Palm Sunday (28 page)

“But that is not the major crisis in the story. The most moving part is when a young, idealistic SS lieutenant comes to Vonnegut for help. His name is Dampfwalze.
Dampjwalze
means ’steamroller.’
Vonnegut
means nothing. Ask any critic on
The New York Review of Books
.

“Lieutenant Dampfwalze, who could be played by Peter O’Toole, feels that he can’t cut the mustard anymore on the railroad platform at Auschwitz, where boxcars of people are unloaded day after day. He is sick and tired of it, but he has the wisdom to seek professional help. Dr. Vonnegut is an eclectic worker in the field of mental health, incidentally, a pragmatic man. He is a little bit Jungian, a little bit Freudian, a little bit Rankian—and so on. He has an open and inquiring mind.

“Actually, he cures Dampfwalze with megavitamins, the same things that cured my son. The Nazis haven’t received nearly the credit they deserve for pioneering megavitamin therapy.

“So Dampfwalze is ready to return to duty. His eyes are shining again. His appetite is good. He sleeps like a baby every night. And he asks Dr. Vonnegut how serious his illness had been.

“Dr. Vonnegut tells him that, if Dampfwalze hadn’t recognized nature’s little danger signals early and put himself into the hands of modern medicine, he might have tried to shoot Adolf Hitler by and by. That is how sick he was.

“And the moral of that story, I think, is that a society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

“I thank you for your attention.”

•   •   •

Three of my six children are adopted nephews. They have retained their original name, the most original of all
names, which is Adams. My first wife and I adopted them after, within a period of only twenty-four hours, their father drowned when his commuter train went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey and then their mother died of cancer in a hospital. Their mother was my only sister, and her death had been expected for quite a while.

There was a fourth Adams brother, an infant, who was adopted by a first cousin of his father in Birmingham, Alabama.

They were orphaned in September of 1958, nearly twenty-two years ago as I write. I came down from Cape Cod at once to run their house in Rumson, New Jersey. They held a meeting at which I was not present. They came downstairs together with a single demand: that they be kept together along with their dogs. One of the dogs, a sheep dog named Sandy, would become the closest friend I have ever had.

•   •   •

James Adams, the oldest of the orphans, as we continue to call them, was then fourteen. He is now thirty-six, the age I was when Jane and I adopted him. He attended college briefly, then became a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, and then a goat farmer in Jamaica, and is now a cabinetmaker in Leverett, Massachusetts.

He is married to Barbara D’Arthanay, a former New England schoolteacher who lived and worked with him for several years on his goat farm on a mountaintop in Jamaica. They are as uninterested in social rank and property as was Henry David Thoreau.

They have given me a grandchild. The area in which they are raising that child consists largely of farmlands being recaptured by the wilderness. The name of the child resonates with the innocent imperialism of earlier white colonists. Her name is India Adams.

God watch over India Adams in the untamed American wilderness.

•   •   •

A tale from Jim’s bachelor days:

Jim went down the Amazon with two friends on a raft after he left the Peace Corps. One night, while the raft was tied up near Manaus, the old rubber boom town in Brazil, a speedboat came alongside. At the wheel was Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet. He had Brazilian friends along. He asked in English if he and his party could come aboard the raft for drinks. In exchange, he said, he would give his hosts a perfect name for their raft.

So there was some drinking on the raft, and fighting for some reason broke out between Yevtushenko and Jim.

So the party was over, and the visitors got back in their speedboat. Just before they cast off, Yevtushenko said: “I have not forgotten my promise. You should call your raft
The Huckleberry Finn.”

Years later I myself would meet Yevtushenko, and I would ask him if the story was true.

“Ah!” he said. “Ah! That was your son? He is a very bad boy!”

Small world.

