Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [8]
The thing I’ve always loved about my troubled paternal grandmother—who I imagine as not yet troubled back then—was that when informed by her husband that they were broke she said, “Okay. Let’s spend the summer in Europe.”
And they did.
At some point in my childhood, my father gave us all code names. He was Boraseesee. My mother was Mullerstay. I was Kindo. If we were ever trapped or captured and wanted to let one another know that it was really us, we could use these names. It was a long shot, but when I was locked up, Kindo tried hard as hell to get word out to Boraseesee and Mullerstay.
We all want to believe that we’re in a sheltered workshop with grown-ups nearby.
When my father came to see me the first time I went crazy, I was sure it wasn’t him. My father was taller and thinner than the stand-in they sent, and he used a fake name to order a cab. I played along, figuring the trip to see me was too dangerous for Kurt to be able to make it. Crossing time zones wasn’t the half of it.
I was twenty-one when Slaughterhouse-Five was published. I mostly didn’t live at home anymore, so it was like watching from afar when the money hit. My sisters grew up as the children of a famous writer. I did not.
The people who lived around us on the Cape had more money than we did. What my father saw as a brief period of wrongful relative poverty was my childhood, to which I was firmly attached and of which I was and remain intensely proud.
After the Coming of the Orphans.
I am on the far right.
(Vonnegut family photo)
chapter 3
The Coming of the Orphans
When I was a boy
There was reason to believe
That people did good things for good reasons.
Why would a couple in their early thirties with only two children and another on the way buy a sixteen-room house? Living in a house so much bigger than a family with three kids needed became a part of my mother’s religion. We had all the standard rooms plus a porch big enough to play Ping-Pong on, a study for my father, a study for my mother, seven bedrooms, and a secret stairway leading to a room we didn’t know what to call. There was a spacious attic with windows looking out over a pond and the marsh and a barn to fix up someday. It was a glorious magical house because my mother made it so, at least partly to force her nuttiness and the world to coexist.
The year before my aunt and uncle died my mother would get up at night and stockpile blankets and food in the attic. When my father asked her what she was doing she replied that the refugees were coming. She was getting messages from license plates and traffic lights. The refugees are coming.
My father and the local GP were on the verge of hospitalizing her when the demands of making a home for my orphaned cousins more or less snapped her out of it. Later, I asked my mother if she didn’t think the refugee stuff and getting messages from license plates and traffic lights was a little nutty, and she pointed out that it was around the time of the Hungarian uprising and there were lots of refugees. When the orphans/refugees came she decided that messages from license plates and blinking lights were more or less reliable.
Whenever we went somewhere that involved leaving the house for more than a few hours, my mother would pretend to have forgotten something and run back into the house. It would only take a minute or so, but there were prayers and rituals that had to be done to ensure that the house wouldn’t burn down while we were gone. Certain light switches had to be left in the up or down position.
Years later, when I complained to her about the voices, she