Cat's Cradle (10 page)

In 1922, he sought shelter from a hurricane in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which country was then occupied by United States Marines.

Johnson was approached there by a brilliant, self-educated, idealistic Marine deserter named Earl McCabe. McCabe was a corporal. He had just stolen his company’s recreation fund. He offered Johnson five hundred dollars for transportation to Miami.

The two set sail for Miami.

But a gale hounded the schooner onto the rocks of San Lorenzo. The boat went down. Johnson and McCabe, absolutely naked, managed to swim ashore. As Bokonon himself reports the adventure:

He was enchanted by the mystery of coming ashore naked on an unfamiliar island. He resolved to let the adventure run its full course, resolved to see just how far a man might go, emerging naked from salt water.

It was a rebirth for him:

How he came by the name of Bokonon was very simple. “Bokonon” was the pronunciation given the name Johnson in the island’s English dialect.

As for that dialect …

The dialect of San Lorenzo is both easy to understand and difficult to write down. I say it is easy to understand, but I speak only for myself. Others have found it as incomprehensible as Basque, so my understanding of it may be telepathic.

Philip Castle, in his book, gave a phonetic demonstration of the dialect and caught its flavor very well. He chose for his sample the San Lorenzan version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

In American English, one version of that immortal poem goes like this:

In San Lorenzan dialect, according to Castle, the same poem went like this:

Shortly after Johnson became Bokonon, incidentally, the lifeboat of his shattered ship was found on shore. That boat was later painted gold and made the bed of the island’s chief executive.

“There is a legend, made up by Bokonon,” Philip Castle wrote in his book, “that the golden boat will sail again when the end of the world is near.”

M
Y READING
of the life of Bokonon was interrupted by H. Lowe Crosby’s wife, Hazel. She was standing in the aisle next to me. “You’ll never believe it,” she said, “but I just found two more Hoosiers on this airplane.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“They weren’t born Hoosiers, but they
live
there now. They live in Indianapolis.”

“Very interesting.”

“You want to meet them?”

“You think I should?”

The question baffled her. “They’re your fellow Hoosiers.”

“What are their names?”

“Her name is Conners and his name is Hoenikker. They’re brother and sister, and he’s a midget. He’s a nice midget, though.” She winked. “He’s a smart little thing.”

“Does he call you Mom?”

“I almost asked him to. And then I stopped, and I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be rude to ask a midget to do that.”

“Nonsense.”

S
O
I
WENT AFT
to talk to Angela Hoenikker Conners and little Newton Hoenikker, members of my
karass
.

Angela was the horse-faced platinum blonde I had noticed earlier.

Newt was a very tiny young man indeed, though not grotesque. He was as nicely scaled as Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, and as shrewdly watchful, too.

He held a glass of champagne, which was included in the price of his ticket. That glass was to him what a fishbowl would have been to a normal man, but he drank from it with elegant ease—as though he and the glass could not have been better matched.

The little son of a bitch had a crystal of
ice-nine
in a thermos bottle in his luggage, and so did his miserable sister, while under us was God’s own amount of water, the Caribbean Sea.

When Hazel had got all the pleasure she could from introducing Hoosiers to Hoosiers, she left us alone. “Remember,” she said as she left us, “from now on, call me
Mom.”

“O.K., Mom,” I said.

“O.K., Mom,” said Newt. His voice was fairly high, in keeping with his little larynx. But he managed to make that voice distinctly masculine.

Angela persisted in treating Newt like an infant—and he forgave her for it with an amiable grace I would have thought impossible for one so small.

Newt and Angela remembered me, remembered the letters I’d written, and invited me to take the empty seat in their group of three.

Angela apologized to me for never having answered my letters.

“I couldn’t think of anything to say that would interest anybody reading a book. I could have made up something about that day, but I didn’t think you’d want that. Actually, the day was just like a regular day.”

“Your brother here wrote me a very good letter.”

Angela was surprised. “Newt did? How could Newt remember anything?” She turned to him. “Honey, you don’t remember anything about that day, do you? You were just a baby.”

“I remember,” he said mildly.

“I wish I’d
seen
the letter.” She implied that Newt was still too immature to deal directly with the outside world. Angela was a God-awfully insensitive woman, with no feeling for what smallness meant to Newt.

“Honey, you should have showed me that letter,” she scolded.

“Sorry,” said Newt. “I didn’t think.”

“I might as well tell you,” Angela said to me, “Dr. Breed told me I wasn’t supposed to co-operate with you. He said you weren’t interested in giving a fair picture of Father.” She showed me that she didn’t like me for that.

I placated her some by telling her that the book would probably never be done anyway, that I no longer had a clear idea of what it would or should mean.

“Well, if you ever
do
do the book, you better make Father a saint, because that’s what he was.”

I promised that I would do my best to paint that picture. I asked if she and Newt were bound for a family reunion with Frank in San Lorenzo.

“Frank’s getting married,” said Angela. “We’re going to the engagement party.”

“Oh? Who’s the lucky girl?”

“I’ll show you,” said Angela, and she took from her purse a billfold that contained a sort of plastic accordion. In each of the accordion’s pleats was a photograph. Angela flipped through the photographs, giving me glimpses of little Newt on a Cape Cod beach, of Dr. Felix Hoenikker accepting his Nobel Prize, of Angela’s own homely twin girls, of Frank flying a model plane on the end of a string.

And then she showed me a picture of the girl Frank was going to marry.

She might, with equal effect, have struck me in the groin.

The picture she showed me was of Mona Aamons Monzano, the woman I loved.

