Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

The union was run by communists then. It is run by gangsters now. As a matter of fact, the start of my prison sentence overlapped with the end of one being served at Finletter by the lifetime president of the I.B.A.A.W. His twenty-three-year-old daughter was running the union from her villa in the Bahamas while he was away. He was on the telephone to her all the time. He told me that the membership was almost entirely black and Hispanic now. It was lily-white back in the thirties — Scandinavians mostly. I don't think a black or Hispanic would have been allowed to join back in the good old days.

Times change.

Whistler spoke at night. On the afternoon before he spoke, I made love to Mary Kathleen O'Looney for the first time. It was mixed up in our young minds, somehow, with the prospect of hearing and perhaps even touching a genuine saint. How better to present ourselves to him or to any holy person, I suppose, than as Adam and Eve — smelling strongly of apple juice?

Mary Kathleen and I made love in the apartment of an associate professor of anthropology named Arthur von Strelitz. His specialty was the headhunters of the Solomon Islands. He spoke their language and respected their taboos. They trusted him. He was unmarried. His bed was unmade. His apartment was on the third floor of a frame house on Brattle Street.

A footnote to history: Not only that house, but that very apartment would be used later as a set in a very popular motion picture called Love Story. It was released during my early days with the Nixon administration. My wife and I went to see it when it came to Chevy Chase. It was a made-up story about a wealthy Anglo-Saxon student who married a poor Italian student, much against his father's wishes. She died of cancer. The aristocratic father was played brilliantly by Ray Milland. He was the best thing in the movie. Ruth cried all through the movie. We sat in the back row of the theater for two reasons: so I could smoke and so there wouldn't be anybody behind her to marvel at how fat she was. But I could not really concentrate on the story, because I knew the apartment where so much of it was happening so well. I kept waiting for Arthur von Strelitz or Mary Kathleen O'Looney or even me to appear.

Small world.

Mary Kathleen and I had the place for a weekend. Von Strelitz had given me the key. He had then gone to visit some other German ?migr? friends on Cape Ann. He must have been about thirty then. He seemed old to me. He was born into an aristocratic family in Prussia. He was lecturing at Harvard when Hitler became dictator of Germany in the spring of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-three. He declined to go home. He applied for American citizenship instead. His father, who never communicated with him in any way again, would command a corps of S.S. and die of pneumonia during the Siege of Leningrad. I know how his father died, since there was testimony about his father at the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg, where I was in charge of housekeeping.

Again: small world.

His father, acting on written orders from Martin Bormann, who was tried in absentia in Nuremberg, caused to be executed all persons, civilian and military, taken prisoner during the siege. The intent was to demoralize the defenders of Leningrad. Leningrad, incidentally, was younger than New York City. Imagine that! Imagine a famous European city, full of imperial treasures and worth besieging, and yet much younger than New York.

Arthur von Strelitz would never learn how his father died. He himself would be rowed ashore from an American submarine in the Solomon Islands, as a spy, while they were still occupied by the Japanese. He would never be heard of again.

Peace.

He thought it was urgent, I remember, that mankind and womankind be defined. Otherwise, he was sure, they were doomed forever to be defined by the needs of institutions. He had mainly factories and armies in mind.

He was the only man I ever knew who wore a monocle.

Now Mary Kathleen O'Looney, age eighteen, lay in his bed. We had just made love. It would be very pretty to paint her as naked now — a pink little body. But I never saw her naked. She was modest. Never could I induce her to take off all her clothes.

I myself stood stark naked at a window, with my private parts just below the sill. I felt like the great god Thor.

"Do you love me, Walter?" Mary Kathleen asked my bare backside.

What could I reply but this: "Of course I do."

There was a knock on the door. I had told my co-editor at The Bay State Progressive where I could be found in case of emergency. "Who is it?" I said.

There was a sound like a little gasoline engine on the other side of the door. It was Alexander Hamilton McCone, my mentor, who had decided to come to Cambridge unannounced — to see what sort of life I was leading on his money. He sounded like a motor because of his stammer. He stammered because of the Cuyahoga Massacre in Eighteen-hundred and Ninety-four. He was trying to say his own name.

I had somehow neglected to tell him that I had become a communist.

Now he had found out about that. He had come first to my room in Adams House, where he was told that I was most likely at The Progressive. He had gone to The Progressive and had ascertained what sort of publication it was and that I was its coeditor. Now he was outside the door with a copy folded under his arm.

I remained calm. Such was the magic of having emptied my seminal vesicles so recently.

Mary Kathleen, obeying my silent arm signals, hid herself in the bathroom. I slipped on a robe belonging to von Strelitz.

He had brought it home from the Solomon Islands. It appeared to be made of shingles, with wreaths of feathers at its collar and cuffs.

Thus was I clad when I opened the door and said to old Mr. McCone, who was in his early sixties then, "Come in, come in."

He was so angry with me that he could only continue to make those motor sounds: "bup-bup-bup-bup-bup . . . " But he meanwhile did a grotesque pantomime of how repulsed he was by the paper, whose front-page cartoon showed a bloated capitalist who looked just like him; by my costume; by the unmade bed; by the picture of Karl Marx on von Strelit's wall.

Out he went again, slamming the door behind him. He was through with me!

Thus did my childhood end at last. I had become a man.

And it was as a man that I went that night, with Mary Kathleen on my arm, to hear Kenneth Whistler speak at the rally for my comrades in the International Brotherhood of Abrasives and Adhesives Workers.

How could I be so serene, so confident? My tuition for the year had already been paid, so I would graduate. I was about to get a full scholarship to Oxford. I had a superb wardrobe in good repair. I had been saving most of my allowance, so that I had a small fortune in the bank.

If I had to, I could always borrow money from Mother, God rest her soul.

What a daring young man I was!

What a treacherous young man I was! I already knew that I would abandon Mary Kathleen at the end of the academic year. I would write her a few love letters and then fall silent after that. She was too low class.

Whistler had a big bandage over one temple and his right arm was in a plaster cast that night. This was a Harvard graduate, mind you, and from a good family in Cincinnati. He was a Buckeye, like me. Mary Kathleen and I supposed that he had been beat up by the forces of evil yet again — by the police or the National Guard, or by goons or organizers of yellow-dog unions.

I held Mary Kathleen's hand.

Nobody had ever told her he loved her before.

I was wearing a suit and a necktie, and so were most of the men there. We wanted to show that we were as decent and sober citizens as anyone. Kenneth Whistler might have been a businessman. He had even found time to shine his shoes.