Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [3]
I RESIGNED MY commission in 1975, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning, not failing, however, to father a son on my way home, unknowingly, during a brief stopover in the Philippines. I thought surely that the subsequent mother, a young female war correspondent for The Des Moines Register, was using foolproof birth control.
Wrong again!
Booby traps everywhere.
THE BIGGEST BOOBY trap Fate set for me, though, was a pretty and personable young woman named Margaret Patton, who allowed me to woo and marry her soon after my graduation from West Point, and then had 2 children by me without telling me that there was a powerful strain of insanity on her mother’s side of her family.
So then her mother, who was living with us, went insane, and then she herself went insane. Our children, moreover, had every reason to suspect that they, too, might go crazy in middle age.
Our children, full-grown now, can never forgive us for reproducing. What a mess.
I REALIZE THAT my speaking of my first and only wife as something as inhuman as a booby trap risks my seeming to be yet another infernal device. But many other women have had no trouble relating to me as a person, and ardently, too, and my interest in them has gone well beyond the merely mechanical. Almost invariably, I have been as enchanted by their souls, their intellects, and the stories of their lives as by their amorous propensities.
But after I came home from the Vietnam War, and before either Margaret or her mother had shown me and the children and the neighbors great big symptoms of their inherited craziness, that mother-daughter team treated me like some sort of boring but necessary electrical appliance like a vacuum cleaner.
GOOD THINGS HAVE also happened unexpectedly, “manna from Heaven” you might want to call them, but not in such quantities as to make life a bowl of cherries or anything approaching that. Right after my war, when I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life, I ran into a former commanding officer of mine who had become President of Tarkington College, in Scipio, New York. I was then only 35, and my wife was still sane, and my mother-in-law was only slightly crazy. He offered me a teaching job, which I accepted.
I could accept that job with a clear conscience, despite my lack of academic credentials beyond a mere BS Degree from West Point, since all the students at Tarkington were learning-disabled in some way, or plain stupid or comatose or whatever. No matter what the subject, my old CO assured me, I would have little trouble keeping ahead of them.
The particular subject he wanted me to teach, what’s more, was 1 in which I had excelled at the Academy, which was Physics.
THE GREATEST STROKE of luck for me, the biggest chunk of manna from Heaven, was that Tarkington had need of somebody to play the Lutz Carillon, the great family of bells at the top of the tower of the college library, where I am writing now.
I asked my old CO if the bells were swung by ropes.
He said they used to be, but that they had been electrified and were played by means of a keyboard now.
“What does the keyboard look like?” I said.
“Like a piano,” he said.
I had never played bells. Very few people have that clanging opportunity. But I could play a piano. So I said, “Shake hands with your new carillonneur.”
THE HAPPIEST MOMENTS in my life, without question, were when I played the Lutz Carillon at the start and end of every day.
I WENT TO work at Tarkington 25 years ago, and have lived in this beautiful valley ever since. This is home.
I have been a teacher here. I was a Warden for a little while, after Tarkington College officially became Tarkington State Reformatory in June of 1999, 20 months ago.
Now I myself am a prisoner here, but with pretty much the run of the place. I haven’t been convicted of anything yet. I am awaiting trial, which I guess will take place in Rochester, for supposedly having masterminded the mass prison break at the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena,