Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

He was not in.

When I got home, there was plenty of new mail in my mailbox, almost all of it from subscribers to The White Christian Minuteman. The common theme was that I was not alone, was not friendless. A woman in Mount Vernon, New York, told me there was a throne in Heaven for me. A man in Norfolk said I was the new Patrick Henry. A woman in St. Paul sent me two dollars to continue my good work. She apologized. She said that was all the money she had. A man in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, asked me why I didn't get out of Jew York and come live in God's country.

I didn't have any idea how Jones had found out about me.

Kraft claimed to be mystified, too. He wasn't really mystified. He had written to Jones as an anonymous fellow-patriot, telling him the glad news that I was alive. He had also asked that Jones send a complimentary copy of his great paper to Bernard B. O'Hare of the Francis X. Donovan Post of the American Legion.

Kraft had plans for me.

And he was, at the very same time, doing a portrait of me that surely showed more sympathetic insight into me, more intuitive affection than could ever have been produced by a wish to fool a boob.

I was sitting for the portrait when Jones came calling. Kraft had spilled a quart of turpentine. I opened the door to get rid of the fumes.

And a very strange chant came floating up the stairwell and through the open door.

I went out onto the landing outside the door, looked down the oak and plaster snail of the stairwell All I could see was the hands of four persons — hands moving up the bannister.

The group was composed of Jones and three friends.

The curious chant went with the advance of the hands. The hands would move about four feet up the bannister, stop, and then the chant would come.

The chant was a panted count to twenty. Two of Jones' party, his bodyguard and his male secretary, had very bad hearts. To keep their poor old hearts from bursting, they were pausing every few steps, timing their rests by counting to twenty.

Jones' bodyguard was August Krapptauer, former Vice-Bundesfuehrer of the German-American Bund. Krapptauer was sixty-three, had done eleven years in Atlanta, was about to drop dead. But he still looked garishly boyish, as though he went to a mortuary cosmetologist regularly. The greatest achievement of his life was the arrangement of a joint meeting of the Bund and the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey in 1940. At that meeting, Krapptauer declared that the Pope was a Jew and that the Jews held a fifteen-million-dollar mortgage on the Vatican. A change of Popes and eleven years in a prison laundry had not changed his mind.

Jones' secretary was an unfrocked Paulist Father named Patrick Keeley. 'Father Keeley,' as his employer still called him, was seventy-three. He was a drunk. He had, before the Second World War, been chaplain of a Detroit gun club which, as later came out, had been organized by agents of Nazi Germany. The dream of the club, apparently, was to shoot the Jews. One of Father Keeley's prayers at a club meeting was taken down by a newspaper reporter, was printed in full the next morning. The prayer appealed to so vicious and bigoted a God that it attracted the astonished attention of Pope Pius XI.

Keeley was unfrocked, and Pope Pius sent a long letter to the American Hierarchy in which he said, among other things: 'No true Catholic will take part in the persecution of his Jewish compatriots. A blow against the Jews is a blow against our common humanity.'

Keeley never went to prison, though many of his close friends did. While his friends enjoyed steam heat, clean beds and regular meals at government expense, Keeley shivered and itched and starved and drank himself blind on skid rows across the land. He would have been on a skid row still, or in a pauper's grave, if Jones and Krapptauer hadn't found and rescued him.

Keeley's famous prayer, incidentally, was a paraphrase of a satiric poem I had composed and delivered on short wave before. And, while I am setting the record straight as to my contributions to literature, may I point out that Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer's claims about the Pope and the mortgage on the Vatican were my inventions, too.

So up the stairs these people came to see me, chanting, 'One, two, three, four ... .'

And, slow as their progress was, the fourth member of the party lagged far behind.

The fourth member was a woman. All I could see of her was her pale and ringless hand.

The hand of Jones was in the lead. It glittered with rings like the hand of a Byzantine prince. An inventory of the jewelry on that hand would have revealed two wedding rings, a star-sapphire presented to him by the Mothers' Auxiliary of the Paul Revere Association of Militant Gentiles in 1940, a diamond swastika on an onyx field presented to him in 1939 by Baron Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, then German Consul General of San Francisco, and an American eagle carved in jade and mounted in silver, a piece of Japanese craftsmanship, a present from Robert Sterling Wilson. Wilson was The Black Fuehrer of Harlem,' a colored man who went to prison in 1942 as a Japanese spy.

The jewelled hand of Jones left the bannister. Jones cantered back down the stairs to the woman, said things to her I couldn't understand. And then up he came again, a remarkably sound-winded septuagenarian.

He came face to face with me, and he smiled showing me snow-white teeth set in Gingiva-Tru. 'Campbell?' he said, only a little out of breath.

'Yes,' I said.

'My name is Dr. Jones. I have a surprise for you,' he said.

'I've already seen your paper,' I said.

'No — not the paper,' he said. 'A bigger surprise than that.'

Father Keeley and Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer now came into view, wheezing, counting to twenty in shattered whispers.

'An even bigger surprise?' I said, preparing to square him away so savagely that he would never think of me as one of his own kind again.

'The woman I've brought with me — ' he said.

'What about her?' I said.

'She's your wife,' he said.

'I got in touch with her — ' said Jones, 'and she begged me not to tell you about her. She insisted it had to be like this, with her just walking in without any warning.'

'So I could see for myself if there was still room for me in your life,' said Helga. 'If there is no room, I will simply say goodbye again, disappear, and never bother you again.'

If the pale, ringless hand on the railing below was the hand of my Helga, it was the hand of a woman forty-five years old. It was the hand of a middle-aged woman who had been a prisoner of the Russians for sixteen years, if the hand was Helga's.

It was inconceivable that my Helga could still be lovely and gay.

If Helga had survived the Russian attack on the Crimea, had eluded all the crawling, booming, whistling, buzzing, creeping, clanking, bounding, chattering toys of war that killed quickly, a slower doom, a doom that killed like leprosy, had surely awaited her. There was no need for me to guess at the doom. It was well-known, uniformly applied to all women prisoners on the Russian front — was part of the ghastly routine of any thoroughly modern, thoroughly scientific, thoroughly asexual nation at thoroughly modern war.

If my Helga had survived the battle, her captors had surely prodded her with gun muzzles into a labor gang. They had surely shepherded her into one of Mother Russia's countless huddles of squinting, lumpy, hopeless, grubbing ragbags — had surely made of my Helga a digger of root crops in frosty fields, a lead-footed, splay-fingered clearer of rubble, a nameless, sexless dragger of noisy carts.

'My wife?' I said to Jones. 'I don't believe you.'

'It's easy enough to prove I'm a liar, if I am a liar,' he said pleasantly. 'Have a look for yourself.'