Vexillologist.

Now the middle of May. The sticks had been cleared from the yard but the new leaves liked to make a heavy sigh in the breezes that came after the storm. Next door Clement, Zetterburg’s neighbor, had run some novel monstrosity up his flagpole, three diagonal stripes of red, gold, and blue against a large square of black at the hoist and a grey half-circle.

―That goddamned provocateur! he said aloud. His breakfast eaten, he stood by the window in the coarse Father’s Day robe of a decade ago, hot cereal bits on his moustache, squinting at the rectangle of fabric. He knows what a fuss it makes! Still he does it every day, and every morning it’s something stranger than before.

―He’s a vexillologist, dear, it’s something of a hobby-horse with him. Mother, in violet pants and a charming blouse already, prematurely grey hair up in an elegant silken knot.

―Vexillologist? Sure he’s vexatious! Ologists and -ists, the whole lot of them, bookish turds living on a kind of common dole for the wussified. I got nothing against a smart man, but any man’s got to be able to trade more’n his wits for his living.

―Dear, you have nothing against, nor on, a smart man—but I think a great deal by one.

―What’s that supposed to mean?

―Only the pension, dear, of our departed son.

Referring to the darling boy whose half-head was jumbled quite extensively by a proton beam he had been mislead about being on as he thrust it (his head) into the beam-path of Karlsruhe University’s cyclotron. The run-up to the war brought him a hero’s status and his parents a comfortable living.

Look at all his devastating injury had afforded them: an abode of brick and stone, fitted inside with oak and cherry; an imperious young swine of a butler named Barthes with mustaches swinging past the border of his face; a motorcar; and the means to go about in it on week-ends, tucked by the hirsute swine into a respectable three-piece suit with the lovely missus in a flirtatious gown on his arm; dinners, opera, club memberships.

While in his room of rich mahogany atop an Eastern rug of the most sublime pile, the son and his viable half-head sat in a wheelchair turned every third hour to a new window, or to an open folio of ribald tales, his favorite, or to the corner so that the young swine could defile the part-time housekeeper without the boy’s glassy eye upon him.

―Anyway, he’s not departed. He’s down the God-damned hall.

―His presence fills a room, she said.

―I can’t even ken what in hell these are for. No foreign country I know of’s heathen enough to decorate their capitols with the ugly things he winds up there.