Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! Part 1

Slapstick Or Lonesome No More!

by Kurt Vonnegut.

Dedicated to the memory of Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy, two angels of my time.

"Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd ..."-ROMEO

PROLOGUE

THIS IS THE CLOSEST I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry-like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago. I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry-like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago.It is about what life feels feels like to me. like to me.There are all these tests of my limited agility and intelligence. They go on and on.The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test.They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.* * *There was very little love in their films. There was often the situational poetry of marriage, which was something else again. It was yet another test-with comical possibilities, provided that everybody submitted to it in good faith.Love was never at issue. And, perhaps because I was so perpetually intoxicated and instructed by Laurel and Hardy during my childhood in the Great Depression, I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love.It does not seem important to me.What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.* * *I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as "common decency." I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it.Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs.When a child, and not watching comedians on film or listening to comedians on the radio, I used to spend a lot of time rolling around on rugs with uncritically affectionate dogs we had.And I still do a lot of that. The dogs become tired and confused and embarra.s.sed long before I do. I could go on forever.Hi ho.* * *One time, on his twenty-first birthday, one of my three adopted sons, who was about to leave for the Peace Corps in the Amazon Rain Forest, said to me, "You know-you've never hugged me."So I hugged him. We hugged each other. It was very nice. It was like rolling around on a rug with a Great Dane we used to have.* * *Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please-a little less love, and a little more common decency."* * *My longest experience with common decency, surely, has been with my older brother, my only brother, Bernard, who is an atmospheric scientist in the State University of New York at Albany.He is a widower, raising two young sons all by himself. He does it well. He has three grown-up sons besides.We were given very different sorts of minds at birth. Bernard could never be a writer. I could never be a scientist. And, since we make our livings with our minds, we tend to think of them as gadgets-separate from our awarenesses, from our central selves.* * *We have hugged each other maybe three or four times-on birthdays, very likely, and clumsily. We have never hugged in moments of grief.* * *The minds we have been given enjoy the same sorts of jokes, at any rate-Mark Twain stuff, Laurel and Hardy stuff.They are equally disorderly, too.Here is an anecdote about my brother, which, with minor variations, could be told truthfully about me:Bernard worked for the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, for a while, where he discovered that silver iodide could precipitate certain sorts of clouds as snow or rain. His laboratory was a sensational mess, however, where a clumsy stranger could die in a thousand different ways, depending on where he stumbled.The company had a safety officer who nearly swooned when he saw this jungle of deadfalls and snares and hair-trigger b.o.o.by traps. He bawled out my brother.My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips: "If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what it's like in here." here."And so on.* * *I told my brother one time that whenever I did repair work around the house, I lost all my tools before I could finish the job."You're lucky," he said. "I always lose whatever I'm working on."We laughed.* * *But, because of the sorts of minds we were given at birth, and in spite of their disorderliness, Bernard and I belong to artificial extended families which allow us to claim relatives all over the world.He is a brother to scientists everywhere. I am a brother to writers everywhere.This is amusing and comforting to both of us. It is nice.It is lucky, too, for human beings need all the relatives they can get-as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.* * *When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings and cousins and uncles and aunts. Yes, and their relatives were all cultivated and gentle and prosperous, and spoke German and English gracefully.* * *They were all religious skeptics, by the way.* * *They might roam the wide world over when they were young, and often have wonderful adventures. But they were all told sooner or later that it was time for them to come home to Indianapolis, and to settle down. They invariably obeyed-because they had so many relatives there.There were good things to inherit, too, of course-sane businesses, comfortable homes and faithful servants, growing mountains of china and crystal and silverware, reputations for honest dealing, cottages on Lake Maxinkuckee, along whose eastern sh.o.r.e my family once owned a village of summer homes.* * *But the delight the family took in itself was permanently crippled, I think, by the sudden American hatred for all things German which unsheathed itself when this country entered the First World War, five years before I was born.Children in our family were no longer taught German. Neither were they encouraged to admire German music or literature or art or science. My brother and sister and I were raised as though Germany were as foreign to us as Paraguay.We were deprived of Europe, except for what we might learn of it at school.We lost thousands of years in a very short time-and then tens of thousands of American dollars after that, and the summer cottages and so on.And our family became a lot less interesting, especially to itself.So-by the time the Great Depression and a Second World War were over, it was easy for my brother and my sister and me to wander away from Indianapolis.And, of all the relatives we left behind, not one could think of a reason why we should come home again.We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.