Contents
Cover Page
About the Book
About the Author
Also by
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Copyright
About the Book
Rudolf Waltz’s principal objection to life was that it was too easy to make horrible mistakes. He was himself to become a double-murderer at the age of twelve – on Mother’s Day. This would at least make subsequent mistakes seem fairly trivial.
Rudolf’s father, Otto Waltz, had in 1910 bought a painting in Vienna from a destitute Adolf Hitler, thereby possibly saving him from starvation for a future generation. He made the further mistake of setting himself up as an artist when he returned from Europe to Midland City, Ohio, where everyone knew Otto couldn’t draw for sour apples. He had funds to indulge this grand illusion (in the splendor of a vast converted ‘medieval granary’ studio, reminiscent of Mount Fujiyama) because his father had made a fortune producing an opium-and-cocaine-laced quack medicine called Saint Elmo’s Remedy, popularly known to be ‘absolutely harmless unless discontinued’. The Waltz inheritance even stretched to a troupe of black servants, which was just as well since Rudy’s mother was as disinclined to look after a home as his ‘artist’ father was to paint.
About the Author
Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of war in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.
Also by Kurt Vonnegut
BLUEBEARD
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
CAT’S CRADLE
GALÁPAGOS
GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE
JAILBIRD
MOTHER NIGHT
PALM SUNDAY
PLAYER PIANO
THE SIRENS OF TITAN
SLAPSTICK
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
WAMPETERS, FOMA & GRANFALLOONS
WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
DEADEYE DICK
Kurt Vonnegut
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Epub ISBN: 9781409017820
Version 1.0
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Copyright © 1982 by The Ramjac Corporation
Published by
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a division of
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www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
For Jill
Preface
“DEADEYE DICK,” like “Barnacle Bill,” is a nickname for a sailor. A deadeye is a rounded wooden block, usually bound with rope or iron, and pierced with holes. The holes receive a multiplicity of lines, usually shrouds or stays, on an old-fashioned sailing ship. But in the American Middle West of my youth, “Deadeye Dick” was an honorific often accorded to a person who was a virtuoso with firearms.
So it is a sort of lungfish of a nickname. It was born in the ocean, but it adapted to life ashore.
ο ο ο
There are several recipes in this book, which are intended as musical interludes for the salivary glands. They have been inspired by James Beard’s American Cookery, Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book, and Bea Sandler’s The African Cookbook. I have tinkered with the originals, however—so no one should use this novel for a cookbook.
Any serious cook should have the reliable originals in his or her library anyway.
ο ο ο
There is a real hotel in this book, the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti. I love it, and so would almost anybody else. My dear wife Jill Krementz and I have stayed there in the so-called “James Jones Cottage,” which was built as an operating room when the hotel was headquarters for a brigade of United States Marines, who occupied Haiti, in order to protect American financial interests there, from 1915 until 1934.
The exterior of that austere wooden box has subsequently been decorated with fanciful, jigsaw gingerbread, like the rest of the hotel.
The currency of Haiti, by the way, is based on the American dollar. Whatever an American dollar is worth, that is what a Haitian dollar is worth, and actual American dollars are in general circulation. There seems to be no scheme in Haiti, however, for retiring worn-out dollar bills, and replacing them with new ones. So it is ordinary there to treat with utmost seriousness a dollar which is as insubstantial as a cigarette paper, and which has shrunk to the size of an airmail stamp.
I found one such bill in my wallet when I got home from Haiti a couple of years ago, and I mailed it back to Al and Sue Seitz, the owners and host and hostess of the Oloffson, asking them to release it into its natural environment. It could never have survived a day in New York City.
ο ο ο
James Jones (1921–1977), the American novelist, was actually married to his wife Gloria in the James Jones Cottage, before it was called that. So it is a literary honor to stay there.
There is supposedly a ghost—not of James Jones, but of somebody else. We never saw it. Those who have seen it describe a young white man in a white jacket, possibly a medical orderly of some kind. There are only two doors, a back door opening into the main hotel, and a front door opening onto a porch. This ghost is said to follow the same route every time it appears. It comes in through the back door, searches for something in a piece of furniture which isn’t there anymore, and then goes out the front door. It vanishes when it passes through the front door. It has never been seen in the main hotel or on the porch.
