“They weren’t born Hoosiers, but they live there now. They live in Indianapolis.”
“Very interesting.”
“You want to meet them?”
“You think I should?”
The question baffled her. “They’re your fellow Hoosiers.”
“What are their names?”
“Her name is Conners and his name is Hoenikker. They’re brother and sister, and he’s a midget. He’s a nice midget, though.” She winked. “He’s a smart little thing.”
“Does he call you Mom?”
“I almost asked him to. And then I stopped, and I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be rude to ask a midget to do that.”
“Nonsense.”
51
O.K., MOM
SO I WENT AFT to talk to Angela Hoenikker Conners and little Newton Hoenikker, members of my karass.
Angela was the horse-faced platinum blonde I had noticed earlier.
Newt was a very tiny young man indeed, though not grotesque. He was as nicely scaled as Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, and as shrewdly watchful, too.
He held a glass of champagne, which was included in the price of his ticket. That glass was to him what a fishbowl would have been to a normal man, but he drank from it with elegant ease—as though he and the glass could not have been better matched.
The little son of a bitch had a crystal of ice-nine in a thermos bottle in his luggage, and so did his miserable sister, while under us was God’s own amount of water, the Caribbean Sea.
When Hazel had got all the pleasure she could from introducing Hoosiers to Hoosiers, she left us alone. “Remember,” she said as she left us, “from now on, call me Mom.”
“O.K., Mom,” I said.
“O.K., Mom,” said Newt. His voice was fairly high, in keeping with his little larynx. But he managed to make that voice distinctly masculine.
Angela persisted in treating Newt like an infant—and he forgave her for it with an amiable grace I would have thought impossible for one so small.
Newt and Angela remembered me, remembered the letters I’d written, and invited me to take the empty seat in their group of three.
Angela apologized to me for never having answered my letters.
“I couldn’t think of anything to say that would interest anybody reading a book. I could have made up something about that day, but I didn’t think you’d want that. Actually, the day was just like a regular day.”
“Your brother here wrote me a very good letter.”
Angela was surprised. “Newt did? How could Newt remember anything?” She turned to him. “Honey, you don’t remember anything about that day, do you? You were just a baby.”
“I remember,” he said mildly.
“I wish I’d seen the letter.” She implied that Newt was still too immature to deal directly with the outside world. Angela was a God-awfully insensitive woman, with no feeling for what smallness meant to Newt.
“Honey, you should have showed me that letter,” she scolded.
“Sorry,” said Newt. “I didn’t think.”
“I might as well tell you,” Angela said to me, “Dr. Breed told me I wasn’t supposed to co-operate with you. He said you weren’t interested in giving a fair picture of Father.” She showed me that she didn’t like me for that.
I placated her some by telling her that the book would probably never be done anyway, that I no longer had a clear idea of what it would or should mean.
“Well, if you ever do do the book, you better make Father a saint, because that’s what he was.”
I promised that I would do my best to paint that picture. I asked if she and Newt were bound for a family reunion with Frank in San Lorenzo.
“Frank’s getting married,” said Angela. “We’re going to the engagement party.”
“Oh? Who’s the lucky girl?”
“I’ll show you,” said Angela, and she took from her purse a billfold that contained a sort of plastic accordion. In each of the accordion’s pleats was a photograph. Angela flipped through the photographs, giving me glimpses of little Newt on a Cape Cod beach, of Dr. Felix Hoenikker accepting his Nobel Prize, of Angela’s own homely twin girls, of Frank flying a model plane on the end of a string.
And then she showed me a picture of the girl Frank was going to marry.
She might, with equal effect, have struck me in the groin.
The picture she showed me was of Mona Aamons Monzano, the woman I loved.
52
NO PAIN
ONCE ANGELA HAD OPENED her plastic accordion, she was reluctant to close it until someone had looked at every photograph.
“There are the people I love,” she declared.
So I looked at the people she loved. What she had trapped in plexiglass, what she had trapped like fossil beetles in amber, were the images of a large part of our karass. There wasn’t a granfallooner in the collection.
