Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (10 page)

“Now then: The gestation period for a ‘possum is twelve days. The gestation period for an Indian elephant is twenty-two months. The gestation period for American liberty, friends and neighbors, turns out to be two hundred years and more!

“Only in my own lifetime has there been serious talk of giving women and racial minorities anything like economic, legal, and social equality. Let liberty be born at last, and let its lusty birth cries be heard in Kingston and in every other city and town and village and hamlet in this vast and wealthy nation, not in Jefferson’s time but in the time of the youngest people here this afternoon. Somewhere I heard a baby cry. It should cry for joy.

“Hooray for the Class of 1990 and those who helped them make America stronger by becoming educated citizens.

“I thank you for your attention.”

(Rhode Island was the first of the Thirteen Colonies to advocate and implement the right of its citizens to worship or not worship however they pleased.)

Jill Krementz is an Episcopalian (although she goes to church rarely) and I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in churches quite a lot). So when we decided to get married in 1979, having lived together for several years, there seemed a smorgasbord of sacred and secular venues in which we might become as one, so to speak. Since we had met during the production of a play of mine, I suggested that the magic spell be cast at what was said to be the actors’ church, “The Little Church Around the Corner,” which (hey, presto!) was also Episcopalian, down on Twenty-ninth Street, just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The darling church won its quaint name and reputation for liking theater people in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Joseph Jefferson (author and star of
Rip Van Winkle)
asked to be married in a high Anglican church a couple of blocks north of Twenty-ninth and right on Fifth Avenue. He was told politely that actors were known to be more casual morally than members of that particular congregation, so why didn’t he “try the little church around the corner.” He did.

So then I did, and never have I caught more hell for having been divorced! (The fact that I was connected with the theater won me no sympathy. Neither did the fact that Jill was a lifelong friend of Paul Moore, the Episcopal Bishop of New York.) It was a woman we talked to. She was obviously powerful, but this was before any women had been ordained. She could be a priest now, and my having divorced my first wife was the most unforgivable thing she had ever heard. (When they got around to ordaining women, one of the first would have this improbable name: Tanya Vonnegut. She was the wife of a cousin of mine, and a great beauty and no doubt an inspiring priest.)

We could get married at The Little Church Around the Corner, according to the battle-axe we spoke to, if I joined the church and did penance with church work, which might include teaching Sunday school. So we put on our show at Christ Church United Methodist up at Sixtieth and Park. (I don’t remember how we happened to choose that one. We may have discussed church architecture with Brendan Gill of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.) There were no snags there. The whole thing went through like a dose of salts, as the saying goes.

(Except that the minister and I would become good friends, and he would invite me to say a few words during a Christmas Eve service along with the comedian Joey Adams, and he and the congregation would eventually come to a parting of the ways, and one of his offenses, supposedly, was having lent the pulpit to a known atheist, who was me and not Joey Adams. He has another church now, and we correspond some about spiritual matters, and he came to the world premiere of Edgar Grana’s and my requiem mass in Buffalo.)

Jill and I had our reception at the Regency Hotel, only a block north of the church. (If you have your reception at the Regency, including the cake, they throw in the bridal suite for the night; my grandchildren were stashed there during the ceremony.) That was eleven years ago now, and our understanding then was that I had had enough children (three of my own and three adopted nephews). But after a while we adopted a darling infant (three days old) named Lily, who has become my principal companion. (She will be a lazy artist when she grows up, since I celebrate every creation of hers as though it were Michelangelo’s
Pietà
or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.)

Jill turned fifty this year and Lily is about to turn eight. I gave Jill a birthday party and also presented her with a Festschrift, a collection of sentimental essays and poems and jokes and salutations from friends and relatives. (I also told her that she was by far the oldest woman I had ever lived with.) My preface to the Festschrift began:

“To whom it may concern:

“Find here an artifact from the first year of the last decade of the second thousand years since the birth of Jesus Christ, a celebration on paper of the fiftieth birthday of my dear gifted wife Jill Krementz on February 19, 1990, a Monday. A dinner party for about fifty of her friends and relatives was held that night at Tavern on the Green in Central Park on the Island of Manhattan.

“Jill was born on that same island, but was raised, the daughter of Virginia and Walter Krementz, in Morristown, New Jersey. On the day she was born I myself was a senior at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, who would enter Cornell University in the fall to study chemistry. Pearl Harbor would be bombed when I was nineteen and she was two months shy of being two.

“At fifty Jill looked and acted like an idealized heiress to a great American fortune who was perhaps thirty-two. She in fact went to private schools and vacationed with heirs and heiresses, but would never be one herself. Everything she owned at fifty she earned as a photographer and a creator of books for children (e.g.,
A Very Young Dancer)
and books about children experiencing profound distress (e.g.,
How It Feels When a Parent Dies).

“We met in 1970 during the production of my play
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village. She had by then worked her way around the world, become the first female staff photographer for a New York daily paper, the
Herald Tribune,
spent a year taking photographs in South Vietnam with the war going on, and published an ethnographic and photographic masterpiece,
Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South,
dedicated to one of her teachers, who was Margaret Mead. But she was living in, shall we say, something less than Buckingham Palace. She was four flights up and no elevator, over a delicatessen on First Avenue just below Fifty-fourth Street.

“She told me about one would-be swain, and I guess there were a lot of those, who could not even say hello for ten minutes after climbing those stairs.