It may have an uneasy conscience about something it did or saw done when the cottage was an operating room.
ο ο ο
There are four real painters in this book, one living and three dead. The living one is my friend in Athens, Ohio, Cliff McCarthy. The dead ones are John Rettig, Frank Duveneck, and Adolf Hitler.
Cliff McCarthy is about my age and from my part of America, more or less. When he went to art school, it was drummed into him that the worst sort of painter was eclectic, borrowing from here and there. But now he has had a show of thirty years of his work, at Ohio University, and he says, “I notice that I have been eclectic.” It’s strong and lovely stuff he does. My own favorite is “The Artist’s Mother as a Bride in 1917.” His mother is all dressed up, and it’s a warm time of year, and somebody has persuaded her to pose in the bow of a rowboat. The rowboat is in a perfectly still, narrow patch of water, a little river, probably, with the opposite bank, all leafy, only fifty yards away. She is laughing.
There really was a John Rettig, and his painting in the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Crucifixion in Rome,” is as I have described it.
There really was a Frank Duveneck, and I in fact own a painting by him, “Head of a Young Boy.” It is a treasure left to me by my father. I used to think it was a portrait of my brother Bernard, it looks so much like him.
And there really was an Adolf Hitler, who studied art in Vienna before the First World War, and whose finest picture may in fact have been “The Minorite Church of Vienna.”
ο ο ο
I will explain the main symbols in this book.
There is an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me.
There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone.
Haiti is New York City, where I live now.
The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done.
ο ο ο
This is fiction, not history, so it should not be used as a reference book. I say, for example, that the United States Ambassador to Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the First World War was Henry Clowes, of Ohio. The actual ambassador at that time was Frederic Courtland Penfield of Connecticut.
I also say that a neutron bomb is a sort of magic wand, which kills people instantly, but which leaves their property unharmed. This is a fantasy borrowed from enthusiasts for a Third World War. A real neutron bomb, detonated in a populated area, would cause a lot more suffering and destruction than I have described.
I have also misrepresented Creole, just as the viewpoint character, Rudy Waltz, learning that French dialect, might do. I say that it has only one tense—the present. Creole only seems to have that one tense to a beginner, especially if those speaking it to him know that the present is the easiest tense for him.
Peace.
—K.V.
Who is Celia? What is she?
That all her swains commend her?
—OTTO WALTZ
(1892–1960)
TO the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that.
They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old.
Blah blah blah.
ο ο ο
My father was Otto Waltz, whose peephole opened in 1892, and he was told, among other things, that he was the heir to a fortune earned principally by a quack medicine known as “Saint Elmo’s Remedy.” It was grain alcohol dyed purple, flavored with cloves and sarsaparilla root, and laced with opium and cocaine. As the joke goes: It was absolutely harmless unless discontinued.
He, too, was a Midland City native. He was an only child, and his mother, on the basis of almost no evidence whatsoever, concluded that he could be another Leonardo da Vinci. She had a studio built for him on a loft of the carriage house behind the family mansion when he was only ten years old, and she hired a rapscallion German cabinetmaker, who had studied art in Berlin in his youth, to give Father drawing and painting lessons on weekends and after school.
It was a sweet racket for both teacher and pupil. The teacher’s name was August Gunther, and his peephole must have opened in Germany around 1850. Teaching paid as well as cabinetmaking, and, unlike cabinetmaking, allowed him to be as drunk as he pleased.
After Father’s voice changed, moreover, Gunther could take him on overnight visits by rail to Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Louisville and Cleveland and so on, ostensibly to visit galleries and painters’ studios. The two of them also managed to get drunk, and to become darlings of the fanciest whorehouses in the Middle West.
Was either one of them about to acknowledge that Father couldn’t paint or draw for sour apples?
ο ο ο
Who else was there to detect the fraud? Nobody. There wasn’t anybody else in Midland City who cared enough about art to notice if Father was gifted or not. He might as well have been a scholar of Sanskrit, as far as the rest of the town was concerned.
