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

said that he did not know its name, but that we could all agree wholeheartedly on this much: that it was a masterpiece.
    “And he was the first planetary citizen my new friends had ever seen, and possibly the last one, too. He was no more a respecter of politics and national boundaries than (that image again) a unicorn. Beauty could be found or created anywhere on this planet, and that was that.
    “AT&T has completed yet another building, this one on the island of Manhattan, near where I live. The telephone company has again done without the services of my father, who could not now be awakened in any case. AT&T hired Philip Johnson instead, a Sleeping Beauty who throughout his adult life has been tickled awake by ardent princes.
    “Should I now rage at Fate for not having enabled my father to have as much fun as Mr. Johnson?
    “I try to imagine my father speaking to me across the abyss between the dead and the living, and I hear him saying this: ‘Do not pity me because I in my prime awaited romantic challenges which never came. If you wish to carve an epitaph on my modest headstone in Crown Hill Cemetery at this late date, then let it be this: IT WAS ENOUGH TO HAVE BEEN A UNICORN.’”
    Thus ends that piece. I am moved to add that Father tried to make good times revisitable (a trick which was easy as pie for the Tralfamadorians in my novel
Slaughterhouse-Five)
by gluing cheerful documents to sheets of masonite and protecting them with varnish. Thanks to Father, this mummified letter now hangs on the wall of my workroom:
    “Dear Pop:
    “I sold my first story to
Collier’s
. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.
    “I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.
    “I’m happier than I’ve been for a good many years.
    “Love.”
    The letter is signed with my first initial, which is what he called me. It is no milestone in literature, but it looms like Stonehenge beside my own little footpath from birth to death. The date is October 28, 1949.
    Father glued a message from himself on the back of that piece of masonite. It is a quotation from
The Merchant of Venice
in his own lovely hand:
    An oath, an oath, I have an oath in Heaven:
Shall I lay perjury on my soul?
     

II
     
    If a maiden sits on the ground in a clearing in a forest where a unicorn lives, they say, the unicorn will come to her and put its head in her lap. That is the best way to catch a unicorn. This procedure must have been discovered by a maiden who sat down in a clearing with no intention of catching a unicorn. The unicorn with its head in her lap must have been an embarrassment. (What next?)
    In the household of my childhood and youth, my sister Alice, dead for many years now (and missed like heck by me), was the maiden and our father was the elusive and spookily enchanted unicorn. My only other sibling, my own big brother who went to MIT, Bernard, and I could never catch him. To him we weren’t all that interesting. As far as the two of us are concerned, this is not a remotely tragic tale. We were tough. We could take it. We had other fans.
    (My daughter Edith was once married most unfortunately to a man named Geraldo Rivera who at this writing interviews little clumps of people on weekday afternoon television who have had experiences which are generally perceived as fantastic. I mention him at this point because some of these guests have been sexually abused by close relatives. I hasten to assert that my sister, five years older than I, was not remotely abused by our gentle father. Like a