* * *Yes, and Indianapolis, which had once had a way of speaking English all its own, and jokes and legends and poets and villains and heroes all its own, and galleries for its own artists, had itself become an interchangeable part in the American machine.It was just another someplace where automobiles lived, with a symphony orchestra and all. And a race track.Hi ho.* * *My brother and I still go back for funerals, of course. We went back last July for the funeral of our Uncle Alex Vonnegut, the younger brother of our late father-almost the last of our old-style relatives, of the native American patriots who did not fear G.o.d, and who had souls that were European.He was eighty-seven years old. He was childless. He was a graduate of Harvard. He was a retired life insurance agent. He was a co-founder of the Indianapolis Chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.* * *His obituary in the Indianapolis Star Indianapolis Star said that he himself was not an alcoholic. said that he himself was not an alcoholic.This denial was at least partly a nice-Nellyism from the past, I think. He used to drink, I know, although alcohol never seriously damaged his work or made him wild. And then he stopped cold. And he surely must have introduced himself at meetings of A. A. as all members must, with his name-followed by this brave confession: "I'm an alcoholic."Yes, and the paper's genteel denial of his ever having had trouble with alcohol had the old-fas.h.i.+oned intent of preserving from taint all the rest of us who had the same last name.We would all have a harder time making good Indianapolis marriages or getting good Indianapolis jobs, if it were known for certain that we had had relatives who were once drunkards, or who, like my mother and my son, had gone at least temporarily insane.It was even a secret that my paternal grandmother died of cancer.Think of that.* * *At any rate, if Uncle Alex, the atheist, found himself standing before Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates after he died, I am certain he introduced himself as follows:"My name is Alex Vonnegut. I'm an alcoholic."Good for him.* * *I will guess, too, that it was loneliness as much as it was a dread of alcoholic poisoning which shepherded him into A. A. As his relatives died off or wandered away, or simply became interchangeable parts in the American machine, he went looking for new brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and uncles and aunts, and so on, which he found in A. A.* * *When I was a child, he used to tell me what to read, and then make sure I'd read it. It used to amuse him to take me on visits to relatives I'd never known I had.He told me one time that he had been an American spy in Baltimore during the First World War, befriending German-Americans there. His a.s.signment was to detect enemy agents. He detected nothing, for there was nothing to detect.He told me, too, that he was an investigator of graft in New York City for a little while-before his parents told him it was time to come home and settle down. He uncovered a scandal involving large expenditures for the maintenance of Grant's Tomb, which required very little maintenance indeed.Hi ho.* * *I received the news of his death over a white, push-b.u.t.ton telephone in my house in that part of Manhattan known as "Turtle Bay." There was a philodendron nearby.I am still not clear how I got here. There are no turtles. There is no bay.Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.* * *So I called my brother in Albany. He was about to turn sixty. I was fifty-two.We were certainly no spring chickens.But Bernard still played the part of an older brother. It was he who got us our seats on Trans World Airlines and our car at the Indianapolis airport, and our double room with twin beds at a Ramada Inn.The funeral itself, like the funerals of our parents and of so many other close relatives, was as blankly secular, as vacant of ideas about G.o.d or the afterlife, or even about Indianapolis, as our Ramada Inn.* * *So my brother and I strapped ourselves into a jet-propelled airplane bound from New York City to Indianapolis. I sat on the aisle. Bernard took the window seat, since he was an atmospheric scientist, since clouds had so much more to say to him than they did to me.We were both over six feet tall. We still had most of our hair, which was brown. We had identical mustaches-duplicates of our late father's mustache.We were harmless looking. We were a couple of nice old Andy Gumps.There was an empty seat between us, which was spooky poetry. It could have been a seat for our sister Alice, whose age was halfway between mine and Bernard's. She wasn't in that seat and on her way to her beloved Uncle Alex's funeral, for she had died among strangers in New Jersey, of cancer-at the age of forty-one."Soap opera!" she said to my brother and me one time, when discussing her own impending death. She would be leaving four young boys behind, without any mother."Slapstick," she said.Hi ho.* * *She spent the last day of her life in a hospital. The doctors and nurses said she could smoke and drink as much as she pleased, and eat whatever she pleased.My brother and I paid her a call. It was hard for her to breathe. She had been as tall as we were at one time, which was very embarra.s.sing to her, since she was a woman. Her posture had always been bad, because of her embarra.s.sment. Now she had a posture like a question mark.She coughed. She laughed. She made a couple of jokes which I don't remember now.Then she sent us away. "Don't look back," she said.So we didn't.She died at about the same time of day that Uncle Alex died-an hour or two after the sun went down.And hers would have been an unremarkable death statistically, if it were not for one detail, which was this: Her healthy husband, James Carmalt Adams, the editor of a trade journal for purchasing agents, which he put together in a cubicle on Wall Street, had died two mornings before-on "The Brokers' Special," the only train in American railroading history to hurl itself off an open drawbridge.Think of that.* * *This really happened.* * *Bernard and I did not tell Alice about what had happened to her husband, who was supposed to take full charge of the children after she died, but she found out about it anyway. An ambulatory female patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News Daily News. The front page headline was about the dive of the train. Yes, and there was a list of the dead and missing inside.Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place.Good for her.* * *Exhaustion, yes, and deep money worries, too, made her say toward the end that she guessed that she wasn't really very good at life.Then again: Neither were Laurel and Hardy.