Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

"How is the horse?" said Sarah.

"Oh, the horse is fine," I said.

"You don't look so good," she said.

"No," I said, "that is because the horse blew first."

"Can you still imitate your mother's laugh?" she said.

This was not the premise of yet another joke. Sarah genuinely wanted to hear me imitate my mother's laugh, something I used to do a lot for Sarah on the telephone. I had not tried the trick in years. I not only had to make my voice high: I also had to make it beautiful.

The thing was this: Mother never laughed out loud. She had been trained to stifle her laughter when a servant girl in Lithuania. The idea was that a master or guest, hearing a servant laughing somewhere in the house, might suspect that the servant was laughing about him.

So when my mother could not help laughing, she made tiny, pure sounds like a music box — or perhaps like bells far away. It was accidental that they were so beautiful.

So — forgetful of where I was, I now filled my lungs and tightened my throat, and to please my old girlfriend, I reincarnated the laughing part of my mother.

It was at that point that Arpad Leen and Frank Ubriaco came back into the living room. They heard the end of my song.

I told Sarah that I had to hang up now, and I did hang up.

Arpad Leen stared at me hard. I had heard women speak of men's undressing them mentally. Now I was finding out what that felt like. As things turned out, that was exactly what Leen was doing to me: imagining what I would look like with no clothes on.

He was beginning to suspect that I was Mrs. Jack Graham, checking up on him while disguised as a man.

I could not know that, of course — that he thought I might be Mrs. Graham. So his subsequent courting of me was as inexplicable as anything that had happened to me all day.

I tried to believe that he was being so attentive in order to soften the bad news he had to give me by and by: that I was simply not RAMJAC material, and that his limousine was waiting down below to take me back, still jobless, to the Arapahoe. But the messages in his eyes were more passionate than that. He was ravenous for my approval of everything he did. He told me, and not Leland Clewes or Israel Edel, that he had just made Frank Ubriaco a vice-president of the McDonald's Hamburgers Division of RAMJAC.

I nodded that I thought that was nice.

The nod was not enough for Leen. "I think it's a wonderful example of putting the right man in the right job," he said. "Don't you? That's what RAMJAC is all about, don't you think — putting good people where they can use their talents to the fullest?"

The question was for me and nobody else, so I finally said, "Yes."

I had to go through the same thing after he had interviewed and hired Clewes and Edel. Clewes was made a vice-president of the Diamond Match Division, presumably because he had been selling advertising matchbooks for so long. Edel was made a vice-president of the Hilton Department of the Hospitality Associates, Ltd., Division, presumably because of his three weeks of experience as a night clerk at the Arapahoe.

It was then my turn to go into the library with him. "Last but not least," he said coyly. After he closed the door on the rest of the house, his flirtatiousness became even more outrageous. "Come into my parlor," he murmured, "said the spider to the fly." He winked at me broadly.

I hated this. I wondered what had happened to the others in here.

There was a Mussolini-style desk with a swivel chair behind it. "Perhaps you should sit there," he said. He made his eyebrows go up and down. "Doesn't that look like your kind of chair? Eh? Eh? Your kind of chair?"

This could only be mockery, I thought. I responded to it humbly. I had had no self-respect for years and years. "Sir," I said, "I don't know what's going on."

"Ah," he said, holding up a finger, "that does happen sometimes."

"I don't know how you found me, or even if I'm who you think I am," I said. i

"I haven't told you yet who I think you are," he said.

"Walter F. Starbuck," I said bleakly.

"If you say so," he said.

"Well," I said, "whoever I am, I'm not much anymore. If you're really offering jobs, all I want is a little one."

"I'm under orders to make you a vice-president," he said, "orders from a person I respect very much. I intend to obey."

"I want to be a bartender," I said.

"Ah!" he said. "And mix pousse-caf?s!"

"I can, if I have to," I said. "I have a Doctor of Mixology degree."

"You also have a lovely high voice when you want to," he said.

"I think I had better go home now," I said. "I can walk. It isn't far from here." It was only about forty blocks. I had no shoes; but who needed shoes? I would get home somehow without them.

"When it's time to go home," he said, "you shall have my limousine."

"It's time to go home now," 1 said. "I don't care how I get there. It has been a very tiring day for me. I don't feel very clever. I just want to sleep. If you know anybody who needs a bartender, even part-time, I can be found at the Arapahoe."

"What an actor you are!" he said.

I hung my head. I didn't even want to look at him or at anybody anymore. "Not at all," I said. "Never was."

"I will tell you something very strange," he said.

"I won't understand it," I said.

"Everyone here tonight remembers having seen you, but they've never seen each other before," he said. "How would you explain that?"

"I have no job," I said. "I just got out of prison. I've been walking around town with nothing to do."

"Such a complicated story," he said. "You were in prison, you say?"

"It happens," I said.

"I won't ask what you were in prison for," he said. What he meant, of course, was that I, as Mrs. Graham disguised as a man, did not have to go on telling taller and taller lies, unless it entertained me to do so.

"Watergate," I said.

"Watergate!" he exclaimed. "I thought I knew the names of almost all the Watergate people." As I would find out later, he not only knew their names: He knew many of them well enough to have bribed them with illegal campaign contributions, and to have chipped in for their defenses afterward. "Why is it that I have never heard the name Starbuck associated with Watergate before?"

"I don't know," I said, my head still down. "It was like being in a wonderful musical comedy where the critics mentioned everybody but me. If you can find an old program, I'll show you my name."

"The prison was in Georgia, I take it," he said.

"Yes," I said. I supposed that he knew that because Roy M. Cohn had looked up my record when he had to get me out of jail.

"That explains Georgia," he said.

I couldn't imagine why anybody would want Georgia explained.

"So that's how you know Clyde Carter and Cleveland Lawes and Dr. Robert Fender," he said.

"Yes," I said. Now I started to be afraid. Why would this man, one of the most powerful corporate executives on the planet, bother to find out so much about a pathetic little jailbird like me? Was there a suspicion somewhere that I knew some spectacular secret that could still be revealed about Watergate? Might he be playing cat-and-mouse with me before having me killed some way?

"And Doris Kramm," he said, "I'm sure you know her, too." I was so relieved not to know her! I was innocent after all! His whole case against me would collapse now. He had the wrong man, and I could prove it! I did not know Doris Kramm! "No, no, no," I said. "I don't know Doris Kramm."

"The lady you asked me not to retire from The American Harp Company," he said.

"I never asked you anything," I said.

"A slip of the tongue," he said.

And then horror grew in me as I realized that I really did know Doris Kramm. She was the old secretary who had been sobbing and cleaning out her desk at the harp showroom. I wasn't about to tell him that I knew her, though.