God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Read online

  "Um." Eliot looked around for a mirror or some reflecting surface. He had no idea what he looked like. There was no water in the pool of the fountain. But there was a little in the birdbath at the center of the pool, a bitter broth of soot and leaves.

  "Didn't you say the man Eliot beat was a tennis pro?" the Senator asked Dr. Brown.

  "Years ago."

  "And Eliot murdered him! And the fact that the man is a mental patient wouldn't interfere with his game, would it?" He didn't wait for an answer. "And then when Eliot came bounding off the court, victorious, to shake our hands, I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. 'And this is the man,' I said to myself, 'who has to prove tomorrow that he's not insane! Ha!' "

  Eliot, drawing courage from the fact that the four men watching him were sure he was sane, now stood, as though to stretch. His real purpose was to bring himself nearer the birdbath. He took advantage of his reputation as an athlete, hopped into the dry pool, did a deep-knee bend, as though working off an excess of animal spirits. His body did the exercise effortlessly. He was made of spring steel.

  The vigorous movements called Eliot's attention to something bulky in his hip pocket. He pulled it out, found that it was a rolled copy of The American Investigator. He unrolled it, half expecting to see Randy Herald begging to be planted with genius seeds. What he saw on the cover was his own picture instead. He was wearing a fire helmet. The picture was a blow-up from a Fourth of July group photograph of the Fire Department.

  The headline said this:

  SANEST MAN IN AMERICA? (SEE INSIDE)

  Eliot looked inside, while the others engaged each other in optimistic palaver about the way the hearing would go next day. Eliot found another picture of himself in the center spread. It was a blurry one of him playing tennis on the nut house court.

  On the facing page, the gallantly sore-headed little family of Fred Rosewater seemed to glare at him as he played. They looked like sharecroppers. Fred had lost a lot of weight, too. There was a picture of Norman Mushari, their lawyer. Mushari, now in business for himself, had acquired a fancy vest and massive gold watch chain. He was quoted as follows:

  "My clients want nothing but their natural and legal birthrights for themselves and their descendents. The bloated Indiana plutocrats have spent millions and mobilized powerful friends from coast to coast in order to deny their cousins their day in court. The hearing has been delayed seven times for the flimsiest of reasons, and, meanwhile, within the walls of a lunatic asylum, Eliot Rosewater plays and plays, and his henchmen deny loudly that he is insane.

  "If my clients lose this case, they will lose their modest house and average furnishings, their used car, their child's small sailboat, Fred Rosewater's insurance policies, their life savings, and thousands borrowed from a loyal friend. These brave, wholesome, average Americans have bet everything they have on the American system of justice, which will not, must not, cannot let them down."

  On Eliot's side of the layout were two pictures of Sylvia. An old one showed her twisting with Peter Lawford in Paris. A brand new one showed her entering a Belgian nunnery, where the rule of silence was observed.

  And Eliot might have reflected on this quaint ending and beginning for Sylvia, had he not heard his father address the old stranger affectionately as "Mr. Trout."

  "Trout!" Eliot exclaimed. He was so startled that he momentarily lost his balance, grabbed the birdbath for support. The birdbath was so precariously balanced on its pedestal that it began to tip. Eliot dropped The Investigator, grabbed the birdbath with both hands to keep it from falling. And he saw himself in the water. Looking up at him was an emaciated, feverish, middle-aged boy.

  "My God," he thought to himself, "F. Scott Fitzgerald, with one day to live."

  He was careful not to cry out Trout's name again as he turned around. He understood that this might betray how sick he was, understood that he and Trout had evidently gotten to know each other during all the blackness. Eliot did not recognize him for the simple reason that all of Trout's bookjackets showed him with a beard. The stranger had no beard.

  "By God, Eliot," said the Senator, "when you told me to bring Trout here, I told the Doctor you were still crazy. You said Trout could explain the meaning of everything you'd done in Rosewater, even if you couldn't. But I was willing to try anything, and calling him in is the smartest thing I ever did."

  "Right," said Eliot, sitting gingerly on the fountain's rim again. He reached behind himself, retrieved The Investigator. He rolled it up, noticed the date on it for the first time. He made a calm calculation. Somehow, somewhere, he had lost one year.

  "You say what Mr. Trout says you should say," ordered the Senator, "and you look the way you look now, and I don't see how we can lose tomorrow."

  "Then I will certainly say what Mr. Trout says I should say, and not change one detail of my make-up. I would appreciate, though, a last run-through of what Mr. Trout says I should say."

  "It's so simple," said Trout. His voice was rich and deep.

  "You two have been over it so many times," said the Senator.

  "Even so," said Eliot, "I'd like to hear it one last time. "

  "Well--" and Trout rubbed his hands, watched the rubbing, "what you did in Rosewater County was far from insane. It was quite possibly the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use?

