selling clarinet parts. As he would tell me later, he had stuck it up there months before — "like a lottery ticket bought in a moment of folly." He had never expected to win. His name was Delmar Peale.

Delmar was nice enough later on to make me a present of the circular, which I hung on my office wall at RAMJAC. I became his superior in the RAMJAC family, since American Harp was a subsidiary of my division.

I was certainly no superior of his the first time we met, though. He played cat-and-mouse with me. "Many clarinet parts, or a few?" he asked cunningly.

"Quite a few, actually," I said. "I realize that you yourself don't handle clarinets — "

"You've come to the right place all the same," he hastened to assure me. "I know everyone in the business. If you and Madam X would like to make yourselves comfortable, I would be glad to make some telephone calls."

"You're too kind," I said.

"Not at all," he said.

"Madam X," incidentally, was the only name he had for Mary Kathleen. That was what she had told him her name was. She had simply barged in one day, trying to escape from people she thought were after her. He had worried a lot about shopping-bag ladies, and he was a practicing Christian, so he had let her stay.

Meanwhile, the sobbing in the gazebo was abating some.

Delmar conducted us to a bench far from the gazebo, so we could not hear him call the police. He had us sit down. "Comfy?" he said.

"Yes, thank you," I said.

He rubbed his hands. "How about some coffee?" he said.

"It makes me too nervous," said Mary Kathleen.

"With sugar and cream, if it's not too much trouble,," I said.

"No trouble at all," he said.

"What's the trouble with Doris?" said Mary Kathleen. That was the name of the secretary who was crying in the gazebo. Her full name was Doris Kramm. She herself was eighty-seven years old.

At my suggestion, People magazine recently did a story on Delmar and Doris as being almost certainly the oldest boss-and-secretary team in the world, and perhaps in all history. It was a cute story. One picture showed Delmar with his Luger, and quoted him to the effect that anybody who tried to rob The American Harp Company " . . . would be one unhappy robber pretty quick."

He told Mary Kathleen now that Doris wept because she had had two hard blows in rapid succession. She had been notified on the previous afternoon that she was going to have to retire immediately, now that RAMJAC had taken over. The retirement age for all RAMJAC employees everywhere, except for supervisory personnel, was sixty-five. And then that morning, while she was cleaning out her desk, she got a telegram saying that her great-grandniece had been killed in a head-on collision after a high-school senior prom in Sarasota, Florida. Doris had no descendents of her own, he explained, so her collateral relatives meant a lot to her.

Delmar and Doris, incidentally, did almost no business up there, and continue to do almost no business up there. I was proud, when I became a RAMJAC executive, that American Harp Company harps were the finest harps in the world. You would have thought that the best harps would come from Italy or Japan or West Germany by now, with American craftsmanship having become virtually extinct. But no — musicians even in those countries and even in the Soviet Union agreed: Only an American Harp Company harp can cut the mustard. But the harp business is not and can never be a volume business, except in heaven, perhaps. So the profit picture, the bottom line, was ridiculous. It is so ridiculous that I recently undertook an investigation of why RAMJAC had ever acquired American Harp. I learned that it was in order to capture the incredible lease on the top of the Chrysler Building. The lease ran until the year Two-thousand and Thirty-one, at a rent of two hundred dollars a month! Arpad Leen wanted to turn the place into a restaurant.