God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Page 6

  Sylvia apologized to the two old men for having to be coarse, and then she recited the two lines Eliot had recited loudly for Ulm:

  "We don't piss in your ashtrays,

  So please don't throw cigarettes in our urinals."

  "The poor poet fled in tears," said Sylvia. "For months after that I was in terror of opening small packages, lest one of them contain the ear of Arthur Garvey Ulm."

  "Hates the arts," said McAllister. He clucked.

  "He's a poet himself," said Sylvia.

  "That's news to me," said the Senator. "I never saw any of it."

  "He used to write me poems sometimes."

  "He's probably happiest when writing on the walls of public lavatories. I often wondered who did it. Now I know. It's my poetic son."

  "Does he write on lavatory walls?" McAllister asked.

  "I heard that he did," said Sylvia. "It was innocent--it wasn't obscene. During the New York days, people told me Eliot was writing the same message in men's rooms all over town."

  "Do you remember what it was?"

  "Yes. 'If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.' As far as I know, that was original with him."

  At that moment Eliot was trying to read himself back to sleep with the manuscript of a novel by none other than Arthur Garvey Ulm

  The name of the book was Get With Child a Mandrake Root, a line from a poem by John Donne. The dedication read, "For Eliot Rosewater, my compassionate turquoise." And under that was another quotation from Donne:

  A compassionate turquoise which doth tell By looking pale, the wearer is not well.

  A covering letter from Ulm explained that the book was going to be published by Palindrome Press in time for Christmas, and was going to be a joint selection, along with The Cradle of Erotica, of a major book club.

  You have no doubt forgotten me, Compassionate Turquoise, the letter said in part. The Arthur Garvey Ulm you knew was a man well worth forgetting. What a coward he was, and what a fool he was to think he was a poet! And what a long, long time it took him to understand exactly how generous and kind your cruelty was! How much you managed to tell me about what was wrong with me, and what I should do about it, and how few words you used! Here then (fourteen years later) are eight hundred pages of prose by me. They could not have been created by me without you, and I do not mean your money. (Money is shit, which is one of the things I have tried to say in the book.) I mean your insistence that the truth be told about this sick, sick society of ours, and that the words for the telling could be found on the walls of restrooms.

  Eliot couldn't remember who Arthur Garvey Ulm was, and so was even further from knowing what advice he might have given the man. The clues Ulm offered were so nebulous. Eliot was pleased that he had given someone useful advice, was thrilled even, when Ulm declared:

  "Let them shoot me, let them hang me, but I have told the truth. The gnashing of the teeth of the Pharisees, Madison Avenue phonies and Philistines will be music to my ears. With your divine assistance, I have let the Djin of truth about them out of the bottle, and they will never, never, never ever get it back in!"

  Eliot began to read avidly the truths Ulm expected to get killed for telling:

  "CHAPTER ONE

  "I twisted her arm until she opened her legs, and she gave a little scream, half joy, half pain (how do you figure a woman?), as I rammed the old avenger home."

  Eliot found himself possessed of an erection. "Oh, for heaven's sakes," he said to his procreative organ, "how irrelevant can you be?"

  "If only there had been a child," said the Senator again. And then the density of his regret was penetrated by this thought: That it was cruel of him to speak so to the woman who had failed to bear the magic child. "Excuse an old fool, Sylvia. I can understand why you might thank God there is no child."

  Sylvia, returning from her cry in the bathroom, experimented with small gestures, all indicating that she would have loved such a baby, but that she might have pitied it, too. "I would never thank God for a thing like that."

  "May I ask you a highly personal question?"

  "It's what life does all the time."

  "Do you think it is remotely possible that he will ever reproduce?"

  "I haven't seen him for three years."

  "I'm asking you to make an extrapolation."

  "I can only tell you," she said, "that, toward the end of our marriage, love-making was something less than a mania with us both. He was once a sweet fanatic for love-making, but not for making children of his own."

