Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [64]
“That is a comforting thought in time of affliction— ‘And this too shall pass away.’ And yet—let us believe that it is not true! Let us live to prove that we can cultivate the natural world that is about us, and the intellectual and moral world that is within us, so that we may secure an individual, social and political prosperity, whose course shall be forward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away....
“I commend you to the care of the Almighty, as I hope that in your prayers you will remember me.... Good-bye, my friends and neighbors.”
An actor playing the bit part of Kavanagh, an Army officer, said, “Time to pull out, Mr. President. Better get inside the car.”
Lincoln gets into the car as the crowd sings “John Brown’s Body.”
Another actor, cast as a brakeman, waved his lantern.
That was when Trout was supposed to blow the whistle, and he did.
As the curtain descended, there was a sob backstage. It wasn’t in the playbook. It was ad lib. It was about beauty. It came from Kilgore Trout.
62
Anything we said at the cast party, the clambake on the beach, was at first hesitant and apologetic, almost as though English were our second language. We were mourning not only Lincoln, but the death of American eloquence.
Another look-alike there was Rosemary Smith, Mask and Wig’s costume mistress, and mother of Frank Smith, its superstar. She resembled Ida Young, grandchild of slaves, who worked for us in Indianapolis when I was little. Ida Young, in combination with my uncle Alex, had as much to do with my upbringing as my parents did.
Nobody was a near double for Uncle Alex. He did not like my writing. I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and Uncle Alex said, “I suppose the young people will like it.” Nobody resembled my aunt Ella Vonnegut Stewart, a first cousin of my father’s, either. She and her husband, Kerfuit, owned a bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. They did not stock my books because they found my language obscene. So it was back then, when I was starting out.
Among other departed souls whom I would not summon back to life, if I had had the power to do so, but who were represented by doppelgängers: nine of my teachers at Shortridge High School, and Phoebe Hurty, who hired me in high school to write ad copy about teenage clothing for Blocks’ Department Store, and my first wife Jane, and my mother, and my uncle John Rauch, husband to another of Father’s first cousins. Uncle John provided me with a history of my family in America, which I printed in Palm Sunday.
Jane’s unknowing stand-in, a pert young woman who teaches biochemistry at Rhode Island University, over at Kingston, said within my hearing, and apropos of nothing more than that day’s theatrical performance and the setting sun: “I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.”
Only the dead had doppelgängers at that party back in 2001. Arthur Garvey Ulm, poet and Resident Secretary of Xanadu, an employee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was short and had a big nose, like my war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare.
My wife Jill was among the living, thank goodness, and was there in the flesh, as was Knox Burger, a Cornell classmate of mine. After Western Civilization’s second unsuccessful suicide attempt, Knox became a fiction editor at Collier’s, which published five short stories every week. Knox got me a good literary agent, Colonel Kenneth Littauer, the first pilot to strafe a trench during World War One.
Trout opined, in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, incidentally, that we had better start numbering timequakes the same way we numbered World Wars