* * *My brother and I had already taken over her household. After she died, her three oldest sons, who were between the ages of eight and fourteen, held a meeting, which no grownups could attend. Then they came out and asked that we honor their only two requirements: That they remain together, and that they keep their two dogs. The youngest child, who was not at the meeting, was a baby only a year old or so.From then on, the three oldest were raised by me and my wife, Jane c.o.x Vonnegut, along with our own three children, on Cape Cod. The baby, who lived with us for a while, was adopted by a first cousin of their father, who is now a judge in Birmingham, Alabama.So be it.The three oldest kept their dogs.* * *I remember now what one of her sons, who is named "Kurt" like my father and me, asked me as we drove from New Jersey to Cape Cod with the two dogs in back. He was about eight.We were going from south to north, so where we were going was "up" to him. There were just the two of us. His brothers had gone ahead."Are the kids up there nice?" he said."Yes, they are," I replied.He is an airline pilot now.They are all something other than children now.* * *One of them is a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica. He has made come true a dream of our sister's: To live far from the madness of cities, with animals for friends. He has no telephone or electricity.He is desperately dependent on rainfall. He is a ruined man, if it does not rain.* * *The two dogs have died of old age. I used to roll around with them on rugs for hours on end, until they were all p.o.o.ped out.* * *Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere-not anywhere.The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: "It isn't the museum, it should be."The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror-to protect the children from eternal grief.* * *For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophic if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind.Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died-to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.Be that as it may, she had vanished entirely as my audience by the time Uncle Alex died.So the seat between my brother and me on the airplane seemed especially vacant to me. I filled it as best I could-with that morning's issue of The New York Times The New York Times.* * *While my brother and I waited for the plane to take off for Indianapolis, he made me a present of a joke by Mark Twain-about an opera Twain had seen in Italy. Twain said that he hadn't heard anything like it "... since the orphanage burned down."We laughed.* * *He asked me politely how my work was going. I think he respects but is baffled by my work.I said that I was sick of it, but that I had always been sick of it. I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing.I told him, too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: "Dear Kurt-I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil."We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.* * *I told him that I had been going to operas recently, and that the set for the first act of Tosca Tosca had looked exactly like the interior of Union Station in Indianapolis to me. While the actual opera was going on, I said, I daydreamed about putting track numbers in the archways of the set, and pa.s.sing out bells and whistles to the orchestra, and staging an opera about Indianapolis during the Age of the Iron Horse. had looked exactly like the interior of Union Station in Indianapolis to me. While the actual opera was going on, I said, I daydreamed about putting track numbers in the archways of the set, and pa.s.sing out bells and whistles to the orchestra, and staging an opera about Indianapolis during the Age of the Iron Horse."People from our great-grandfathers' generation would mingle with our own, when we were young-" I said, "and all the generations in between. Arrivals and departures would be announced. Uncle Alex would leave for his job as a spy in Baltimore. You would come home from your freshman year at M.I.T."There would be shoals of relatives," I said, "watching the travelers come and go-and black men to carry the luggage and s.h.i.+ne the shoes."* * *"Every so often in my opera," I said, "the stage would turn mud-colored with uniforms. That would be a war."And then it would clear up again."* * *After the plane took off, my brother showed me a piece of scientific apparatus which he had brought along. It was a photoelectric cell connected to a small tape recorder. He aimed the electric eye at clouds. It perceived lightning flashes which were invisible to us in the dazzle of daytime.The secret flashes were recorded as clicks by the recorder. We could also hear the clicks as they happened-on a tiny earphone."There's a hot one," my brother announced. He indicated a distant c.u.mulus cloud, a seeming Pike's Peak of whipped cream.He let me listen to the clicks. There were two quick ones, then some silence, then three quick ones, then silence again."How far away is that cloud?" I asked him."Oh-a hundred miles, maybe," he said.I thought it was beautiful that my big brother could detect secrets so simply from so far away.* * *I lit a cigarette.Bernard doesn't smoke any more, because it is so important that he live a good while longer. He still has two little boys to raise.* * *Yes, and while my big brother meditated about clouds, the mind I I was given daydreamed the story in this book. It is about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death, and so on. It depicts myself and my beautiful sister as monsters, and so on. was given daydreamed the story in this book. It is about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death, and so on. It depicts myself and my beautiful sister as monsters, and so on.This is only natural, since I dreamed it on the way to a funeral.* * *It is about this terribly old man in the ruins of Manhattan, you see, where almost everyone has been killed by a mysterious disease called "The Green Death."He lives there with his illiterate, rickety, pregnant little granddaughter, Melody. Who is he really? I guess he is myself-experimenting with being old.Who is Melody? I thought for a while that she was all that remained of my memory of my sister. I now believe that she is what I feel to be, when I experiment with old age, all that is left of my optimistic imagination, of my creativeness.Hi ho.* * *The old man is writing his autobiography. He begins it with words which my late Uncle Alex told me one time should be used by religious skeptics as a prelude to their nightly prayers.These are the words: "To whom it may concern."

