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At the end of his life, eight years before the First World War, his many descendents, my father and grandfather among them, must have looked like innocent, happy sailors in a flotilla of freshly painted little catboats, running before the wind in a safe harbor, always in sight of land.

The harbor was Indianapolis. The sailboats were jobs and shares in the Vonnegut Hardware Company.

Seventy-four years later, the Vonnegut Hardware Company exists no more. The “Mile Square” in the heart of Indianapolis, where it once had its bustling main store, is a desert of parking lots now. At night the Mile Square is as eerily desolate as East Berlin. The retail outlets of the Vonnegut Hardware Company were ruined by perfectly fair competition—by discount stores.

So I can bequeath no Vonnegut Hardware stock to my own descendents, nor can I offer them jobs with that firm, if life on the outside becomes too rough-and-tumble. I am the last of my grandfather’s branch of the family to have worked there, to have been given a little sailboat for a while.

• • •

In lieu of stock, I can only leave my descendents a story about the legendary times, now lost in the mists, when the name Vonnegut was synonymous with hardware in Indianapolis. That story will be lost forever, if I do not now take it out of my perishable head and write it down.

There was this Japanese jeweler in Indianapolis, you see, who, among other things, made class rings by hand for the graduates of Tudor Hall, the small and exclusive girls’ school to which rich girls from all over Indiana were sent before going East to college. My sister, although her family was broke, went there. My first wife, although her family was broke, went there.

The name of the jeweler was Iku Matsu Moto. He had many secrets, probably because his customers asked him very little about himself It turned out that he used to be a strong man with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

So he appeared at the main store of Vonnegut Hardware Company on East Washington Street one day, and he wanted an anvil. His shop was on Monument Circle, three blocks away. In Indianapolis, which was laid out by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the same Frenchman who laid out Washington, D.C., each block is one tenth of a mile on a side.

So Iku Matsu Moto found an anvil he liked, and he asked the salesman how much it cost. The salesman told him jocularly that he could have it for nothing if Iku Matsu Moto could carry it home. So Iku Matsu Moto carried it home.

• • •

I scarcely know any of the few Vonneguts still living in Indianapolis, and my own children will know and care about them as much as I know or care about my German relatives. Things fall apart.

There is a Bernard Vonnegut in Albany. That’s my brother, I believe. And there is a Peter Vonnegut there, who is Bernard’s son, and who is a librarian, and who married a woman named Michi Minatoya, who, like Iku Matsu Moto, is of Japanese ancestry. They have two children, Carl Hiroaki Vonnegut and Emiko Alice Vonnegut, my brother’s only grandchildren. They, too, are, among other things, de St. Andrés. Strange and nice.

• • •

There is a Dr. Mark Vonnegut in Brookline, Massachusetts. That’s my son, I believe.

I am proud of Mark, and I praised him and drew on his experience in this manner at a meeting of the Mental Health Association in New Jersey in Morristown on June 4, 1980:

“The title of this speech in your programs is ’Must We Do without References?’ Please cross that out, in case you want to remember later on what really happened here. The new title is Tear and Loathing in Morristown, New Jersey,’ and I want you all to know how safe I feel up here. If I go crazy, you will know all the latest things to do about it. I will be out of the nuthouse and back on the streets in no time, coked to the gills on Thorazine.

“The tide in your programs is a typographical error anyway. It should have been ’Must We Do without Reference Points?’ You might want to add that word ’Points’ to the original