Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

Since Tex’s wife and I had been lovers, I knew that his ancestors weren’t Texans, but Lithuanians. His father, whose name certainly wasn’t Johnson, was a Lithuanian second mate on a Russian freighter who jumped ship when it put in for emergency repairs at Corpus Christi. Zuzu told me that Tex’s father was not only an illegal immigrant but the nephew of the former Communist boss of Lithuania.

So much for the Alamo.

I turned to him at the Board meeting, and I said, “Tex—for pity sakes, say something! You know darn good and well I’m the best teacher you’ve got! I don’t say that. The students do! Is the whole faculty going to be brought before this Board, or am I the only one? Tex?”

He stared straight ahead. He seemed to have turned to cement. “Tex?” Some leadership!

I put the same question to the Chairman, who had been pauperized by Microsecond Arbitrage but didn’t know it yet. “Bob—” I began.

He winced.

I began again, having gotten the message in spades that I was a servant and not a relative: “Mr. Moellenkamp, sir—” I said, “you know darn well, and so does everybody else here, that you can follow the most patriotic, deeply religious American who ever lived with a tape recorder for a year, and then prove that he’s a worse traitor than Benedict Arnold, and a worshipper of the Devil. Who doesn’t say things in a moment of passion or absentmindedness that he doesn’t wish he could take back? So I ask again, am I the only one this was done to, and if so, why?”

He froze.

“Madelaine?” I said to Madelaine Astor, who would later write me such a dumb letter.

She said she did not like it that I had told students that a new Ice Age was on its way, even if I had read it in The New York Tunes. That was another thing I’d said that Wilder had on tape. At least it had something to do with science, and at least it wasn’t something I had picked up from Slazinger or Grandfather Wills or Damon Stern. At least it was the real me.

“The students here have enough to worry about,” she said. “I know I did.”

She went on to say that there had always been people who had tried to become famous by saying that the World was going to end, but the World hadn’t ended.

There were nods of agreement all around the table. I don’t think there was a soul there who knew anything about science.

“When I was here you were predicting the end of the World,” she said, “only it was atomic waste and acid rain that were going to kill us. But here we are. I feel fine. Doesn’t everybody else feel fine? So pooh.”

She shrugged. “About the rest of it,” she said, “I’m sorry I heard about it. It made me sick. If we have to go over it again, I think I’ll just leave the room.”

Heavens to Betsy! What could she have meant by “the rest of it”? What could it be that they had gone over once, and were going to have to go over again with me there? Hadn’t I already heard the worst?

No.

“The rest of it” was in a manila folder in front of Jason Wilder. So there is Manila playing a big part in my life again. No Sweet Rob Roys on the Rocks this time.

In the folder was a report by a private detective hired by Wilder to investigate my sex life. It covered only the second semester, and so missed the episode in the sculpture studio. The gumshoe recorded 3 of 7 subsequent trysts with the Artist in Residence, 2 with a woman from a jewelry company taking orders for class rings, and maybe 30 with Zuzu Johnson, the wife of the President. He didn’t miss a thing Zuzu and I did during the second semester. There was only 1 misunderstood incident:

when I went up into the loft of the stable, where the Lutz Carillon had been stored before there was a tower and where Tex Johnson was crucified 2 years ago. I went up with the aunt of a student. She was an architect who wanted to see the pegged post-and-beam joinery up there. The operative assumed we made love up there. We hadn’t.

We made love much later that afternoon, in a toolshed by the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

I wasn’t to see the contents of Wilder’s folder for another 10 minutes or so. Wilder and a couple of others wanted to go on discussing what really bothered them about me, which was what I had been doing, supposedly, to the students’ minds. My sexual promiscuity among older women wasn’t of much interest to them, the College President excepted, save as a handy something for which I could be fired without raising the gummy question of whether or not my rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution had been violated.

Adultery was the bullet they would put in my brain, so to speak, after I had been turned to Swiss cheese by the firing squad.

To Tex Johnson, the closet Lithuanian, the contents of the folder were more than a gadget for diddling me out of tenure. They were a worse humiliation for Tex than they were for me.

At least they said that my love affair with his wife was over.

He stood up. He asked to be excused. He said that he would just as soon not be present when the Trustees went over for the second time what Madelaine had called “the rest of it.”

He was excused, and was apparently about to leave without saying anything. But then, with one hand on the doorknob, he uttered two words chokingly, which were the title of a novel by Gustave Flaubert. It was about a wife who was bored with her husband, who had an exceedingly silly love affair and then committed suicide.

“Madame Bovary,” he said. And then he was gone.

He was a cuckold in the present, and crucifixion awaited him in the future. I wonder if his father would have jumped ship in Corpus Christi if he had known what an unhappy end his only son would come to under American Free Enterprise.

I had read Madame Bovary at West Point. All cadets in my day had to read it, so that we could demonstrate to cultivated people that we, too, were cultivated, should we ever face that challenge. Jack Patton and I read it at the same time for the same class. I asked him afterward what he thought of it. Predictably, he said he had to laugh like hell.

He said the same thing about Othello and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.

I confess that to this day I have come to no firm conclusions about how smart or dumb Jack Patton really was. This leaves me in doubt about the meaning of a birthday present he sent me in Vietnam shortly before the sniper killed him with a beautiful shot in Hue, pronounced “whay.” It was a gift-wrapped copy of a stroke magazine called Black Garterbelt. But did he send it to me for its pictures of women naked except for black garterbelts, or for a remarkable science fiction story in there, “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore”?

But more about that later.

I have no idea how many of the Trustees had read Madame Bovary. Two of them would have had to have it read aloud to them. So I was not alone in wondering why Tex Johnson would have said, his hand on the doorknob, “Madame Bovary.”

If I had been Tex, I think I might have gotten off the campus as fast as possible, and maybe drowned my sorrows among the nonacademics at the Black Cat Café. That was where I was going to wind up that afternoon. It would have been funny in retrospect if we had wound up as a couple of sloshed buddies at the Black Cat Café.

Imagine my saying to him or his saying to me, both of us drunk as skunks, “I love you, you old son of a gun. Do you know that?”

One Trustee had it in for me on personal grounds. That was Sydney Stone, who was said to have amassed a fortune of more than $1,000,000,000 in 10 short years, mainly in commissions for arranging sales of American properties to foreigners. His masterpiece, maybe, was the transfer of ownership of my father’s former employer, E. I. Dii Pont de Nemours & Company, to I. G. Farben in Germany.