God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Page 11

And another fish came crashing in. Harry slammed it on the head, too--and slammed another and another, until eight great fish lay dead.

  Harry laughed, wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Son of a bitch, boys! Son of a bitch!"

  The boys laughed back. All three were as satisfied with life as men can ever be.

  The youngest boy thumbed his nose at the fairy's restaurant.

  "Fuck'em all, boys. Right?" said Harry.

  Bunny came to Amanita's and Caroline's table, jingled his slave bracelet, put his hand on Amanita's shoulder, remained standing. Caroline took the opera glasses from her eyes, said a depressing thing. "It's so much like life. Harry Pena is so much like God."

  "Like God?" Bunny was amused.

  "You don't see what I mean?"

  "I'm sure the fish do. I don't happen to be a fish. I'll tell you what I am, though."

  "Please--not while we're eating," said Amanita.

  Bunny gave a crippled little chuckle, went on with his thought. "I am a director of a bank."

  "What's that got to do with anything?" Amanita inquired.

  "You find out who's broke and who isn't. And, if that's God out there, I hate to tell you, but God is bankrupt."

  Amanita and Caroline expressed, each in her own way, disbelief that a man that virile could ever have a business failure. While they were twittering in this wise, Bunny's hand tightened on Amanita's shoulder to the point where she complained. "You're hurting me."

  "Sorry. Didn't know it was possible."

  "Bastard."

  "Might as well be." And the hand bit hard again. "That's all over," he said, meaning Harry and his sons. The pulsing pressure of his hand let Amanita know that he wanted very much for her to keep her mouth shut for a change, that he was being serious for a change. "Real people don't make their livings that way any more. Those three romantics out there make as much sense as Marie Antoinette and her milkmaids. When the bankruptcy proceedings begin--in a week, a month, a year--they'll find out that their only economic value was as animated wallpaper for my restaurant here." Bunny, to his credit, was not happy about this. "That's all over, men working with their hands and backs. They are not needed."

  "Men like Harry will always win, won't they?" said Caroline.

  "They're losing everywhere." Bunny let go of Amanita. He looked around his restaurant, invited Amanita to do so, too, to help him count the house. He invited them, moreover, to despise his customers as much as he did. Almost all were inheritors. Almost all were beneficiaries of boodles and laws that had nothing to do with wisdom or work.

  Four stupid, silly, fat widows in furs laughed over a bathroom joke on a paper cocktail napkin.

  "And look who's winning. And look who's won."

  11

  NORMAN MUSHARI rented a red convertible at the Providence Airport, drove eighteen miles to Pisquontuit to find Fred Rosewater. As far as Mushari's employers knew, he was in his apartment in Washington, sick in bed. On the contrary, he felt very good.

  He didn't find Fred all afternoon, for the not very simple reason that Fred was asleep on his sailboat, a secret thing Fred often did on warm days. There was never much doing in life insurance for poor people on warm afternoons.

  Fred would row out to his mooring in a little yacht club dinghy, scree-scraw, scree-scraw, with three inches of freeboard all around. And he would transfer his bulk to Rosebud II, and lie down in the cockpit, out of sight, with his head on an orange lifejacket. He would listen to the lapping of the water, the clinking and creaking of the rigging, put one hand on his genitals, feel at one with God, go to sleepy-bye. That much was lovely.

  The Buntlines had a young upstairs maid named Selena Deal, who knew Fred's secret. One little window in her bedroom looked out on the fleet. When she sat on her narrow bed and wrote, as she was doing now, her window framed the Rosebud II. Her door was ajar, so she could hear the telephone ring. That was all she had to do during the afternoons, usually-- answer the telephone in case it rang. It seldom rang, and, as Selena asked herself, "Why would it?"

  She was eighteen years old. She was an orphan from an orphanage that had been founded by the Buntline family in Pawtucket in 1878. When it was founded, the Buntlines required three things: That all orphans be raised as Christians, regardless of race, color, or creed, that they take an oath once a week, before Sunday supper, and that, each year, an intelligent, clean female orphan enter domestic service in a Buntline home, ... in order to learn about the better things in life, and perhaps to be inspired to climb a few rungs of the ladder of culture and social grace.

