Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

“It must have cost a lot.”

“Nobel Prize money bought it. Two things that money bought: a cottage on Cape Cod and that monument.”

“Dynamite money,” I marveled, thinking of the violence of dynamite and the absolute repose of a tombstone and a summer home.

“What?”

“Nobel invented dynamite.”

“Well, I guess it takes all kinds…”

Had I been a Bokononist then, pondering the miraculously intricate chain of events that had brought dynamite money to that particular tombstone company, I might have whispered, “Busy, busy, busy.”

Busy, busy, busy , is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes.”

“And sometimes it isn’t,” said Marvin Breed.

I asked Marvin Breed if he’d known Emily Hoenikker, the wife of Felix; the mother of Angela, Frank, and Newt; the woman under that monstrous shaft.

“Know her?” His voice turned tragic. “Did I know her, mister? Sure, I knew her. I knew Emily. We went to Ilium High together. We were co-chairmen of the Class Colors Committee then. Her father owned the Ilium Music Store. She could play every musical instrument there was. I fell so hard for her I gave up football and tried to play the violin. And then my big brother Asa came home for spring vacation from M.I.T., and I made the mistake of introducing him to my best girl.” Marvin Breed snapped his fingers. “He took her away from me just like that. I smashed up my seventy-five-dollar violin on a big brass knob at the foot of my bed, and I went down to a florist shop and got the kind of box they put a dozen roses in, and I put the busted fiddle in the box, and I sent it to her by Western Union messenger boy.”

“Pretty, was she?”

“Pretty?” he echoed. “Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings and not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be. There wasn’t a man in Ilium County who wasn’t in love with her, secretly or otherwise. She could have had any man she wanted.” He spit on his own floor. “And she had to go and marry that little Dutch son of a bitch! She was engaged to my brother, and then that sneaky little bastard hit town.” Marvin Breed snapped his fingers again. “He took her away from my big brother like that.

“I suppose it’s high treason and ungrateful and ignorant and backward and anti-intellectual to call a dead man as famous as Felix Hoenikker a son of a bitch. I know all about how harmless and gentle and dreamy he was supposed to be, how he’d never hurt a fly, how he didn’t care about money and power and fancy clothes and automobiles and things, how he wasn’t like the rest of us, how he was better than the rest of us, how he was so innocent he was practically a Jesus — except for the Son of God part..

Marvin Breed felt it was unnecessary to complete his thought. I had to ask him to do it.

“But what?” he said. “But what?” He went to a window looking out at the cemetery gate. “But what,” he murmured at the gate and the sleet and the Hoenikker shaft that could be dimly seen.

“But,” he said, “but how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb? And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn’t even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding…”

He shuddered, “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

It was in the tombstone salesroom that I had my first vin-dit , a Bokononist word meaning a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism, in the direction of believing that God Almighty knew all about me, after all, that God Almighty had some pretty elaborate plans for me.

The vin-dit had to do with the stone angel under the mistletoe. The cab driver had gotten it into his head that he had to have that angel for his mother’s grave at any price. He was standing in front of it with tears in his eyes.

Marvin Breed was still staring out the window at the cemetery gate, having just said his piece about Felix Hoenikker. “The little Dutch son of a bitch may have been a modern holy man,” he added, “But Goddamn if he ever did anything he didn’t want to, and Goddamn if he didn’t get everything he ever wanted.

“Music,” he said.

“Pardon me?” I asked.

“That’s why she married him. She said his mind was tuned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars.” He shook his head. “Crap.”

And then the gate reminded him of the last time he’d seen Frank Hoenikker, the model-maker, the tormentor of bugs in jars. “Frank,” he said.

“What about him?”

“The last I saw of that poor, queer kid was when he came out through that cemetery gate. His father’s funeral was still going on. The old man wasn’t underground yet, and out through the gate came Frank. He raised his thumb at the first car that came by. It was a new Pontiac with a Florida license plate. It stopped. Frank got in it, and that was the last anybody in Ilium ever saw of him.”

“I hear he’s wanted by the police.”

“That was an accident, a freak. Frank wasn’t any criminal. He didn’t have that kind of nerve. The only work he was any good at was model-making. The only job he ever held onto was at Jack’s Hobby Shop, selling models, making models, giving people advice on how to make models. When he cleared out of here, went to Florida, he got a job in a model shop in Sarasota. Turned out the model shop was a front for a ring that stole Cadillacs, ran ’em straight on board old L.S.T.’s and shipped ’em to Cuba. That’s how Frank got balled up in all that. I expect the reason the cops haven’t found him is he’s dead. He just heard too much while he was sticking turrets on the battleship Missouri with Duco Cement.”

“Where’s Newt now, do you know?”

“Guess he’s with his sister in Indianapolis. Last I heard was he got mixed up with that Russian midget and flunked out of pre-med at Cornell. Can you imagine a midget trying to become a doctor? And, in that same miserable family, there’s that great big, gawky girl, over six feet tall. That man, who’s so famous for having a great mind, he pulled that girl out of high school in her sophomore year so he could go on having some woman take care of him. All she had going for her was the clarinet she’d played in the Ilium High School band, the Marching Hundred.

“After she left school,” said Breed, “nobody ever asked her out. She didn’t have any friends, and the old man never even thought to give her any money to go anywhere. You know what she used to do?”

“Nope.”

“Every so often at night she’d lock herself in her room and she’d play records, and she’d play along with the records on her clarinet. The miracle of this age, as far as I’m concerned, is that that woman ever got herself a husband.”

“How much do you want for this angel?” asked the cab driver.

“I’ve told you, it’s not for sale.”

“I don’t suppose there’s anybody around who can do that kind of stone cutting any more,” I observed.

“I’ve got a nephew who can,” said Breed. “Asa’s boy. He was all set to be a heap-big re -search scientist, and then they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and the kid quit, and he got drunk, and he came out here, and he told me he wanted to go to work cutting stone.”