God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Read online

  "What if the nut came out and gave sensible explanations for his place being the way it is?"

  "He would still be a nut."

  Eliot accepted this, or seemed to. He didn't argue with it, allowed that he had better wash up and get dressed for his trip. He rummaged through his desk drawers, found a small paper bag containing purchases he had made the day before, a bar of Dial soap, a bottle of Absorbine, Jr., for his athlete's foot, a bottle of Head and Shoulders shampoo for his dandruff, a bottle of Arrid roll-on deodorant, and a tube of Crest toothpaste.

  "I'm glad to see you taking pride in your appearance again, boy."

  "Hm?" Eliot was reading the label on the Arrid, which he had never used before. He had never used any underarm deodorant before.

  "You get cleaned up, cut down on the booze, clear out of here, open a decent office in Indianapolis or Chicago or New York, and, when the hearing comes up, they'll see you're as sane as anybody."

  "Um." Eliot asked his father if he had ever used Arrid.

  The Senator was offended. "I shower every morning and night. I presume that takes care of any fulsome effluvium."

  "It says here that you might get a rash, and you should stop using it, if you get a rash."

  "If it worries you, don't use it. Soap and water are the important things."

  "Um."

  "That's one of the troubles with this country," said the Senator. "The Madison Avenue people have made us all more alarmed about our own armpits than about Russia, China and Cuba combined."

  The conversation, actually a very dangerous one between two highly vulnerable men, had drifted into a small area of peace. They could agree with one another, and not be afraid.

  "You know--" said Eliot, "Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn't any disease, and there wasn't any crime, and there wasn't any war, so they went after odors. "

  "If you get in court," said the Senator, "it would be just as well if you didn't mention your enthusiasm for Trout. Your fondness for all that Buck Rogers stuff might make you look immature in the eyes of a lot of people."

  The conversation had left the area of peace again. Eliot's voice was edgy as he persisted in telling the story by Trout, which was called Oh Say Can You Smell?

  "This country," said Eliot, "had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country's dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn't a scientist, and they didn't need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem."

  "Uh huh," said the Senator. He couldn't stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarrassed for his son. "He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?" he suggested, to hasten the tale to a conclusion.

  "No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses."

  Eliot was now taking a full bath in the frightful little lavatory, shivering and barking and coughing as he sloshed himself with sopping paper towels.

  His father could not watch, roamed the office instead, averting his eyes from the obscene and ineffectual ablutions. There was no lock on the office door, and Eliot had, at his father's insistence, shoved a filing cabinet against it. "What if somebody should walk in here and see you stark naked?" the Senator had demanded. And Eliot had responded, "To these people around here, Father, I'm no particular sex at all."

  So the Senator pondered that unnatural sexless-ness along with all the other evidences of insanity, disconsolately pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. There were three cans of beer in it, a 1948 New York State driver's license, and an unsealed envelope, addressed to Sylvia in Paris, never mailed. In the envelope was a love poem from Eliot to Sylvia, dated two years before.

  The Senator thrust aside shame and read the poem, hoping to learn from it things that might defend his son. This was the poem he read, and he was not able to keep shame away when he was through:

  "I'm a painter in my dreams, you know,

  Or maybe you didn't know. And a sculptor.

  Long time no see.

  And a kick to me

  Is the interplay of materials

  And these hands of mine.

  And some of the things I would do to you

  Might surprise you.

  For instance, if I were there with you as you read this,

  And you were lying down,

  I might ask you to bare your belly

  In order that I might take my left thumbnail

  And draw a straight line five inches long

  Above your pubic hair.

  And then I might take the index finger

  Of my right hand,

  And insinuate it just over the rim of the right side

  Of your famous belly button,

  And leave it there, motionless, for maybe half an hour.

  Queer?

  You bet."

  The Senator was shocked. It was the mention of pubic hair that really appalled him. He had seen very few naked bodies in his time, perhaps five or six, and pubic hair was to him the most unmentionable, unthinkable of all materials.