O
NCE
A
NGELA HAD OPENED
her plastic accordion, she was reluctant to close it until someone had looked at every photograph.

“There are the people I love,” she declared.

So I looked at the people she loved. What she had trapped in plexiglass, what she had trapped like fossil beetles in amber, were the images of a large part of our
karass
. There wasn’t a
granfallooner
in the collection.

There were many photographs of Dr. Hoenikker, father of a bomb, father of three children, father of
ice-nine
. He was a little person, the purported sire of a midget and a giantess.

My favorite picture of the old man in Angela’s fossil collection showed him all bundled up for winter, in an overcoat, scarf, galoshes, and a wool knit cap with a big pom-pom on the crown.

This picture, Angela told me, with a catch in her throat, had been taken in Hyannis just about three hours before the old man died. A newspaper photographer had recognized the seeming Christmas elf for the great man he was.

“Did your father die in the hospital?”

“Oh, no! He died in our cottage, in a big white
wicker chair facing the sea. Newt and Frank had gone walking down the beach in the snow …”

“It was a very warm snow,” said Newt. “It was almost like walking through orange blossoms. It was very strange. Nobody was in any of the other cottages …”

“Ours was the only one with heat,” said Angela.

“Nobody within miles,” recalled Newt wonderingly, “and Frank and I came across this big black dog out on the beach, a Labrador retriever. We threw sticks into the ocean and he brought them back.”

“I’d gone back into the village for more Christmas tree bulbs,” said Angela. “We always had a tree.”

“Did your father enjoy having a Christmas tree?”

“He never said,” said Newt.

“I think he liked it,” said Angela. “He just wasn’t very demonstrative. Some people aren’t.”

“And some people are,” said Newt. He gave a small shrug.

“Anyway,” said Angela, “when we got back home, we found him in the chair.” She shook her head. “I don’t think he suffered any. He just looked asleep. He couldn’t have looked like that if there’d been the least bit of pain.”

She left out an interesting part of the story. She left out the fact that it was on that same Christmas Eve that she and Frank and little Newt had divided up the old man’s
ice-nine
.

A
NGELA ENCOURAGED ME
to go on looking at snapshots.

“That’s me, if you can believe it.” She showed me an adolescent girl six feet tall. She was holding a clarinet in the picture, wearing the marching uniform of the Ilium High School band. Her hair was tucked up under a bandsman’s hat. She was smiling with shy good cheer.

And then Angela, a woman to whom God had given virtually nothing with which to catch a man, showed me a picture of her husband.

“So that’s Harrison C. Conners.” I was stunned. Her husband was a strikingly handsome man, and looked as though he knew it. He was a snappy dresser, and had the lazy rapture of a Donjuán about the eyes.

“What—what does he do?” I asked.

“He’s president of Fabri-Tek.”

“Electronics?”

“I couldn’t tell you, even if I knew. It’s all very secret government work.”

“Weapons?”

“Well, war anyway.”

“How did you happen to meet?”

“He used to work as a laboratory assistant to Father,” said Angela. “Then he went out to Indianapolis and started Fabri-Tek.”

“So your marriage to him was a happy ending to a long romance?”

“No. I didn’t even know he knew I was alive. I used to think he was nice, but he never paid any attention to me until after Father died.

“One day he came through Ilium. I was sitting around that big old house, thinking my life was over….” She spoke of the awful days and weeks that followed her father’s death. “Just me and little Newt in that big old house. Frank had disappeared, and the ghosts were making ten times as much noise as Newt and I were. I’d given my whole life to taking care of Father, driving him to and from work, bundling him up when it was cold, unbundling him when it was hot, making him eat, paying his bills. Suddenly, there wasn’t anything for me to do. I’d never had any close friends, didn’t have a soul to turn to but Newt.

“And then,” she continued, “there was a knock on the door—and there stood Harrison Conners. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He came in, and we talked about Father’s last days and about old times in general.”

Angela almost cried now.

“Two weeks later, we were married.”

R
ETURNING TO MY OWN SEAT
in the plane, feeling far shabbier for having lost Mona Aamons Monzano to Frank, I resumed my reading of Philip Castle’s manuscript.

I looked up
Monzano, Mona Aamons
in the index, and was told by the index to see
Aamons, Mona
.

So I saw
Aamons, Mona
, and found almost as many page references as I’d found after the name of “Papa” Monzano himself.

And after
Aamons, Mona
came
Aamons, Nestor
. So I turned to the few pages that had to do with Nestor, and learned that he was Mona’s father, a native Finn, an architect.

Nestor Aamons was captured by the Russians, then liberated by the Germans during the Second World War. He was not returned home by his liberators, but was forced to serve in a
Wehrmacht
engineer unit that was sent to fight the Yugoslav partisans. He was captured by Chetniks, royalist Serbian partisans, and then by Communist partisans who attacked the
Chetniks. He was liberated by Italian parachutists who surprised the Communists, and he was shipped to Italy.

The Italians put him to work designing fortifications for Sicily. He stole a fishing boat in Sicily, and reached neutral Portugal.

While there, he met an American draft dodger named Julian Castle.

Castle, upon learning that Aamons was an architect, invited him to come with him to the island of San Lorenzo and to design for him a hospital to be called the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.

Aamons accepted. He designed the hospital, married a native woman named Celia, fathered a perfect daughter, and died.

A
S FOR THE LIFE
of
Aamons, Mona
, the index itself gave a jangling, surrealistic picture of the many conflicting forces that had been brought to bear on her and of her dismayed reactions to them.