Bluebeard Read online

  "During the Great Depression," she said, "I thought you were the one real friend I had in the world. And then we made love, and I never heard from you again."

  "I can't believe this," I said. "You told me to go away--for the good of both of us. Have you forgotten that?"

  "You must have been awfully glad to hear me say that," she said. "You sure went away."

  "What did you expect me to do?" I said.

  "To give some sign, any sign, that you cared how I was," she said. "You've had fourteen years to do it, but you never did it--not one telephone call, not one postcard. Now here you are back like a bad penny: expecting what? Expecting to get laid again."

  "You mean we could have gone on being lovers?" I asked incredulously.

  "Lovers? Lovers? Lovers?" she mocked me raucously. The echoes of her scorn for lovers sounded like warring blackbirds overhead.

  "There's never been any shortage of lovers for Marilee Kemp," she said. "My father loved me so much he beat me every day. The football team at the high school loved me so much they raped me all night after the Junior Prom. The stage manager at the Ziegfield Follies loved me so much he told me that I had to be part of his stable of whores or he'd fire me and have somebody throw acid in my face. Dan Gregory loved me so much he threw me down the stairs because I'd sent you some expensive art materials."

  "He did what?" I said.

  So she told me the true story of how I had become the apprentice of Dan Gregory.

  I was flabbergasted. "But--but he must have liked my pictures, didn't he?" I stammered.

  "No," she said.

  "That's one beating I took on account of you," she said. "I took another one after we made love and I never heard from you again. Now let's talk about all the wonderful things you did for me."

  "I never felt so ashamed in my life," I said.

  "All right--I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me."

  "Yes--" I said, "I remember those."

  "You used to rub your feet on the carpets and then give me shocks on my neck when I least expected it," she said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "And we were so naughty sometimes," she said.

  "When we made love," I said.

  She blew up again. "No! No! No! You jerk! You jerk! You incomparable jerk!" she exclaimed. "The Museum of Modern Art!"

  "So you lost an eye in the war," she said.

  "So did Fred Jones," I said.

  "So did Lucrezia and Maria," she said.

  "Who are they?" I said.

  "My cook," she said, "and the woman who let you in."

  "Did you win a lot of medals in the war?" she said.

  Actually, I hadn't done too badly. I had a Bronze Star with a Cluster, and a Purple Heart for my wound, and a Presidential Unit Citation, a Soldier's Medal, a Good Conduct Badge, and a European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Ribbon with seven Battle Stars.

  I was proudest of my Soldier's Medal, which is usually awarded to a soldier who has saved the life of another soldier in situations not necessarily related to combat. In 1941, I was giving a course in camouflage techniques to officer candidates at Fort Benning, Georgia. I saw a barracks on fire, and I gave the alarm, and then went in twice, without regard for my own safety, and carried out two unconscious enlisted men.

  They were the only two people in there, and nobody was supposed to be in there. They had been drinking, and had accidentally started the fire themselves, for which they were given two years at hard labor--plus loss of all pay and dishonorable discharges.

  About my medals: all I said to Marilee was that I guessed I had received my share.

  How Terry Kitchen used to envy me for my Soldier's Medal, incidentally. He had a Silver Star, and he said a Soldier's Medal was worth ten of those.

  "Whenever I see a man wearing a medal," said Marilee, "I want to cry and hug him, and say, 'Oh, you poor baby--all the terrible things you've been through, just so the woman and the children could be safe at home.'"

  She said she used to want to go up to Mussolini, who had so many medals that they covered both sides of his tunic right down to his belt, and say to him, "After all you've been through, how can there be anything left of you?"

  And then she brought up the unfortunate expression I had used when talking to her on the telephone: "Did you say that in the war you were "combing pussy out of your hair'?"

  I said I was sorry I'd said it, and I was.

  "I never heard that expression before," she said. "I had to guess what it meant."

  "Just forget I said it," I said.

  "You want to know what my guess was? I guessed that wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people, since the young men were dead or gone away," she said. "How close was I?"

  "Oh my, oh my, oh my," I said.

  "What's the matter, Rabo?" she said.

  "You hit the nail on the head," I said.

  "Wasn't very hard to guess," she said. "The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It's always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves."

  "They can pretend pretty hard sometimes," I said.

  "They know that the ones who pretend the hardest," she said, "get their pictures in the paper and medals afterwards."

  "Do you have an artificial leg?" she said.

  "No," I said.

  "Lucrezia, the woman who let you in, lost a leg along with her eye. I thought maybe you'd lost one, too."

  "No such luck," I said.

  "Well--" she said, "early one morning she crossed a meadow, carrying two precious eggs to a neighbor who had given birth to a baby the night before. She stepped on a mine. We don't know what army was responsible. We do know the sex. Only a male would design and bury a device that ingenious. Before you leave, maybe you can persuade Lucrezia to show you all the medals she won."

  And then she added: "Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren't they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet."