  Now Eliot came out of the lavatory, all naked and hairy, drying himself with a tea towel. The tea towel was new. It still had a price tag on it. The Senator was petrified, felt beset by overwhelming forces of filth and obscenity on all sides.

  Eliot did not notice. He continued to dry himself innocently, then threw the tea towel into the wastebasket. The black telephone rang.

  "This is the Rosewater Foundation. How can we help you?"

  "Mr. Rosewater--" said a woman, "there was a thing on the radio about you."

  "Oh?" Eliot now began to play unconsciously with his pubic hair. It was nothing extravagant. He would simply uncoil a tight spring of it, let it snap back into place.

  "It said they were going to try to prove you were crazy."

  "Don't worry about it, dear. There's many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip."

  "Oh, Mr. Rosewater--if you go away and never come back, we'll die."

  "I give you my word of honor I'm coming back. How is that?"

  "Maybe they won't let you come back."

  "Do you think I'm crazy, dear?"

  "I don't know how to put it."

  "Any way you like."

  "I can't help thinking people are going to think you're crazy for paying so much attention to people like us."

  "Have you seen the other people there are to pay attention to?"

  "I never been out of Rosewater County."

  "It's worth a trip, dear. When I get back, why don't I give you a trip to New York?"

  "Oh God! But you're never coming back!"

  "I gave you my word of honor."

  "I know, I know--but we all feel it in our bones, we smell it in the air. You're not coming back."

  Eliot had now found a hair that was a lulu. He kept extending and extending it until it was revealed as being one foot long. He looked down at it, then glanced at his father, incredulously proud of owning such a thing.

  The Senator was livid.

  "We tried to plan all kinds of ways to say goodbye to you, Mr. Rosewater," the woman went on. "Parades and signs and flags and flowers. But you won't see a one of us. We're all too scared."

  "Of what?"

  "I don't know." She hung up.

  Eliot pulled on his new Jockey shorts. As soon as they were snugly on, his father spoke grimly.

  "Eliot--"

  "Sir--?" Eliot was running his thumbs pleasurably under the elasticized belly-band. "These things certainly give support. I'd forgotten how nice it was to have support."

  The Senator blew up. "Why do you hate me so?" he cried.

  Eliot was flabbergasted. "Hate you? Father--I don't hate you. I don't hate anybody."

  "Your
every act and word is aimed at hurting me as much as you possibly can!"

  "No!"

  "I have no idea what I ever did to you that you're paying me back for now, but the debt must surely be settled by now."

  Eliot was shattered. "Father--please--"

  "Get away! You'll only hurt me more, and I can't stand any more pain."

  "For the love of God--"

  "Love!" the Senator echoed bitterly. "You certainly loved me, didn't you? Loved me so much you smashed up every hope or ideal I ever had. And you certainly loved Sylvia, didn't you?"

  Eliot covered his ears.

  The old man raved on, spraying fine beads of spit. Eliot could not hear the words, but lip-read the terrible story of how he had ruined the life and health of a woman whose only fault had been to love him.

  The Senator stormed out of the office, was gone.

  Eliot uncovered his ears, finished dressing, as though nothing special had happened. He sat down to tie his shoelaces. When these were tied, he straightened up. And he froze as stiff as any corpse.

  The black telephone rang. He did not answer.

  13

  SOMETHING THERE WAS IN ELIOT, though, that watched the clock. Ten minutes before his bus was due at the Saw City Kandy Kitchen, he thawed, arose, pursed his lips, picked some lint from his suit, went out his office door. He had no surface memory of the fight with his father. His step was jaunty, that of a Chaplinesque boulevardier.

  He bent to pat the heads of dogs who welcomed him to street level. His new clothes hampered him, bound him in the crotch and armpits, crackled as though lined with newspaper, reminded him of how nicely turned out he was.

