Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [31]
• • •
Yes, and when I converted the mansion in Vermont into a clinic and small children’s hospital, and also my permanent home, I had those words chipped in stone over the front door. But they so troubled my patients and their parents that I had them chipped away again. The words seemed a confession of weakness and indecision to them, a suggestion that they might as well have stayed away.
I continued to carry the words in my head, however, and in fact did little harm. And the intellectual center of gravity for my practice was a single volume which I locked into a safe each night—the bound manuscript of the child-rearing manual Eliza and I had written during our orgy on Beacon Hill.
Somehow, we had put everything in there.
And the years flew by.
• • •
Somewhere in there I married an equally wealthy woman, actually a third cousin of mine, whose maiden name was Rose Aldrich Ford. She was very unhappy, because I did not love her, and because I would never take her anywhere. I have never been good at loving. We had a child, Carter Paley Swain, whom I also failed to love. Carter was normal, and completely uninteresting to me. He was somehow like a summer squash on the vine—featureless and watery, and merely growing larger all the time.
After our divorce, he and his mother bought a condominium in the same building with Eliza, down in Machu Picchu, Peru. I never heard from them again—even when I became President of the United States.
And the time flew.
• • •
I woke up one morning to find that I was almost fifty years old! Mother had moved in with me in Vermont. She sold her house in Turtle Bay. She was feeble and afraid.
She talked a good deal about Heaven to me.
I knew nothing at all about the subject then. I assumed that when people were dead they were dead.
“I know your father is waiting for me with open arms,” she said, “and my Mommy and Daddy, too.”
She was right about that, it turned out. Waiting around for more people is just about all there is for people in Heaven to do.
• • •
The way Mother described Heaven, it sounded like a golf course in Hawaii, with manicured fairways and greens running down to a lukewarm ocean.
I twitted her only lightly about wanting that sort of Paradise. “It sounds like a place where people would drink a lot of lemonade,” I said.
“I love lemonade,” she replied.
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MOTHER TALKED toward the end, too, about how much she hated unnatural things—synthetic flavors and fibers and plastics and so on. She loved silk and cotton and linen and wool and leather, she said, and clay and glass and stone. She loved horses and sailboats, too, she said.
“They’re all coming back, Mother,” I said, which was true.
My hospital itself had twenty horses by then—and wagons and carts and carriages and sleighs. I had a horse of my own, a great Clydesdale. Golden feathers hid her hooves. “Budweiser” was her name.
Yes, and the harbors of New York and Boston and San Francisco were forests of masts again, I’d heard. It had been quite some time since I’d seen them.
• • •
Yes, and I found the hospitality of my mind to fantasy pleasantly increased as machinery died and communications from the outside world became more and more vague.
So I was unsurprised one night, after having tucked Mother in bed, to enter my own bedroom with a lighted candle, and to find a Chinese man the size of my thumb sitting on my mantelpiece. He was wearing a quilted blue jacket and trousers and cap.
As far as I was able to determine afterwards, he was the first official emissary from the People’s Republic of China to the United States of America in more than twenty-five years.
• • •
During the same period, not a single foreigner who got inside China, so far as I know, ever returned from there.
So “going to China” became a widespread euphemism for committing suicide.
Hi ho.
• • •
My little visitor motioned for me to come closer, so he would not have to shout. I presented one ear to him. It must have been a horrible sight—the tunnel with all the hair and bits of wax inside.
He told me that