Midland City wasn’t a Vienna or a Paris. It wasn’t even a St. Louis or a Detroit. It was a Bucyrus. It was a Kokomo.
ο ο ο
Gunther’s treachery was discovered, but too late. He and Father were arrested in Chicago after doing considerable property damage in a whorehouse there, and Father was found to have gonorrhea, and so on. But Father was by then a fully committed, eighteen-year-old good-time Charley.
Gunther was denounced and fired and blacklisted. Grandfather and Grandmother Waltz were tremendously influential citizens, thanks to Saint Elmo’s Remedy. They spread the word that nobody of quality in Midland City was ever to hire Gunther for cabinetwork or any other sort of work—ever again.
Father was sent to relatives in Vienna, to have his gonorrhea treated and to enroll in the world-famous Academy of Fine Arts. While he was on the high seas, in a first-class cabin aboard the Lusitania, his parents’ mansion burned down. It was widely suspected that the showplace was torched by August Gunther, but no proof was found.
Father’s parents, rather than rebuild, took up residence in their thousand-acre farm out near Shepherdstown—leaving behind the carriage house and a cellar hole.
This was in 1910—four years before the outbreak of the First World War.
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So Father presented himself at the Academy of Fine Arts with a portfolio of pictures he had created in Midland City. I myself have examined some of the artwork of his youth, which Mother used to moon over after he died. He was good at cross-hatching and shading a drapery, and August Gunther must have been capable in those areas, too. But with few exceptions, everything Father depicted wound up looking as though it were made of cement—a cement woman in a cement dress, walking a cement dog, a herd of cement cattle, a cement bowl of cement fruit, set before a window with cement curtains, and so on.
He was no good at catching likenesses, either. He showed the Academy several portraits of his mother, and I have no idea what she looked like. Her peephole closed long before mine opened. But I do know that no two of Father’s portraits of her resemble each other in the least.
Father was told to come back to the Academy in two weeks, at which time they would tell him whether they would take him in or not.
He was in rags at the time, with a piece of rope for a belt, and with patched trousers and so on—although he was receiving an enormous allowance from home. Vienna was then the capital of a great empire, and there were so many elaborate uniforms and exotic costumes, and so much wine and music that it seemed to Father to be a fancy dress ball. So he decided to come to the party as a starving artist. What fun!
And he must have been very good-looking then, for he was, in my opinion, the best-looking man in Midland City when I got to know him a quarter of a century later. He was slender and erect to the end. He was six feet tall. His eyes were blue. He had curly golden hair, and he had lost almost none of it when his peephole closed, when he was allowed to stop being Otto Waltz, when he became just another wisp of undifferentiated nothingness again.
ο ο ο
So he came back in two weeks, and a professor handed him back his portfolio, saying that his work was ludicrous. And there was another young man in rags there, and he, too, had his portfolio returned with scorn.
His name was Adolf Hitler. He was a native Austrian. He had come from Linz.
And Father was so mad at the professor that he got his revenge right then and there. He asked to see some of Hitler’s work, with the professor looking on. He picked a picture at random, and he said it was a brilliant piece of work, and he bought it from Hitler for more cash on the spot than the professor, probably, could earn in a month or more.
Only an hour before, Hitler had sold his overcoat so that he could get a little something to eat, even though winter was coming on. So there is a chance that, if it weren’t for my father, Hitler might have died of pneumonia or malnutrition in 1910.
Father and Hitler paired off for a while, as people will—comforting and amusing each other, jeering at the art establishment which had rejected them, and so on. I know they took several long walking trips, just the two of them. I learned of their good times together from Mother. When I was old enough to be curious about Father’s past, World War Two was about to break out, and Father had developed lockjaw as far as his friendship with Hitler was concerned.
Think of that: My father could have strangled the worst monster of the century, or simply let him starve or freeze to death. But he became his bosom buddy instead.