  I said with utmost fatigue, "O.K., Marilee--you've certainly made your point. I have never felt worse in my life. I only wish the Arno were deep enough to drown myself in. Can I please return to my hotel?"

  "No," she said. "I think I've reduced you to the level of self-esteem which men try to force on women. If I have, I would very much like to have you stay for the tea I promised you. Who knows? We might even become friends again."

  29

  MARILEE LED ME to a small and cozy library which used to house, she said, her late husband's great collection of male homosexual pornography. I asked her what had become of the books, and she said she had sold them for a great deal of money, which she had divided among her servants--all women who had been badly hurt one way or another by war.

  We settled into overstuffed chairs, facing each other across a coffee table. She beamed at me fondly and then said this: "Well, well, well, my young protege--how goes it? Long time no see. Marriage on the rocks, you say?"

  "I'm sorry I said that," I said. "I'm sorry I said anything. I feel like something the cat drug in."

  We were served tea and little cakes at that point by a woman who had two steel clamps where her hands should have been. Marilee said something to her in Italian, and she laughed.

  "What did you say to her?" I asked.

  "I said your marriage was on the rocks," she said.

  The woman with the clamps said something to her in Italian, and I requested a translation.

  "She said you should marry a man next time," said Marilee.

  "Her husband plunged her hands into boiling water," she said, "in order to make her tell him who her lovers had been while he was away at war. They were Germans and then Americans, by the way, and gangrene set in."

  Over the fireplace of Marilee's cozy library was th
e Dan Gregory-style painting I mentioned earlier, a gift to her from the people of Florence: showing her late husband, Count Bruno, refusing a blindfold while facing a firing squad. She said that it hadn't happened exactly that way, but that nothing ever did. So I asked her how it happened that she became the Contessa Portomaggiore, with the beautiful palazzo and rich farms to the north and so on.

  When she and Gregory and Fred Jones arrived in Italy, she said, before the United States got into the war, and against Italy and Germany and Japan, they were received as great celebrities. They represented a propaganda victory for Mussolini: "'America's greatest living artist and one of its greatest aviators and the incomparably beautiful and gifted American actress, Marilee Kemp,' he called us," said Marilee. "He said the three of us had come to take part in the spiritual and physical and economic miracle in Italy, which would become the model for the world for thousands of years to come."

  The propaganda value of the three of them was so great that she was accorded in the press and at social events the respect a real and famous actress deserved. "So suddenly I wasn't a dim-witted floozy anymore," she said. "I was a jewel in the crown of the new Roman emperor. Dan and Fred, I must say, found this confusing. They had no choice in public but to treat me more respectfully, and I had fun with that. This country is absolutely crazy about blondes, of course, so that, whenever we had to make an entrance, I came first--and they came along behind me, as part of my entourage.

  "And it was somehow very easy for me to learn Italian," she said. "I was soon better at it than Dan, who'd taken lessons in it back in New York. Fred, of course, never learned Italian at all."

  Fred and Dan became heroes in Italy after they died fighting more or less for the Italian cause. Marilee's celebrity survived them--as a very beautiful and charming reminder of their supreme sacrifice, and of the admiration many Americans had, supposedly, for Mussolini.

  She was still certainly beautiful, by the way, at the time of our reunion, even without makeup and in widow's weeds. She should have been an old lady after all she had been through, but she was only forty-three. She had a third of a century still to go!

  And, as I say, she would become Europe's largest Sony distributor, among other things. There was life in the old girl yet!

  The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.

  After Dan Gregory's death, her regular escort in Rome was Mussolini's Oxford-educated and unmarried Minister of Culture, the handsome Bruno, Count Portomaggiore. He explained to Marilee at once that they could have no physical relationship, since he was interested sexually only in men and boys. Such a preference, if acted upon, was a capital offense at the time, but Count Bruno felt perfectly safe, no matter how outrageously he might behave. He was confident that Mussolini would protect him, since he was the only member of the old aristocracy who had accepted a high position in his government, and who virtually wallowed in admiration at the upstart dictator's booted feet.

  "He was a perfect ass," said Marilee. She said that people laughed at his cowardice and vanity and effeminacy.

  "He was also," she added, "the perfect head of British Intelligence in Italy."

  After Dan and Fred were killed, and before the United States got into the war, Marilee was the toast of Rome. She had a wonderful time shopping and dancing, dancing, dancing, with the count, who enjoyed hearing her talk, and was always the perfect gentleman. Her wish was his command, and he never threatened her physically, and never demanded that she do this or that until one night, when he told her that Mussolini himself had ordered him to marry her!

  "He had many enemies," said Marilee, "and they had been telling Mussolini that he was a homosexual and a British spy. Mussolini certainly knew he loved men and boys, but didn't even suspect that a man that silly could have the nerve or wit to be a spy."