  The Senator clucked ruefully. "If only I had taken proper care of my child!" He winced. "I paid a call to the psychoanalyst Eliot used to go to in New York. Finally got around to it last year. I seem to get around to everything about Eliot twenty years too late. The thing is--the thing is--I--I've never been able to get it through my head that such a splendid animal could ever go so much to hell!"

  Mushari concealed his hunger for clinical details of Eliot's ailment, waited tensely for someone to urge the Senator to continue. No one did, so Mushari exposed himself. "And what did the doctor say?"

  The Senator, suspecting nothing, resumed his tale: "These people never want to talk about what you want to talk about. It's always something else. When he found out who I was, he didn't want to talk about Eliot. He wanted to talk about the Rosewater Law." The Rosewater Law was what the Senator thought of as his legislative masterpiece. It made the publication or possession of obscene materials a Federal offense, carrying penalties up to fifty thousand dollars and ten years in prison, without hope of parole. It was a masterpiece because it actually defined obscenity.

  Obscenity, it said, is any picture or phonograph record or any written matter calling attention to reproductive organs, bodily discharges, or bodily hair.

  "This psychoanalyst," the Senator complained, "wanted to know about my childhood. He wanted to go into my feelings about bodily hair." The Senator shuddered. "I asked him to kindly get off the subject, that my revulsions were shared, so far as I knew, by all decent men." He pointed to McAllister, simply wanting to point at someone, anyone. "There's your key to pornography. Other people say, 'Oh, how can you recognize it, how can you tell it from art and all that?' I've written the key into law! The difference between pornography and art is bodily hair!"

  He flushed, apologized abjectly to Sylvia. "I beg your pardon, my dear."

  Mushari had to prod him again. "And the doctor didn't say anything about Eliot?"

  "The damn doctor said Eliot never told him a damn thing but well-known facts from history, almost all of them related to the oppression of odd-balls or the poor. He said any diagnosis he made of Eliot's disease would have to be irresponsible speculation. As a deeply worried father, I told the doctor, 'Go ahead and guess as much as you want to about my son. I won't hold you responsible. I'd be most grateful if you'd say anything, true or not, because I ran out of ideas about my boy, responsible or irresponsible, true or not, years ago. Stick your stainless steel spoon in this unhappy old man's brains, Doctor,' I told him, 'and stir.'

  "He said to me, 'Before I tell you what my irresponsible thoughts are, I'll have to discuss sexual perversion some. I intend to involve Eliot in the discussion--so, if an involvement of that sort would affect you violently, let's have our talk come to an end right here.' 'Carry on,' I said. 'I'm an old futz, and the theory is that an old futz can't be hurt very much by anything anybody says. I've never believed it before, but I'll try to believe it now.'

  " 'Very well--' he said, 'let's assume that a healthy young man is supposed to be sexually aroused by an attractive woman not his mother or sister. If he's aroused by other things, another man, say, or an umbrella or the ostrich boa of the Empress Josephine or a sheep or a corpse or his mother or a stolen garterbelt, he is what we call a pervert.'

  "I replied that I had always known such people were about, but that I'd never thought much about them because there didn't seem to be much to think about them.

  " 'Good,' he said.
'That's a calm, reasonable reaction, Senator Rosewater, that I'm frank to say surprises me. Let us hasten on to the admission that every case of perversion is essentially a case of crossed wires. Mother Nature and Society order a man to take his sex to such and such a place and do thus and so with it. Because of the crossed wires, the unhappy man enthusiastically goes straight to the wrong place, proudly, vigorously does some hideously inappropriate thing; and he can count himself lucky if he is simply crippled for life by a police force rather than killed by a mob.'

  "I began to feel terror for the first time in many years," said the Senator, "and I told the doctor so.

  " 'Good,' he said again. 'The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again. Eliot certainly has his wires crossed, but the inappropriate thing to which the short circuit has caused him to bring his sexual energies isn't necessarily such a very bad thing.'

