It was even a secret that my paternal grandmother died of cancer.
Think of that.
At any rate, if Uncle Alex, the atheist, found himself standing before Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates after he died, I am certain he introduced himself as follows:
“My name is Alex Vonnegut. I’m an alcoholic.”
Good for him.
I will guess, too, that it was loneliness as much as it was a dread of alcoholic poisoning which shepherded him into A.A. As his relatives died off or wandered away, or simply became interchangeable parts in the American machine, he went looking for new brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and uncles and aunts, and so on, which he found in A.A.
When I was a child, he used to tell me what to read, and then make sure I’d read it. It used to amuse him to take me on visits to relatives I’d never known I had.
He told me one time that he had been an American spy in Baltimore during the First World War, befriending German-Americans there. His assignment was to detect enemy agents. He detected nothing, for there was nothing to detect.
He told me, too, that he was an investigator of graft in New York City for a little while – before his parents told him it was time to come home and settle down. He uncovered a scandal involving large expenditures for the maintenance of Grant’s Tomb, which required very little maintenance indeed.
Hi ho.
I received the news of his death over a white, push-button telephone in my house in that part of Manhattan known as ‘Turtle Bay.” There was a philodendron nearby.
I am still not clear how I got here. There are no turtles. There is no bay.
Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.
So I called my brother in Albany. He was about to turn sixty. I was fifty-two.
We were certainly no spring chickens.
But Bernard still played the part of an older brother. It was he who got us our seats on Trans World Airlines and our car at the Indianapolis airport, and our double room with twin beds at a Ramada Inn.
The funeral itself, like the funerals of our parents and of so many other close relatives, was as blankly secular, as vacant of ideas about God or the afterlife, or even about Indianapolis, as our Ramada Inn.
So my brother and I strapped ourselves into a jet-propelled airplane bound from New York City to Indianapolis. I sat on the aisle. Bernard took the window seat, since he was an atmospheric scientist, since clouds had so much more to say to him than they did to me.
We were both over six feet tall. We still had most of our hair, which was brown. We had identical mustaches – duplicates of our late father’s mustache.
We were harmless looking. We were a couple of nice old Andy Gumps.
There was an empty seat between us, which was spooky poetry. It could have been a seat for our sister Alice, whose age was halfway between mine and Bernard’s. She wasn’t in that seat and on her way to her beloved Uncle Alex’s funeral, for she had died among strangers in New Jersey, of cancer – at the age of forty-one.
“Soap opera!” she said to my brother and me one time, when discussing her own impending death. She would be leaving four young boys behind, without any mother.
“Slapstick,” she said.
Hi ho.
She spent the last day of her life in a hospital. The doctors and nurses said she could smoke and drink as much as she pleased, and eat whatever she pleased.
My brother and I paid her a call. It was hard for her to breathe. She had been as tall as we were at one time, which was very embarrassing to her, since she was a woman. Her posture had always been bad, because of her embarrassment. Now she had a posture like a question mark.
She coughed. She laughed. She made a couple of jokes which I don’t remember now.
Then she sent us away. “Don’t look back,” she said.
So we didn’t.
She died at about the same time of day that Uncle Alex died – an hour or two after the sun went down.
And hers would have been an unremarkable death statistically, if it were not for one detail, which was this: Her healthy husband, James Carmalt Adams, the editor of a trade journal for purchasing agents, which he put together in a cubicle on Wall Street, had died two mornings before – on “The Brokers’ Special,” the only train in American railroading history to hurl itself off an open drawbridge.
Think of that.
This really happened.
Bernard and I did not tell Alice about what had happened to her husband, who was supposed to take charge of the children after she died, but she found out about it anyway. An ambulatory female patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News. The front page headline was about the dive of the train. Yes, and there was a list of the dead and missing inside.
Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place.
Good for her.
Exhaustion, yes, and deep money worries, too, made her say toward the end that she guessed that she wasn’t really very good at life.
Then again: Neither were Laurel and Hardy.
My brother and I had already taken over her household. After she died, her three oldest sons, who were between the ages of eight and fourteen, held a meeting, which no grownups could attend. Then they came out and asked that we honor their only two requirements: That they remain together, and that they keep their two dogs. The youngest child, who was not at the meeting, was a baby only a year old or so.
From then on, the three oldest were raised by me end my wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut, along with our own three children, on Cape Cod. The baby, who lived with us for a while, was adopted by a first cousin of their father, who is now a judge in Birmingham, Alabama.
So be it.
The three oldest kept their dogs.
I remember now what one of her sons, who is named “Kurt” like my father and me, asked me as we drove from New Jersey to Cape Cod with the two dogs in back. He was about eight.
We were going from south to north, so where we were going was “up” to him. There were just the two of us. His brothers had gone ahead.
“Are the kids up there nice?” he said.
“Yes, they are,” I replied.
He is an airline pilot now.
They are all something other than children now.
One of them is a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica. He has made come true a dream of our sister’s: To live far from the madness of cities, with animals for friends. He has no telephone or electricity.
He is desperately dependent on rainfall. He is a ruined man, if it does not rain.
The two dogs have died of old age. I used to roll around with them on rugs for hours on end, until they were all pooped out.
Yes, and our sister’s sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere – not anywhere.
The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: “It isn’t the museum, it should be.”
The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror – to protect the children from eternal grief.
For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophic if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.
Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died – to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.
Be that as it may, she had vanished entirely as my audience by the time Uncle Alex died.
So the seat between my brother and me on the airplane seemed especially vacant to me. I filled it as best I could – with that morning’s issue of The New York Times.