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
ο ο ο
The painting Father bought from Hitler was a watercolor which is now generally acknowledged as having been the best thing the monster ever did as a painter, and it hung for many years over my parents’ bed in Midland City, Ohio. Its title was: “The Minorite Church of Vienna.”
FATHER was so well received in Vienna, known to one and all as an American millionaire disguised as a ragged genius, that he roistered there for nearly four years. When the First World War broke out in August of 1914, he imagined that the fancy dress ball was to become a fancy dress picnic, that the party was to be moved out into the countryside. He was so happy, so naive, so self-enchanted, that he asked influential friends if they couldn’t get him a commission in the Hungarian Life Guard, whose officers’ uniforms included a panther skin.
He adored that panther skin.
He was summoned by the American ambassador to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Henry Clowes, who was a Cleveland man and an acquaintance of Father’s parents. Father was then twenty-two years old. Clowes told Father that he would lose his American citizenship if he joined a foreign army, and that he had made inquiries about Father, and had learned that Father was not the painter he pretended to be, and that Father had been spending money like a drunken sailor, and that he had written to Father’s parents, telling them that their son had lost all touch with reality, and that it was time Father was summoned home and given some honest work to do.
“What if I refuse?” said Father.
“Your parents have agreed to stop your allowance,” said Clowes.
So Father went home.
ο ο ο
I do not believe he would have stayed in Midland City, if it weren’t for what remained of his childhood home, which was its fanciful carriage house. It was hexagonal. It was stone. It had a conical slate roof. It had a naked skeleton inside of noble oak beams. It was a little piece of Europe in southwestern Ohio. It was a present from my great-grandfather Waltz to his homesick wife from Hamburg. It was a stone-by-stone replica of a structure in an illustration in her favorite book of German fairy tales.
It still stands.
I once showed it to an art historian from Ohio University, which is in Athens, Ohio. He said that the original might have been a medieval granary built on the ruins of a Roman watchtower from the time of Julius Caesar. Caesar was murdered two thousand years ago.
Think of that.
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I do not think my father was entirely ungifted as an artist. Like his friend Hitler, he had a flair for romantic architecture. And he set about transforming the carriage house into a painter’s studio fit for the reincarnated Leonardo da Vinci his doting mother still believed him to be.
Father’s mother was as crazy as a bedbug, my own mother said.
ο ο ο
I sometimes think that I would have had a very different sort of soul, if I had grown up in an ordinary little American house—if our home had not been vast.
Father got rid of all the horse-drawn vehicles in the carriage house—a sleigh, a buckboard, a surrey, a phaeton, a brougham, and who-knows-what-all? Then he had ten horse stalls and a tack room ripped out. This gave him for his private enjoyment more uninterrupted floor-space beneath a far higher ceiling than was afforded by any house of worship or public building in the Midland City of that time.
Was it big enough for a basketball game? A basketball court is ninety-four feet long and fifty feet wide. My childhood home was only eighty feet in diameter. So, no—it lacked fourteen feet of being big enough for a basketball game.
ο ο ο
There were two pairs of enormous doors in the carriage house, wide enough to admit a carriage and a team of horses. One pair faced north, one pair faced south. Father had his workmen take down the northern pair, which his old mentor, August Gunther, made into two tables, a dining table and a table on which Father’s paints and brushes and palette knives and charcoal sticks and so on were to be displayed.
The doorway was then filled with what remains the largest window in the city, admitting copious quantities of that balm for all great painters, northern light.
It was before this window that Father’s easel stood.
ο ο ο
Yes, he had been reunited with the disreputable August Gunther, who must have been in his middle sixties then. Old Gunther had only one child, a daughter named Grace, so Father was like a son to him. A more suitable son for Gunther would be hard to imagine.
Mother was just a little girl then, and living in a mansion next door. She was terrified of old Gunther. She told me one time that all nice little girls were supposed to run away from him. Right up until the time Mother died, she cringed if August Gunther was mentioned. He was a hobgoblin to her. He was the bogeyman.
As for the pair of great doors facing south: Father had them bolted shut and padlocked, and the workmen caulked the cracks between and around them, to keep out the wind. And then August Gunther cut a front door into one of them. That was the entrance to Father’s studio, what would later be my childhood home.
