God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Read online

  3

  NORMAN MUSHARI learned that, on the night of Aida, Eliot disappeared again, jumped out of his homeward-bound cab at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue.

  Ten days later, Sylvia got this letter, which was written on the stationery of the Elsinore Volunteer Fire Department, Elsinore, California. The name of the place set him off on a new line of speculation about himself, to the effect that he was a lot like Shakespeare's Hamlet.

  Dear Ophelia--

  Elsinore isn't quite what I expected, or maybe there's more than one, and I've come to the wrong one. The high school football players here call themselves "The Fighting Danes." In the surrounding towns they're known as "The Melancholy Danes." In the past three years they have won one game, tied two, and lost twenty-four. That's what happens, I guess, when Hamlet goes in as quarterback.

  The last thing you said to me before I got out of the taxicab was that maybe we should get a divorce. I did not realize that life had become that uncomfortable for you. I do realize that I am a very slow realizer. I still find it hard to realize that I am an alcoholic, though even strangers know this right away.

  Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I'm temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father's ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating without instructions. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do there, and why to do it. Don't worry, I don't hear voices. But there is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life in New York. And I roam.

  And I roam.

  Young Mushari was disappointed to read that Eliot did not hear voices. But the letter did end on a definitely cracked note. Eliot described the fire apparatus of Elsinore, as though Sylvia would be avid for such details.

  They paint their fire engines here with orange and black stripes, like tigers. Very striking! They use detergent in their water, so that the water will soak right through wallboard to get at a fire. That certainly makes good sense, provided it doesn't harm the pumps and hoses. They haven't been using it long enough to really know. I told them they should write the pump manufacturer and tell him what they're doing, and they said they would. They think I am a very big volunteer fireman from back East. They are wonderful people. They aren't like the sparrowfarts and dancing masters who come tapping at the Rosewater Foundation's door. They're like the Americans I knew in the war.

  Be patient, Ophelia.

  Love,

  Hamlet.

  Eliot went from Elsinore to Vashti, Texas, and was soon arrested. He wandered up to the Vashti firehouse, covered with dust, needing a shave. He started talking to some idlers there about how the government ought to divide up the wealth of the country equally, instead of some people having more than they could ever use, and others having nothing.

  He rambled on, said such things as, "You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them." He mentioned a revolution, too. He thought there might be one in about twenty years, and he thought it would be a good one, provided infantry veterans and volunteer firemen led it.

  He was thrown in jail as a suspicious character. They let him go after a mystifying series of questions and answers. They made him promise never to come back to Vashti again.

  A week after that, he turned up in New Vienna, Iowa. He wrote another letter to Sylvia on the stationery of the fire department there. He called Sylvia "the most patient woman in the world," and he told her that her long vigil was almost over.

  I know now, he wrote, where I must go. I am going there with all possible speed! I will telephone from there! Perhaps I'll stay there forever. It isn't clear to me yet what I must do when I get there. But that will become clear, too, I'm sure. The scales are falling from my eyes!

  Incidentally, I told the fire department here that they might try putting detergent in their water, but that they should write the pump manufacturer first. They like the idea. They're going to bring it up at the next meeting. I've gone sixteen hours without a drink! I don't miss the poison at all! Cheers!

  When Sylvia got that letter, she immediately had a recording device attached to her telephone, another nice break for Norman Mushari. Sylvia did this because she thought that Eliot had at last gone irrevocably bananas. When he called, she wanted to record every clue as to his whereabouts and condition, so that she could have him picked up.

  The call came:

  "Ophelia?"

  "Oh, Eliot, Eliot--where are you, darling?"

  "In America--among the rickety sons and grandsons of the pioneers."

  "But where? But where?"

  "Absolutely anywhere--in an aluminum and glass phone booth in a drab little American anywhere, with American nickels, dimes and quarters scattered on the little gray shelf before me. There is a message written with a ballpoint pen on the little gray shelf."

