At my recital of these quantities, my wife gave a high laugh and turned away from me, as if to hide tears of discouragement, for I knew that she could not imagine any benefactor wealthy enough to be willing to pay for such an undertaking. And we both knew that we could not request the gift of these hope chests and their contents from my impoverished brethren, my fellow coffin-makers who were now so scattered in the land as to be hopelessly out of contact with one another and quite incapable of a cooperative endeavor of these proportions, even had we been able to pay for the materials ourselves.
I then resolved that the cost of the hope chests and the contents therein might be borne by those wealthy citizens who seemed frequently to be willing, when properly approached, to finance the causes of the underprivileged among them, a surprisingly large group of ladies and gentlemen who, when they believe that most of the fashionable others in their class are supporting a particular cause, will themselves support that cause without question or stint. What was needed were a group of money collectors, a person able to arrange the appropriate publicity, an accountant or two to attend to the financial details and to keep scrupulous track of all funds, also an attorney, secretaries, an office of some sort, an executive director, and a board of directors. And we would need these people and facilities in the reverse order of their naming, for, once we had invited several prominent philanthropists to serve on our board of directors, which invitation, by the flattery of being singled out, they would eagerly accept, we would then be able to hire an executive director at a salary consistent with his or her responsibilities, and once we had hired an executive director, we would be able to hire the necessary secretarial help to take care of the paperwork that would commence to arrive once the newly hired attorney had filed for the incorporation charter and with it the plea for exemption from taxation, which would not be granted by the tax authority, of course, until we had procured the services of several accountants and clerks so as to keep our records in a satisfactory way, at which point we would be ready to hire the publicist, and as soon as he or she had begun his or her work, we would hire a battalion of collectors to begin calling on the numerous individuals who wished to support our particular cause.
My wife now grew exceedingly excited, and she showed me that the most important link in this chain was the post of executive director, for that person would be required not only to arrange and bear the responsibility for all the contributions coming in, but also for all the expenditures, the half-ton of cotton batting, the two and one-third miles of pine board, the thousands of yards of red velvet cloth, and the purchase of the blankets, linens, clothing, &c., and also that person would bear the responsibility of letting out the contracts to the numerous cabinet makers and woodworkers for the manufacture of our three hundred eighty-seven hope chests, a tedious task and one that could only be performed by someone close to me, so that it could be guaranteed that my specifications for the hope chest would be followed exactly.
Who could such a person be? we asked ourselves. My wife did not think that she would be incapable of the job, but I disagreed, for it did seem to me that, because of her longtime association with me and my heresy, it might be thought by the philanthropists, if she were the titular head of the organization, that they were coming out in support of my particular crime of heresy. No, I told her, they would not wish to have their endorsement of the cause of benevolence towards prisoners in general be construed as supporting any crime or prisoner in particular. And besides, I said to her, you are frail and weakly, and the demands of such a position would be beyond your capacities. She protested nobly, but I was eventually able to convince her of the foolhardiness of her desire to place herself in that position, however well-intended that desire. Next we considered her cousin Gina for the post, but again, I argued persuasively that Gina’s association with the crime for which I had been imprisoned was almost as close as my wife’s, especially since she had been coming to visit only me and no other prisoner for these last several months. We also considered several among the brethren who had not been imprisoned or who were not in any way known for their past or present practice of the various rites associated with our faith, but these too we had to dismiss, for the obvious reason that to organize and operate a philanthropic organization such as we were proposing would be to rip into shreds the careful fabric of invisibility that the brethren had woven in the last year. And naturally there was no imaginable way for me myself, condemned and immobilized as I then was, to direct the soliciting of funds and the expenditure thereof. And so, by gradual degrees, I began again to slip into despondency.
But I was not to remain despondent, for it shortly occurred to my wife to suggest to me the name of Jacob Moon, and immediately the gloom lifted and all was clear and bright again. For Jacob Moon was the perfect man for the job, and he would think so quite as much as we, I assured my wife. The responsibilities and tasks such a post would place before him would not leave him gaping in awe or trembling with unsureness. Jacob Moon was a man of the world, and though in a certain way, because he was so much a man of the world, I pitied him, still and all, it gave him a definite facility for working efficiently and effectively in the world. He was a living demonstration of the only aspect of being a man of time that could in any way be rationalized as a benefit of that condition, for while it is not true that every man who is able to function efficiently and effectively in the world is, ipso facto, not a man of the eternal dead, it never the less is true that every man of time, if he does not agonize over his condition and fight against it, will turn out eventually to be one of our nation’s fine administrators, technicians or government functionaries. These people, because they cannot trust to luck or fate or to any of the various forces that transcend their own mortal lives, are forced thereby early in life to cultivate and refine to an amazing degree their skills and the quality of their attention to the ways of the world, with the result that they often become the men and women who are great in the eyes of the world. Only the dead, and those who worship the dead, do not envy them. The scripture says, Envy not the living. Cast not your eyes with longing upon their heaped up wealth and worldly honors, for they are but the wages of inattention to the dead, the fruits of a season lived as if it were endless. (I Trib., ix, 9.) And (I Trib., xxii, 30): Look unto the heavens, and let your feet fall where they may. Whether the road be smooth or rocky matters not to them, nor should it matter to you.