God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Two days later, the people of Rosewater panic. Eliot plans to meet Sylvia at the Bluebird Room. Eliot’s clients believe that Eliot is permanently leaving, and he cannot convince them otherwise. Delbert Peach, who is known for his alcoholism, is Eliot’s first visitor. Peach tells Eliot that, as a gift, he stopped drinking for good 10 minutes prior to his visit. Peach relays a dream that Eliot died, and he then shares his fears that Eliot will never return. Eliot assures him that should he move back to New York to live a privileged life, then a whale would swallow him and spit him back out in Rosewater.

The red telephone rings: Mary Moody is on the line. Eliot yells at her for using the fire department to make a personal call. She hangs up, calls the black telephone, and Eliot answers in a soft voice. She is crying, and Eliot does not understand that he is the one who made her cry, or that it had been her on the red phone.

The Senator arrives. He tells Eliot about the firm’s plan to declare him unfit to run the foundation. Eliot immediately pushes the button for the fire alarm. The noise scares people up to seven miles away. Eliot then admits that he is skeptical about his rationality and has been since he was 10 years old.

They discuss the Kilgore Trout story “Oh Say Can You Smell?” as Eliot cleans up. It is about a country solely focused on “fighting odors.” The hero is a dictator who, unable to remove all odors, gets rid of peoples’ noses instead.

As Eliot bathes, the Senator finds an envelope containing a poem from Eliot to Sylvia, which is now two years old. The poem describes Eliot wanting to trace his finger down Sylvia’s bare stomach, which appalls Senator Lister. Eliot comes out of the bathroom and answers the phone while he is still naked. The woman on the phone tells Eliot she heard something about him on the radio. She says that if he leaves, they will all die. He gives her his word that he will return. The Senator then says that everything Eliot does is calculated to hurt him. When the Senator storms out, the black telephone rings, but Eliot doesn’t answer it.

Eliot forgets about the fight with his father and goes to the lunchroom, where men are talking about money. He goes to Fire Chief Charley Warmergran’s insurance office. Noyes Finnerty is there, a 51-year-old man who went to prison for life after strangling his young wife. Eliot manages to secure his parole, but Noyes never thanks him.

Eliot remembers a Kilgore Trout book about ingratitude called The First District Court of Thankyou. In the book, defendants can choose to publicly thank the plaintiff or endure a month of solitary confinement on bread and water. Eighty percent of them choose the isolation rather than publicly thanking the plaintiff.

Noyes watches Eliot speak with Charley about their experiences dealing with fires. Charley realizes something is wrong when Eliot congratulates him for an award that he won three years prior: The Young Hoosier Horatio Alger Award. When Charley expresses confusion, Noyes says that Eliot only hears “the big click” (235), which is something one learns to hear in prison. The click signals the end of a person’s “unstable” behavior before they enter a period of calm. Noyes leaves, and Eliot says he has never felt better.

Eliot goes to the Saw City Kandy Kitchen and then continues walking. He sees many different people from Rosewater, and they are all distraught at the prospect of him leaving. More than one person thanks him for saving their life.

He buys a ticket to Indianapolis, boards a bus, and sees Diana Moon Glampers outside, dragging a white plastic phone that she smashes in front of him. She tells him that he is everything and that he was the only reason she ever needed a phone.

On the bus, Eliot reads a Trout novel called Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass. It tells the story of Raymond Boyle, a sergeant on a space expedition that reaches the apparent edge of the universe. He is one of the only earthlings and an English teacher who is going because of his skill with language. The chaplain tells him that the Milky Way has died, and he gets a three-day pass to grieve.

The bus stops in Nashville, Indiana. When Eliot gets to Indianapolis, a firestorm is burning the city. He remembers The Bombing of Germany by Hans Rumpf, a book he has hidden in his desk with a passage about the Nazi’s fire-bombing campaign in Dresden. He cannot believe the size of the fire; it looks sacred to him.

Eliot wakes beside a fountain in a garden at Dr. Brown’s private psychiatric hospital. The fountain’s rim bears the words: “Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled” (255). Eliot is dressed in white and holds a tennis racket. A bird sings nearby throughout his visit. He understands that this place could not have escaped the fire, which means there was no fire; it was in his imagination. He accepts this peacefully and wishes he could fly.

Four men in dark suits sit near him: Senator Lister, Dr. Brown, McAllister, and a man Eliot does not immediately recognize. Eliot meant to tell the men something, but he looked up into a tree and forgot what he was going to say. The Senator prompts him, explaining that Eliot announced having a “beautiful” solution to their problem. Eliot has lost 43 pounds and is back to what the Senator calls his “fighting weight” (259). The Senator reminds him that tomorrow, Eliot must prove his mental competency to continue running the foundation.

Eliot notices a rolled-up copy of The American Investigator in his pocket. He sees his picture on the cover, wearing a fire helmet, with the headline: “SANEST MAN IN AMERICA?” (260). In the photo spread, there is an image of Eliot playing tennis. The opposite page shows Fred and Mushari, who is wearing an expensive gold watch chain. Mushari says the hearing has been delayed seven times, and he wants satisfaction for his clients.

There are two pictures of Sylvia. One shows her dancing with Peter Lawford in Paris. In the other, she is entering a nunnery under a code of silence. Eliot hears his father address the stranger in the garden as Mr. Trout. Eliot does not recognize Trout without his book jacket beard. Prior, Eliot asked his father to bring Trout to the garden. Eliot checks the date on the paper and realizes that a year has passed since his admittance to the psychiatric hospital.

Trout admires Eliot. He tells him that his work with the volunteer fire department is an example of “people treasuring people as people” (266). He also says that Eliot’s work in Rosewater is one of the purest examples of altruism he has ever seen. Eliot has given Trout hope that cruelty and greed need not be part of the human experience. When Eliot asks Trout why he shaved off his beard, Trout responds, “Think of the sacrilege of a Jesus figure redeeming stamps” (266).

The Senator explains that 57 Rosewater women have recently alleged that Eliot is the father of their children. McAllister says that Mushari bribed the women—and other townspeople—to disparage Eliot falsely. Eliot asks each of them to swear that he is rational and they agree. He writes a check to Fred for $1 million. The Senator and McAllister insist that the sum is too large, so Eliot rewrites a check for $100,000. Eliot asks whether the hearing would be dismissed if he had an heir. Elated, the Senator confirms that an heir would discredit Fred’s claim. Eliot then alleges that the 57 children are his, although this is not true. He orders that their last names be changed to Rosewater and that they gain full rights to his inheritance, thereby preventing Fred and Mushari from accessing the Rosewater fortune. In closing, Eliot blesses his children: “Let their names be Rosewater from this moment on. And tell them that their father loves them, no matter what they may turn out to be. And tell them […] to be fruitful and multiply” (272).