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bloodless attitude given her preoccupation with, well, blood. Weiner seemed most interested in meeting really cool celebs. These were the two authorial personas on display: the geeky genius whose art is hermetically sealed off from the vulgarities of the real world, and the crowd-pleaser slavish after shiny morsels of fame. 8 Vonnegut, in his belief that artists should serve as instruments of destiny, was utterly alone.
    As the first half of the evening drew to a close, Weiner and Oates made a beeline for the wings. Vonnegut rose to his feet with great deliberation. He took a cautious first step, to avoid tripping over his microphone wire. Then he began a long, shuffling trip across the empty stage. “Oh, no,” the woman next to me said tenderly. “He’s all by himself!”
     
     
     
    AFTER INTERMISSION came questions from the audience.
    Someone asked, “What is the political responsibility of a writer?”
    Vonnegut responded, “We need to say what political responsibility does an American have.”
    Someone asked, “What’s the single most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
    Vonnegut said, “My Lord, that’s a tough question, because there’s so much beauty, really; it’s what keeps me going in life, is just glimpsing beauty all the time. I suppose the most beautiful thing, though you can’t see it exactly, is music.”
    Someone asked what his essential topic was.
    Vonnegut said, “I write again and again about my family.”
    Toward the end, a girl named Mary asked Vonnegut, “Can you sum up your philosophy of life in two sentences? And will you go to the prom with me? It is my senior year.”
    It was the kind of setup Vonnegut should have knocked out of the ballpark. But he looked exhausted. More than that, he looked heartbroken. This is what Weiner and Oates seemed unable to grasp: The man was heartbroken.
    Not sexist. Not cranky. Heartbroken.
    He had spent his entire life writing stories and essays and novels in the naked hope that he might redeem his readers. As grim and dystopic as some of those books were, every one was written under the assumption that human beings are capable of a greater decency. And not because of God’s will, that tired old crutch. But because of their simple duty to others of their kind.
    Now, in the shadow of his own death, he was facing the incontrovertible evidence that his life’s work had been for naught. Right before his eyes, Americans had regressed to a state of infantile omnipotence. They drove SUVs and cheered for wars on TV and worshipped the beautiful and ignorant and despised the poor and brushed aside the science of their own doom. They had lost interest in their own consciences, and declined to make the sacrifices that might spare their very own grandchildren.
    “My philosophy of life?” Vonnegut said. “I haven’t a clue.”
    “What about the prom?” the moderator said, hopefully.
    Vonnegut made a crack about the girl being jailbait.
     
     
     
    IT WAS A LAUGH LINE, and some people did laugh. But there was a terrible disappointment in the moment: Vonnegut, for all his gifts of compassion, was failing in a simple act of generosity.
    He knew that this girl, Mary, wanted only a taste of his wisdom, his famous wit. She had read his books and, like all his fans, she had come to love him as a father, someone who had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.
    And this was what Mary wanted from him now: a little of his old magic. So did the rest of the folks sitting in the Bushnell Theater in downtown Hartford, not just the ones who stood