  " 'What is it?' I cried, thinking in spite of myself of Eliot stealing women's underwear, of Eliot snip-ping off locks of hair on subways, of Eliot as a Peeping Tom." The Senator from Indiana shuddered. " 'Tell me, Doctor--tell me the worst. Eliot is bringing his sexual energies to what?'

  " 'To Utopia,' he said."

  Frustration made Norman Mushari sneeze.

  7

  ELIOT'S EYELIDS were growing heavy as he read Get With Child a Mandrake Root. He was rumpling about in it at random, hoping to find by chance the words that were supposed to make Pharisees gnash their teeth. He found one place where a judge was damned for never having given his wife an orgasm, and another where an advertising executive in charge of a soap account got drunk, locked his apartment doors, and put on his mother's wedding dress. Eliot frowned, tried to think that that sort of thing was fair-to-middling Pharisee-baiting, failed to think SO.

  He read now the account executive's fiancee's seduction of her father's chauffeur. Suggestively, she bit off the breast-pocket buttons of his uniform jacket. Eliot Rosewater fell fast asleep.

  The telephone rang three times.

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

  "Mr. Rosewater--" said a fretful man, "you don't know me."

  "Did someone tell you that mattered?"

  "I'm nothing, Mr. Rosewater. I'm worse than nothing."

  "Then God made a pretty bad mistake, didn't he?"

  "He sure did when he made me."

  "Maybe you brought your complaint to the right place."

  "What kind of a place is it, anyway?"

  "How did you happen to hear of us?"

  "There's this big black and yellow sticker in the phone booth. Says, 'Don't Kill Yourself. Call the Rosewater Foundation,' and it's got your number." Such stickers were in every phone booth in the county, and in the back windows of the cars and trucks of most of the volunteer firemen, too. "You know what somebody's written right under that in pencil?"

  "No."

  "Says, 'Eliot Rosewater is a saint. He'll give you love and money. If you'd rather have the best piece of tail in southern Indiana, call Melissa.' And then it's got her number."

  "You're a stranger in these parts?"

  "I'm a stranger in all parts. But what are you anyway--some kind of religion?"

  "Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist."

  "What?"

  "That's what I generally say when people insist I must have a religion. There happens to be such a sect, and I'm sure it's a good one. Foot-washing is practiced, and the ministers draw no pay. I wash my feet, and I draw no pay."

  "I don't get it," said the caller.

  "Just a way of trying to put you at ease, to let you know you don't have to be deadly serious with me. You don't happen to be a Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist, do you?"

  "Jesus, no."

  "There are two hundred people who are, and sooner or later I'm going to say to one of them what I've just said to you." Eliot took a drink. "I live in dread of that moment--and it's sure to come."

  "You sound like a drunk. It sounded like you just took a drink."

  "Be that as it may--what can we do to help you?"

  "Who the hell are you?"

  "The Government."

  "The what?"

  "The Government. If I'm not a Church, and I still want to keep people from killing themselves, I must be the Government. Right?"

  The man muttered something.

  "Or the Community Chest," said Eliot.

  "Is this some kind of joke?"

  "That's for me to know and you to find out."

  "Maybe you think it's funny to put up signs about people who want to commit suicide."

  "Are you about to?"

  "And what if I was?"

  "I wouldn't tell you the gorgeous reasons I have discovered for going on living."

  "What would you do?"

  "I'd ask you to name the rock-bottom price you'd charge to go on living for just one more week."

  There was a silence.

  "Did you hear me?" said Eliot.

  "I heard you."

  "If you're not going to kill yourself, would you please hang up? There are other people who'd like to use the line."

  "You sound so crazy."

  "You're the one who wants to kill himself."

  "What if I said I wouldn't live through the next week for a million dollars?"

  "I'd say, 'Go ahead and die.' Try a thousand."

  "A thousand."

  "Go ahead and die. Try a hundred."

  "A hundred."

  "Now you're making sense. Come on over and talk." He told him where his office was. "Don't be afraid of the dogs in front of the firehouse," he said. "They only bite when the fire horn goes off."

