Bluebeard Page 5

  "The cook told you that?" I said.

  "Celeste told me," she said. "She also told me that her mother was thinking of having her tubes tied."

  "I'm certainly glad to know all this," I said, "in case of an emergency."

  Back to the past I go again, with the present nipping at my ankles like a rabid fox terrier:

  My mother died believing that I had become a protege of Dan Gregory, from whom I had never heard directly. Before she got sick, she predicted that "Gregorian" would send me to art school, that "Gregorian" would persuade magazines to hire me as an illustrator when I was old enough, that "Gregorian" would introduce me to all his rich friends, who would tell me how I could get rich, too, investing the money I made as an artist in the stock market. In 1928, the stock market never seemed to do anything but go up and up, just like the one we have today! Whoopee!

  So she not only missed the stock market crash a year later, but the realization a couple of years after the crash that I wasn't even indirectly in touch with Dan Gregory, that he probably didn't even know I was alive, that the effusive praise for the artwork I was sending to New York for criticism wasn't coming from the highest paid artist in American history, but from what my father called in Armenian: "... maybe his cleaning woman, maybe his cook, maybe his whore."

  7

  I REMEMBER THE AFTERNOON I came home from school when I was about fifteen or so, and Father was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table in our little kitchen, with Marilee's letters in a stack before him. He had reread them all.

  This was not a violation of my privacy. The letters were family property--if you can call only two people a family. They were like bonds we had accumulated, gilt-edged securities of which I would be the beneficiary when they and I reached maturity. Once they paid off, I would be able to take care of Father, too, and he sure needed help. His savings had been wiped out by the failure of the Luma County Savings and Loan Association, which we and everybody in town had taken to calling "El Banco Busto." There was no federal insurance scheme for bank deposits back then.

  El Banco Busto, moreover, had held the mortgage on the little building whose first floor was Father's shop and whose second story was our home. Father used to own the building, thanks to a loan from the bank. After the bank failed, though, its receivers liquidated all its assets, foreclosing all the mortgages which were in arrears, which was most of them. Guess why they were in arrears? Practically everybody had been dumb enough to entrust their savings to El Banco Busto.

  So the father I found reading Marilee's letters in the afternoon was a man who had become a mere tenant in a building he used to own. As for the shop downstairs: it was vacant, since he couldn't afford to rent that, too. All his machinery had been sold at auction anyway in order to get a few pennies for what we were: people who had been dumb enough to entrust his or her savings to El Banco Busto.

  What a comedy!

  Father looked up from Marilee's letters when I came in with my schoolbooks, and he said, "You know what this woman is? She has promised you everything, but she has nothing to give." He named the Armenian sociopath who had swindled him and Mother in Cairo. "She is the new Vartan Mamigonian," he said.

  "What do you mean?" I said.

  And he said exactly as though the handwritten letters were bonds or insurance policies or whatever: "I have just read the fine print." He went on to say that Marilee's first letters had been rich in phrases like "Mr. Gregory says," and "Mr. Gregory feels," and "Mr. Gregory wants you to know," but that, since the third letter, such locutions had entirely disappeared. "This is a nobody," he said, "who will never be anybody, who is trying to get somebody anyway, by stealing the reputation of Gregorian!"

  I felt no shock. Some part of me had noticed the same thing about the letters. Some other part of me had managed to bury the bad, bad implications.

  I asked Father what had triggered this investigation at this time. He indicated ten books which had arrived for me from Marilee soon after I left for school. He had stacked them on the drainboard of our sink, a sink full of dirty dishes and pans. I examined them. They were young people's story classics of the day, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Adventures of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Tanglewood Tales, Gulliver's Travels, Tales from Shakespeare and so on. Reading matter for young people before the Second World War was a dozen universes removed from the unwanted pregnancies and incest and minimum-wage slavery and treacherous high school friendships and so on in the novels of Polly Madison.

  Marilee had sent me these books because they were vibrantly illustrated by Dan Gregory. They were not only the most beautiful artifacts in our apartment: they were about the most beautiful artifacts in all of Luma County, and I responded to them as such. "How nice of her!" I exclaimed. "Would you look at these! Would you look at these?"

  "I have," he said.

  "Aren't they beautiful?" I said.

  "Yes," he said, "they are beautiful. But maybe you can explain to me why Mr. Gregorian, who thinks so highly of you, hasn't signed at least one of them, and perhaps scribbled a little note of encouragement to my gifted son?"

  All this was said in Armenian. He never talked anything but Armenian at home after the failure of El Banco Busto.