  There was talk coming from the lunchroom. Eliot listened without showing himself. He did not recognize any of the voices, although they belonged to friends of his. Three men were talking ruefully of money, which they did not have. There were many pauses, for thoughts came to them almost as hard as money did.

  "Well," said one at last, "it ain't no disgrace to be poor." This line was the first half of a fine old joke by the Hoosier humorist, Kin Hubbard.

  "No," said another man, completing the joke, "but it might as well be."

  Eliot crossed the street, went into Fire Chief Charley Warmergran's insurance office. Charley was not a pitiful person, had never applied to the Foundation for help of any kind. He was one of about seven in the county who had actually done quite well under real free enterprise. Bella of Bella's Beauty Nook was another. Both of them had started with nothing, both were children of brakemen on the Nickel Plate. Charley was ten years younger than Eliot. He was six-feet-four, had broad shoulders, no hips, no belly. In addition to being Fire Chief, he was Federal Marshal and Inspector of Weights and Measures. He also owned, jointly with Bella, La Boutique de Paris, which was a nice little haberdashery and notions store in the new shopping center for the well-to-do people in New Ambrosia. Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.

  Charley's famous secretary was on an errand. The only other person there when Eliot walked in was Noyes Finnerty, who was sweeping the floor. Noyes had been the center of the immortal Noah Rosewater Memorial High School Basketball Team which went undefeated in 1933. In 1934, Noyes strangled his sixteen-year-old wife for notorious infidelity, went to prison for life. Now he was paroled, thanks to Eliot. He was fifty-one. He had no friends, no relatives. Eliot found out about his being in prison by accident, while leafing through old copies of The Rosewater County Clarion Call, made it his business to get him paroled.

  Noyes was a quiet, cynical, resentful man. He had never thanked Eliot for anything. Eliot was neither hurt nor startled. He was used to ingratitude. One of his favorite Kilgore Trout books dealt with ingratitude and nothing else. It was called, The First District Court of Thankyou, which was a court you could take people to, if you felt they hadn't been properly grateful for something you had done. If the defendant lost his case, the court gave him a choice between thanking the plaintiff in public, or going into solitary confinement on bread and water for a month. According to Trout, eighty per cent of those convicted chose the black hole.

  Noyes was a lot faster than Charley in perceiving that Eliot was far from well. He stopped sweeping, watched acutely. He was a mean voyeur. Charley, enchanted by memories of so many fires at which he and Eliot had behaved so well, did not become suspicious until Eliot congratulated him on having just won an award which he had in fact won three years before.

  "Eliot--are you kidding?"

  "Why would I kid you? I think it's a wonderful honor." They were discussing the Young Hoosier Horatio Alger Award for 1962, awarded to Charley by the Indiana Federation of Conservative Young Republican Businessmen's Clubs.

  "Eliot--" said Charley wincingly, "that was three years ago."

  "It was?"

  Charley arose from his desk. "And you and I sat up in your office, and we decided to send the damn plaque back."

  "We did?"

  "We went over the history of the thing, and we decided it was the kiss of death."

  "Why would we decide that?"

  "You were the one who dug up the history, Eliot."

  Eliot frowned ever so slightly. "I've forgotten." The little frown was a formality. The forgetting didn't really bother him.

  "They started giving the thing in 1945. They'd given it sixteen times before I won it. Don't you remember now?"

  "No."

  "Out of sixteen winners of the Young Hoosier Horatio Alger Award, six were behind bars for fraud or income-tax evasion, four were under indictment for one thing or another, two had falsified their war records, and one actually went to the electric chair."

  "Eliot--" said Charley with mounting anxiety, "did you hear what I just said?"

  "Yes," said Eliot.

  "What did I just say?"

  "I forget."

  "You just said you heard me."

  Noyes Finnerty spoke up. "All he hears is the big click." He came forward for a closer examination of Eliot. His approach was not sympathetic. It was clinical. Eliot's response was clinical, too, as though a nice doctor were shining a bright light in his eyes, looking for something. "He heard that click, man. Man, did he ever hear that click."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" Charley asked him.

