"Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr Rosewater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

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Begat he not a soul.
_Bon voyage_, dear Cousin or whoever you are. Be generous. Be kind. You can safely ignore
the arts and sciences. They never helped anybody. Be a sincere, attentive friend of the poor.


The letter was signed,
The late Eliot Rosewater.


His heart going like a burglar alarm, Norman Mushari hired a large safe-deposit box, and
he put the letter into it. That first piece of solid evidence would not be lonesome long.
Mushari went back to his cubicle, reflected that Sylvia was in the process of divorcing
Eliot, with old McAllister representing the defendant. She was living in Paris, and Mushari wrote
a letter to her, suggesting that it was customary in friendly, civilized divorce actions for
litigants to return each other's letters. He asked her to send him any letters from Eliot that she
might have saved.
He got fifty-three such letters by return mail.




TWO


Eliot Rosewater was born in 1918, in Washington, D.C. Like his father, who claimed to
represent the Hoosier State, Eliot was raised and educated and entertained on the Eastern Seaboard
and in Europe. The family visited the so-called "home" in Rosewater County very briefly every
year, just long enough to reinvigorate the lie that it was home.
Eliot had unremarkable academic careers at Loomis and Harvard. He became an expert sailor
during summers in Cotuit, on Cape Cod, and an intermediate skier during winter vacations in
Switzerland.
He left Harvard Law School on December 8, 1941, to volunteer for the Infantry of the Army
of the United States. He served with distinction in many battles. He rose to the rank of captain,
was a company commander. Near the end of the war in Europe, Eliot suffered what was diagnosed as
combat fatigue. He was hospitalized in Paris, where he wooed and won Sylvia.
After the war, Eliot returned to Harvard with his stunning wife, took his law degree. He
went on to specialize in international law, dreamed of helping the United Nations in some way. He
received a doctorate in that field, and was handed simultaneously the presidency of the new
Rosewater Foundation. His duties, according to the charter, were exactly as flimsy or as
formidable as he himself declared them to be.
Eliot chose to take the Foundation seriously. He bought a town house in New York, with a
fountain in the foyer. He put a Bentley and a Jaguar in the garage. He hired a suite of offices in
the Empire State Building. He had them painted lime, burnt-orange and oyster white. He proclaimed
them the headquarters for all the beautiful, compassionate and scientific things he hoped to do.
He was a heavy drinker, but no one worried about it. No amount of booze seemed to make him
drunk.