  "And what does it say?"

  " 'Sheila Taylor is a cock-teaser.' I'm sure it's true."

  There was an arrogant blat from Eliot's end. "Hark!" said Eliot. "A Greyhound bus has blatted its Roman trumpets flatulently outside the bus depot, which is also a candy store. Lo! One old American responds, comes tottering out. There is no one to bid him farewell, nor does he look up and down the street for someone to wish him well. He carries a brown paper parcel tied with twine. He is going somewhere, no doubt to die.

  "He is taking leave of the only town he's ever known, the only life he's ever known. But he isn't thinking about saying goodbye to his universe. His whole being is intent on not offending the mighty bus driver, who looks down fumingly from his blue leather throne. Wupps! Too bad! The old American crawled aboard in fair shape, but now he can't find his ticket. He finds it at last, too late, too late. The driver is filled with rage. He slams the door, starts off with a savage clashing of gears, blows his horn at an old American woman crossing the street, rattles the window-panes. Hate, hate, hate."

  "Eliot--is there a river there?"

  "My telephone booth is in the broad valley of an open sewer called the Ohio. The Ohio is thirty miles to the south. Carp as big as atomic submarines fatten on the sludge of the sons and grandsons of the pioneers. Beyond the river lie the once green hills of Kentucky, the promised land of Dan'l Boone, now gulched and gashed by strip mines, some of which are owned by a charitable and cultural foundation endowed by an interesting old American family named Rosewater.

  "On that side of the river, the Rosewater Foundation's holdings are somewhat diffuse. On this side, though, right around my phone booth, for a distance of about fifteen miles in any direction you care to go, the Foundation owns almost everything. The Foundation, however, has left the booming night-crawler business wide open. Signs on every home proclaim, 'Night-crawlers for Sale.'

  "The key industry here, hogs and night-crawlers aside, is the making of saws. The saw factory is owned by the Foundation, of course. Because saws are so important here, the athletes of Noah Rosewater Memorial High School are known as 'The Fighting Sawmakers.' Actually, there aren't many sawmakers left. The saw factory is almost fully automatic now. If you can work a pinball machine, you can run the factory, make twelve thousand saws a day.

  "A young man, a Fighting Sawmaker about eighteen years old, is strolling insouciantly past my phone booth now, wearing the sacred blue and white. He looks dangerous, but he wouldn't harm a soul. His two best subjects in school were Citizenship and Problems in Modern American Democracy, both taught by his basketball coach. He understands that anything violent he might do would not only weaken the Republic, but would ruin his own life, too. There is no work for him in Rosewater. There is damn little work for him anywhere. He often carries birth-control devices in his pocket, which many people find alarming and disgusting. The same people find it alarming and disgusting that the boy's father
did not use birth-control devices. One more kid rotten-spoiled by postwar abundance, one more princeling with goose-berry eyes. He's meeting his girl now, a girl not much older than fourteen-- a five-and-ten-cent-store Cleopatra, a four-letter word.

  "Across the street is the firehouse--four trucks, three drunks, sixteen dogs, and one cheerful, sober young man with a can of metal polish."

  "Oh, Eliot, Eliot--come home, come home."

  "Don't you understand, Sylvia? I am home. I know now that this has always been home--the Town of Rosewater, the Township of Rosewater, the County of Rosewater, the State of Indiana."

  "And what do you intend to do there, Eliot?"

  "I'm going to care about these people."

  "That's--that's very nice," said Sylvia bleakly. This was a pale and delicate girl, cultivated, wispy. She played the harpsichord, spoke six languages enchantingly. As a child and young woman, she had met many of the greatest men of her time in her parents' home--Picasso, Schweitzer, Hemingway, Toscanini, Churchill, de Gaulle. She had never seen Rosewater County, had no idea what a night-crawler was, did not know that land anywhere could be so deathly flat, that people anywhere could be so deathly dull.

