Harps are self-destructive, incidentally. When I found myself in the harp business at RAMJAC, I had hoped that American Harp had among its assets some wonderful old harps that would turn out to be as valuable as Stradivari's and the Amatis' violins. There was zero chance for this dream's coming true. The tensions in a harp are so tremendous and unrelenting that it becomes unplayable after fifty years and belongs on a dump or in a museum.

I discovered something fascinating about prothonotary warblers, too. They are the only birds that are housebroken in captivity. You would think that the harps would have to be protected from bird droppings by canopies — but not at all!

The warblers deposit their droppings in teacups that are set around. In a state of nature, evidently, they deposit their droppings in other birds' nests. That is what they think the teacups are.

Live and learn!

But back to Mary Kathleen and me among all those harps — with the prothonotary warblers overhead and the police on their way:

"After my husband died, Walter," she said, "I became so unhappy and lost that I turned to alcohol." That husband would have been Jack Graham, the reclusive engineer who had founded The RAMJAC Corporation. He had not built the company from scratch. He had been born a multimillionaire. So far as I knew, of course, she might have been talking about a plumber or a truck driver or a college professor or anyone.

She told about going to a private sanitarium in Louisville, Kentucky, where she was given shock treatments. These blasted all her memories from Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five until Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-five. That would explain why she thought she could still trust me now. Her memories of how callously I had left her, and of my later betrayal of Leland Clewes and all that, had been burned away. She was able to believe that I was still the fiery idealist I had been in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five. She had missed my part in Watergate. Everybody had missed my part in Watergate.

"I had to make up a lot of memories," she went on, "just to fill up all the empty spaces. There had been a war, I knew, and I remembered how much you hated fascism. I saw you on a beach somewhere — on your back, in a uniform, with a rifle, and with the water washing gently around you. Your eyes were wide open, Walter, because you were dead. You were staring straight up at the sun."

We were silent for a moment. A yellow bird far above us warbled as though its heart would break. The song of a prothonotary warbler is notoriously monotonous, as I am the first to admit. I am not about to risk the credibility of my entire tale by claiming that prothonotary warblers rival the Boston Pops Orchestra with their songs. Still — they are capable of expressing heartbreak — within strict limits, of course.

"I've had the same dream of myself," I said. "Many's the time, Mary Kathleen, that I've wished it were true."

"No! No! No!" she protested. "Thank God you're still alive! Thank God there's somebody still alive who cares what happens to this country. I thought maybe I was the last one. I've wandered this city for years now, Walter, saying to myself, They've all died off, the ones who cared.' And then there you were."

"Mary Kathleen," I said, "you should know that I just got out of prison."

"Of course you did!" she said. "All the good people go to prison all the time. Oh, thank God you're still alive! We will remake this country and then the world. I couldn't do it by myself, Walter."

"No — I wouldn't think so," I said.

"I've just been hanging on for dear life," she said. "I haven't been able to do anything but survive. That's how alone I've been. I don't need much help, but I do need some."

"I know the problem," I said.

"I can still see enough to write, if I write big," she said, "but I can't read the stories in newspapers anymore. My eyes — " She said she sneaked into bars and department stores and motel lobbies to listen to the news on television, but that the sets were almost never tuned to the news. Sometimes she would hear a snatch of news on somebody's portable radio, but the person owning it usually switched to music as soon as the news began.

Remembering the news I had heard that morning, about the police dog that ate a baby, I told her that she wasn't really missing much.

"How can I make sensible plans," she said, "if I don't know what's going on?"

"You can't," I said.

"How can you base a revolution on Lawrence Welk and Sesame Street and All in the Family! " she said. All these shows were sponsored by RAMJAC.

"You can't," I said. j

"I need solid information," she; said.

"Of course you do," I said. "We all do."

"It's all such crap," she said. "I find this magazine called People in garbage cans," she said, "but it isn't about people. It's about crap."

This all seemed so pathetic to me: that a shopping-bag lady hoped to plan her scuttlings about the city and her snoozes among ash cans on the basis of what publications and radio and television could tell her about what was really going on.

It seemed pathetic to her, too. "Jackie Onassis and Frank Sinatra and the Cookie Monster and Archie Bunker make their moves," she said, "and then I study what they have done, and then I decide what Mary Kathleen O'Looney had better do.

"But now I have you," she said. "You can be my eyes — and my brains!"

"Your eyes, maybe," I said. "I haven't distinguished myself in the brains department recently."

"Oh — if only Kenneth Whistler were alive, too," she said.

She might as well have said, "If only Donald Duck were alive, too." Kenneth Whistler was a labor organizer who had been my idol in the old days — but I felt nothing about him now, had not thought about him for years.

"What a trio we would make," she went on. "You and me and Kenneth Whistler!"

Whistler would have been a bum, too, by now, I supposed — if he hadn't died in a Kentucky mine disaster in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-one. He had insisted on being a worker as well as a labor organizer, and would have found modern union officials with their soft, pink palms intolerable. I had shaken hands with him. His palm had felt like the back of a crocodile. The lines in his face had had so much coal dust worked into them that they looked like black tattoos. Strangely enough, this was a Harvard man — the class of Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-one.

"Well," said Mary Kathleen, "at least there's still us — and now we can start to make our move."

"I'm always open to suggestions," I said.

"Or maybe it isn't worth it," she said.

She was talking about rescuing the people of the United States from their economy, but I thought she was talking about life in general. So I said of life in general that it probably was worth it, but that it did seem to go on a little too long. My life would have been a masterpiece, for example, if I had died on a beach with a fascist bullet between my eyes.

"Maybe people are just no good anymore," she said. "They all look so mean to me. They aren't like they were during the Depression. I don't see anybody being kind to anybody anymore. Nobody will even speak to me."

She asked me if I had seen any acts of kindness anywhere.

I reflected on this and I realized that I had encountered almost nothing but kindness since leaving prison. I told her so.

"Then it's the way I look," she said. This was surely so. There was a limit to how much reproachful ugliness most people could bear to look at, and Mary Kathleen, and all her shopping-bag sisters had exceeded that limit.

She was eager to know about individual acts of kindness toward me, to have it confirmed that Americans could still be good-hearted. So I was glad to tell her about my first twenty-four hours as a free man, starting with the kindnesses shown to me by Clyde Carter, the guard, and then by Dr. Robert Fender, the supply clerk and science-fiction writer. After that, of course, I was given a ride in a limousine by Cleveland Lawes.