1.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:.

It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Smoke from a cooking fire on the terrazzo floor of the lobby of the Empire State Building on the Island of Death floats out over the ailanthus jungle which Thirty-fourth Street has become.

The pavement on the floor of the jungle is all crink.u.m-crank.u.m-heaved this way and that by frost-heaves and roots.

There is a small clearing in the jungle. A blue-eyed, lantern-jawed old white man, who is two meters tall and one hundred years old, sits in the clearing on what was once the back seat of a taxicab.

I am that man.

My name is Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.

I am barefoot. I wear a purple toga made from draperies found in the ruins of the Americana Hotel.

I am a former President of the United States of America. I was the final President, the tallest President, and the only one ever to have been divorced while occupying the White House.

I inhabit the first floor of the Empire State Building with my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, who is Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, and with her lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. The three of us have the building all to ourselves.

Our nearest neighbor is one and one-half kilometers away.

I have just heard one of her roosters crow.

Our nearest neighbor is Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, a woman who loves life and is better at it than anyone I ever knew. She is a strong and warm-hearted and hard-working farmer in her early sixties. She is built like a fireplug. She has slaves whom she treats very well. And she and the slaves raise cattle and pigs and chickens and goats and corn and wheat and vegetables and fruits and grapes along the sh.o.r.es of the East River.