There were many photographs of Dr. Hoenikker, father of a bomb, father of three children, father of ice-nine. He was a little person, the purported sire of a midget and a giantess.
My favorite picture of the old man in Angela’s fossil collection showed him all bundled up for winter, in an overcoat, scarf, galoshes, and a wool knit cap with a big pom-pom on the crown.
This picture, Angela told me, with a catch in her throat, had been taken in Hyannis just about three hours before the old man died. A newspaper photographer had recognized the seeming Christmas elf for the great man he was.
“Did your father die in the hospital?”
“Oh, no! He died in our cottage, in a big white wicker chair facing the sea. Newt and Frank had gone walking down the beach in the snow …”
“It was a very warm snow,” said Newt. “It was almost like walking through orange blossoms. It was very strange. Nobody was in any of the other cottages …”
“Ours was the only one with heat,” said Angela.
“Nobody within miles,” recalled Newt wonderingly, “and Frank and I came across this big black dog out on the beach, a Labrador retriever. We threw sticks into the ocean and he brought them back.”
“I’d gone back into the village for more Christmas tree bulbs,” said Angela. “We always had a tree.”
“Did your father enjoy having a Christmas tree?”
“He never said,” said Newt.
“I think he liked it,” said Angela. “He just wasn’t very demonstrative. Some people aren’t.”
“And some people are,” said Newt. He gave a small shrug.
“Anyway,” said Angela, “when we got back home, we found him in the chair.” She shook her head. “I don’t think he suffered any. He just looked asleep. He couldn’t have looked like that if there’d been the least bit of pain.”
She left out an interesting part of the story. She left out the fact that it was on that same Christmas Eve that she and Frank and little Newt had divided up the old man’s ice-nine.
53
THE PRESIDENT OF FABRI-TEK
ANGELA ENCOURAGED ME to go on looking at snapshots.
“That’s me, if you can believe it.” She showed me an adolescent girl six feet tall. She was holding a clarinet in the picture, wearing the marching uniform of the Ilium High School band. Her hair was tucked up under a bandsman’s hat. She was smiling with shy good cheer.
And then Angela, a woman to whom God had given virtually nothing with which to catch a man, showed me a picture of her husband.
“So that’s Harrison C. Conners.” I was stunned. Her husband was a strikingly handsome man, and looked as though he knew it. He was a snappy dresser, and had the lazy rapture of a Donjuán about the eyes.
“What—what does he do?” I asked.
“He’s president of Fabri-Tek.”
“Electronics?”
“I couldn’t tell you, even if I knew. It’s all very secret government work.”
“Weapons?”
“Well, war anyway.”
“How did you happen to meet?”
“
He used to work as a laboratory assistant to Father,” said Angela. “Then he went out to Indianapolis and started Fabri-Tek.”
“So your marriage to him was a happy ending to a long romance?”
“No. I didn’t even know he knew I was alive. I used to think he was nice, but he never paid any attention to me until after Father died.
“One day he came through Ilium. I was sitting around that big old house, thinking my life was over….” She spoke of the awful days and weeks that followed her father’s death. “Just me and little Newt in that big old house. Frank had disappeared, and the ghosts were making ten times as much noise as Newt and I were. I’d given my whole life to taking care of Father, driving him to and from work, bundling him up when it was cold, unbundling him when it was hot, making him eat, paying his bills. Suddenly, there wasn’t anything for me to do. I’d never had any close friends, didn’t have a soul to turn to but Newt.
“And then,” she continued, “there was a knock on the door—and there stood Harrison Conners. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He came in, and we talked about Father’s last days and about old times in general.”
Angela almost cried now.
“Two weeks later, we were married.”
54
COMMUNISTS, NAZIS, ROYALISTS, PARACHUTISTS, AND DRAFT DODGERS
RETURNING TO MY OWN SEAT in the plane, feeling far shabbier for having lost Mona Aamons Monzano to Frank, I resumed my reading of Philip Castle’s manuscript.