  The oath, which Selena had taken six hundred times, before six hundred very plain suppers, went like this, and was written by Castor Buntline, poor old Stewart's great-grandfather:

  I do solemnly swear that I will respect the sacred private property of others, and that I will be content with whatever station in life God Almighty may assign me to. I will be grateful to those who employ me, and will never complain about wages and hours, but will ask myself instead, "What more can I do for my employer, my republic, and my God?" I understand that I have not been placed on Earth to be happy. I am here to be tested. If I am to pass the test, I must be always unselfish, always sober, always truthful, always chaste in mind, body, and deed, and always respectful to those to whom God has, in His Wisdom, placed above me. If I pass the test, I will go to joy everlasting in Heaven when I die. If I fail, I shall roast in hell while the Devil laughs and Jesus weeps.

  Selena, a pretty girl who played the piano beautifully and wanted to be a nurse, was writing to the head of the orphanage, a man named Wilfred Parrot. Parrot was sixty. He had done a lot of interesting things in his life, such as fighting in Spain in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and, from 1933 until 1936, writing a radio serial called "Beyond the Blue Horizon." He ran a happy orphanage. All of the children called him "Daddy," and all of the children could cook and dance and play some musical instrument and paint.

  Selena had been with the Buntlines a month. She was supposed to stay a year. This is what she wrote:

  Dear Daddy Parrot: Maybe things will get better here, but I don't see how. Mrs. Buntline and I don't get along very well. She keeps saying I am ungrateful and impertinent. I don't mean to be, but I guess maybe I am. I just hope she doesn't get so mad at me she turns against the orphanage. That is the big thing I worry about. I am just going to have to try harder to obey the oath. What goes wrong all the time is things she sees in my eyes. I can't keep those things out of my eyes. She says something or does something I think is kind of dumb or pitiful or something, and I don't say anything about it, but she looks in my eyes and gets very mad. One time she told me that music was the most important thing in her life, next to her husband and her daughter. They have loudspeakers all over the house, all connected to a big phonograph in the front coat closet. There is music all day long, and Mrs. Buntline said what she enjoyed more than anything was picking out a musical program at the start of every day, and loading it into the record changer. This morning there was music coming out of all the loudspeakers, and it didn't sound like any music I had ever heard before. It was very high and fast and twittery, and Mrs. Buntline was humming along with it, rocking her head from side to side to show me how much she loved it. It was driving me crazy. And then her best friend, a woman named Mrs. Rosewater, came over, and she said how much she loved the music, too. She said someday, when her ship came in, she would have beautiful music all the time, too. I finally broke down and asked Mrs. Buntline what on earth it was. "Why, my dear child," she said, "that is none other than the immortal Beethoven." "Beethoven!" I said. "Have you ever heard of him before?" she said. "Yes, mam, I have. Daddy Parrot played Beethoven all the time back at the orphanage, but it didn't sound like that." So she took me in where the phonograph was, and she said, "Very well, I will prove it is Beethoven. I have loaded the changer with nothing but Beethoven. Every so often I just go on a Beethoven binge." "I just adore Beethoven, too," Mrs. Rosewater said. Mrs. Buntline told me to look at what was i
n the record changer and tell her whether it was Beethoven or not. It was. She had loaded the changer with all nine symphonies, but that poor woman had them playing at 78 revolutions per minute instead of 33, and she couldn't tell the difference. I told her about it, Daddy. I had to tell her, didn't I? I was very polite, but I must have gotten that look in my eyes, because she got very mad, and she made me go out and clean up the chauffeur's lavatory in the back of the garage. Actually, it wasn't a very dirty job. They haven't had a chauffeur for years.