“Jill was born on the cusp between the signs of Aquarius the Water Bearer and Pisces the Fishes. She was born to be a good swimmer, if a lazy one, and to prefer water to wine. The most significant cusp in her case, though, was the one which separated virtual patriarchy in this country from the Women’s Liberation Movement. It coincided with Jill’s blossoming into womanhood. So she dared to behave in the workplace and during business transactions as though her gender, despite her sensational good looks, were immaterial. Whatever a man got in the way of pay and respect for doing approximately what she did, she wanted, too. She usually got it, causing not a few people to remark that she was unladylike.

“After graduating from the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in 1958, Jill made Manhattan and then the whole world her university. Whatever the lesson, she earned her own way, at first accepting any sort of office work which would put her among editors and journalists. She took only one formal university course, which was in anthropology at Columbia.

“Before that her particular heroine was Margaret Bourke-White, who took all the chances that male photographers were taking for
Life
magazine, and whose pictures were as good as or better than theirs. Margaret Mead was Jill’s second heroine, and thus did she become, long before I met her, not only a photojournalist but a first-rate social scientist. She had to wait until she was almost fifty, and so did I, for thoughtful people of academic influence to look at all the books that she had created for or about Americans under the age of sixteen and realize that she had few peers in her understanding of the pains and satisfactions of growing up.

“We could be thankful on her fiftieth birthday, moreover, that her education had been so informal. She had no choice, praise God, but to accept what young people had to say about life at face value, since she was without training which would have empowered her to explain and interpret and footnote simply everything. All she felt entitled to do was record what the kids said, for better or for worse, and take their photographs.

“Her books aren’t theory. They are evidence, take it or leave it, wholly organic, growing out of the topsoil of this moist, blue-green planet like an apple tree.

“Scientists of the future will want to know if any of the photographs of Jill in this book have been retouched. No. Let them explain, if they can, why it was that the older she was the more beautiful she became.”

The Festschrift ended with this clever sonnet, “To Jill Turning Fifty,” by one of Jill’s favorite photographic subjects, the man of letters John Updike:

John Updike lectured in Indianapolis soon after Jill’s fiftieth birthday. Before he went, he asked me what he should know about the city of my birth. I said that I myself had become a stranger there when Jill was an itty-bitty baby. “I get invited out there to lecture, too,” I said, “and when I go I don’t feel as though I’m going home.” It was one more nice enough American city where nice people would come to hear me. There would be some people who knew me from long ago, or whose parents did, but that could happen to Updike, too. I didn’t have to go to my hometown for that to be the case, and neither did he. I had met old high school classmates or their children in San Diego, in Portland, Oregon, in Iowa City, in Manhattan.

(The sublime actress Meryl Streep, whom I had never met, came up to me in a movie theater lobby one time to tell me that she had been the roommate at Vassar of the daughter of a girl I used to date in high school.)

The Class of 1940 of Shortridge High School had its Fiftieth Reunion recently, and those in charge sent out a list of members who had vanished entirely as far as Indianapolis was concerned. I was able to report back that one of them was anything but a ghost to fellow biochemists in Boston, where he was an expert on the aging process. Another, I wrote, was a good deal more than a memory to music people in New York City, since he was a manager of the musical estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.

(I didn’t go to the reunion. I was afraid of it because, like everybody else, I had had some really lousy times in high school. I probably would have gone anyway and had a swell time and lots of laughs. But then I was lucky enough to come down with the disease of the moment in the Hamptons, which was Lyme disease. I get sick only when it’s useful, knock on wood. Viral pneumonia got me out of trying to be a chemist in 1942.I went briefly apeshit in the 1980s in an effort to get out of life entirely, and wound up playing Eightball in a locked ward for thirty days instead.)

I told John that Indianapolis, as far as I knew, was the only human settlement in all of history whose location was determined by a pen and a straightedge. The new State of Indiana was approximately a rectangle, but with a jagged bottom edge which had been scrawled by water obeying gravity, not by men. Men next drew on a map a great X, connecting the corners of the new state with diagonals. Where the diagonals intersected, no matter what was there, there would be the capital, whose name was to be Indianapolis. And it came to pass. (There was no navigable waterway there for cheap transportation, but the railroads would find it quick enough.)

The city-to-be was laid out on featureless land as flat as a pool table (Eightball, anybody?), according to a plan by the French-born architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who had designed yet another arbitrarily chosen capital, Washington, D.C. “John,” I said, “it is an infinitely expandable chessboard of identical squares, each block one-tenth of a mile long, with all streets running exactly east and west or north and south, and with a circle in the middle.” (Shades of the Euclidean idealism of the French Revolution, whose child I sometimes think I am.)

I used to be a halfway decent chess player (until my brains turned to tapioca). When telling John about a city he had never seen, I realized that it really was like a chessboard on which games were played out, with this piece gone and then that one (me and my big brother and my sister and our parents all leaving the board in one match). And then the pieces were set up again, but with new identities. I gave John the names of some of the more famous persons, past and present, who had been pieces on that board. “James Whitcomb Riley,” I said, “Charles Manson, Richard Lugar, Steve McQueen, Dan Quayle, Kin Hubbard, Booth Tarkington, Jane Pauley, the Reverend Jim Jones of Kool-Aid fame.” (I added that George Bush’s making Dan Quayle the custodian of our nation’s destiny, should Bush become seriously impaired, was proof to me that Bush didn’t give a damn what became of the rest of us once he himself was gone. There’s a bomber pilot for you.)