"The Lake" is an essay first published in the June 1988 edition of Architectural Digest. It featured a photograph by Jill Krementz of Vonnegut in a rowboat[1] and a "turn-of-the-century portrait" featuring his grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, as well as his father, Kurt, Sr., as a young boy.[2] The piece was later reprinted in Fates Worse Than Death in 1991.
Summary[]
Lake Maxinkuckee
Vonnegut has always felt "a blank and shining serenity" at the edge of a natural body of water, which indicates that he can find his way home, no matter how lost he may be. This stems from his boyhood on Lake Maxincuckee in northern Indiana, where the Vonnegut family lived in during the winter. Walking the shoreline, he knew could keep going in one direction to get home. Many people have their "deepest understanding of time and space" develop from childhood "experiences with geography" about how to get home again. At that time, not only his family had a home, but four adjacent houses with close relatives. His immigrant grandfather's generation had acquired the land not long after the native Potawatomi had been displaced. Often they would yell to each other the nonsense phrases from their childhoods "Epta-mayan-hoy? Ya! Epta-mayan-hoy!" which was, phonetically, their German for "Do abbots mow hay? Yes! Abbots mow hay!"
Like the Potawatomi, the Epta-mayan-hoys have now vanished from Lake Maxincuckee. Vonnegut feels no sadness at this, since the real lake is the one imprinted on his memory in his youth. Once when he saw the lake from a flight, he felt nothing. In his head is the one he swam for all two and a half miles when he was eleven years old, with his brother and sister urging him on from a rowboat. A play about those properties would be Checkovian, involving several siblings inheriting a single beloved land, their own children moving on to new, distant places. His own family's cottage, acrimoniously owned jointly by Vonnegut's father and his two siblings, was sold to a stranger, the Concert Master of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, after the Second World War. The buyer allowed Vonnegut, recently discharged from the Army, and his new wife, Jane, to use the property for their honeymoon before taking possession. Before the wedding, her family of English descent asked if she really wanted to get involved with a German family.
Jane, now deceased, had Vonnegut read The Brothers Karamazov during the honeymoon, which she considered the greatest of all novels. He found it appropriate to read while saying goodbye to an old family property, since it was "all about the state of people's portable souls". The two went on the lake in the old rowboat named "The Beralikur", after Vonnegut's brother Bernard, sister Alice, and himself. He recounted again to his wife how he swam across the lake and she asked what influence Culver Military Academy, also located on the lake, had on his childhood. He replied that he hoped he'd never be sent there to be yelled at while wearing a uniform. A loon sprung from the lake, crying out, and only now does Vonnegut realize he should have replied "Ya! Epta-mayan-hoy!"
Jane was also a writer, and her book about raising their family on Cape Cod, entitled Angels Without Wings, was posthumously published forty-two years after their honeymoon. The home that they shared in Barnstable was imprinted on the youthful minds of their children, who now jointly own it, along with any royalties from the book. One, a painter, lives there year round with her husband and their son, while other siblings and their children frequently visit. They too will learn the geography of the local harbor, ponds, and marshes, and all of them, "monolingual and of mixed ancestry", will probably invent their own words among themselves. Almost the final word in The Brothers Karamazov is "Hurrah!"[3]