Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [17]
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This Edwardian sport married the beautiful and musical Alice Barus in 1885. They had three children. My mother was the oldest. And then Alice Barus died of pneumonia when Mother was six.
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“Shortly thereafter,” says Uncle John, “Albert married a very attractive but extremely eccentric woman, who was never accepted by Albert’s family or close friends. Her name was Ora D. Lane. She was an accomplished violinist and came from Zanesville, Ohio. She was familiarly known as ’O.D.’ but most people referred to her as ’Odious.’ She became a sort of storybook stepmother to Albert’s children. She chastised and ill-treated them in subtle ways. She seemed to resent them and abused them so that they all suffered a distinctive psychic trauma from which they never fully recovered. Where formerly they had known nothing but loving and tender care, now they were subjected to every sort of indignity, humiliation, and neglect. She terrorized Albert as well, threatened his life, slept with a pistol under her pillow, and was a perfect demon and termagant. Kindly, gentle Albert stood it as long as he could and then divorced her; but he was obliged to settle a large alimony upon her which depleted his capital, which was not large. He had never been an accumulator and had spent freely, relying upon the brewery to carry him as usual with a large annual income.
“But nothing daunted, Albert soon was married a third time to a nondescript widow named Meda Langtry, a Canadian, who had a daughter whom Albert adopted and renamed Alberta.
“Meda was much younger than Albert. In fact she was about the same age as his daughter Edith.”
“Shortly after Albert’s third and last marriage came Prohibition in 1921,” Uncle John goes on, “the brewery was closed. Albert lost his position, and from then on his affairs went from bad to worse until he died in what he would have regarded as relative poverty. The last years of his life were supported by the sale of several parcels of real estate including his former residence, a large house situated on an estate of a hundred acres on a hill overlooking White River and running north to Kessler Boulevard and West Fifty-sixth Street in the City of Indianapolis. This land would now be worth at least a million dollars or more.
“He, like all rich men, had a miscellaneous assortment of personal property which will be acquired not for investment but as adjuncts of abundant privileges such as miscellaneous securities, paintings, porcelains, furniture, and other art objects. Much had to be sold but he had a few securities left and his estate inventory came to $311,607.65. All that his children got out of the Peter Lieber fortune was a small remnant from Albert’s estate and a few trust funds which Peter had established for them in Merchants Bank stock. And so the proverbial cycle of ’shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves’ was completed in three generations due for them to Prohibition and Albert’s extravagance and improvidence.
“But while Albert was still in his prime and riding high, his daughter, Edith—K’s mother—was married on November 22, 1913, to Kurt Vonnegut. They were a charming and extremely attractive couple.”
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As has already been said, my father’s mother Nanette was cheerful and sociable, and uninterested in the fine arts save for music—and my father’s father Bernard was a freak in the family for being able to draw and paint so well at an early age. He was also unsociable, and evidently unhappy in Indianapolis most of the time.
Uncle John said to me in conversation one time that my grandfather Bernard was