"Kurt Vonnegut - Bluebeard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

With it had come the potato barn.
Edith and I did not come to know each other well until after her husband died and my first
wife, Dorothy, and our two sons, Terry and Henri, moved out on me. I sold our house, which was
in the village of Springs, six miles north of here, and made Edith's barn not only my studio but
my home.
That improbable dwelling, incidentally, is invisible from the main house, where I am
writing now.

* * *

Edith had no children by her first husband, and she was past childbearing when I
transmogrified her from being Mrs. Richard Fairbanks, Jr., into being Mrs. Rabo Karabekian
instead.
So we were a very tiny family indeed in this great big house, with its two tennis courts
and swimming pool, and its carriage house and its potato barn -- and its three hundred yards of
private beach on the open Atlantic Ocean.
One might think that my two sons, Terry and Henri Karabekian, whom I named in honor
of my closest friend, the late Terry Kitchen, and the artist Terry and I most envied, Henri Matisse,
might enjoy coming here with their families. Terry has two sons of his own now. Henri has a
daughter.
But they do not speak to me.
"So be it! So be it!" I cry in this manicured wilderness. "Who gives a damn!" Excuse this
outburst.

* * *

Dear Edith, like all great Earth Mothers, was a multitude. Even when there were only the
two of us and the servants here, she filled this Victorian ark with love and merriment and hands-
on domesticity. As privileged as she had been all her life, she cooked with the cook, gardened
with the gardener, did all our food shopping, fed the pets and birds, and made personal friends of
wild rabbits and squirrels and raccoons.
But we used to have a lot of parties, too, and guests who sometimes stayed for weeks --
her friends and relatives, mostly. I have already said how matters stood and stand with my own
few blood relatives, alienated descendants all. As for my synthetic relatives in the Army: some
were killed in the little battle in which I was taken prisoner, and which cost me one eye. Those
who survived I have never seen or heard from since. It may be that they were not as fond of me
as I was of them.
 These things happen.
The members of my other big synthetic family, the Abstract Expressionists, are mostly
dead now, having been killed by everything from mere old age to suicide. The few survivors, like
my blood relatives, no longer speak to me.
"So be it! So be it!" I cry in this manicured wilderness. "Who gives a damn!" Excuse this
outburst.

* * *

All of our servants quit soon after Edith died. They said it had simply become too lonely
here. So I hired some new ones, paying them a great deal of money to put up with me and all the
loneliness. When Edith was alive, and the house was alive, the gardener and the two maids and
the cook all lived here. Now only the cook, and, as I say, a different cook, lives in, and has the