  Whether the advice and encourgement had come from Gregory or Marilee didn't matter much to me at that point. If I do say so myself, I had become one hell of a good artist for a kid in any case. I was so conceited about my prospects, with or without help from New York City, that I defended Marilee mainly to cheer up Father.

  "If this Marilee, whoever she is, whatever she is, thinks so much of your pictures," he said, "why doesn't she sell some of them and send you the money?"

  "She's been extremely generous," I replied--and so she had been: generous with her time, but also with the finest artist's materials then available anywhere. I had no idea of their value, and neither did she. She had taken them without permission from the supply room in the basement of Gregory's mansion. I myself would see that room in a couple of years, and there was enough stuff in there to take care of Gregory's needs, as prolific as he was, for a dozen lifetimes. She didn't think he would miss what she sent me, and she didn't ask permission because she was scared to death of him.

  He used to hit and kick her a lot.

  But about the actual value of the stuff: the paints I was using sure weren't Sateen Dura-Luxe. They were Mussini oils and Horadam watercolors from Germany. My brushes came from Winsor and Newton in England. My pastels and colored pencils and inks came from Le-febvre-Foinet in Paris. My canvas came from Claessen's in Belgium. No other artist west of the Rockies had such priceless art supplies!

  For that matter, Dan Gregory was the only illustrator I ever knew who expected his pictures to take their places among the great art treasures of the world, who used materials which might really do what Sateen Dura-Luxe was supposed to do: outlast the smile on the "Mona Lisa." The rest of them were satisfied if their work survived the trip to the print shop. They commonly sneered that they did such hack work only for money, that it was art for people who didn't know anything about art--but not Dan Gregory.

  "She is using you," said my father.

  "Tor what?" I said.

  "So she can feel like a big shot," he said.

  The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. "You were her audience," she said. "Writers will kill for an audience."

  "An audience of one?" I said.

  "That's all she needed," she said. "That's all anybody needs. Just look at how her handwriting improved and her vocabulary grew. Look at all the things she found to talk about, as soon as she realized you were hanging on every word. She certainly couldn't write for that bastard Gregory. There was no point in writing to the folks back home, either. They couldn't even read! Did you really believe her when she said she was describing things she saw around the city because you might want to paint pictures of them?"

  "Yes--" I said, "I guess I did." M
arilee wrote long descriptions of breadlines for all the people who had been put out of work by the Depression, and of men in nice suits who obviously used to have money, but who were now selling apples on street corners, and of a legless man on a sort of skateboard, who was a World War One veteran or was pretending to be one, selling pencils in Grand Central Station, and of high-society people thrilled to be hobnobbing with gangsters in speakeasies--that sort of thing.

  "That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person."

  "Who's the one person you write for?" I asked.

  And she said, "This is going to sound very strange, because you'd think it would be somebody the same age as my readers, but it isn't. That's the secret ingredient of my books, I think. That's why they seem so strong and trustworthy to young people, why I don't sound like one dumb teenager talking to another one. I don't put anything down on paper which Abe Berman wouldn't find interesting and truthful."

  Abe Berman, of course, was her brain surgeon husband who died of a stroke seven months ago.

  She has asked me for the keys to the barn again. I told her if she ever even mentioned the barn again, I was going to tell everybody that she was really Polly Madison--invite the local papers to come on over and interview her, and so on. If I actually did that, it would not only wreck Paul Slazinger: it would also attract a lynch mob of religious fundamentalists to our doorstep.

  I happened to watch the sermon of a television evangelist the other night, and he said Satan was making a four-pronged attack on the American family with communism, drugs, rock and roll, and books by Satan's sister, who was Polly Madison.

  To return to my correspondence with Marilee Kemp: My notes to her cooled after father denounced her as the new Vartan Mamigonian. I was no longer counting on her for anything. Simply as part of the growing-up process, I didn't want her to go on trying to be my substitute mother. I was becoming a man, and didn't need a mother anymore, or so I thought.

  Without any help from her, in fact, I had started to make money as an artist, as young as I was, and right there in bankrupt little San Ignacio. I had gone to the local paper, the Luma County Clarion, looking for work of any kind after school, and had mentioned that I could draw pretty well. The editor asked me if I could draw a picture of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Dan Gregory's hero of heroes, incidentally, and I did so in two or three minutes maybe, without having to refer to a photograph.

  Then he had me draw a beautiful female angel, and I did that.

  Then he had me draw a picture of Mussolini pouring a quart of something into the mouth of the angel. He had me label the bottle CASTOR OIL and the angel WORLD PEACE. Mussolini liked to punish people by making them drink a quart of castor oil. That sounded like a comical way to teach somebody a lesson, but it wasn't. The victims often vomited and shit themselves to death. Those who survived were all torn up inside.