  When Mussolini ordered his Minister of Culture to prove that he wasn't a homosexual by wedding Marilee, he also handed him a document for Marilee to sign. It was designed to placate old aristocrats to whom the idea of an American floozy's inheriting ancient estates would have been intolerable. It set forth that, in the case of the count's death, Marilee would have his property for life, but without the right to sell it or leave it to anyone else. Upon her death, it was to go to the count's nearest male relative, who, as I have said, turned out to be an automobile dealer in Milan.

  The next day, the Japanese in a surprise attack sank a major fraction of the United States warships at Pearl Harbor, leaving this still pacifistic, antimilitaristic country no choice but to declare war on not only Japan, but on Japan's allies, Germany and Italy, as well.

  But even before Pearl Harbor, Marilee told the only man ever to propose marriage to her, and a rich nobleman at that, that no, she would not marry him. She thanked him for happiness such as she had never known before. She said that his proposal and the accompanying document had awakened her from what could only be a dream, and that it was time for her to return to the United States, where she could try to deal with who and what she really was, even though she didn't have a home there.

  But then, all excited the next morning about going home, Marilee found the spiritual climate of Rome, although the real Sun was shining brightly and the real clouds were somewhere else, to be as dark and chilling as, and this is how she described it to me in Florence, "rain and sleet at midnight."

  Marilee listened to the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio that morning. One item was about the approximately seven thousand American citizens living in Italy. The American Embassy, which was still operating, still technically at peace with Italy, announced that it was making plans to provide transportation back to the United States for as many as possible, as soon as possible. The Italian government responded that it would do all within its power to facilitate their departure, but that there was surely no reason for a mass exodus, since Italy and the United States had close bonds of both blood and history which should not be broken in order to satisfy the demands of Jews and Communists and the decaying British Empire.

  Marilee's personal maid came in with the quotidian announcement that some sort of workman wanted to talk to her about the possibility of old, leaking gas pipes in her bedroom, and he wore coveralls and had a toolbox. He tapped the walls and sniffed, and murmured to himself in Italian. And then, when the two of them were surely alone, he began, still facing the wall, to speak softly in middle-western American English.

  He said that he was from the War Department of the United States, which is what the Department of Defense used to be called. We had no separate spy organization back then. He said that he had no idea how she felt down deep about democracy or fascism, but that it was his duty to ask her, for the good of their country, to remain in Italy and to continue to curry the favor of Mussolini's government.

  By her own account, Marilee then thought about democracy and fascism for the first time in her life. She decided that democracy sounded better.

  "Why should I stay here and do that?" she asked.

  "Sooner or later, you might hear something we would be very interested in knowing," he said. "Sooner or later, or even possibly never, your country might have some use to make of you."

  She said to him that the whole world suddenly seemed to be going crazy.

  He commented that there was nothing sudden about it, that it had belonged in a prison or a lunatic asylum for quite some time.

  As an example of what she saw as sudden craziness, she told him about Mussolini's ordering his minister of culture to marry her.

  He replied, according to Marilee: "If you have one atom of love for America in your heart, you will marry him."

  Thus did a coal miner's daughter become the Contessa Portomaggiore.

  30

  MARILEE DID NOT learn until the war was nearly over that her husband was a British agent. She, too, thought him a wea
kling and a fool, but forgave him that since they lived so well and he was so nice to her. "He had the most amusing and kind and flattering things to say to me. He really enjoyed my company. We both loved to dance and dance."

  So there was another woman in my life with a mania for dancing, who would do it with anybody as long as they did it well.

  "You never danced with Dan Gregory," I said.

  "He wouldn't," she said, "and you wouldn't either."

  "I couldn't," I said. "I never had."

  "Anybody who wants to can," she said.

  She said that the news that her husband was a British spy made almost no impression on her. "He had all these uniforms for different occasions, and I never cared what any of them were supposed to mean. They were covered with emblems which I never bothered to decode. I never asked him: "Bruno, what did you get this medal for? What does the eagle on your sleeve mean? What are those two crosses on your collar points?" So when he told me that he was a British spy, that was just more of the junk jewelry of warfare. It had almost nothing to do with me or him."

  She said that after he was shot she expected to feel a terrible emptiness, but did not. And then she understood that her real companion and mate for life was the Italian people. "They spoke to me so lovingly wherever I went, Rabo, and I loved them in return, and did not give a damn about what junk jewelry they wore!"

  "I'm home, Rabo," she said. "I never would have got here if it hadn't been for the craziness of Dan Gregory. Thanks to loose screws in the head of an Armenian from Moscow, I'm home, I'm home."

  "Now tell me what you've been doing with all these years," she said.

  "For some reason I find myself dismayingly uninteresting," I said.

  "Oh, come, come, come," she said. "You lost an eye, you married, you reproduced twice, and you say you've taken up painting again. How could a life be more eventful?"

  I thought to myself that there had been events, but very few, certainly, since our Saint Patrick's Day love-making so long ago, which had made me proud and happy. I had old soldier's anecdotes I had told my drinking buddies in the Cedar Tavern, so I told her those. She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I'd be.