Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [3]
So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil asked me, “What did his wife say?”
“She doesn’t know yet,” I said. “It just happened.”
“Call her up and get a statement.”
“What?”
“Tell her you’re Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have some sad news. Give her the news, and see what she says.”
So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a baby. And so on.
When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what the squashed guy had looked like when he was squashed.
I told her.
“Did it bother you?” she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.
“Heck no, Nancy,” I said. “I’ve seen lots worse than that in the war.”
Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn’t a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn’t know that, either. There hadn’t been much publicity.
I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, “I know, I know. I know.”
World War Two had certainly made everybody very tough. And I became a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer fireman in the village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home. My boss there was one of the toughest guys I ever hope to meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore. While I was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.
He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn’t been an officer, as though I’d done something wrong.
My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We had a lot of scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.
I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, why they did it, what desirable results there had been and so on. I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still.
I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, “Secret? My God—from whom?”
We were United World Federalists back then. I don’t know what we are now. Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot—or I do, anyway, late at night.
A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so—whatever the last year was for the New York World’s Fair. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from Stamboul.
I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop so they could stand by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines.
We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware. There were lots of things to stop and see—and then it was time to go, always time to go. The little girls were wearing white party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were. “Time to go, girls,” I’d say. And we would go.
And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I knocked on the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O’Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey like a dinner bell.
I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to Gerhard M