Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page B

Richard M. Nixon’s special advisor on youth affairs, from Nineteen-hundred and Seventy until my arrest in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-five, smoking four packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day, nobody ever asked me for facts or opinions or anything. I need not even have come to work, and I might have spent my time better in helping my poor wife with the little interior-decorating business she ran out of our right little, tight little brick bungalow out in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The only visitors I ever had to my subterranean office, its walls golden-brown with cigarette tars, were the President’s special burglars, whose office was above mine. They suddenly realized one day, when I had a coughing fit, that somebody was right below them, and that I might be able to hear their conversations. They performed experiments, with one of them yelling and stamping upstairs, and another one listening in my office. They satisfiedthemselves at last that I had heard nothing, and was a harmless old poop, in any event. The yeller and stamper was a former Central Intelligence Agency operative, a writer of spy thrillers, and a graduate of Brown University. The listener below was a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a former district attorney, and a graduate of Fordham University. I myself, as I may have said already, was a Harvard man.
    And this Harvard man, knowing full well that everything he wrote would be shredded and baled with all the rest of the White House wastepaper, unread, still turned out some two hundred or more weekly reports on the sayings and doings of youth, with footnotes, bibliographies, and appendices and all. But the conclusions implied by my materials changed so little over the years that I might as well have simply sent the same telegrams each week to limbo. It would have said this:
    YOUNG PEOPLE STILL REFUSE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS IMPOSSIBILITY OF WORLD DISARMAMENT AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY. COULD BE FAULT OF NEW TESTAMENT (QUOD VIDE) .
    walter f. starbuck
president’s special advisor
on youth affairs
    At the end of every futile day in the subbasement I would go home to the only wife I have ever had, who was Ruth—waiting for me in our little brick bungalow inChevy Chase, Maryland. She was Jewish, which I am not. So our only child, a son who is now a book reviewer for
The New York Times
, is half-Jewish. He has further confused racial and religious matters by marrying a black nightclub singer, who has two children by a former husband. The former husband was a nightclub comedian of Puerto Rican extraction named Jerry Cha-cha Rivera, who was shot as an innocent bystander during the robbery of a RAMJAC carwash in Hollywood. My son has adopted the children, so that they are now legally my grandchildren, my only grandchildren.
    Life goes on.
    My late wife Ruth, the grandmother of these children, was born in Vienna. Her family owned a rarebook store there—before the Nazis took it away from them. She was six years younger than I. Her father and mother and two siblings were killed in concentration camps. She herself was hidden by a Christian family, but was discovered and arrested, along with the head of that family, in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-two. So she herself was in a concentration camp near Munich, finally liberated by American troops, for the last two years of the war. She herself would die in her sleep in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four—of congestive heart failure, two weeks before my own arrest. Whither I went, and no matter how clumsily, there did my Ruth go—as long as she could. If I marveled at this out loud, she would say, “Where else could I be? What else could I do?”
    She might have been a great translator, for one thing.Languages came so easily to her, as they did not to me. I spent four years in Germany after the Second World War, but never mastered German. But there was no European language that Ruth could not speak at least a little bit. She passed the time in the concentration camp,