Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Kroner has on his mind when I call on him. Now, please, let’s sleep.”
    “Finnerty!” she said. “He’s the one who threw a monkey wrench into things. Honestly! How long is he going to stay?”
    “He’ll get sick of us in a couple of days, the way he gets sick of anything.”
    “The N.I.P.B. mustn’t leave him much time to go traipsing over the country to insult old friends.”
    “He quit. Hasn’t got a job.”
    She sat up in bed. “They fired him! Well, good for them.”
    “Quit. They offered him a raise to stay. His idea.” He found himself awakened by a subject that interested him. Anita’s hammering at the subject of Pittsburgh had tended to make him curl up tighter and tighter. Now he felt himself relaxing somewhat, straightening out like a man. Finnerty was a magical name again; Paul’s feelings about him had swung a full circle. Morale and
esprit de corps
, which Paul hadn’t felt in any undertaking for years, had sprung up between them in the course of the exhilarating humiliation of Checker Charley. Moreover—Paul’s thoughts were coming alive as though refreshed by a cool wind—there was enchantment in what Finnerty had done, a thing almost as inconceivable and beautifully simple as suicide: he’d quit.
    “Paul …”
    “Hmmmm?”
    “Your father thought you’d be manager of Pittsburgh someday. If he were alive, nothing would make him happier than to know you got the job.”
    “Umm hmmmm.” He remembered how Anita, shortly after their marriage, had dug up a picture of his father from a trunk and had had it enlarged and framed as her first birthday present to him. The picture was over on his bureau now,where she had put it—where he could see it the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. She had never met Paul’s father, and he hadn’t said much about him to her; yet she’d built up a kind of mythology about the man that could keep her talking knowingly for hours. The myth had it that Paul’s father in his youth had been just as easygoing as Paul, and that the strength that got him to the top job in the economy came in the middle years of his life—came in the years Paul was just beginning.
    Kroner, too, kept alive the notion that Paul could be expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. This faith of Kroner’s had had a lot to do with Paul’s getting to be manager of Ilium; and now that faith might get him the managership of Pittsburgh. When Paul thought about his effortless rise in the hierarchy, he sometimes, as now, felt sheepish, like a charlatan. He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality. In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.
    “What are you going to do about Shepherd?” said Anita.
    Paul started to curl up again. “Do? I’ve already done it. Nothing.”
    “If somebody doesn’t clip his wings, he’s going right over everybody’s heads one of these days.”
    “Welcome to.”
    “You don’t mean that.”
    “I mean I want to sleep.”
    Her bedsprings creaked as she lay down once more. She shifted her weight about restlessly for several minutes. “You know, it’s a funny thing,” she said.
    “Hmmmm?”
    “I’ve always noticed that when Shepherd turned his face a certain way, he looked an awful lot like somebody else. And it wasn’t until tonight that I figured out who it was.”
    “Mmmm.”
    “When you see him at just the right angle, he’s the spitting image of your father.”

7

    P RIVATE FIRST C LASS E LMO C. H ACKETTS , J R ., approached the Shah of Bratpuhr, Doctor Ewing J. Halyard, of the State Department, Khashdrahr Miasma, their interpreter, General of the Armies Milford S. Bromley,