  Another time, Daddy, she took me out to watch a sailboat race in Mr. Buntline's big motorboat. I asked to go. I said all anybody ever seemed to talk about in Pisquontuit was sailboat races. I said I would like to see what was so wonderful about them. Her daughter Lila was racing that day. Lila is the best sailer in town. You should see all the cups she has won. They are the main decorations of the house. There aren't any pictures to speak of A neighbor has a Picasso, but I heard him say he would a lot rather have a daughter who could sail like Lila. I don't think it makes much difference one way or another, but I didn't say so. Believe me, Daddy, I don't say half the things I could. Anyway, we went out to see this sailboat race, and I wish you could have heard the way Mrs. Buntline yelled and swore. You remember the things Arthur Gonsalves used to say? Mrs. Buntline used words that would have been news to Arthur. I never saw a woman get so excited and mad. She just forgot I was there. She looked like a witch with the rabies. You would have thought the fate of the universe was being decided by those sunburned children in those pretty little white boats. She finally remembered me, and she realized she had said some things that didn't sound very good. "You've got to understand why we're all so excited right now," she said. "Lila has two legs on the Commodore's Cup." "Oh," I said, "that explains everything." I swear, Daddy, that's all I said, but there must have been that look in my eyes.

  What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what else I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed liked a dumb thing. "Thank you very much," I said. That was exactly what she was waiting for. "You're entirely welcome," she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.

  Maybe I am just too wicked and dumb to realize how wonderful Pisquontuit really is. Maybe this is a case of pearls before swine, but I don't see how. I am homesick. Write soon. I love you.

  Selena

  P.S. Who really does run this crazy country? These creeps sure don't.

  Norman Mushari killed the afternoon by driving over to Newport, paid a quarter to tour the famous Rumfoord Mansion. The queer thing about the tour was that the Rumfoords were still living there, and glaring at all comers. Moreover, they didn't need the money, God knows.

  Mushari was sufficiently offended by the way that Lance Rumfoord, who was six feet eight inches tall, sneered whinnyingly at him, that he complained about it to a family servant who was guiding the tour. "If they hate the public so much," said Mushari, "they shouldn't invite them in and take their money."

  This failed to gain the sympathy of the servant, who explained with acrid fatalism that the estate was open to the public for only one day out of every five years. This was required by a will now three generations old.

  "Why would a will say that?"

  "It was the feeling of the founder of this estate that it would be in the best interests of those living within these walls to periodically take a sampling of the sorts of people who were appearing at random outside of them." He looked Mushari up and down. "You might call it keeping up with current events. You know?"

  As Mushari was leaving the estate, Lance Rumfoord came loping after him. Predatorily genial, he towered over little Mushari, explained that his mother considered herself a great judge of character, and had made the guess that Mushari had once served in the United States Infantry.

  "No."

  "Really? She so seldom misses. She said specifically that you had been a sniper."

  "No."

  Lance shrugged. "If not in this life, in some other one, then." And he sneered and whinnied again.

  Sons of suicides often think of killing themselves at the end of a day, when their blood sugar is low. And so it was with Fred Rosewater when he came home from work. He nearly fell over the Electrolux in the living room archway, caught his balance with a quick stride, barked his shin on a little table, knocked the mints on the table to the floor. He got down on his hands and knees and picked them up.

  He knew his wife was home, for the record-player Amanita had given to her for her birthday was going. She only owned five records, and they were all in the changer. They were her bonus for joining a record club. She had gone through hell, selecting five free records from a list of one hundred. The five she finally chose were Come Dance With Me, by Frank Sinatra, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, and Other Sacred Selections, by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; It's a Long Way to Tipperary and Others, by the Soviet Army Chorus and Band, The New World Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and Poems of Dylan Thomas, read by Richard Burton.

  The Burton record was playing as Fred picked up the mints.

  Fred stood up, swayed. There were bells in his ears. There were spots before his eyes. He went into the bedroom, found his wife asleep in bed with her clothes on. She was drunk, and full of chicken and mayonnaise, as she always was after a luncheon with Amanita. Fred tiptoed out again, thought of hanging himself from a pipe in the cellar.