•   •   •

Steven Adams was eleven when we adopted him, the same age as my natural son Mark. He was the least dependent of the lot, being a superb athlete and having joined an alternative family long before his parents died, the worldwide family of coaches and teammates and competitors everywhere. Coaches on Cape Cod, just like the coaches in New Jersey, greeted him like a long-lost son.

Steve arrived on Cape Cod wearing a jacket with this
emblazoned on the back: “New Jersey Little League All-Stars.” Further introductions were unnecessary.

He went to Dartmouth, where he studied English literature and played end. He is in Los Angeles now, a professional writer of comedy for television shows. He is thirty-three and has never married, and he runs a lot.

I know Steve least well of all my children, since, to his credit, he has had the least need of me. At the same time, he is the only one who has chosen to become what I am, which is a full-time writer. His work now is entirely comical. As far as I know, he will not begin a piece unless it promises to lead him at once to a joke of some kind. He is well paid for unseriousness. If he ever became serious, he would lose his job.

His job also requires him to ignore all he learned at Dartmouth of history and literature and philosophy and what have you, and to joke only about matters with which his audience is familiar, recent television commercials, celebrities of the moment, big-grossing motion pictures of the past year, extraordinarily popular records, political figures in the news incessantly, and on and on. This must become tiresome.

He is the most rootless of my children, and the one most likely to drift away. If he reproduces, his children, in California, perhaps, will never find out, probably, unless they read this book, that they are de St. Andrés and have second cousins named Carl Hiroaki Vonnegut and Emiko Alice Vonnegut and on and on.

•   •   •

Steve’s younger brother Kurt Adams, nine years old when we adopted him, also lives in Leverett, near his brother Jim. Kurt was the first of the brothers to settle there. He is thirty-two now, and a pilot for Air New England, and a builder on speculation of beautiful post-and-beam houses
which are entirely heated by wood stoves. He lives in such a house himself. He is married to an excellent artist named Lindsay Palermo. So far, they have not had a child.

Kurt is the only canny business person of the lot. He is of modest means, but he makes satisfying gains on small investments. He has a little victory garden of dollars that he tends.

The rest do not care for money games. They cannot pay attention—any more than my father or mother or sister could, than my brother can.

This is a matter of genetics, I think. People are born caring or not caring about managing money well.

We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained. I write.

•   •   •

My brother is an enthusiast for the scientific study of thunderstorms. My late sister was born to be an enthusiast for painting and sculpture, but resisted. She said, very wisely, in my opinion, “Just because you have talent, it doesn’t mean that you have to
do
something with it.”

•   •   •

There is a fourth Adams brother. He was an infant when his mother died. He was adopted by a first cousin of his father in Birmingham, Alabama, a judge. His mother died before she could have any influence over his character, and yet his attitudes toward life are identical with hers—and his jokes. His name is Peter Nice.

He talks of settling in Leverett—to be near his brothers, who are more like him than anyone else in the world.

•   •   •

When we adopted the Adamses, two of our natural children got artificial twins. Steve Adams was the same age as
Mark Vonnegut. Kurt Adams was the same age as Edith Vonnegut. This was purely delightful for Edith, who took her new twin to “Show and Tell” at the Barnstable Elementary School. She got two more strong older brothers, as well. For Mark, the benefits of a family merger weren’t so apparent at once. He was no longer the oldest child and the only male child—and so on.

•   •   •

All the children remain close these days, and think of themselves as genuine brothers and sisters. They are lucky to have so many interested and responsive relatives. There are many affectionate reunions a year in the big old house on Cape Cod where they were raised together. They were such a formidable gang when they were young that one policeman became a specialist in their habits and haunts. He had a lovely name, and always left his blue flasher on when he parked in our yard. His name was Sergeant Nightingale.

Whenever Sergeant Nightingale came to interrogate this child or that one, the flasher on his cruiser splashed our house with blue as it went around and around.

Nobody ever went to prison, though.

Nobody ever dealt dope.

