Richard Wilson - Mother to the World.pdf

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MOTHER TO THE WORLD
Richard Wilson
His name was Martin Rolfe. She called him Mr. Ralph.
She was Cecelia Beamer, called Siss.
He was a vigorous, intelligent, lean and wiry forty-two, a
shade under six feet tall. His hair, black, was thinning but
still covered all of his head; and all his teeth were his own.
His health was excellent. He'd never had a cavity Or an opera-
tion and he fervently hoped he never would.
She was a slender, strong young woman of twenty-eight,
five feet four. Her eyes, nose and mouth were regular and
well-spaced but the combination fell short of beauty. She
wore her hair, which was dark blonde, not quite brown,
straight back and long in two pigtails which she braided
daily, after a ritualistic hundred brushings. Her figure was
better than average for her age and therefore good, but she
did nothing to emphasize it. Her disposition was cheerful
when she was with someone; when alone her tendency was
to work hard at the job at hand, giving it her serious atten-
tion. Whatever she was doing was the most important thing
in the world to her just then and she had a compulsion to do
it absolutely right. She was indefatigable but she liked, almost
demanded, to be praised for what she did well.
Her amusements were simple ones. She liked to talk to
people but most people quickly became bored with what she
had to say she was inclined to be repetitive. Fortunately for
her, she also liked to talk to animals, birds included.
She was a retarded person with the mentality of an eight-
year-old.
Eight can be a delightful age. Rolfe remembered his son at
eight bright, inquiring, beginning to emerge from childhood
but not so fast as to lose any of his innocent charm; a refresh-
ing, uninhibited conversationalist with an original viewpoint
on life. The boy had been a challenge to him and a constant
delight. He held on to that memory, drawing sustenance from
it, for her.
Young Rolfe was dead now, along with his mother and
three billion other people.
Rolfe and Siss were the only ones left in all the world.
It was M.R. that had done it, he told her. Massive Retalia-
tion; from the Other Side.
When American bombs rained down from long-range jets
and rocket carriers, nobody'd known the Chinese had what
they had. Nobody'd suspected it of that relatively backward
country which the United States had believed it was soften-
ing up, in a brushfire war, for enforced diplomacy.
Rolfe hadn't been aware of any speculation that Peking's
scientists were concentrating their research not on weapons
but on biochemistry. Germ warfare, sure. There'd been prop-
aganda from both sides about that, but nothing had been
hinted about a biological agent, as it must have been, that
could break down human cells and release the water.
"M.R.," he told her. "Better than nerve gas or the neutron
bomb." Like those, it left the buildings and equipment intact.
Unlike them, it didn't leave any messy corpses only the
bones, which crumbled and blew away. Except the bone dust
trapped inside the pathetic mounds of clothing that lay every-
where in the city.
"Are they coming over now that they beat us?"
"I'm sure they intended to. But there can't be any of them
left. They outsmarted themselves, I guess. The wind must
 
have blown it right back at them. I don't really know what
happened, Siss. All I know is that everybody's gone now,
except you and me."
"But the animals"
Rolfe had found it best in trying to explain something to
Siss to keep it simple, especially when he didn't understand
it himself. Just as he had learned long ago that if he didn't
know how to pronounce a word he should say it loud and
confidently.
So all he told Siss was that the bad people had got hold
of 'a terrible weapon called M.R. she'd heard of that and
used it on the good people and that nearly everybody had
died. Not the animals, though, and damned if he knew why.
"Animals don't sin," Siss told him.
"That's as good an explanation as any I can think of," he
said. She was silent for a while. Then she said: "Your name
initials are M.R., aren't they?"
He'd never considered it before, but she was right. Martin
Roife Massive Retaliation. I hope she doesn't blame every-
thing on me, he thought. But then she spoke again. "M.R.
That's short for Mister. What I call you. Your name that I
have for you. Mister Ralph."
"Tell me again how we were saved, Mr. Ralph."
She used the expression in an almost evangelical sense,
making him uncomfortable. Rolfe was a practical man, a
realist and freethinker.
"You know as well as I do, Siss," he said. "It's because
Professor Cantwell was doing government research and
because he was having a party. You certainly remember;
Cantwell was your boss."
"I know that. But you tell it so good and I like to hear it."
"All right. Bill Cantwell was an old friend of mine from
the army and when I came to New York I gave him a call at
the University. It was the first time I'd talked to him in years;
I had no idea he'd married again and had set up housekeeping
in Manhattan."
"And had a working girl named Siss," she put in.
"The very same," he agreed. Siss never referred to herself
as a maid, which was what she had been. "And so when I
asked Bill if he could put me up, I thought it would be in his
old bachelor apartment. He said sure, just like that, and I
didn't find out till I got there, late in the evening, that he had
a new wife and was having a house party and had invited two
couples from out of town to stay over."
"I gave my room to Mr. and Mrs. Glena, from Columbus,"
Siss said.
"And the Torquemadas, of Seville, had the regular guest
room." Whoever they were; he didn't remember names the
way she did. "So that left two displaced persons, you and
me."
"Except for the Nassers."
The Nassers, as she pronounced it, were the two self-con-
tained rooms in the Cantwell basement. The NASAs, or the
Nasas, was what Cantwell called them because the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration had given him a con-
tract to study the behavior of human beings in a closed
system.
Actually the money had gone to Columbia University,
where Cantwell was a professor of mechanical and aerospace
engineering.
"A sealed-off environment," Rolfe said. "But because
Columbia didn't have the space just at that time, and because
the work was vital, NASA gave Cantwell permission to build
the rooms in his own home. They were -still are -in his
 