  "In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So--if we can't find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out."

  "Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that. We can thank the vanished frontier for that piece of common-sense cruelty. The time is coming, if it isn't here now, when it will no longer be common sense. It will simply be cruel."

  "A poor man with gumption can still elevate himself out of the mire," said the Senator, "and that will continue to be true a thousand years from now."

  "Maybe, maybe," Trout answered gently. "He may even have so much gumption that his descendents will live in a Utopia like Pisquontuit, where, I'm sure, the soul-rot and silliness and torpor and insensitivity are exactly as horrible as anything epidemic in Rosewater County. Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time.

  "We must find a cure."

  "Your devotion to volunteer fire departments is very sane, too, Eliot, for they are, when the alarm goes off, almost the only examples of enthusiastic unselfishness to be seen in this land. They rush to the rescue of any human being, and count not the cost. The most contemptible man in town, should his contemptible house catch fire, will see his enemies put the fire out. And, as he pokes through the ashes for remains of his contemptible possessions, he will be comforted and pitied by no less than the Fire Chief."

  Trout spread his hands. "There we have people treasuring people as people. It's extremely rare. So from this we must learn."

  "By God, you're great!" the Senator said to Trout. "You should have been a public relations man! You could make lockjaw sound good for the community! What was a man with your talents doing in a stamp redemption center?"

  "Redeeming stamps," Trout mildly replied.

  "Mr. Trout," said Eliot, "what happened to your beard?"

  "That was the first thing you asked me."

  "Tell me again."

  "I was hungry and demoralized. A friend knew of a job. So I shaved off my beard and applied. P.S., I got the job."

  "I don't suppose they would have hired you with a beard."

  "I would have shaved it off, even if they'd s
aid I could keep it."

  "Why?"

  "Think of the sacrilege of a Jesus figure redeeming stamps."

  "I can't get enough of this Trout," the Senator declared.

  "Thank you."

  "I just wish you'd stop saying you're a socialist. You're not! You're a free-enterpriser!"

  "Through no choice of my own, believe me."

  Eliot studied the relationship between the two interesting old men. Trout was not offended, as Eliot thought he should have been, by the suggestion that he be an ultimately dishonest man, a press agent. Trout apparently enjoyed the Senator as a vigorous and wholly consistent work of art, was disinclined to dent or tamper with him in any way. And the Senator admired Trout as a rascal who could rationalize anything, not understanding that Trout had never tried to tell anything but the truth.

  "What a political platform you could write, Mr. Trout!"

  "Thank you."

  "Lawyers think this way, too--figuring out wonderful explanations for hopeless messes. But somehow, from them, it never sounds right. From them it always sounds like the 1812 Overture played on a kazoo." He sat back, beamed. "Come on--tell us some of the other wonderful things Eliot was doing down there when he was so full of booze."

  "The court," said McAllister, "is certainly going to want to know what Eliot learned from the experiment."

  "Keep away from booze, remember who you are, and behave accordingly," the Senator roundly declared. "And don't play God to people, or they will slobber all over you, take you for everything they can get, break commandments just for the fun of being forgiven--and revile you when you are gone."

  Eliot couldn't let this pass. "Revile me, do they?"

  "Oh hell--they love you, they hate you, they cry about you, they laugh at you, they make up new lies about you every day. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off, just as though you really were God, and one day walked out."

  Eliot felt his soul cringe, knew he could never stand to return to Rosewater County again.

  "It seems to me," said Trout, "that the main lesson Eliot learned is that people can use all the uncritical love they can get."

  "This is news?" the Senator raucously inquired.

  "It's news that a man was able to give that kind of love over a long period of time. If one man can do it, perhaps others can do it, too. It means that our hatred of useless human beings and the cruelties we inflict upon them for their own good need not be parts of human nature. Thanks to the example of Eliot Rosewater, millions upon millions of people may learn to love and help whomever they see."

  Trout glanced from face to face before speaking his last word on the subject. The last word was: "Joy."

  "Poo-tee-weet?"

  Eliot looked up into the tree again, wondered what his own ideas about Rosewater County had been, ideas he had somehow lost up there in the sycamore.

  "If only there had been a child--" said the Senator.

  "Well, if you really want grandchildren," said McAllister jocularly, "you have something like fifty-seven to choose from, at the most recent count."

  Everybody but Eliot had a good laugh over that.

  "What's this about fifty-seven grandchildren?"

  "Your progeny, my boy," the Senator chuckled.

  "My what?"

  "Your wild oats."

  Eliot sensed that this was a crucial mystery, risked showing how sick he was. "I don't understand."

  "That's how many women in Rosewater County claim you're the father of their children."

  "This is crazy."

  "Of course it is," said the Senator.