•   •   •

There was only one really fancy auto smashup. Mark rolled and totaled a Volkswagen Microbus with about eight people in it. It scattered people out along the shoulder of the road the way a saltshaker will scatter salt. People flew out through the sun roof, out through the side doors, out through the tailgate. Mark was the last one to fly out. He landed on his feet, and found himself facing oncoming traffic like a football lineman.

Nobody was killed or seriously hurt, thank God.

Jim Adams was not the only one of my children to
come close to actual combat with a major literary figure. About the time Jim and Yevtushenko were menacing each other on the Amazon, Mark Vonnegut was considering a fight with Jack Kerouac in our kitchen on Cape Cod. These confrontations even took place in the same time zone, but in different hemispheres.

I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy. He called Boles, who is black, “a blue-gummed nigger.” He said that Jews were the real Nazis, and that Allen Ginsberg had been told by the Communists to befriend Kerouac, in order that they might gain control of American young people, whose leader he was.

This was pathetic. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man. He wished to play poker, so I dealt some cards. There were four hands, I think—one for Boles, one for Kerouac, one for Jane, one for me. Kerouac picked up the remainder of the deck, and he threw it across the kitchen.

It was then that Mark came in, unexpectedly home for a weekend from Swarthmore College, where he was a religion major. He was also a middleweight wrestler in very good shape. He wore a full beard and a work shirt and blue jeans, and carried a duffel bag. Everything about his costume and even his posture might have been inspired by Kerouac’s books.

The moment Kerouac saw him, Kerouac stood and looked him over smolderingly from head to toe. The calm before a fight settled dankly over the room.

“You think you understand me,” said Kerouac to Mark. “You don’t understand me at all. You want to fight about it?”
Mark said nothing, not knowing who Kerouac was or what he was so mad about.

Kerouac praised himself as a fighter, asked Mark if he really thought he was man enough to take him on.

Mark understood this much, anyway: that he might really have to fight this person. He didn’t want to, but then again, he wouldn’t have minded fighting him all that much.

But then Kerouac sat back down in his chair heavily, shaking his head and saying over and over again, “Doesn’t understand me at all.”

Later on that night, after Kerouac and Boles left, Mark and I talked some about Kerouac, who was then completing his seventeenth and last book. He would die very soon.

It turned out that Mark had never read Kerouac.

•   •   •

And Mark is a physician now, married to Pat O’Shea, a schoolteacher, and they have one son, Zachary Vonnegut, the firstborn of my grandchildren, now three years old, and the only one so far to carry on my own curious last name. Mark is the first Vonnegut in America to be a healer, and only the second one to earn a doctor’s degree of any sort. My brother Bernard, of course, has a doctor’s degree in chemistry.

And Conrad Aiken, the poet, the one time I met him, told me that a child will compete with its father in an area where the father is weak, in an area where the father mistakenly believes himself to be quite accomplished. Aiken himself did this, by his own account. His father was a Renaissance man, a surgeon, an athlete, something of a musician, something of a poet, and on and on. Aiken said that he himself became a poet because he realized that his father’s poetry really wasn’t very good.

So what am I, if I believe that, to make of myself as mirrored in my own children, who cheerfully compete in every area, including writing, in which I have ever dabbled
while they were watching? I played chess a little, and now all of them can beat me at chess. I painted and drew some, and now Jim Adams and Mark Vonnegut and Edith Vonnegut and Nanette Vonnegut can all paint and draw circles around me. Desperately, this old man is going to have a one-man show of his drawings this fall, but they’re no damn good.

Yes, and I carpentered some, so now Jim Adams and Kurt Adams and Steve Adams and Mark Vonnegut can all do cabinet work. And on and on.

Mark has written a first-rate book. Edith has not only written but illustrated a first-rate book.

I noodled around some on the piano and the clarinet, so Steve Adams now composes his own music and performs with his guitar in cabarets, and Mark plays saxophone and a little piano in a jazz band composed entirely of physicians, and on and on.