"Kurt Vonnegut - Deadeye Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

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.

***



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 honour to stay there.

There is supposedly a ghost тАФ 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. The
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 of 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.

***



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.



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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 favourite 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 rowing boat. The rowing boat 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