Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [63]
The cast party afterward was a clambake on the beach at Xanadu. As in the last scene of 8½, the motion picture by Federico Fellini, tout le monde was there, if not in person, then represented by look-alikes. Monica Pepper resembled my sister Allie. The bakemaster, a local man who is paid to stage such parties in the summertime, resembled my late publisher Seymour Lawrence (1926—1993), who rescued me from certain oblivion, from smithereens, by publishing Slaughterhouse-Five, and then bringing all my previous books back into print under his umbrella.
Kilgore Trout looked like my father.
The only sound effect Trout had to create backstage was in the last moments of the last scene of the last act of the play, of what Trout himself called “a manmade timequake.” He was equipped with an antique steam whistle from the heyday of Indian Head Mills. A plumber, who was a club member and looked a lot like my brother, put the gaily mournful whistle atop a tank of compressed air, with a valve in between. That is what Trout was, too, in all he wrote: gaily mournful.
There were of course many club members who had no parts in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, who would have liked at least to blow that big brass rooster, once they saw it and then heard it blown by the plumber himself during dress rehearsal. But the club most of all wanted Trout to feel that he was home at last, and a vital member of an extended family.
Not merely the club and the household staff at Xanadu, and the chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous, which met in the ballroom there, and the battered women and children and grandparents who had found shelter there, were grateful for his healing and encouraging mantra, which made bad times a coma: You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do. The whole world was.
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In order that Trout not miss his cue to blow the whistle, which he was terrified of doing, of spoiling everything for his family, the plumber who looked like my brother stood behind him and the apparatus, his hands on Trout’s old shoulders. He would squeeze those shoulders gently when it was time for Trout’s debut in show biz.
The last scene in the play is set in the yards of the railroad station at Springfield, Illinois. The date is February 11th, 1861. Abraham Lincoln, in this instance played by the half-African-American great-great-grandson of John Wilkes Booth, having just been elected President of the United States in its darkest hour, is about to depart his hometown by railroad, for Washington, God help him, District of Columbia.
He says, as indeed Lincoln said: “No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feelings of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of you people, I owe everything. I have lived here a quarter of a century, and passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return.
“I am called upon to assume the Presidency at a time when eleven of our sovereign states have announced their intention to secede from the Union, when threats of war increase in fierceness from day to day.
“It is a grave duty which I now face. In preparing for it, I have tried to enquire: what great principle or ideal is it that has kept this Union so long together? And I believe that it was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty to the people of this country and hope to all the world. This sentiment was the fulfillment of an ancient dream, which men have held through all time, that they might one day shake off their chains and find freedom in the brotherhood of life. We gained democracy, and now there is the question of whether it is fit to survive.
“Perhaps we have come to the dreadful day of awakening,