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

asides, non sequiturs, dialyses, epicrises, meioses, antiphrases, and so on in parentheses.)

III
     
    When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information. I have seen and heard hatred that pure coming from women maybe ten times since she died on Mother’s Day in 1944 (about a month before D Day). I don’t think the hatred has much to do with the particular man who gets it. Father surely didn’t deserve it. Most likely, it seems to me, it is a response to aeons of subjugation, although my mother and all the other women who have displayed it for my supposed benefit were about as enslaved as Queen Elizabeth or Cleopatra.
    My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside, but my mother had too much of it. When the clock struck midnight (and we really did have a grandfather clock which struck the hours with authority), out it came. For her it was like throwing up. She had to do it. Poor soul! Poor soul!
    This is a self-serving theory, insinuating that Father and I did not deserve to be so hated. Forget it. When I was in Prague about four years before the Artists overthrew the Communists, a local writer told me that Czechs love to build elaborate theories so closely reasoned as to seem irrefutable and then, self-mockingly, to knock them down. I do that, too. (My favorite Czech writer is Karel Čapek, whose magical essay on literature I have thrown into the Appendix as proof that I am correct to be so charmed by him.)
    But to get back to the thing between my father and my sister, the unicorn and the maiden: Father, no more a Freudian than Lewis Carroll, made Alice his principal source of encouragement and sympathy. He made the most of an enthusiasm they had in common, which was for the visual arts. Alice was just a girl, remember, and aside from the embarrassment of having a unicorn lay its head in her lap, so to speak, she was traumatized mainly by having every piece of sculpture or picture she made celebrated by Father as though it were Michelangelo’s
Pietà
or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In later life (which was going to last only until she was forty-one) this made her a lazy artist. (I have often quoted her elsewhere as saying, “Just because people have talent, that doesn’t mean they have to
do
something with it.”)
    “My only sister, Alice,” I wrote, again in
Architectural Digest,
“possessed considerable gifts as a painter and sculptor, with which she did next to nothing. Alice, who was six feet tall and a platinum blonde, asserted one time that she could roller-skate through a great museum like the Louvre, which she had never seen and which she wasn’t all that eager to see, and which she in fact would never see, and fully appreciate every painting she passed. She said that she would be hearing these words in her head above the whir and clack of her wheels on the terrazzo: ‘Got it, got it, got it.’
    “I have subsequently discussed this with artists who are a lot more productive and famous than she was, and they have said that they, too, can almost always extract all the value from an unfamiliar painting in a single
pow.
Or, if the painting is without value, then they get no
pow.
    “And I think yet again about my father, who struggled to become a painter after he was forced into early and unwelcome retirement by the Great Depression. He had reason to be optimistic about this new career, since the early stages of his pictures, whether still lifes or portraits or landscapes, were full of
pow.
Mother, meaning to be helpful, would say of each one: ‘That’s really wonderful, Kurt. Now all you have to do is
finish
it.’ He would then ruin it. I remember a portrait he did of his only brother, Alex, who was an insurance salesman, which he called
Special Agent.
When he roughed it in, his hand and eye conspired with a few bold strokes