Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (2 page)

The General asked my name but otherwise made no comment. I am sure, though, that he made a record of the incident, as he should have, and that his report shadowed me, as it should have, during my subsequent three years as a full-time soldier, ensuring that I, until the very end, would never rise above the rank of Private First Class. It served me right, and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. (A half-educated PFC has so much to
think
about!)

When the war was over (forty-five years ago!), I like everybody else was entitled to wear a badge and several ribbons which were militarily correct and respectable. It is my wry satisfaction now, since I know what I did to deserve such ornaments, to regard them as no more meaningful than the borrowed trinkets I wore at that fateful ROTC inspection so long ago. The joke at the beginning was the joke at the end. How was that for foreshadowing?

And who goes to an Ivy League school in order to become a permanent PFC? I did. (So did Norman Mailer. He has his own tale to tell.)

It was a tradition in the Indianapolis branch of our once large and cohesive family that we should go east to college but then come back to Indianapolis. My Uncle Alex went to Harvard, and his first assignment was to write an essay about why he had chosen to study there. His opening sentence, he told me, was, “I came to Harvard because my big brother is at MIT.”

His big brother was my father, Kurt Sr., who was then studying architecture. Many years later, when I joined the Army as an unpromotable PFC, my father would say, “Good! They will teach you to be neat!” (He could be very funny, but he wasn’t funny that time. He was grim. That is how messy I was, I guess.) He died eventually, and in an act of Freudian cannibalism, I dropped the “Jr.” from my name. (Thus in lists of my works do I appear to be both my father and my son, Kurt Vonnegut and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.) I had this to say about him in
Architectural Digest:

“When my father was sixty-five and I was twenty-seven, I said to him, thinking him a very old man, that it must have been fun for him to be an architect. He replied unexpectedly that it had been no fun at all, since architecture had everything to do with accounting and nothing to do with art. I felt that he had mousetrapped me, since he had encouraged me up until that moment to believe that architecture for him had indeed been a lark.

“I now perceive his deception, so suddenly discontinued, as having been a high order of gallantry. While my two siblings and I were growing up, he gave us the illusion that our father was jauntily content with his professional past and excited about all the tough but amusing challenges still to come. The truth was that the Great Depression and then World War II, during which almost all building stopped, came close to gutting him as an architect. From the time he was forty-five until he was sixty-one he had almost no work. In prosperous times those would have been his best years, when his evident gifts, reputation, and maturity might have caused some imaginative client to feel that Father was entitled to reach, even in Indianapolis, for greatness or, if you will, for soul-deep fun.

“I am not about to speak of soup kitchens, much in the news again of late. We never missed a meal during the Great Depression. But Father had to close down his office, started up by
his
father, the first licensed architect in Indiana, and let his six employees go. Small jobs still came his way now and then, jobs so uninteresting, I now understand, that they would have been soporific to a high school drafting class. If we hadn’t needed the money, Father might have said what I heard him say to a would-be client after World War II, when prosperity had returned to the land: ‘Why don’t you get some pencils and squared paper, and see what you and your wife can do?’ He said this pleasantly. He was trying to be helpful.

“During the war he stopped being an architect entirely, and went to work in inventory control at the Atkins Saw Company, which was making weapons of some sort, maybe bayonets. It was then that his wife died. It became clear to him, too, that none of his three children would live in Indianapolis when the war was over. We would be following careers which would require us to live far away. So he was all but gutted yet again.

“When prosperity, but not his children, returned to Indianapolis, Father became a partner of much younger men in a new architectural firm. His reputation was still excellent, and he was one of the most universally loved men in town, a founder, by the way, of the city’s now world-famous Children’s Museum. He was especially admired for his design of the Bell Telephone headquarters on North Meridian Street, a project conceived before the stock market crash.

“After the war, Bell Telephone resolved to add more floors to the building, their exteriors to be identical with those of the eight below. They hired another architect, although Father was not senile or alcoholic or in any other way impaired. To Bell Telephone, an architect was an architect. Bell got the job done and it looked OK. So much for the romance of architecture.

“Father retired alone to Brown County, Indiana, soon after that, to spend the rest of his life as a potter. He built his own potter’s wheel. He died down there in the hills in 1957, at the age of seventy-two.

“When I try to remember now what he was like when I was growing up and he had so little satisfying work to do, I see him as Sleeping Beauty, dormant in a brier patch, waiting for a prince. And it is easy to jump from that thought to this one: All architects I have known, in good times or bad, have seemed to be waiting forever for a generous, loving client who will let them become the elated artists they were born to be.

“So my father’s life might be seen as a particularly lugubrious fairy tale. He was Sleeping Beauty, and in 1929 not one but several princes, including Bell Telephone, had begun to hack through the briers to wake him up. But then they all got sick for sixteen years. And while they were in the hospital a wicked witch turned Sleeping Beauty into Rip Van Winkle instead.

“When the Depression hit I was taken out of private school and put into public school. So I had a new set of friends to bring home to have a look at whatever my father was. These were the ten-year-old children of the yeomanry of Hoosierdom, and it was they who first told me that my father was as exotic as a unicorn.

“In an era when men of his class wore dark suits and white shirts and monochromatic neckties, Father appeared to have outfitted himself at the Salvation Army. Nothing matched. I understand now, of course, that he had selected the elements of his costume with care, that the colors and textures were juxtaposed so as to be interesting and, finally, beautiful.

