Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [11]
Who knows?
• • •
I would like to know, too, what his secret sorrow was. Eliza and I, when we were young, were so wrapped up in each other that we rarely noticed the emotional condition of anybody else. But we were surely impressed by Dr. Mott’s sadness. So it must have been profound.
• • •
I once asked his grandson, the King of Michigan, Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, if he had any idea why Dr. Mott had found life to be such a crushing affair. “Gravity hadn’t yet turned mean,” I said. “The sky had not yet turned from blue to yellow, never to be blue again. The planet’s natural resources had yet to come to an end. The country had not yet been depopulated by Albanian flu and The Green Death.
“Your grandfather had a nice little car and a nice little house and a nice little practice and a nice little wife and a nice little child,” I said to the King. “And yet he used to mope so!”
My interview with the King took place, incidentally, in his palace on Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana, where Culver Military Academy had once stood. I was still nominally the President of the United States of America, but I had lost control of everything. There wasn’t any Congress any more, or any system of Federal Courts, or any Treasury or Army or any of that.
There were probably only eight hundred people left in all of Washington, D.C. I was down to one employee when I paid my respects to the King.
Hi ho.
• • •
He asked me if I regarded him as an enemy, and I said, “Heavens, no, Your Highness—I am delighted that someone of your calibre has brought law and order to the Middle West.”
• • •
He grew impatient with me when I pressed him to tell me more about his grandfather, Dr. Mott.
“Christ,” he said, “what American knows anything about his grandparents?”
• • •
He was a skinny and supple and ascetic young soldier-saint in those days. My granddaughter, Melody, would come to know him when he was an obscene voluptuary, a fat old man in robes encrusted with precious stones.
• • •
He was wearing a simple soldier’s tunic without any badges of rank when I met him.
As for my own costume: It was appropriately clownish—a top hat, a claw-hammer coat and striped pants, a pearl-gray vest with matching spats, a soiled white shirt with a choke collar and tie. The belly of my vest was festooned with a gold watch-chain which had belonged to John D. Rockefeller, the ancestor of mine who had founded Standard Oil.
Dangling from the watch-chain were my Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard and a miniature plastic daffodil. My middle name had by then been legally changed from Rockefeller to Daffodil-11.
“There were no murders or embezzlements or suicides or drinking problems or drug problems in Dr. Mott’s branch of the family,” the King went on, “as far as I know.”
He was thirty. I was seventy-nine.
“Maybe Grandfather was just one of those people who was born unhappy,” he said. “Did you ever think of that?”
6
PERHAPS SOME PEOPLE really are born unhappy. I surely hope not.
Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and the determination to be utterly happy all the time.
Perhaps even in this we were freaks.
Hi ho.
• • •
What is happiness?
In Eliza’s and my case, happiness was being perpetually in each other’s company, having plenty of servants and good food, living in a peaceful, book-filled mansion on an asteroid covered with apple trees, and growing up as specialized halves of a single brain.
Although we pawed and embraced each other a great deal, our intentions were purely intellectual. True—Eliza matured sexually at the age of seven. I, however, would not enter puberty until my last year in Harvard Medical School, at the age of twenty-three. Eliza and I used bodily contact only in order to increase the intimacy of our brains.
Thus did we give birth to a single genius, which died as quickly as we were parted, which was reborn the moment we got together again.
• • •
We became almost cripplingly specialized as halves of