Sarah Vowell - Assassination Vacation

Also by Sarah Vowell

The Partly Cloudy Patriot
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Copyright 2005 by Sarah Vowell
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vowell, Sarah.
Assassination vacation / Sarah Vowell.
p. cm.
1. Presidents United States Assassination. 2. Presidents United States Biography. 3. Presidents Homes and haunts United States. 4. Assassins United States Biography. 5. Assassins Homes and haunts United States. 6. Historic sites United States. 7. United States History, local. 8. United States Description and travel. 9. Vowell, Sarah Travel United States. I. Title.
E176.1.V89 2005 973.099 dc22
[B] 2004059134

ISBN 0-7432-8253-1

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In the Middle Ages, relics spawned a continentwide craze. Devotees packed their bags and streamed out of towns and villages, thronging the pilgrimage trails. For most, a journey to see the relic of St. Thomas or St. James offered the only valid excuse for leaving home.

The real Lincoln exists in my mind, Pris said.

I was astonished. You dont believe that. What do you mean by saying that? You mean you have the idea in your mind.

She cocked her head on one side and eyed me. No, Louis. I really have Lincoln in my mind. And Ive been working night after night to transfer him out of my mind, back into the outside world.

Thats what writing is. Youre keeping people alive in your head.

Contents

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes. There they were John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz in tune and in the flesh. The men who murdered Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were elbow to elbow with Lee Harvey Oswald and the klutzy girls who botched their hits on klutzy Gerald Ford, harmonizing on a toe-tapper called Everybodys Got the Right to Be Happy, a song I cheerfully hummed walking back to the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying.

Not that I came all the way from New York City just to enjoy a chorus line of presidential assassins. Mostly, I came to the Berkshires because of the man who brought one of those presidents back to life. I was there to visit Chesterwood, the house and studio once belonging to Daniel Chester French, the artist responsible for the Abraham Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial. A nauseating four-hour bus ride from the Port Authority terminal just to see the room where some patriotic chiseler came up with a marble statue? For some reason, none of my friends wanted to come with.

Because I had to stay overnight and this being New England, the only place to stay was a bed-and-breakfast. It was a lovely old country mansion operated by amiable people. That said, I am not a bed - and - breakfast person.

I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. Theyre pretty. Theyre personal. Theyre quaint, a polite way of saying no TV. They are romantic, i.e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. Theyre cozy, meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.

The real reason bed-and-breakfasts make me nervous is breakfast. As if its not queasy enough to stay in a strangers home and sleep in a bed bedecked with nineteen pillows. In the morning, the usually cornflake-consuming, wheat-intolerant guest is served floury baked goods on plates so fancy any normal person would keep them locked in the china cabinet even if Queen Victoria herself rose from the dead and showed up for tea. The guest, normally a silent morning reader of newspapers, is expected to chat with the other strangers staying in the strangers home.

At my Berkshires bed-and-breakfast, I am seated at a table with one middle-aged Englishman and an elderly couple from Greenwich, Connecticut. The three of them make small talk about golf, the weather, and the rooms chandeliers, one of which, apparently, is Venetian. I cannot think of a thing to say to these people. Seated at the head of the table, I am the black hole of breakfast, a silent void of gloom sucking the sunshine out of their neighborly New England day. But that is not the kind of girl my mother raised me to be. I consider asking the Connecticut couple if they had ever run into Jack Paar, who I heard had retired near where they live, but I look like I was born after Paar quit hosting The Tonight Show (because I was) and so Id have to explain how much I like watching tapes of old programs at the Museum of Television and Radio and I dont want to get too personal.

It seems that all three of them attended a Boston Pops concert at Tanglewood the previous evening, and they chat about the conductor. This, I think, is my in. I, too, enjoy being entertained.

Relieved to have something, anything, to say, I pipe up, I went to the Berkshire Theatre Festival last night.

Oh, did you see Peter Pan ? the woman asks.

No, I say. Assassins!

Whats that? wonders the Englishman.

To make up for the fact that Ive been clammed up and moping I speak too fast, merrily chirping, Its the Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president.

Oh, remarks Mr. Connecticut. How was it?

Oh my god, I gush. Even though the actors were mostly college kids, I thought it was great! The orange-haired guy who played the man who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in my direction I could feel myself blush. Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of Television and Radio is too personal, but I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.

Now, a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfasts teapot collection, they probably didnt want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when Im around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. Im dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, its 1980. Once I erupt, theyll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.

I continue. But the main thing that surprised me was how romantic Assassins was.