I looked up Monzano, Mona Aamons in the index, and was told by the index to see Aamons, Mona.
So I saw Aamons, Mona, and found almost as many page references as I’d found after the name of “Papa” Monzano himself.
And after Aamons, Mona came Aamons, Nestor. So I turned to the few pages that had to do with Nestor, and learned that he was Mona’s father, a native Finn, an architect.
Nestor Aamons was captured by the Russians, then liberated by the Germans during the Second World War. He was not returned home by his liberators, but was forced to serve in a Wehrmacht engineer unit that was sent to fight the Yugoslav partisans. He was captured by Chetniks, royalist Serbian partisans, and then by Communist partisans who attacked the Chetniks. He was liberated by Italian parachutists who surprised the Communists, and he was shipped to Italy.
The Italians put him to work designing fortifications for Sicily. He stole a fishing boat in Sicily, and reached neutral Portugal.
While there, he met an American draft dodger named Julian Castle.
Castle, upon learning that Aamons was an architect, invited him to come with him to the island of San Lorenzo and to design for him a hospital to be called the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.
Aamons accepted. He designed the hospital, married a native woman named Celia, fathered a perfect daughter, and died.
55
NEVER INDEX YOUR OWN BOOK
AS FOR THE LIFE of Aamons, Mona, the index itself gave a jangling, surrealistic picture of the many conflicting forces that had been brought to bear on her and of her dismayed reactions to them.
“Aamons, Mona:” the index said, “adopted by Monzano in order to boost Monzano’s popularity, 194-199, 216 n.; childhood in compound of House of Hope and Mercy, 63-81; childhood romance with P. Castle, 72 f; death of father, 89 ff; death of mother, 92 f; embarrassed by role as national erotic symbol, 80, 95 f, 166 n., 209, 247 n., 400-406, 566 n., 678; engaged to P. Castle, 193; essential naïveté, 67-71, 80, 95 f, 116 n., 209, 274 n., 400-406, 566 n., 678; lives with Bokonon, 92-98, 196-197; poems about, 2 n., 26, 114, 119, 311, 316, 477 n., 501, 507, 555 n., 689, 718 ff, 799 ff, 800 n., 841, 846 ff, 908 n., 971, 974; poems by, 89, 92, 193; returns to Monzano, 199; returns to Bokonon, 197; runs away from Bokonon, 199; runs away from Monzano, 197; tries to make self ugly in order to stop being erotic symbol to islanders, 80, 95 f, 116 n., 209, 247 n., 400-406, 566 n., 678; tutored by Bokonon, 63-80; writes letter to United Nations, 200; xylophone virtuoso, 71.”
I showed this index entry to the Mintons, asking them if they didn’t think it was an enchanting biography in itself, a biography of a reluctant goddess of love. I got an unexpectedly expert answer, as one does in life sometimes. It appeared that Claire Minton, in her time, had been a professional indexer. I had never heard of such a profession before.
She told me that she had put her husband through college years before with her earnings as an indexer, that the earnings had been good, and that few people could index well.
She said that indexing was a thing that only the most amateurish author undertook to do for his own book. I asked her what she thought of Philip Castle’s job.
“Flattering to the author, insulting to the reader,” she said. “In a hyphenated word,” she observed, with the shrewd amiability of an expert, ‘self-indulgent.’ I’m always embarrassed when I see an index an author has made of his own work.”
“Embarrassed?”
“It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work,” she informed me. “It’s a shameless exhibition—to the trained eye.”
“She can read character from an index,” said her husband.
“Oh?” I said. “What can you tell about Philip Castle?”
She smiled faintly. “Things I’d better not tell strangers.”
“Sorry.”
“He’s obviously in love with this Mona Aamons Monzano,” she said.
“That’s true of every man in San Lorenzo I gather.”
“He has mixed feelings about his father,” she said.
“That’s true of every man on earth.” I egged her on gently.
