Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle

“Father, as you probably know, spent practically his whole professional life working for the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company in Ilium. When the Manhattan Project came along, the bomb project, Father wouldn’t leave Ilium to work on it. He said he wouldn’t work on it at all unless they let him work where he wanted to work. A lot of the time that meant at home. The only place he liked to go, outside of Ilium, was our cottage on Cape Cod. Cape Cod was where he died. He died on a Christmas Eve. You probably know that, too.

“Anyway, I was playing on the carpet outside his study on the day of the bomb. My sister Angela tells me I used to play with little toy trucks for hours, making motor sounds, going ‘burton, burton, burton’ all the time. So I guess I was going‘ burton, burton, burton,’ on the day of the bomb; and Father was in his study, playing with a loop of string.

“It so happens I know where the string he was playing with came from. Maybe you can use it somewhere in your book. Father took the string from around the manuscript of a novel that a man in prison had sent him. The novel was about the end of the world in the year 2000, and the name of the book was 2000 A.D. It told about how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world. There was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was going to end, and then Jesus Christ Himself appeared ten seconds before the bomb went off. The name of the author was Marvin Sharpe Holderness, and he told Father in a covering letter that he was in prison for killing his own brother. He sent the manuscript to Father because he couldn’t figure out what kind of explosives to put in the bomb. He thought maybe Father could make suggestions.

“I don’t mean to tell you I read the book when I was six. We had it around the house for years. My brother Frank made it his personal property, on account of the dirty parts. Frank kept it hidden in what he called his ‘wall safe’ in his bedroom. Actually, it wasn’t a safe but just an old stove flue with a tin lid. Frank and I must have read the orgy part a thousand times when we were kids. We had it for years, and then my sister Angela found it. She read it and said it was nothing but a piece of dirty rotten filth. She burned it up, and the string with it. She was a mother to Frank and me, because our real mother died when I was born.

“My father never read the book, I’m pretty sure. I don’t think he ever read a novel or even a short story in his whole life, or at least not since he was a little boy. He didn’t read his mail or magazines or newspapers, either. I suppose he read a lot of technical journals, but to tell you the truth, I can’t remember my father reading anything.

“As I say, all he wanted from that manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string.

“Have you ever read the speech he made when he accepted the Nobel Prize? This is the whole speech: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you.’

“Anyway, Father looked at that loop of string for a while, and then his fingers started playing with it. His fingers made the string figure called a ‘cat’s cradle.’ I don’t know where Father learned how to do that. From his father, maybe. His father was a tailor, you know, so there must have been thread and string around all the time when Father was a boy.

“Making the cat’s cradle was the closest I ever saw my father come to playing what anybody else would call a game. He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up. In a scrapbook my sister Angela used to keep up, there was a clipping from Time magazine where somebody asked Father what games he played for relaxation, and he said, ‘Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?’

“He must have surprised himself when he made a cat’s cradle out of the string, and maybe it reminded him of his own childhood. He all of a sudden came out of his study and did something he’d never done before. He tried to play with me. Not only had he never played with me before; he had hardly ever even spoken to me.

“But he went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, and he showed me his teeth, and he waved that tangle of string in my face. ‘See? See? See?’ he asked. ‘Cat’s cradle. See the cat’s cradle? See where the nice pussycat sleeps? Meow. Meow.’

“His pores looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nostrils were stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of Hell. So close up, my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I dream about it all the time.

“And then he sang. ‘Rockabye catsy, in the tree top’; he sang, ‘when the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bough breaks, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come craydull, catsy and all.’

“I burst into tears. I jumped up and I ran out of the house as fast as I could go.

“I have to sign off here. It’s after two in the morning. My roommate just woke up and complained about the noise from the typewriter.”

Newt resumed his letter the next morning. He resumed it as follows:

“Next morning. Here I go again, fresh as a daisy after eight hours of sleep. The fraternity house is very quiet now. Everybody is in class but me. I’m a very privileged character. I don’t have to go to class any more. I was flunked out last week. I was a pre-med. They were right to flunk me out. I would have made a lousy doctor.

“After I finish this letter, I think I’ll go to a movie. Or if the sun comes out, maybe I’ll go for a walk through one of the gorges. Aren’t the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn’t get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt.

“But back to August 6, 1945. My sister Angela has told me many times that I really hurt my father that day when I wouldn’t admire the cat’s cradle, when I wouldn’t stay there on the carpet with my father and listen to him sing. Maybe I did hurt him, but I don’t think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lived. People couldn’t get at him because he just wasn’t interested in people. I remember one time, about a year before he died, I tried to get him to tell me something about my mother. He couldn’t remember anything about her.

“Did you ever hear the famous story about breakfast on the day Mother and Father were leaving for Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize? It was in The Saturday Evening Post one time. Mother cooked a big breakfast. And then, when she cleared off the table, she found a quarter and a dime and three pennies by Father’s coffee cup. He’d tipped her.

“After wounding my father so terribly, if that’s what I did, I ran out into the yard. I didn’t know where I was going until I found my brother Frank under a big spiraea bush. Frank was twelve then, and I wasn’t surprised to find him under there. He spent a lot of time under there on hot days. Just like a dog, he’d make a hollow in the cool earth all around the roots. And you never could tell what Frank would have under the bush with him. One time he had a dirty book. Another time he had a bottle of cooking sherry. On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight.

“The bug fight was so interesting that I stopped crying right away — forgot all about the old man. I can’t remember what all Frank had fighting in the jar that day, but I can remember other bug fights we staged later on: one stag beetle against a hundred red ants, one centipede against three spiders, red ants against black ants. They won’t fight unless you keep shaking the jar. And that’s what Frank was doing, shaking, shaking, the jar.