Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [44]
I knew Mr. Johnson pretty well. Father and I used to go hunting for rabbits and birds with him down in Brown County, before Allie cried so much we had to give it up. He asked me there in his office, leaning back in his swivel chair, his eyes slits, how I planned to begin my career as a journalist.
“Well, sir,” I said, “I thought maybe I could get a job on The Culver Citizen and work there for three or four years. I know the area pretty well.” Culver was on Lake Maxincuckee in northern Indiana. We used to have a summer cottage on that lake.
“And then?” he said.
“With that much experience,” I said, “I should be able to get a job with a much bigger paper, maybe in Richmond or Kokomo.”
“And then?” he said.
“After maybe five years on a paper like that,” I said, “I think I’d be ready to take a shot at Indianapolis.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, “but I have to make a phone call.”
“Of course,” I said.
He swiveled around so his back was to me when he made the call. He spoke softly, but I wasn’t trying to overhear. I figured it was none of my business.
He hung up the phone and swiveled around to face me again. “Congratulations!” he said. “You have a job on The Indianapolis Times.”
40
I went to college in faraway Ithaca, New York, instead of going to work for The Indianapolis Times. Ever since, I, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
I think now, with the clambake at Xanadu only five years away, about a man I might have been, spending his adult life among those he went to high school with, loving and hating, as had his parents and grandparents, a town that was his own.
He’s gone!
Full fathom five he lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
He would have known several jokes I know, like the one Fred Bates Johnson told one time, when he and Father and I, just a kid, and some others, were hunting down in Brown County. According to Fred, a bunch of guys like us went hunting for deer and moose up in Canada. Somebody had to do the cooking, or they would all starve to death.
They drew straws to see who would cook while the others hunted from dawn to dusk. To make the joke more immediate, Fred said it was Father who got the short straw. Father could cook. Mother couldn’t. She was proud she couldn’t cook, and wouldn’t wash dishes and so on. I liked to go over to other kids’ houses, where their mothers did those things.
The hunters agreed that anybody who complained about Father’s cooking became the cook. So Father prepared worse and worse meals, while the others were having one hell of a good time in the forest. No matter how awful a supper was, though, the hunters pronounced it lip-smacking delicious, clapping Father on the back and so on.
After they marched off one morning, Father found a pile of fresh moose poop outside. He fried it in motor oil. That night he served it as steaming patties.
The first guy to taste one spit it out. He couldn’t help himself! He spluttered, “Jesus Christ! That tastes like moose poop fried in motor oil!”
But then he added, “But good, but good!”
I think Mother was raised to be so useless because her father Albert Lieber, the brewer and speculator, believed that America was going to have an aristocracy based on the European model. Proofs of membership in such a caste over there, and so it would be over here, too, he must have reasoned, were wives and daughters who were ornamental.
41
I don’t think I missed the boat when I failed to write a novel about Albert Lieber, and how he was largely responsible for my mother’s suicide on Mother’s Day Eve, 1944. German-Americans in Indianapolis lack universality. They have never been sympathetically, or even villainously, stereotyped in movies or books or plays. I would have had to explain them from scratch.
Lotsa luck!