Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online

microscope. Again: That wasn’t the real Maxincuckee down there. The real one is in my head.
    “The one in my head is the one I swam across, all two and one-half miles of it, when I was eleven years old, with my sister, five years older than me, and my brother, nine years older than me, in a leaky rowboat near me, urging me on. My sister died thirty years ago. My brother, an atmospheric scientist, is still going strong, daydreaming about clouds and electricity. Times change, but my lake never will.
    “If I were ever to write a novel or a play about Maxincuckee, it would be Chekhovian, since what I saw were the consequences of several siblings’ inheriting and trying to share a single beloved property, and with their own children, once grown, moving to other parts of the world, never to return, and on and on. Our cottage, owned jointly and often acrimoniously by my father and his brother and his sister, was sold to a stranger at the end of World War II. The buyer put off taking possession for a week in order that I, just married after being discharged from the Army, might take my bride there for a honeymoon. He was Concert Master of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and so must have been a romantic man. My bride, whose name was Jane Cox and who was of English ancestry, confided in me that one of her own relatives had asked her, ‘Do you really want to get mixed up with all those Germans?’
    “Jane has gone to Heaven, too, now, like my sister. She had me read
The Brothers Karamazov
during our honeymoon. She considered it the greatest of all novels. It was appropriate reading for a farewell visit to an old family property, since it was all about the state of people’s portable souls and accorded no importance to immovable real estate.
    “It was chilly but sunny. It was late autumn then.
    “We went out in an old, leaky rowboat, which all my life I had called ‘The Beralikur,’ a mixture of my first name with those of my siblings, Bernard and Alice. But that name was not painted on the boat, which would have been redundant. Everybody who was anybody at Maxincuckee already knew that the name of that leaky boat was the Beralikur.
    “ ‘I swam all the way across this lake when I was eleven years old,’ I said to Jane.
    “ ‘You told me,’ she said.
    “And I said, ‘I don’t think you believe I could really do a thing like that. I can’t believe it, so why should you? But you ask my brother and sister if it isn’t true.’
    “Jane was a writer, too, by the way.
Angels Without Wings,
a book she wrote about raising all our kids on Cape Cod, was published posthumously last autumn, forty-two years exactly after our honeymoon.
    “She asked me on our honeymoon what influence Culver Military Academy, which I haven’t even mentioned, had on my thinking when I was a child. It was at the head of the lake, after all, and was the principal employer of the town, which is also called Culver. It was like a little West Point and Annapolis combined, with a Cavalry troop and a big fleet of sailboats and noisy parades and so on. They fired a cannon every night at sunset.
    “ ‘I thought about it when they fired the cannon,’ I said, ‘and hoped I would never be sent there. I didn’t want to be yelled at and have to wear a uniform.’
    “A loon popped up to the surface of Lake Maxincuckee during our honeymoon, and gave its chilling, piercing, liquid cry of seeming lunacy.
    “Only now do I realize that my answer should have been this:
‘Ya! Epta-mayan-hoy!’
    “I lived on Cape Cod for twenty years, and so caused to be imprinted on the minds of my own children all there is to know and feel about the harbor at Barnstable and the marsh it feeds at high tide and, only two hundred yards from our house, a very deep puddle made by a glacier and called Coggin’s Pond.
    “Those children, close to middle age now and with children of their own, have not had to learn the hard way that the harbor and the marsh and the pond are