They have built a windmill for grinding grain, and a still for making brandy, and a smokehouse-and on and on.

"Vera-" I told her the other day, "if you would only write us a new Declaration of Independence, you would be the Thomas Jefferson of modern times."

I write this book on the stationery of the Continental Driving School, three boxes of which Melody and Isadore found in a closet on the sixty-fourth floor of our home. They also found a gross of ball-point pens.

Visitors from the mainland are rare. The bridges are down. The tunnels are crushed. And boats will not come near us, for fear of the plague peculiar to this island, which is called "The Green Death."

And it is that plague which has earned Manhattan the sobriquet, "The Island of Death."

Hi ho.

It is a thing I often say these days: "Hi ho." It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long.

Hi ho.

The gravity is very light today. I have an erection as a result of that. All males have erections on days like this. They are automatic consequences of near-weightlessness. They have little to do with eroticism in most cases, and nothing to do with it in the life of a man my age. They are hydraulic experiences-the results of confused plumbing, and little more.

Hi ho.

The gravity is so light today, that I feel as though I might scamper to the top of the Empire State Building with a manhole cover, and fling it into New Jersey.

That would surely be an improvement on George Was.h.i.+ngton's sailing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock. And yet some people insist that there is no such thing as progress.

I am sometimes called "The King of Candlesticks," because I own more than one thousand candlesticks.

But I am fonder of my middle name, which is "Daffodil-11." And I have written this poem about it, and about life itself, of course: "I was those seeds, "I am this meat, "This meat hates pain, "This meat must eat.

"This meat must sleep, "This meat must dream, "This meat must laugh, "This meat must scream.

"But when, as meat, "It's had its fill, "Please plant it as "A Daffodil."

And who will read all this? G.o.d knows. Not Melody and Isadore, surely. Like all the other young people on the island, they can neither read nor write.

They have no curiosity about the human past, nor about what life may be like on the mainland.

As far as they are concerned, the most glorious accomplishment of the people who inhabited this island so teemingly was to die, so we could have it all to ourselves.

I asked them the other evening to name the three most important human beings in history. They protested that the question made no sense to them.

I insisted that they put their heads together anyway, and give me some sort of answer, which they did. They were very sulky about the exercise. It was painful to them.

They finally came up with an answer. Melody does most of the talking for them, and this is what she said in all seriousness: "You, and Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus."

Hi ho.

When I do not ask them questions, they are as happy as clams.

They hope to become slaves of Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa some day. That is O.K. with me.

2.

AND I I REALLY WILL REALLY WILL try to stop writing "Hi ho" all the time. try to stop writing "Hi ho" all the time.

Hi ho.

I was born right here in New York City. I was not then a Daffodil Daffodil I was christened Wilbur I was christened Wilbur Rockefeller Rockefeller-Swain.

I was not alone, moreover. I had a dizygotic twin, a female. She was named Eliza Mellon Swain.

We were christened in a hospital rather than in a church, and we were not surrounded by relatives and our parents' friends. The thing was: Eliza and I were so ugly that our parents were ashamed.

We were monsters, and we were not expected to live very long. We had six fingers on each little hand, and six toes on each little footsie. We had supernumerary nipples as well-two of them apiece.

We were not mongolian idiots, although we had the coa.r.s.e black hair typical of mongoloids. We were something new. We were neanderthaloids neanderthaloids. We had the features of adult, fossil human beings even in infancy-ma.s.sive brow-ridges, sloping foreheads, and steamshovel jaws.

We were supposed to have no intelligence, and to die before we were fourteen.

But I am still alive and kicking, thank you. And Eliza would be, too, I'm certain, if she had not been killed at the age of fifty-in an avalanche on the outskirts of the Chinese colony on the planet Mars.

Hi ho.

Our parents were two silly and pretty and very young people named Caleb Mellon Swain and Let.i.tia Vanderbilt Swain, nee Rockefeller. They were fabulously well-to-do, and descended from Americans who had all but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot's Delight-obsessively turning money into power, and then power back into money again, and then money back into power again.

