EPILOGUE
My big and only brother Bernard, a widower for twenty-five years, died after prolonged bouts with cancers, without excruciating pain, on the morning of April 25th, 1997, at the age of eighty-two, now four days ago. He was a Senior Research Scientist Emeritus, in the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center of the State University of New York at Albany, and the father of five fine sons.
I was seventy-four. Our sister Alice would have been seventy-nine. At the time of her humbling death at the age of forty-one, I said, "What a wonderful old lady Allie would have been." No such luck.
We were luckier with Bernard. He died the beloved, sweet, funny, highly intelligent old geezer he deserved to become. He was enraptured at the very end by a collection of sayings of Albert Einstein. Example: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Another: "Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world."
Most famously, Einstein is reputed to have said, "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." Bernard was himself so open-minded about how the universe might be dealt with that he thought praying would help, possibly, in drastic situations. When his son Terry had cancer of the throat, Bernie, ever the experimentalist, prayed for his recovery. Terry indeed survived.
So it was with silver iodide, too. Bernie wondered if crystals of that substance, so like crystals of frozen water, might not teach supercooled droplets in clouds how to turn to ice, to snow. He tried it. It worked.
He spent the final decade of his professional life attempting to discredit a very old and widely respected paradigm of whence came electrical charges in thunderstorms, and where they went, and what they did and why. He was opposed. The last of the more than one hundred fifty articles he wrote, to be published posthumously, describes experiments that can demonstrate incontrovertibly whether he was right or wrong.
Either way, he could not lose. However the experiments came out, he would have found the results enormously entertaining. Either way, he would have laughed like hell.
He was funnier than I am in conversation. During the Great Depression, I learned as much about jokes while tagging after him as I did from the comedians in movies and on the radio. I was honored that he found me funny, too. It turned out that he had accumulated a small portfolio of my stuff that had amused him. One item was a letter I had written to our uncle Alex when I was twenty-five. At that time, I had published nothing, had a wife and son, and had just come from Chicago to work as a flack for General Electric in Schenectady, New York.
I got that job because Bernie had become a celebrity in the GE Research Laboratory, in association with Irving Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer, for experiments with cloud seeding, and because the company decided to have regular newspaper people handle its publicity. At Bernie's suggestion, GE hired me away from the Chicago City News Bureau, where I had been a beat reporter. I had worked simultaneously for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago.
I thought Uncle Alex knew that Bernie and I were at GE then, and that I was in Publicity. He didn't know!
And Uncle Alex had seen a syndicated photograph of Bernie, credited to the Schenectady Gazette. He wrote to that paper, saying he was "a wee bit proud" of his nephew and would like a copy of the picture. He enclosed a dollar. The Gazette got the picture from GE, and so forwarded the request to my new employer. My new boss, logically enough, handed it on to me.
I replied as follows on blue GE stationery:
As you can see, I signed it "Guy Fawkes," a name infamous in British history.
Uncle Alex was so insulted that he flipped his wig. He took the letter to a lawyer to find out what legal steps he might take to compel an abject apology from someone high in the company, and to make this cost the author his job. He was going to write to the President of GE, telling him he had an employee who did not know the value of a dollar.
Before he could take such steps, though, somebody told him who Guy Fawkes was in history, and where I was, and that the letter was so hilariously grotesque that it had to be a joke from me. He wanted to kill me for making such a fool of him. I don't think he ever forgave me, although all I intended was that he be tickled pink.
If he had sent my letter to General Electric, demanding spiritual restitution, I would have been fired. I don't know what would then have become of me and my wife and son. Nor would I ever have come upon the material for my novels Player Piano and Cat's Cradle, and several short s letter. Bernie on his deathbed gave it to me. Otherwise, it would have been lost forever. But there it is.
Timequake! I am back in 1947 again, having just come to work for General Electric, and a rerun begins. We all have to do again exactly what we did the first time through, for good or ill.
Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place.
I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for anymore.
A woman who knew Bernie for only the last ten days of his life, in the hospice at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany, described his manners while dying as "courtly" and "elegant." What a brother!
What a language.
Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
(Series: # )
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