  "I look at these people, these Americans," Eliot went on, "and I realize that they can't even care about themselves any more--because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river--they're almost completely automatic now. And America doesn't even need these people for war--not any more. Sylvia--I'm going to be an artist."

  "An artist?"

  "I'm going to love these discarded Americans, even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art."

  4

  ROSEWATER COUNTY, the canvas Eliot proposed to paint with love and understanding, was a rectangle on which other men--other Rosewaters, mainly-- had already made some bold designs. Eliot's predecessors had anticipated Mondrian. Half the roads ran east and west and half the roads ran north and south. Bisecting the county exactly, and stopping at its borders, was a stagnant canal fourteen miles long. It was the one dash of reality added by Eliot's great grandfather to a stock and bond fantasy of a canal that would join Chicago, Indianapolis, Rosewater and the Ohio. There were now bullheads, crappies, redeyes, blue-gills, and carp in the canal. It was to people interested in catching such fish that night-crawlers were sold.

  The ancestors of many of the night-crawler merchants had been stockholders and bondholders in the Rosewater Inter-State Ship Canal. When the scheme failed utterly, some of them lost their farms, which were bought by Noah Rosewater. A Utopian community in the southwest corner of the county, New Ambrosia, invested everything it had in the canal, and lost. They were Germans, communists and atheists who practiced group marriage, absolute truthfuless, absolute cleanliness, and absolute love. They were now scattered to the winds, like the worthless papers that represented their equity in the canal. No one was sorry to see them go. Their one contribution to the county that was still viable in Eliot's time was their brewery, which had become the home of Rosewater Golden Lager Ambrosia Beer. On the label of each can of beer was a picture of the heaven on earth the New Ambrosians had meant to build. The dream city had spires. The spires had lightning-rods. The sky was filled with cherubim.

  The town of Rosewater was in the dead center of the county. In the dead center of town was a Parthenon built of honest red brick, columns and all. Its roof was green copper. The canal ran through it, and so, in the bustling past, had the New York Central, Monon, and Nickel Plate Railroads. When Eliot and Sylvia took up residence, only the canal and the Monon tracks remained, and the Monon was bankrupt, and its tracks were brown.

  To the west of the Parthenon was the old Rosewater Saw Company, red brick, too, green-roofed, too. The spine of its roof was broken, its windows unglazed. It was a New Ambrosia for barn swallows and bats. Its four tower clocks were handless. Its big brass whistle was choked with nests.

  To the east of the Parthenon was the County Courthouse, red brick, too, green-roofed, too. Its tower was identical with that of the old saw company. Three of its four clocks still had their hands, but they did not run. Like an abscess at the base of a dead tooth, a private business had somehow managed to establish itself in the cellar of the public building. It had a little red neon sign. "Bella's Beauty Nook," it said. Bella weighed three hundred fourteen pounds.

  To the east of the courthouse was the Samuel Rosewater Veterans' Memorial Park. It had a flagpole and an honor roll. The honor roll was a four-by-eight sheet of exterior plywood painted black. It was hung on pipe, sheltered by a gable that was only two inches wide. It had all the names of Rosewater County people who had laid down their lives for their country.

  The only other masonry structures were the Rosewater Mansion and its carriage house, set on an artificial elevation at the east end of the park and surrounded by a rank of iron spikes, and the Noah Rosewater Memorial High School, home of the Fighting Sawmakers, which bounded the park on the south. To the north of the park was the old Rosewater Opera House, a terrifyingly combustible frame wedding cake which had been converted to a firehouse. All else was shithouses, shacks, alcoholism, ignorance, idiocy and perversion, for all that was healthy and busy and intelligent in Rosewater County shunned the county seat.