A hexagonal loft encircled and overhung the great chamber. This was partitioned off into bedrooms and bathrooms and a small library.
Above that was an attic under the conical slate roof. Father had no immediate use for the attic, so it was left in its primitive condition.
It was all so impractical—which I guess was the whole idea.
Father was so elated by the vastness of the ground floor, which was paved with cobblestones laid in sand, that he considered putting the kitchen up on a loft. But that would have put the servants and all their hustle and bustle and cooking smells up among the bedrooms. There was no basement to put them in.
So he reluctantly put the kitchen on the ground floor, tucked under a loft and partitioned off with old boards. It was cramped and stuffy. I would love it. I would feel so safe and cozy in there.
ο ο ο
Many people found our house spooky, and the attic in fact was full of evil when I was born. It housed a collection of more than three hundred antique and modern firearms. Father had bought them during his and Mother’s six-month honeymoon in Europe in 1922. Father thought them beautiful, but they might as well have been copperheads and rattlesnakes.
They were murder.
MY mother’s peephole opened in Midland City in 1901. She was nine years younger than Father. She, like him, was an only child—the daughter of Richard Wetzel, the founder and principal stockholder of the Midland County National Bank. Her name was Emma.
She was born into a mansion teeming with servants, right next door to my father’s childhood home, but she would die penniless in 1978, four years ago now, in a little shitbox she and I shared in the suburb of Midland City called Avondale.
ο ο ο
She remembered seeing Father’s childhood home burn down when she was nine years old, when Father was on his way to Vienna. But Father made a far greater impression on her than the fire when he came home from Vienna and looked over the carriage house with the idea of turning it into a studio.
She had her first glimpse of him through the privet hedge between the two properties. This was a bird-legged, bucktoothed, skinny thirteen-year-old, who had never seen men dressed in anything but overalls or business suits. Her parents had spoken glowingly of Father, since he was rich and came from an excellent family. They had suggested playfully that she could do worse than marry him someday.
So now she peeked at him through the hedge, her heart beating madly, and, great God! He was all scarlet and silver, except for a panther skin over one shoulder—and a sable busby with a purple plume on his head.
He was wearing one of the many souvenirs he had brought home from Vienna, which was the dress uniform of a major in the Hungarian Life Guard, the regiment he had hoped to join.
ο ο ο
A real Hungarian Life Guard back in the Austro-Hungarian Empire might have been putting on a field gray uniform about then.
Father’s friend Hitler, who was an Austrian, had managed to join the German rather than the Austrian army—because he admired all things German so much. He was wearing field gray.
ο ο ο
Father was living with his parents out near Shepherdstown at the time, but all his souvenirs were stored in the carriage house. And, on the day that Mother saw him in the uniform, he had begun opening trunks and packing cases, with his old mentor, August Gunther, looking on. He had put on the uniform to make Gunther laugh.
They came outside, lugging a table between them. They were going to have lunch in the shade of an ancient walnut tree. They had brought beer and bread and sausage and cheese and roast chicken, all of which had been produced locally. The cheese, incidentally, was Liederkranz, which most people assume is a European cheese. Liederkranz was invented in Midland City, Ohio, in about 1865.
ο ο ο
So Father, setting down for a lusty lunch with old Gunther, was aware that a little girl was watching everything through the hedge, and he made jokes about her which she could hear. He said to Gunther that he had been away so long that he could no longer remember the names of American birds. There was a bird in the hedge there, he said, and he described Mother as though she were a bird, and he asked old Gunther what to call the bird.
And Father approached the supposed little bird with a piece of bread in his hand, asking if little birds like her ate bread, and Mother fled into her parents’ house.
She told me this. Father told me this.
ο ο ο
But she came out again, and she found a better place to spy from—where she could see without being seen. There were puzzling new arrivals at the picnic. They were two short, dark youths, who had evidently been wading. They were barefoot, and their trousers were wet above the knees. Mother had never seen anything quite like them for this reason: The two, who were brothers, were Italians, and there had never been Italians in Midland City before.