basement, and that's where you and I slept that fateful night
when the world ended."
"I still don't understand."
"We were completely sealed off in there," Rolfe said. "We
weren't breathing Earth air and we weren't connected in any
way to the rest of the world. We might as well have been out
in space or on the moon. So when it happened to everybody
else to Professor and Mrs. Cantwell, and to the Glenns and
the Torquemadas and to the Nassers in Egypt and the Joneses
in Jones Beach and all the people at Columbia, and in Wash-
ington and Moscow and Pretoria and London and Peoria and
Medicine Hat and La Jolla and all those places all over it
didn't happen to us. That's because Professor Cantwell was a
smart man and his closed systems worked."
"And we were saved."
"That's one way of looking at it."
"What's the other way?"
"We were doomed."
From his notebooks:
Siss asked why I'm so sure there's nobody but us left in
the whole world. A fair question. Of course I'm not abso-
lutely positively cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, swear-on-a
Bible convinced that there isn't a poor live slob hidden away
in some remote corner. Other people besides Bill must have
been working with closed systems; certainly any country with
a space program would be, and maybe some of their nassers
were inhabited, too. I hadn't heard that any astronauts or
cosmonauts were in orbit that day but if they were, and got
down safely, I guess they could be alive somewhere.
But I've listened to the rest of the world on some of the
finest radio equipment ever put together and there hasn't been
a peep out of it. I've listened and signaled and listened and
signaled and listened. Nothing. Nil. Short wave, long wave,
AM, FM, UHF, marine band, everywhere. Naught. Not a
thing. Lots of automatic signals from unmanned satellites, of
course, and the quasars are still being heard from, but nothing
human.
I've sent out messages on every piece of equipment con-
nected to Con Ed's EE net. RCA, American Cable & Radio,
the Bell System, Western Union, The Associated Press, UPI,
Reuters' world news network. The New York Times' multi-
farious teletypes, even the Hilton Hotels' international reser-
vations system. Nothing. By this time I'd become fairly expert
at communications and I'd found the Pentagon network at
AT&T. Silent. Ditto the hot line to the Kremlin. I read the
monitor teletype and saw the final message from Washington
to Moscow. Strictly routine. No hint that anything was amiss
anywhere. Just as it must have been at the Army message
center at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning a genera-
tion ago.
This is for posterity, these facts. My evidence is circum-
stantial. But to Siss I say: "There's nobody left but us. I
know. You'll have to take my word for it that the rest of
the world is as empty as New York."
Nobody here but us chickens, boss. Us poor flightless birds.
One middle-aged rooster and one sad little hen, somewhat
deficient in the upper story. What do you want us to do, boss?
What's the next step in the great cosmic scheme? Tell us:
where do we go from here?
But don't tell me; tell Siss. I don't expect an answer; she
does. She's the one who went into the first church she found
open that Sunday morning (some of them were locked, you
know) and said all the prayers she knew, and asked for
mercy for her relatives, and her friends, and her employers,
 