  Eliot stood, all tensed up. "This is--is impossible!"

  "You act as though this was the first time you ever heard of it," said the Senator, and he gave Dr. Brown a glance of flickering unease.

  Eliot covered his eyes. "I'm sorry, I--I seem to have drawn a complete blank on this particular subject."

  "You're all right, aren't you, boy?"

  "Yes." He uncovered his eyes. "I'm fine. There's just this little gap in my memory--and you can fill it up again. How--how did all these women come to say this thing about me?"

  "We can't prove it," said McAllister, "but Mushari has been going around the county, bribing people to say bad things about you. The baby thing started with Mary Moody. One day after Mushari was in town, she announced that you were the father of her twins, Foxcroft and Melody. And that touched off a kind of female mania, apparently--"

  Kilgore Trout nodded, appreciating the mania.

  "So women all over the county started claiming their children were yours. At least half of them seem to believe it. There's one fifteen-year-old girl down there whose stepfather went to prison for getting her pregnant. Now she claims it was you."

  "It isn't true!"

  "Of course it isn't, Eliot," said his father. "Calm down, calm down. Mushari won't dare mention it in court. The whole scheme backfired and went out of control for him. It's so obviously a mania, no judge would listen. We ran blood tests on Foxcroft and Melody, and they couldn't possibly be yours. We have no intention of testing the other fifty-six claimants. They can go to hell."

  "Poo-tee-weet?"

  Eliot looked up into the tree, and the memory of all that had happened in the blackness came crashing back--the fight with the bus driver, the straitjacket, the shock treatments, the suicide attempts, all the tennis, all the strategy meetings about the sanity hearing.

  And with that mighty inward crash of memories came the idea he had had for settling everything instantly, beautifully, and fairly.

  "Tell me--" he said, "do you all swear I'm sane?"

  They all swore to that passionately.

  "And am I still head of the Foundation? Can I still write checks against its account?"

  McAllister told him that he certainly could.

  "How's the balance?"

  "You haven't spent anything for a year--except for legal fees and what it costs to keep you here, and the three hundred thousand dollars you sent Harvard, and the fifty thousand you gave to Mr. Trout."

  "At that, he spent more this year than last year," said the Senator. This was true. Eliot's Rosewater County operation had been cheaper than staying in a sanitarium.

  McAllister told Eliot that he had a balance of about three and a half million dollars, and Eliot asked him for a pen and a check. He then wrote a check to his cousin Fred, in the amount of one million dollars.

  The Senator and McAllister went through the roof, told him they had already offered a cash settlement to Fred, and that Fred, through his lawyer, had haughtily refused. "They want the whole thing!" said the Senator.

  "That's too bad," said Eliot, "because they're going to get this check, and that's all."

  "That's for the court to say--and God only knows what the court will say," McAllister warned him. "And you never know. You never know."

  "If I had a child," said Eliot, "there wouldn't be any point in a hearing, would there? I mean, the child would inherit the Foundation automatically, whether I was crazy or not, and Fred's degree of relationship would be too distant to entitle him to anything?"

  "True."

  "Even so," said the Senator, "a million dollars is much too much for the Rhode Island pig!"

  "How much, then?"

  "A hundred thousand is plenty."

  So Eliot tore up the check for a million, made out another for a tenth that much. He looked up, found himself surrounded by awe, for the import of what he had said had now sunk in.

  "Eliot--" quavered the Senator, "are you telling us there is a child?"

  Eliot gave him a Madonna's smile. "Yes."

  "Where? By whom?"

  Eliot gestured sweetly for their patience. "In time, in time."

  "I'm a grandfather!" said the Senator. He tipped back his old head and thanked God.

  "Mr. McAllister," said Eliot, "are you duty-bound to carry out any legal missions I may give you, regardless of what my father or anyone else may say to the contrary?"

&n
bsp; "As legal counsel of the Foundation, I am."

  "Good. I now instruct you to draw up at once papers that will legally acknowledge that every child in Rosewater County said to be mine is mine, regardless of blood type. Let them all have full rights of inheritance as my sons and daughters."

  "Eliot!"

  "Let their names be Rosewater from this moment on. And tell them that their father loves them, no matter what they may turn out to be. And tell them--" Eliot fell silent, raised his tennis racket as though it were a magic wand.

  "And tell them," he began again, "to be fruithful and multiply."

  DELL BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT

  Bluebeard

  Breakfast of Champions

  Cat's Cradle

  Deadeye Dick

  Galapagos

  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

  Jailbird

  Mother Night

  Palm Sunday

  Player Piano

  The Sirens of Titan

  Slapstick

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

  Welcome to the Monkey House

  A DELTA BOOK

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 1965 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, New York.

  The trademark Delta(r) is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  October 1998

  10 9

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-30742297-2

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