“He’s insecure.”
“What mortal isn’t?” I demanded. I didn’t know it then, but that was a very Bokononist thing to demand.
“He’ll never marry her.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve said all I’m going to say,” she said.
“I’m gratified to meet an indexer who respects the privacy of others.”
“Never index your own book,” she stated.
A duprass, Bokonon tells us, is a valuable instrument for gaining and developing, in the privacy of an interminable love affair, insights that are queer but true. The Mintons’ cunning exploration of indexes was surely a case in point. A duprass, Bokonon tells us, is also a sweetly conceited establishment. The Mintons’ establishment was no exception.
Sometime later, Ambassador Minton and I met in the aisle of the airplane, away from his wife, and he showed that it was important to him that I respect what his wife could find out from indexes.
“You know why Castle will never marry the girl, even though he loves her, even though she loves him, even though they grew up together?” he whispered.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Because he’s a homosexual,” whispered Minton. “She can tell that from an index, too.”
56
A SELF-SUPPORTING SQUIRREL CAGE
WHEN LIONEL BOYD JOHNSON and Corporal Earl McCabe were washed up naked onto the shore of San Lorenzo, I read, they were greeted by persons far worse off than they. The people of San Lorenzo had nothing but diseases, which they were at a loss to treat or even name. By contrast, Johnson and McCabe had the glittering treasures of literacy, ambition, curiosity, gall, irreverence, health, humor, and considerable information about the outside world.
From the “Calypsos” again:
Oh, a very sorry people, yes,
Did I find here.
Oh, they had no music,
And they had no beer.
And, oh, everywhere
Where they tried to perch
Belonged to Castle Sugar, Incorporated,
Or the Catholic church.
This statement of the property situation in San Lorenzo in 1922 is entirely accurate, according to Philip Castle. Castle Sugar was founded, as it happened, by Philip Castle’s great-grandfather. In 1922, it owned every piece of arable land on the island.
“Castle Sugar’s San Lorenzo operations,
” wrote young Castle, “never showed a profit. But, by paying laborers nothing for their labor, the company managed to break even year after year, making just enough money to pay the salaries of the workers’ tormentors.
“The form of government was anarchy, save in limited situations wherein Castle Sugar wanted to own something or to get something done. In such situations the form of government was feudalism. The nobility was composed of Castle Sugar’s plantation bosses, who were heavily armed white men from the outside world. The knighthood was composed of big natives who, for small gifts and silly privileges, would kill or wound or torture on command. The spiritual needs of the people caught in this demoniacal squirrel cage were taken care of by a handful of butterball priests.
“The San Lorenzo Cathedral, dynamited in 1923, was generally regarded as one of the man-made wonders of the New World,” wrote Castle.
57
THE QUEASY DREAM
THAT CORPORAL MCCABE and Johnson were able to take command of San Lorenzo was not a miracle in any sense. Many people had taken over San Lorenzo— had invariably found it lightly held. The reason was simple: God, in His Infinite Wisdom, had made the island worthless.
Hernando Cortes was the first man to have his sterile conquest of San Lorenzo recorded on paper. Cortes and his men came ashore for fresh water in 1519, named the island, claimed it for Emperor Charles the Fifth, and never returned. Subsequent expeditions came for gold and diamonds and rubies and spices, found none, burned a few natives for entertainment and heresy, and sailed on.
“When France claimed San Lorenzo in 1682,” wrote Castle, “no Spaniards complained. When Denmark claimed San Lorenzo in 1699, no Frenchmen complained. When the Dutch claimed San Lorenzo in 1704, no Danes complained. When England claimed San Lorenzo in 1706, no Dutchmen complained. When Spain reclaimed San Lorenzo in 1720, no Englishmen complained. When, in 1786, African Negroes took command of a British slave ship, ran it ashore on San Lorenzo, and proclaimed San Lorenzo an independent nation, an empire with an emperor, in fact, no Spaniards complained.
Cat's Cradle: A Novel Page 8