and for me, and for all the dead people who had been alive
only yesterday, and finally for herself; and then she asked
why. She was in there for an hour and when she came out I
don't think she'd had an answer.
Nobody here but us chickens, boss. What do you want us
to do now, fricassee ourselves?
Late on the morning of doomsday they had taken a walk
down Broadway, starting from Cantwell's house near the
Columbia campus.
There were a number of laughs to be had from cars in
comical positions, if anybody was in a laughing mood. Some
were standing obediently behind white lines at intersections,
and obviously their drivers had been overtaken during a red
light. With its driver gone, each such car had simply stood
there, its engine dutifully using up all the gas in its tank and
then coughing to a stop. Others had nosed gently into shop
windows, or less gently into other cars or trucks. One truck,
loaded with New Jersey eggs, had overturned and its cargo
was dripping in a yellowy-white puddle. Rolfe, his nose
twitching as if in anticipation of a warm day next week, made
a mental note never to return to that particular spot.
Several times he found a car which had been run up upon
from behind by another. It was as if, knowing they would
never again be manufactured, they were trying copulation.
While Siss was in church Rolfe found a car that had not
idled away all its gas and he made a dry run through the
streets. He discovered that he could navigate pretty well
around the stalled or wrecked cars, though occasionally he
had to drive up on the sidewalk or make a three-block detour
to get back to Broadway.
Then he and Siss, subdued after church, went downtown.
"Whose car is this, Mr. Ralph?" she asked him.
"My car, Siss. Would you like one, too?"
"I can't drive."
"I'll teach you. It may come in handy."
"I was the only one in church," she said. It hadn't got
through to her yet, he thought; not completely.
"Who were you expecting?" he asked kindly.
"God, maybe."
She was gazing straight ahead, clutching her purse in her
lap. She had the expression of a person who had been let
down.
At 72nd Street a beer truck had demolished the box office
of the Trans-Lux movie house and foamy liquid was still
trickling out of it, across the sidewalk and along the gutter
and into a sewer. Rolfe stopped the car and got out. An
aluminum barrel had been punctured. The beer leaking from
it was cool. He leaned over and let it run into his mouth for
a while.
The Trans-Lux had been having a Fellini festival; the pic-
ture was 8V2. On impulse he went inside and came back to
the car with the reels of film in a black tin box. He remem-
bered the way the movie had opened, with all the cars stalled
in traffic. Like Broadway, except that the Italian cars had
people in them. He put the box in the rear of the car and
said: "We'll go to the movies sometime." Siss looked at him
blankly.
At Columbus Circle a Broadway bus had locked horns with
a big van carrying furniture from North Carolina. At 50th
Street a Mustang had nosed gently into the front of a steak
house, as if someone had led it to a hitching post.
He made an illegal left turn at 42nd Street, noting what
was playing at the Rialto: two naughty, daring, sexy, nudie
pix, including a re-run of "My Bare Lady." He didn't stop
 
for that one.
At the old Newsweek Building east of Broadway, an
Impala had butted into the ground-floor liquor store. The
plate glass lay smashed but the bottles in the window were
intact. He made a mental note. Across the street, one flight
up, was the Keppel Folding Boat Company, which had long
intrigued him. Soon it might be useful to unfold one and sail
off to a better place. He marked it in his mind.
Bookstores, 42nd Street style. Dirty books and magazines.
Girly books. Deviant, flagellant, homosexual, Lesbian, sadistic
books. Pornographic classics restored to the common man
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The Kama Sutra, quaint
but lasciviously advertised. Books of nudes for the serious
artist (no retoucher's airbrush here, men!).
Nudie pix in packets, wrapped in pliofilm, at a buck and a
half the set. Large girls in successive states of undress. How
big can a breast be before it disgusts? What is the optimum
bosom size? A cup? D cup? It would depend on the number
to be fed, wouldn't it? And how hungry they were? Or was
that criterion passe?
He looked over at Siss, who wasn't looking at him or the
bookstores or the dirty-movie houses but straight ahead. She
had a nice figure. About a C.
But it was never the body alone; it was the mind that went
with it and the voice with which it spoke.
"What are you thinking, Siss?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said. It was probably true. "What are you
thinking?"
Riposte. How could he tell her?
He improvised. They were passing Bryant Park. "Pigeons
in the park," he said. "I'm thinking of the pigeons. Hungrier
than yesterday because nobody's buying peanuts for them,
bringing slices of bread from home; there's no bread lady
buying bagfuls for them at Horn & Hardart's day-old bakery
shop."
"It's a sad time, isn't it, Mr. Ralph?"
"Yes, Siss; a sad time."
They got to First Avenue and the U.N. There wasn't any-
body there, either.
Notes for a History of the World was what he wrote on
page one of his notebook.
On page two he had alternate titles, some facetious:
The True History of the Martin Rolfe Family on the
Planet Earth; or, Two for Tomorrow.
Recollections of a World Well Lost.
How the Population Crisis Was Solved.
What Next? or, if You Don't Do It, Marty, Who the Hell
Will?
From his notebooks:
Thank God for movies. We'd be outen our minds by now
if I hadn't taught myself to be a projectionist.
Radio City Music Hall apparently's only movie on Con
Ed's EE list. Bit roomy for Siss and me but getting used to it.
Sometimes she sits way down front, I in mezzanine, and we
shout to each other when Gregory Peck does heroic things.
Collected first runs to add to 81/2 from all major Manhat-
tan houses Capitol, Criterion, Cinema I & II, State, etc.so
we have good backlog. Also, if Siss likes, we run it again right
away or next night. I don't mind. Then there are the 42nd St.
houses and the art houses and the nabes & Mod. Museum film
library. Shouldn't run out for a long time.
Days are for exploring and shopping. I go armed because
of the animals. Siss stays home at hotel.
(Why are there animals? Find out. Where find out; how?)
 

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