“While other fathers were speaking gloomily of coal and iron and grain and lumber and cement and so on, and yes, of Hitler and Mussolini, too, my father was urging friends and startled strangers alike to pay attention to some object close at hand, whether natural or manmade, and to celebrate it as a masterpiece. When I took up the clarinet, he declared the instrument, black studded with silver, to be a masterpiece. Never mind whether it could make music or not. He adored chess sets, although he could not play that game worth a nickel. My new friends and I brought him a moth one time, wanting to know what sort of moth it was. He said that he did not know its name, but that we could all agree wholeheartedly on this much: that it was a masterpiece.

“And he was the first planetary citizen my new friends had ever seen, and possibly the last one, too. He was no more a respecter of politics and national boundaries than (that image again) a unicorn. Beauty could be found or created anywhere on this planet, and that was that.

“AT&T has completed yet another building, this one on the island of Manhattan, near where I live. The telephone company has again done without the services of my father, who could not now be awakened in any case. AT&T hired Philip Johnson instead, a Sleeping Beauty who throughout his adult life has been tickled awake by ardent princes.

“Should I now rage at Fate for not having enabled my father to have as much fun as Mr. Johnson?

“I try to imagine my father speaking to me across the abyss between the dead and the living, and I hear him saying this: ‘Do not pity me because I in my prime awaited romantic challenges which never came. If you wish to carve an epitaph on my modest headstone in Crown Hill Cemetery at this late date, then let it be this:
IT WAS ENOUGH TO HAVE BEEN A UNICORN.’”

Thus ends that piece. I am moved to add that Father tried to make good times revisitable (a trick which was easy as pie for the Tralfamadorians in my novel
Slaughterhouse-Five)
by gluing cheerful documents to sheets of masonite and protecting them with varnish. Thanks to Father, this mummified letter now hangs on the wall of my workroom:

“Dear Pop:

“I sold my first story to
Collier’s
. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.

“I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.

“I’m happier than I’ve been for a good many years.

“Love.”

The letter is signed with my first initial, which is what he called me. It is no milestone in literature, but it looms like Stonehenge beside my own little footpath from birth to death. The date is October 28, 1949.

Father glued a message from himself on the back of that piece of masonite. It is a quotation from
The Merchant of Venice
in his own lovely hand:

If a maiden sits on the ground in a clearing in a forest where a unicorn lives, they say, the unicorn will come to her and put its head in her lap. That is the best way to catch a unicorn. This procedure must have been discovered by a maiden who sat down in a clearing with no intention of catching a unicorn. The unicorn with its head in her lap must have been an embarrassment. (What next?)

In the household of my childhood and youth, my sister Alice, dead for many years now (and missed like heck by me), was the maiden and our father was the elusive and spookily enchanted unicorn. My only other sibling, my own big brother who went to MIT, Bernard, and I could never catch him. To him we weren’t all that interesting. As far as the two of us are concerned, this is not a remotely tragic tale. We were tough. We could take it. We had other fans.

(My daughter Edith was once married most unfortunately to a man named Geraldo Rivera who at this writing interviews little clumps of people on weekday afternoon television who have had experiences which are generally perceived as fantastic. I mention him at this point because some of these guests have been sexually abused by close relatives. I hasten to assert that my sister, five years older than I, was not remotely abused by our gentle father. Like a maiden with a unicorn’s head in her lap, she was at worst merely mystified.)

Our father when I, his youngest child, got to know him was, understandably, desperate for uncritical friendship from a member of the reputedly compassionate sex, since our mother (his wife) was going insane. Late at night, and always in the privacy of our own home, and never with guests present, she expressed hatred for Father as corrosive as hydrofluoric acid. Hydrofluoric acid can eat its way out of a glass bottle, and then through a tabletop and then through the floor, and then straight to Hell.

(Actually, hydrofluoric acid can’t eat through wax. A joke going around Cornell DU in my day, when most of my brothers were studying engineering of some sort, was, “If you happen to discover a universal solvent, what will you store it in?” And again actually, water is much closer to being a universal solvent than hydrofluoric acid. It just can’t eat through glass.)

I made the strong suggestion in
Palm Sunday
that my mother’s untreated, unacknowledged insanity was caused by bad chemicals she swallowed rather than created within herself, principally alcohol and unlimited quantities of prescribed barbiturates. (She did not live long enough to have a doctor pep her up with some sort of amphetamine.) I am willing to believe that her ailment was hereditary, but I have no American ancestors (fully accounted for in
Palm Sunday)
who were clinically crazy. In any case, what the heck? I didn’t get to choose my ancestors, and I look upon my brain and the rest of my body as a house I inhabit which was built long before I was born.

(My actual house here in Manhattan was built on spec in 1862 by somebody named L. S. Brooks. It is eighteen and a half feet wide and forty-six feet deep, and three stories high. Brooks built twenty identical houses all at one whack!)

At the time of the disgraceful Bush vs. Dukakis campaign for the Presidency of the United States of America (at which time the eventual winner was promising to protect rich light people everywhere from poor dark people everywhere), I was an invited speaker at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Philadelphia. My inherited brain and voicebox said this to those assembled:

“I greet you with all possible respect. It is tough to make unhappy people happier unless they need something easily prescribed, such as food or shelter or sympathetic companionship—or liberty.

“You have honored my own trade, which is the telling of stories for money, some true, some false, by inviting my friend and colleague Elie Wiesel and then me to speak to you. You may be aware of the work of Dr. Nancy Andreassen at the University of Iowa Medical Center, who interviewed professional writers on the faculty of her university’s famous Writers’ Workshop in order to discover whether or not our neuroses were indistinguishable from those of the general population. Most of us, myself included, proved to be depressives from families of depressives.