  About the fire horn: To the best of Eliot's knowledge, it was the loudest alarm in the Western Hemisphere. It was driven by a seven-hundred-horsepower Messerschmitt engine that had a thirty-horsepower electric starter. It had been the main air-raid siren of Berlin during the Second World War. The Rosewater Foundation had bought it from the West German government and presented it to the town anonymously.

  When it arrived by flatcar, the only clue as to the donor was a small tag that said, simply: "Compliments of a friend."

  Eliot wrote in a cumbersome ledger he kept under his cot. It was bound in pebbled black leather, had three hundred ruled pages of eye-rest green. He called it his Domesday Book. It was in this book, from the very first day of the Foundation's operations in Rosewater, that Eliot entered the name of each client, the nature of the client's pains, and what the Foundation had done about them.

  The book was nearly full, and only Eliot or his estranged wife could have interpreted all that was written there. What he wrote now was the name of the suicidal man who had called him, who had come to see him, who had just departed--departed a little sulkily, as though suspecting that he had been swindled or mocked, but couldn't imagine how or why.

  "Sherman Wesley Little," wrote Eliot. "Indy, Su-TDM-LO-V2-W3K3-K2CP-RF $300." Decoded, this meant that Little was from Indianapolis, was a suicidal tool-and-die maker who had been laid off, a veteran of the Second World War with a wife and three children, the second child suffering from cerebral palsy. Eliot had awarded him a Rosewater Fellowship of $300.

  A prescription that was far more common than money in the Domesday Book was "AW." This represented Eliot's recommendation to people who were down in the dumps for every reason and for no reason in particular: "Dear, I tell you what to do-- take an aspirin tablet, and wash it down with a glass of wine."

  "FH" stood for "Fly Hunt." People often felt a desperate need to do something nice for Eliot. He would ask them to come at a specific time in order to rid his office of flies. During the fly season, this was an Augean task, for Eliot had no screens on his windows, and his office, moreover, was connected directly to the foul kitchen of the lunchroom below by means of a greasy hot-air register in the floor.

  So the fly hunts were actually rituals, and were r
itualized to such an extent that conventional fly-swatters were not used, and men and women hunted flies in very different ways. The men used rubber bands, and the women used tumblers of lukewarm water and soapsuds.

  The rubber-band technique worked like this: A man would slice through a rubber band, making it a strand rather than a loop. He would stretch the strand between his hands, sight down the strand as though it were a rifle barrel, let it snap when a fly was in his sights. A well-hit fly would often be vaporized, accounting for the peculiar color of Eliot's walls and woodwork, which was largely dried fly puree.

  The tumbler-and-soapsuds technique worked like this: A woman would look for a fly hanging upside down. She would then bring her tumbler of suds directly under the fly very slowly, taking advantage of the fact that an upside-down fly, when approached by danger, will drop straight down two inches or more, in a free fall, before using his wings. Ideally, the fly would not sense danger until it was directly below him, and he would obligingly drop into the suds to be caught, to work his way down through the bubbles, to drown.

  Of this technique Eliot often said: "Nobody believes it until she tries it. Once she finds out it works, she never wants to quit."

  In the back of the ledger was a very unfinished novel which Eliot had begun years before, on an evening when he understood at last that Sylvia would never come back to him.

  Why do so many souls voluntarily return to Earth after failing and dying, failing and dying, failing and dying there? Because Heaven is such a null. Over Dem Pearly Gates these words should be emblazoned:

  A LITTLE NOTHING, O GOD, GOES A LONG, LONG WAY.

  But the only words written on the infinite portal of Paradise are the grafitti of vandal souls. "Welcome to the Bulgarian World's Fair!" says a penciled plaint on a pediment of pearl. "Better red than dead," another opines.

  "You ain't a man till you've had black meat," suggests another. And this has been revised to read, "You ain't a man till you've been black meat."

  "Where can I get a good lay around here?" asks a bawdy soul, drawing this reply: "Try 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson."

  My own contribution:

  Those who write on Heaven's walls Should mold their shit in little balls. And those who read these lines of wit Should eat these little balls of shit.