  The new Rosewater Saw Company, all yellow brick and no windows, was set in a cornfield midway between Rosewater and New Ambrosia. It was served by a gleaming new spur of the New York Central, and by a sizzling double-barreled highway that missed the county seat by eleven miles. Near it were the Rosewater Motel and the Rosewater Bowl-A-Rama, and the great grain elevators and animal pens that were shipping points for fruits of the Rosewater Farms. And the few highly paid agronomists, engineers, brewers, accountants and administrators who did all that needed doing lived in a defensive circle of expensive ranch homes in another cornfield near New Ambrosia, a community named, for no reason whatsoever, "Avondale." All had gas-lit patios framed and terraced with railroad ties from the old Nickel Plate right-of-way.

  Eliot stood in relation to the clean people of Avondale as a constitutional monarch. They were employees of the Rosewater Corporation, and the properties they managed were owned by the Rosewater Foundation. Eliot could not tell them what to do--but he was surely the King, and Avondale knew it.

  So, when King Eliot and Queen Sylvia took up residence in the Rosewater Mansion, they were showered by figs from Avondale--invitations, visits, flattering notes and calls. All were deflected. Eliot required Sylvia to receive all prosperous visitors with an air of shallow, absent-minded cordiality. Every Avondale woman left the mansion stiffly, as though, as Eliot observed gleefully, she had a pickle up her ass.

  Interestingly, the social-climbing technocrats of Avondale were able to bear the theory that the Rosewaters snubbed them because the Rosewaters felt superior to them. They even enjoyed the theory as they discussed it again and again. They were avid for lessons in authentic, upper-class snobbery, and Eliot and Sylvia seemed to be giving those.

  But then the King and Queen got the Rosewater family crystal, silver and gold out of the dank vaults of the Rosewater County National Bank, began to throw lavish banquets for morons, perverts, starvelings and the unemployed.

  They listened tirelessly to the misshapen fears and dreams of people who, by almost anyone's standards, would have been better off dead, gave them love and trifling sums of money. The only social life they had that was untainted by pity had to do with the Rosewater Volunteer Fire Department. Eliot arose quickly to the rank of Fire Lieutenant, and Sylvia was elected President of the Ladies' Auxiliary. Though Sylvia had never before touched a bowling ball, she was made captain of the auxiliary's bowling team, too.

  Avondale's clammy respect for the monarchy turned to incredulous contempt, and then to savagery. Yahooism, drinking, cuckolding, and self-esteem all took sharp upturns. The voices of Avondale acquired the tone of bandsaws cutting galvanized tin when discussing the King and Queen, as though a tyranny had been overthrown. Avond
ale was no longer a settlement of rising young executives. It was peopled by vigorous members of the true ruling class.

  Five years later, Sylvia suffered a nervous collapse, burned the firehouse down. So sadistic had republican Avondale become about the royalist Rosewaters that Avondale laughed.

  Sylvia was placed in a private mental hospital in Indianapolis, was taken there by Eliot and Charley Warmergran, the Fire Chief. They took her in the Chief's car, which was a red Henry J with a siren on top. They turned her over to a Dr. Ed Brown, a young psychiatrist who later made his reputation describing her illness. In the paper, he called Eliot and Sylvia "Mr. and Mrs. Z," and he called the town of Rosewater "Hometown, U.S.A." He coined a new word for Sylvia's disease, "Samaritrophia," which he said meant, "hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself."

  Norman Mushari now read Dr. Brown's treatise, which was also in the confidential files of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. His eyes were moist and soft and brown, compelling him to see the pages as he saw the world, as though through a quart of olive oil.

  Samaritrophia, he read, is the suppression of an overactive conscience by the rest of the mind. "You must all take instructions from me!" the conscience shrieks, in effect, to all the other mental processes. The other processes try it for a while, note that the conscience is unappeased, that it continues to shriek, and they note, too, that the outside world has not been even microscopically improved by the unselfish acts the conscience had demanded.

  They rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole cover of that dark dungeon. They can hear the conscience no more. In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, does appear. Enlightened Self-interest gives them a flag, which they adore on sight. It is essentially the black and white Jolly Roger, with these words written beneath the skull and crossbones, "The hell with you, Jack, I've got mine!"