But Caleb and Let.i.tia were harmless themselves. Father was very good at backgammon and so-so at color photography, they say. Mother was active in the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People. Neither worked. Neither was a college graduate, though both had tried.

They wrote and spoke nicely. They adored each other. They were humble about having done so poorly in schools. They were kind.

And I cannot fault them for being shattered by having given birth to monsters. Anyone would have been shattered by giving birth to Eliza and me.

And Caleb and Let.i.tia were at least as good at parenting as I was, when my turn rolled around. I was wholly indifferent to my own children, although they were normal in every way.

Perhaps I would have been more entertained by my children if they had been monsters like Eliza and me.

Hi ho.

Young Caleb and Let.i.tia were advised not to break their hearts and risk their furniture by attempting to raise Eliza and me in Turtle Bay. We were no more true relatives of theirs, their advisors said, than baby crocodiles.

Caleb's and Let.i.tia's response was humane. It was also expensive and Gothic in the extreme. Our parents did not hide us in a private hospital for cases such as ours. They entombed us instead in a spooky old mansion which they had inherited-in the midst of two hundred acres of apple trees on a mountain-top, near the hamlet of Galen, Vermont.

No one had lived there for thirty years.

Carpenters and electricians and plumbers were brought in to turn it into a sort of paradise for Eliza and me. Thick rubber padding was put under all the wall-to-wall carpets, so we would not hurt ourselves in case we fell. Our diningroom was lined with tile, and there were drains in the floor, so we and the room could be hosed off after every meal.

More important, perhaps, were two chain-link fences which went up. They were topped with barbed wire. The first enclosed the orchard. The second separated the mansion from the prying eyes of the workmen who had to be let in through the first from time to time in order to look after the apple trees.

Hi ho.

A staff was recruited from the neighborhood. There was a cook. There were two cleaning women and a cleaning man. There were two practical nurses who fed us and dressed us and undressed us and bathed us. The one I remember best is Withers Witherspoon, a combination guard, chauffeur and handyman.

His mother was a Withers. His father was a Witherspoon.

Yes, and these were simple country people, who, with the exception of Withers Witherspoon, who had been a soldier, had never been outside Vermont. They had rarely ventured more than ten miles from Galen, for that matter-and they were necessarily all related to one another, as inbred as Eskimos.

They were of course distantly related to Eliza and me, too, since our Vermont ancestors had once been content to dogpaddle endlessly, so to speak, in the same tiny genetic pool.

But, in the American scheme of things at that time, they were related to our family as carp were related to eagles, say-for our family had evolved into world-travelers and multimillionaires.

Hi ho.

Yes, and it was easy for our parents to buy the fealty of these living fossils from the family past. They were given modest salaries which seemed enormous to them, since the money-making lobes of their brains were so primitive.

They were given pleasant apartments in the mansion, and color television sets. They were encouraged to eat like emperors, charging whatever they liked to our parents. They had very little work to do.

Better still, they did not have to think much for themselves. They were placed under the command of a young general pract.i.tioner who lived in the hamlet, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott, who would look in on us every day.

Dr. Mott was a Texan, incidentally, a melancholy and private young man. To this day, I do not know what induced him to move so far from his people and his birthplace-to practice medicine in an Eskimo settlement in Vermont.

As a curious footnote in history, and a probably meaningless one: The grandson of Dr. Mott would become the King of Michigan during my second term as President of the United States.

I must hiccup again: Hi ho.

I swear: If I live to complete this autobiography, I will go through it again, and cross out all the "Hi ho's."

Hi ho.

Yes, and there was an automatic sprinkler system in the mansion-and burglar alarms on the windows and doors and skylights.

When we grew older and uglier, and capable of breaking arms or tearing heads off, a great gong was installed in the kitchen. This was connected to cherry red push-b.u.t.tons in every room and at regular intervals down every corridor. The b.u.t.tons glowed in the dark.

A b.u.t.ton was to be pushed only if Eliza or I began to toy with murder.

Hi ho.