They were Gino Maritimo, eighteen, and Marco Maritimo, twenty. They were in one hell of a lot of trouble. They weren’t expected at the picnic. They weren’t even supposed to be in the United States. Thirty-six hours before, they had been stokers aboard an Italian freighter which was taking on cargo in Newport News, Virginia. They had jumped ship in order to escape military conscription at home, and because the streets of America were paved with gold. They spoke no English.
Other Italians in Newport News boosted them and their cardboard suitcases into an empty boxcar in a train that was bound for God-knows-where. The train began to move immediately. The sun went down. There were no stars, no moon that night. America was blackness and clackety-clack.
How do I know what the night was like? Gino and Marco Maritimo, as old men, both told me so.
ο ο ο
Somewhere in the seamless darkness, which may have been West Virginia, Gino and Marco were joined by four American hoboes, who at knife-point took their suitcases, their coats, their hats, and their shoes.
They were lucky they didn’t have their throats slit for fun. Who would have cared?
ο ο ο
How they wished that their peepholes would close! But the nightmare went on and on. And then it became a daymare. The train stopped several times, but in the midst of such ugliness that Gino and Marco could not bring themselves to step out into it, to somehow start living there. But then two railroad detectives with long clubs made them get out anyway, and, like it or lump it, they were on the outskirts of Midland City, Ohio, on the other side of Sugar Creek from the center of town.
They were terribly hungry and thirsty. They could either await death, or they could invent something to do. They invented. They saw a conical slate roof on the other side of the river, and they walked toward that. In order to keep putting one foot in front of the other, they pretended that it was of utmost importance that they reach that structure and no other.
They waded across Sugar Creek, rather than draw attention to themselves on the bridge. They would have swum the creek, if it had been that deep.
And now here they were, as astonished as my mother had been to see a young man all dressed in scarlet and silver, with a sable busby on his head.
When Father looked askance at the two of them from his seat under the oak, Gino, the younger of the brothers, but their leader, said in Italian that they were hungry and would do any sort of work for food.
Father replied in Italian. He was good with languages. He was fluent in French and German and Spanish, too. He told the brothers that they should by all means sit down and eat, if they were as hungry as they appeared to be. He said that nobody should ever be hungry.
He was like a god to them. It was so easy for him to be like a god to them.
After they had eaten, he took them up into the attic above the loft, the future gun room. There were two old cots up there. Light and air came from windows in a cupola at the peak of the roof. A ladder, its bottom bolted to the center of the attic floor, led up into the cupola. Father told the brothers that they could make the attic their home, until they found something better.
He said he had some old shoes and sweaters and so on, if they wanted them, in his trunks below.
He put them to work the next day, ripping out the stalls and tack room.
And no matter how rich and powerful the Maritimo brothers subsequently became, and no matter how disreputable and poor Father became, Father remained a god to them.
AND somewhere in there, before America entered the First World War against the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, Father’s parents had their peepholes closed by carbon monoxide from a faulty heating system in their farmhouse out near Shepherdstown.
So Father became a major stockholder in the family business, the Waltz Brothers Drug Company, to which he had contributed nothing but ridicule and scorn.
And he attended stockholders’ meetings in a beret and a paint-stained smock and sandals, and he brought old August Gunther along, claiming Gunther was his lawyer, and he protested that he found his two uncles and their several sons, who actually ran the business, intolerably humorless and provincial and obsessed by profits, and so on.
He would ask them when they were going to stop poisoning their fellow citizens, and so on. At that time, the uncles and cousins were starting the first chain of drugstores in the history of the country, and they were especially proud of the soda fountains in those stores, and had spent a lot of money to guarantee that the ice cream served at those fountains was the equal of any ice cream in the world. So Father wanted to know why ice cream at a Waltz Brothers Drugstore always tasted like library paste, and so on.
He was an artist, you see, interested in enterprises far loftier than mere pharmacy.
And now is perhaps the time for me to name my own profession. Guess what? I, Rudy Waltz, the son of that great artist Otto Waltz, am a registered pharmacist.
ο ο ο