Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

So at high noon there was silence.

All the people in the town jumped out of their skins when the sun reached its zenith. They asked each other in astonishment, “Good gravy! What was that?”

My lawyer wanted to know what that had to do with my not swearing.

I replied that in an era as foulmouthed as this one, “Good gravy” had the same power to startle as a cannon shot.

There on Harvard Square, back in 1975, Sam Wakefield again made himself the helmsman of my destiny. He told me to stay out on the sidewalk, where I felt safe. I was shaking like a leaf. I wanted to bark like a dog.

He went into the restaurant, and somehow calmed everybody down, and offered to pay for all damages from his own pocket right then and there. He had a very rich wife, Andrea, who would become Tarkington’s Dean of Women after he committed suicide. Andrea died 2 years before the prison break, and so is not buried with so many others next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

She is buried next to her husband in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The glacier could still shove the 2 of them into West Virginia or Maryland. Bon Voyage!

Andrea Wakefield was the 2nd person I spoke to after Tarkington fired me. Damon Stern was the first. I am talking about 1991 again. Practically everybody else was eating lobsters. Andrea came up to me after meeting Stern farther down on the Senior Walk.

“I thought you would be in the Pavilion eating lobster,” she said.

“Not hungry,” I said.

“I can’t stand it that they’re boiled alive,” she said. “You know what Damon Stern just told me?”

“I’m sure it was interesting,” I said.

“During the reign of Henry the 8th of England,” she said, “counterfeiters were boiled alive.”

“Show biz,” I said. “Were they boiled alive in pub-

“He didn’t say,” she said. “And what are you doing here?”

“Enjoying the sunshine,” I said.

She believed me. She sat down next to me. She was already wearing her academic gown for the faculty parade to graduation. Her cowl identified her as a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, France. In addition to her duties as Dean, dealing with unwanted pregnancies and drug addiction and the like, she also taught French and Italian and oil painting. She was from a genuinely distinguished old Philadelphia family, which had given civilization a remarkable number of educators and lawyers and physicians and artists. She actually may have been what Jason Wilder and several of Tarkington’s Trustees believed themselves to be, obviously the most highly evolved creatures on the planet.

She was a lot smarter than her husband.

I always meant to ask her how a Quaker came to marry a professional soldier, but I never did.

Too late now.

Even at her age then, which was about 60, 10 years older than me, Andrea was the best figure skater on the faculty. I think figure skating, if Andrea Wakefield could find the right partner, was eroticism enough for her. General Wakefield couldn’t skate for sour apples. The best partner she had on ice at Tarkington, probably, was Bruce Bergeron—the boy who was trapped in an elevator at Bloomingdale’s, who became the youth who couldn’t get into any college but Tarkington, who became the man who joined the chorus of an ice show and then was murdered by somebody who presumably hated homosexuals, or loved one too much.

Andrea and I had never been lovers. She was too contented and old for me.

“I want you to know I think you’re a Saint,” said Andrea.

“How so?” I said.

“You’re so nice to your wife and mother-in-law.”

“It’s easier than what I did for Presidents and Generals and Henry Kissinger,” I said.

“But this is voluntary,” she said.

“So was that,” I said. “I was real gung-ho.”

“When you realize how many men nowadays dissolve their marriages when they become the least little bit inconvenient or uncomfortable,” she said, “all I can think is that you’re a Saint.”

“They didn’t want to come up here, you know,” I said. “They were very happy in Baltimore, and Margaret would have become a physical therapist.”

“It isn’t this valley that made them sick, is it?” she said. “It isn’t this valley that made my husband sick.”

“It’s a clock that made them sick,” I said. “It would have struck midnight for both of them, no matter where they were.”

“That’s how I feel about Sam,” she said. “I can’t feel guilty.”

“Shouldn’t,” I said.

“When he resigned from the Army and went over to the peace movement,” she said, “I think he was trying to stop the clock. Didn’t work.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“Don’t let the war kill you, too,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said.

“You still haven’t found the money?” she said. She was talking about the money Mildred had gotten for the house in Baltimore. While Mildred was still fairly sane, she deposited it in the Scipio branch of the First National Bank of Rochester. But then she withdrew it in cash when the bank was bought by the Sultan of Brunei, without telling me or Margaret that she had done so. Then she hid it somewhere, but she couldn’t remember where.

“I don’t even think about it anymore,” I said. “The most likely thing is that somebody else found it. It could have been a bunch of kids. It could have been somebody working on the house. Whoever it was sure isn’t going to say so.”

We were talking about $45,000 and change.

“I know I should give a darn, but somehow I can’t give a darn,” I said.

“The war did that to you,” she said.

“Who knows?” I said.

As we chatted in the sunshine, a powerful motorcycle came to life with a roar in the valley, in the region of the Black Cat Café. Then another one spoke, and yet another.

“Hell’s Angels?” she said. “You mean it’s really going to happen?”

The joke was that Tex Johnson, the College President, having seen one too many motorcycle movies, believed that the campus might actually be assaulted by Hell’s Angels someday. This fantasy was so real to him that he had bought an Israeli sniper’s rifle, complete with a telescopic sight, and ammunition for it from a drugstore in Portland, Oregon. He and Zuzu were visiting Zuzu’s half sister. That was the same weapon which would eventually get him crucified.

But now Tex’s anticipation of an assault by Hell’s Angels didn’t seem so comical after all. A mighty doomsday chorus of basso profundo 2-wheelers was growing louder and louder and coming closer and closer. There could be no doubt about it! Whoever it was, whatever it was, its destination could only be Tarkington!

It wasn’t Hell’s Angels.

It wasn’t lower-class people of any kind.

It was a motorcade of highly successful Americans, most on motorcycles, but some in limousines, led by Arthur Clarke, the fun-loving billionaire. He himself was on a motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him, holding on for dear life, her skirt hiked up to her crotch, was Gloria White, the 60-year-old lifelong movie star!

Bringing up the rear were a sound truck and a flatbed carrying a deflated hot-air balloon. When the balloon was inflated at the center of the Quadrangle it would turn out to be shaped like a castle Clarke owned in Ireland!

Cough, cough. Silence. Two more: Cough, cough. There, I’m OK now. Cough. That’s it. I really am OK now. Peace.

This wasn’t Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who wrote all the books about humanity’s des-

tiny in other parts of the Universe. This was Arthur K. Clarke, the billionaire speculator and publisher of magazines and books about high finance.