  That is how I became a paid political cartoonist at a tender age. I did one cartoon a week, with the editor telling me exactly what to draw.

  Much to my surprise, Father began to blossom as an artist, too. In all the guessing about where my artistic talent might have come from, one thing seemed certain: it hadn't come from him or from anybody on his side of the family. When he still had his shoe repair shop, I never saw him do anything imaginative with all the scraps lying around, maybe make a fancy belt for me or a purse for Mother. He was a no-nonsense repairman, and that was all.

  But then, as though he were in a trance, and using the simplest hand-tools, he began to make perfectly beautiful cowboy boots, which he sold from door to door. They weren't only tough and comfortable: they were dazzling jewelry for manly feet and calves, scintillating with gold and silver stars and eagles and flowers and bucking broncos cut from flattened tin cans and bottle caps.

  But this new development in his life wasn't as nice for me to see as you might think.

  It gave me the creeps, actually, because I would look into his eyes, and there wasn't anybody home anymore.

  I would see the same thing happen to Terry Kitchen years later. He used to be my closest friend. And suddenly he began to paint the pictures which make many people say today that he was the greatest of all the Abstract Expressionists--superior to Pollock, to Rothko.

  That was fine, I guess, except that when I looked into my best friend's eyes, there wasn't anybody home anymore.

  Ah, me.

  Anyway: back around Christmas in 1932, Marilee's most recent letters were lying around somewhere, mostly unread. I had become bored with being her audience.

  And then this telegram arrived, addressed to me.

  Father would comment before we opened it that it was the first telegram our family had ever received.

  The message was this:

  BE MY APPRENTICE. WILL PA

  TRANSPORTATION HERE PLUS FREE ROOM, BOARD, MODEST ALLOWANCE, ART LESSONS.

  DAN GREGORY.

  8

  THE FIRST PERSON I told about this magnificent opportunity was the old newspaper editor for whom I had been drawing cartoons. His name was Arnold Coates, and he said this to me:

  "You really are an artist, and you have to get out of here or you'll shrivel up like a raisin. Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie, if you'll pardon my saying so.

  "New York is just going to be a stopover for you," he went on. "Europe is where the real painters are, and always will be."

  He was wrong about that.

  "I never prayed before, but I'll pray tonight that you never go to Europe as a soldier. We should never get suckered again into providing meat for the cannons and machine guns they love so much. They could go to war at any time. Look how big their armies are in the midst of a Great Depression!

  "If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe," he said, "and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again.

  "If I had my way," he said, "American geography books would call those European countries by their right names: "The Syphilis Empire," "The Republic of Suicide," "Dementia Praecox," which of course borders on beautiful "Paranoia."

  "There!" he said. "I've spoiled Europe for you, and you haven't even seen it yet. And maybe I've spoiled art for you, too, but I hope not. I don't see how artists can be blamed if their beautiful and usually innocent creations for some reason just make Europeans unhappier and more bloodthirsty all the time."

  That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."

  Can you imagine that?

  Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

  So I went to New York City to be born again.

  It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else to start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends and relatives to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States.

  "Here goes nothing," says the American as he goes off the high diving board.

  Yes, and my mind really was as blank as an
embryo's as I crossed this great continent on womblike Pullman cars. It was as though there had never been a San Ignacio. Yes, and when the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

  Ten minutes later I was born in Grand Central Station, wearing the first suit I had ever owned, and carrying a cardboard valise and a portfolio of my very best drawings.

  Who was there to welcome this beguiling Armenian infant?

  Not a soul, not a soul.

  I would have made a great Dan Gregory illustration for a story about a yokel finding himself all alone in a big city he has never seen before. I had got my suit through the mail from Sears, Roebuck, and nobody could draw cheap, mail-order clothes like Dan Gregory. My shoes were old and cracked, but I had shined them and put new rubber heels on them myself. I had also threaded in new laces, but one of those had broken somewhere around Kansas City. A truly observant person would have noticed the clumsy splice in the broken shoelaces. Nobody could describe the economic and spiritual condition of a character in terms of his shoes like Dan Gregory.

  My face, however, was wrong for a yokel in a magazine story back then. Gregory would have had to make me an Anglo-Saxon.

  He could have used my head in a story about Indians. I would have made a passable Hiawatha. He illustrated an expensive edition of Hiawatha one time, and the model he used for the title character was the son of a Greek fry cook.

  In the movies back then, just about any big-nosed person whose ancestors came from the shores of the Mediterranean or the Near East, if he could act a little, could play a rampaging Sioux or whatever. The audiences were more than satisfied.

  Now I yearned to get back on the railroad train! I had been so happy there! How I adored that train! God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!