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When I first came to New York City as a working grown-up, as a public relations man for General Electric, based in Schenectady, older people would often ask me if I was related to Walter and Marjorie Vonnegut. They were remembered as actors and bon vivants. They drank a lot. They drank hard liquor in speakeasies, and had stories to tell about gangsters they had met.

They got divorced because Marjorie fell in love with Don Marquis, the creator of Archie and Mehitabel. Marquis was a bachelor then, and she married him.

Late in the 1930s Uncle Walter had trouble getting parts because of his drinking, and he came home to Indiana with a new wife, a pretty young actress named Rosalie, who was never really accepted by the family. They built a little house in an orchard in northern Indiana, which Uncle Walter’s widowed mother owned. They lived there and drank a lot, and talked about starting a little repertory company there in the wilderness, as boozed-up former actors and actresses will do.

They died pretty soon.

• • •

Jane Cox Vonnegut and I, childhood sweethearts in Indianapolis, separated in 1970 after a marriage which by conventional measurement was said to have lasted twenty-five years. We are still good friends, as they say. Like so many couples who are no longer couples these days, we have been through some terrible, unavoidable accident that we are ill-equipped to understand. Like our six children, we only just arrived on this planet and we were doing the best we could. We never saw what hit us. It wasn’t another woman, it wasn’t another man.

We woke up in ambulances headed for different hospitals, so to speak, and would never get together again. We were alive, yes, but the marriage was dead.

And it was no Lazarus.

It was a good marriage for a long time—and then it wasn’t. The shock of having our children no longer need us happened somewhere in there. We were both going to have to find other sorts of seemingly important work to do and other compelling reasons for working and worrying so. But I am beginning to explain, which is a violation of a rule I lay down whenever I teach a class in writing: “All you can do is tell what happened. You will get thrown out of this course if you are arrogant enough to imagine that you can tell me why it happened. You do not know. You cannot know.”

• • •

So I am embarrassed about the failure of my first marriage. I am embarrassed by my older relatives’ responses to my books. But I was embarrassed before I was married or had written a book. A bad dream I have dreamed for as long as I can remember may hold a clue. In that dream, I know that I have murdered an old woman a long time ago. I have led an exemplary Ufe ever since.

But now the police have come to get me, with incontrovertible evidence of my crime. This is more or less the plot of Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, of course. By coincidence, Dostoevski and I have the same birthday, too.

• • •

Could that woman be my mother? I asked a psychiatrist that. She said that the woman might not even be a woman. She could be a man.

I went to a Hindu with occult powers, supposedly. I answered his ad in The Village Voice, in which he offered to tell people for a fee what they had been in previous lives. I asked him whether I had ever killed anybody in another life. He replied that I had lived only once before, and that my highest rank was as a squire to a knight in northern Europe. I had in fact killed a child accidentally. My knight and I and some others were riding through a village, and a child somehow fell under the hooves of my horse.

“It was not your fault,” said the seer.

Even so.

• • •

Long after I started dreaming that dream, I did a story for Life magazine about a mass murderer in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He and my daughter Edith knew each other some. His name was Tony Costa.

He was adjudged guilty and insane. He was put into Bridgewater, a Massachusetts institution for the criminally insane—not all that far from Provincetown.