Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [7]
But Caleb and Letitia were harmless themselves. Father was very good at backgammon and so-so at color photography, they say. Mother was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Neither worked. Neither was a college graduate, though both had tried.
They wrote and spoke nicely. They adored each other. They were humble about having done so poorly in schools. They were kind.
And I cannot fault them for being shattered by having given birth to monsters. Anyone would have been shattered by giving birth to Eliza and me.
• • •
And Caleb and Letitia were at least as good at parenting as I was, when my turn rolled around. I was wholly indifferent to my own children, although they were normal in every way.
Perhaps I would have been more entertained by my children if they had been monsters like Eliza and me.
Hi ho.
• • •
Young Caleb and Letitia were advised not to break their hearts and risk their furniture by attempting to raise Eliza and me in Turtle Bay. We were no more true relatives of theirs, their advisors said, than baby crocodiles.
Caleb’s and Letitia’s response was humane. It was also expensive and Gothic in the extreme. Our parents did not hide us in a private hospital for cases such as ours. They entombed us instead in a spooky old mansion which they had inherited—in the midst of two hundred acres of apple trees on a mountain-top, near the hamlet of Galen, Vermont.
No one had lived there for thirty years.
• • •
Carpenters and electricians and plumbers were brought in to turn it into a sort of paradise for Eliza and me. Thick rubber padding was put under all the wall-to-wall carpets, so we would not hurt ourselves in case we fell. Our diningroom was lined with tile, and there were drains in the floor, so we and the room could be hosed off after every meal.
More important, perhaps, were two chain-link fences which went up. They were topped with barbed wire. The first enclosed the orchard. The second separated the mansion from the prying eyes of the workmen who had to be let in through the first from time to time in order to look after the apple trees.
Hi ho.
• • •
A staff was recruited from the neighborhood. There was a cook. There were two cleaning women and a cleaning man. There were two practical nurses who fed us and dressed us and undressed us and bathed us. The one I remember best is Withers Witherspoon, a combination guard, chauffeur and handyman.
His mother was a Withers. His father was a Witherspoon.
• • •
Yes, and these were simple country people, who, with the exception of Withers Witherspoon, who had been a soldier, had never been outside Vermont. They had rarely ventured more than ten miles from Galen, for that matter—and they were necessarily all related to one another, as inbred as Eskimos.
They were of course distantly related to Eliza and me, too, since our Vermont ancestors had once been content to dogpaddle endlessly, so to speak, in the same tiny genetic pool.
But, in the American scheme of things at that time, they were related to our family as carp were related to eagles, say—for our family had evolved into world-travelers and multimillionaires.
Hi ho.
• • •
Yes, and it was easy for our parents to buy the fealty of these living fossils from the family past. They were given modest salaries which seemed enormous to them, since the money-making lobes of their brains were so primitive.
They were given pleasant apartments in the mansion, and color television sets. They were encouraged to eat like emperors, charging whatever they liked to our parents. They had very little work to do.
Better still, they did not have to think much for themselves. They were placed under the command of a young general practitioner who lived in the hamlet,