  "It's a thing you learn to listen for in prison."

  "We're not in prison now."

  "It ain't a thing that happens just in prison. In prison, though, you get to listening for things more and more. You stay there long enough, you go blind, you're all ears. The click is one thing you listen for. You two--you think you're mighty close? If you were really close--and that don't mean you have to like him, just know him--you would have heard that click of his a mile away. You get to know a man, and down deep there's something bothering him bad, and maybe you never find out what it is, but it's what makes him do like he does, it's what makes him look like he's got secrets in his eyes. And you tell him, 'Calm down, calm down, take it easy now.' Or you ask him, 'How come you keep doing the same crazy things over and over again, when you know they're just going to get you in trouble again?' Only you know there's no sense arguing with him, on account of it's the thing inside that's making him go. It says, 'Jump,' he jumps. It says, 'Steal,' he steals. It says, 'Cry,' he cries. Unless he dies young, though, or unless he gets everything all his way and nothing big goes wrong, that thing inside of him is going to run down like a wind-up toy. You're working in the prison laundry next to this man. You've known him twenty years. You're working along, and all of a sudden you hear this click from him. You turn to look at him. He's stopped working. He's all calmed down. He looks real dumb. He looks real sweet. You look in his eyes, and the secrets are gone. He can't even tell you his own name right then. He goes back to work, but he'll never be the same. That thing that bothered him so will never click on again. It's dead, it's dead. And that part of that man's life where he had to be a certain crazy way, that's
done!"

  Noyes, who had begun with such a massive lack of passion, was now rigid and perspiring. Both of his hands were white, choking the broomhandle in a deathgrip. And while the natural design of his story suggested that he calm down, to illustrate how nicely the man next to him in the laundry had calmed down, it was impossible for him to simulate peace. The wrenching work his hands did on the broomhandle became obscene, and the passion that would not die made him nearly inarticulate. "Done! Done!" he insisted. It was the broomhandle that enraged him most now. He tried to snap it across his thigh, snarled at Charley, the owner of the broom, "The son of a bitch won't break! Won't break!

  "You lucky bastard," he said to Eliot, still trying to break the broom, "you've had yours!" He showered Eliot with obscenities.

  He flung the broom away. "Motherfucker won't break!" he cried, and he stormed out the door.

  Eliot was unruffled by the scene. He asked Charley mildly what the man had against brooms. He said, too, that he guessed he had better catch his bus.

  "Are--are you all right, Eliot?"

  "I'm wonderful."

  "You are?"

  "I never felt better in my life. I feel as though-- as though--"

  "Yeah--?"

  "As though some marvelous new phase of my life were about to begin."

  "That must be nice."

  "It is! It is!"

  And that continued to be Eliot's mood as he sauntered to the Saw City Kandy Kitchen. The aspect of the street was unnaturally quiet, as though a gun fight were expected, but Eliot did not notice this. The town was certain he was leaving forever. Those most dependent on Eliot had heard the click as clearly as they would have heard a cannon shot. There had been a lot of frantic, lame-brained planning of an appropriate farewell--a firemen's parade, a demonstration with placards saying the things that most needed saying, a triumphal arch of water from fire hoses. The plans had all collapsed. There was no one to organize such a thing, to lead. Most were so eviscerated by the prospect of Eliot's leaving that they could not find the energy or bravery to stand at the rear of a large crowd, even, and feebly wave bye-bye. They knew the street down which he would walk. From that most fled.

  Eliot left the afternoon dazzle of the sidewalk for the humid shade of the Parthenon, strolled along the canal. A retired saw-maker, a man about the Senator's age, was fishing with a bamboo pole. He was seated on a camp stool. A transistor radio was on the pavement between his high shoes. The radio was playing "Ol' Man River." "Darkies all work," it said, "while the white folks play."