  But then he remembered his son. He heard a toilet flush, so that was where little Franklin was, in the bathroom. He went into Franklin's bedroom to wait for him. It was the only room in the house where Fred felt really comfortable. The shades were drawn, which was midly puzzling, since there was no reason for the boy to exclude the last of the daylight, and there were no neighbors to peep in.

  The only light came from a curious lamp on the bedside table. The lamp consisted of a plaster statuette of a blacksmith who had his hammer raised. There was a pane of frosted orange glass behind the blacksmith. And behind the glass was an electric bulb, and over the bulb was a little tin windmill. Hot air rising from the bulb caused the windmill to turn. The bright surfaces of the turning mill made the light playing on the orange glass flicker, made it look a lot like real fire.

  There was a story that went with the lamp. It was thirty-three years old. The company that made the lamps had been Fred's father's very last speculation.

  Fred thought of taking a lot of sleeping pills, remembered his son again. He looked about the weirdly illuminated room for something to talk to the boy about, saw the corner of a photograph sticking out from under the pillow on the bed. Fred pulled it into the open, thinking it was probably a picture of some sports hero, or maybe a picture of Fred himself at the helm of the Rosebud II.

  But it turned out to be a pornographic picture that little Franklin had bought that morning from Lila Buntline, using money he earned himself on his paper route. It showed two fat, simpering, naked whores, one of whom was attempting to have impossible sexual congress with a dignified, decent, un-smiling Shetland pony.

  Sickened, confused, Fred put the picture into his pocket, stumbled out into the kitchen, wondered what, in God's name, to say.

  About the kitchen: an electric chair would not have seemed out of place in it. It was Caroline's idea of a place of torment. There was a philodendron. It had died of thirst. In the soapdish on the sink was a mottled ball of soap made out of many moistened slivers pressed together. Making soap balls out of slivers was the only household art Caroline had brought to marriage. It was a thing her mother had taught her to do.

  Fred thought of filling the bathtub with hot water, of
climbing in and slashing his wrists with a stainless steel razorblade. But then he saw that the little plastic garbage can in the corner was full, knew how hysterical Caroline became if she got up from a drunken sleep and found that no one had carried out the garbage. So he carried it to the garage and dumped it, then washed out the can with the hose at the side of the house.

  "Frusha-frusha-blacka-blacka-burl," said the water in the can. And Fred saw that someone had left the light on in the cellar. He looked down through the dusty window in an areaway, saw the top of the jelly cupboard. Resting on it was the family history his father had written--a history that Fred had never wished to read. There was also a can of rat poison there, and a thirty-eight-calibre revolver sick with rust.

  It was an interesting still life. And then Fred perceived that it wasn't entirely at rest. A little mouse was nibbling at one corner of the manuscript.

  Fred tapped on the window. The mouse hesitated, looked everywhere but at Fred, went on nibbling again.

  Fred went down into the basement, took the manuscript from its shelf to see how badly damaged it was. He blew the dust from the title page, which said, A History of the Rosewaters of Rhode Island, by Merrihue Rosewater. Fred untied the string that held the manuscript together, turned to page one, which said:

  The Old World home of the Rosewaters was and is in the Scilly Islands, off Cornwall. The founder of the family there, whose name was John, arrived on St. Mary Island in 1645, with the party accompanying the fifteen-year-old Prince Charles, later to become Charles the Second, who was fleeing the Puritan Revolution. The name Rosewater was then a pseudonym. Until John chose it for himself, there were no Rosewaters in England. His real name was John Graham. He was the youngest of the five sons of James Graham, Fifth Earl and First Marquis of Montrose. There was need for a pseudonym, for James Graham was a leader of the Royalist cause, and the Royalist cause was lost. James, among other romantic exploits, once disguised himself, went to the Scotch Highlands, organized a small, fierce army, and led it to six bloody victories over the far greater forces of the Lowland Presbyterian Army of Archibald Campbell, the Eighth Earl of Argyll. James was also a poet. So every Rosewater is in fact a Graham, and has the blood of Scotch nobility in him. James was hanged in 1650.