Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [39]
What Jane anticipated with such joy again and again was some event involving one or more of our six children, now all adults with children of their own: a psychiatric nurse, a comedy writer, a pediatrician, a painter, an airline pilot, and a printmaker.
I did not speak at her Episcopal obsequy. I wasn’t up to it. Everything I had to say was for her ears alone, and she was gone. The last conversation we had, we two old friends from Indianapolis, was two weeks before she died. It was on the telephone. She was in Washington, D.C., where the Yarmolinskys had their home. I was in Manhattan, and married, as I still am, to the photographer and writer Jill Krementz.
I don’t know which of us initiated the call, whose nickel it was. It could have been either one of us. Whoever it was, it turned out that the point of the call was to say good-bye.
Our son the doctor Mark would say after she died that he himself would never have submitted to all the medical procedures she acquiesced to in order to stay alive as long as she could, to go on saying, her eyes shining, “I can’t wait!”
Our last conversation was intimate. Jane asked me, as though I knew, what would determine the exact moment of her death. She may have felt like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was. During our twenty-two years of marriage, I had decided where we were going next, to Chicago, to Schenectady, to Cape Cod. It was my work that determined what we did next. She never had a job. Raising six kids was enough for her.
I told her on the telephone that a sunburned, raffish, bored but not unhappy ten-year-old boy, whom we did not know, would be standing on the gravel slope of the boat-launching ramp at the foot of Scudder’s Lane. He would gaze out at nothing in particular, birds, boats, or whatever, in the harbor of Barnstable, Cape Cod.
At the head of Scudder’s Lane, on Route 6A, one-tenth of a mile from the boat-launching ramp, is the big old house where we cared for our son and two daughters and three sons of my sister’s until they were grownups. Our daughter Edith and her builder husband, John Squibb, and their small sons, Will and Buck, live there now.
I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick up a stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone hit the water, she would die.
Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swarthmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I’m so glad. Why? Because I loved her.
35
Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.
I am a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers. Again: Somebody should look into this. It may be that writers of either sex are born to be swoopers or bashers. I visited Rockefeller University recently, and they are seeking and finding more and more genes that tend to make us behave this way or that way, just as a rerun after a timequake would do. Even before that visit, it had appeared to me that Jane’s and my children and Allie’s and Jim’s children, while not alike as grownups, had each become the sort of grownups they practically had to be.
All six are OK.
Then again, all six have had countless opportunities