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• • •

So my brother and I strapped ourselves into a jet-propelled airplane bound from New York City to Indianapolis. I sat on the aisle. Bernard took the window seat, since he was an atmospheric scientist, since clouds had so much more to say to him than they did to me.

We were both over six feet tall. We still had most of our hair, which was brown. We had identical mustaches—duplicates of our late father’s mustache.

We were harmless looking. We were a couple of nice old Andy Gumps.

There was an empty seat between us, which was spooky poetry. It could have been a seat for our sister Alice, whose age was halfway between mine and Bernard’s. She wasn’t in that seat and on her way to her beloved Uncle Alex’s funeral, for she had died among strangers in New Jersey, of cancer—at the age of forty-one.

“Soap opera!” she said to my brother and me one time, when discussing her own impending death. She would be leaving four young boys behind, without any mother.

“Slapstick,” she said.

Hi ho.

• • •

She spent the last day of her life in a hospital. The doctors and nurses said she could smoke and drink as much as she pleased, and eat whatever she pleased.

My brother and I paid her a call. It was hard for her to breathe. She had been as tall as we were at one time, which was very embarrassing to her, since she was a woman. Her posture had always been bad, because of her embarrassment. Now she had a posture like a question mark.

She coughed. She laughed. She made a couple of jokes which I don’t remember now.

Then she sent us away. “Don’t look back,” she said.

So we didn’t.

She died at about the same time of day that Uncle Alex died—an hour or two after the sun went down.

And hers would have been an unremarkable death statistically, if it were not for one detail, which was this: Her healthy husband, James Carmalt Adams, the editor of a trade journal for purchasing agents, which he put together in a cubicle on Wall Street, had died two mornings before—on “The Brokers’ Special,” the only train in American railroading history to hurl itself off an open drawbridge.

Think of that.

• • •

This really happened.

• • •

Bernard and I did not tell Alice about what had happened to her husband, who was supposed to take full charge of the children after she died, but she found out about it anyway. An ambulatory female patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News. The front page headline was about the dive of the train. Yes, and there was a list of the dead and missing inside.

Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place.

Good for her.

• • •

Exhaustion, yes, and deep money worries, too, made her say toward the end that she guessed that she wasn’t really very good at life.

Then again: Neither were Laurel and Hardy.

• • •

My brother and I had already taken over her household. After she died, her three oldest sons, who were between the ages of eight and fourteen, held a meeting, which no grownups could attend. Then they came out and asked that we honor their only two requirements: That they remain together, and that they keep their two dogs. The youngest child, who was not at the meeting, was a baby only a year old or so.

From then on, the three oldest were raised by me and my wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut, along with our own three children, on Cape Cod. The baby, who lived with us for a while, was adopted by a first cousin of their father, who is now a judge in Birmingham, Alabama.

So be it.

The three oldest kept their dogs.

• • •

I remember now what one of her sons, who is named “Kurt” like my father and me, asked me as we drove from New Jersey to Cape Cod with the two dogs in back. He was about eight.

We were going from south to north, so where we were going was “up” to him. There were just the two of us. His brothers had gone ahead.

“Are the kids up there nice?” he said.

“Yes,