Bluebeard Read online

  Nowadays, of course, everything must be done with plutonium and laser beams.

  And could Dan Gregory ever paint pictures of railroad trains! He used to work from blueprints he got from the manufacturers, so that a misplaced rivet or whatever wouldn't spoil his picture for a railroad man. And if he had done a picture of the Twentieth Century Limited the day I arrived, the stains and dirt on the outside would be native to the run between Chicago and New York. Nobody could paint grime like Dan Gregory.

  And where was he now? Where was Marilee? Why hadn't they sent someone to meet me with his great Marmon touring car?

  He knew exactly when I was coming. He was the one who had picked the date, an easy one to remember. It was Saint Valentine's Day. And he had done me so many kindnesses through the mail, and not through Marilee or any flunky. All the messages were in his own handwriting. They were brief, but they were incredibly generous, too. I was not only to buy a warm suit for myself at his expense, but one for Father, too.

  His notes were so compassionate! He didn't want me to get scared or make a fool of myself on the trains, so he told me how to act in a Pullman berth and on the dining car, and how much and when to tip the waiters and porters, and how to change trains in Chicago. He couldn't have been nicer to his own son, if he had had a son.

  He even went to the trouble of sending me expense money as postal money orders rather than personal checks, which indicated that he knew about the failure of the only bank in San Ignacio.

  What I didn't know was that, back in December, when he sent me the telegram, Marilee was in the hospital with both legs and one arm broken. He had given her a shove in his studio which sent her backwards and down the staircase. She looked dead when she hit the bottom, and two servants happened to be standing there--at the bottom of the stairs.

  So Gregory was scared and remorseful. When he visited Marilee in the hospital the first time, all shamefaced, he told her he was sorry and loved her so much that he would give her anything she could think to ask for--anything.

  He probably thought it was going to be diamonds or something like that, but she asked for a human being. She asked for me.

  Circe Berman has just suggested that I was a replacement for the Armenian baby which had been taken from her womb in Switzerland.

  Maybe so.

  And then Marilee told Gregory what to say to me in the telegram and then his letters, and how much money to send me for what, and on and on. She was still in the hospital when I reached New York, but she certainly didn't expect him to stand me up at the station.

  But that's what he did.

  He was turning mean again.

  That wasn't the whole story, either. I wouldn't get the whole story until I visited Marilee in Florence after the war. Gregory, incidentally, had been dead and buried in Egypt for about ten years by then.

  Only after the war did Marilee, reborn as the Con-tessa Portomaggiore, tell me that I was the reason she had been pushed down the stairs back in 1932. She had sheltered me from that abashing information, and so, from very different motives, certainly, had Dan Gregory.

  But she came up to his studio the night he nearly killed her, to get him to give his serious attention to pictures of mine for the very first time. In all the years I had been sending pictures to New York, he had never looked at one. Marilee thought that this time might be different, since Gregory was happier than she had ever seen him. Why? He had that afternoon received a letter of thanks from the man he believed to be the most brilliant leader on earth, the Italian dictator Mussolini, the man who made his enemies drink castor oil.

  Mussolini had thanked him for a portrait of himself which Gregory had painted as a gift. Mussolini was depicted as a general of Alpine troops on a mountaintop at sunrise, and you can bet that every bit of leather and piping and braid and brass and pleating, and all the decorations, were exactly as they should be. Nobody could paint uniforms like Dan Gregory.

  Gregory would be shot dead in Egypt eight years later, incidentally, by the British, while wearing an Italian uniform.

  But the point is this: Marilee spread out my pictures on a refectory table in his studio, and he knew what they were. As she had hoped, he ambled over to them with all possible amiability. The moment he looked at them closely, though, he flew into a rage.

  But it wasn't the nature of my pictures which infuriated him. It was the quality of the art materials I had used. No boy artist in California could afford such expensive imported colors and paper and canvas. Marilee, obviously, had taken them from his supply room.

  So he gave her a shove, and she fell backwards down the stairs.

  Somewhere in here I want to tell about the suit I ordered from Sears, Roebuck along with my own. Father and I measured each other up for the suits, which was strange even in itself, since I can't recall our ever having touched before.

  But when the suits arrived, it was obvious that somebody somewhere had misplaced a decimal point where Father's pants were concerned. As short as his legs were, his pants were much shorter. As scrawny as he was around the middle, he couldn't button the pants at the waist. The coat was just perfect, though.

  So I said to him, "I'm really sorry about the pants. You'll have to send them back."

  And he said, "No. I like it very much. It's a very good funeral suit."

  And I said, "What do you mean, "funeral suit"?" I had this vision of his going to other people's funerals without any pants on--not that he had ever gone to anybody's funeral but my mother's, as far as I know.

  And he said, "You don't have to wear pants to your own funeral," he said.

  When I went back to San Ignacio for his funeral five years later, he was laid out in the coat of that suit at least, but the bottom half of the casket was closed, so I had to ask the mortician if Father had pants on.

  It turned out that he did, and that the pants fit nicely. So Father had gone to the trouble of getting pants that fit from Sears, Roebuck.

  But there were two unexpected fillips to the mortician's answer. He wasn't the one who had buried my mother, incidentally. The one who buried my mother had gone bankrupt and left town to seek his fortune elsewhere. The one who was burying my father had come to seek his fortune in San Ignacio, where the streets were paved with gold.

  One surprising piece of news from him was that my father was going to be buried wearing a pair of his own cowboy boots, which he had been wearing when he died at the movies.

  The other fillip was the undertaker's assumption that Father was a Mohammedan. This was exciting to him. It was his biggest adventure in being uncritically pious in a madly pluralistic democracy.

  "Your father is the first Mohammedan I've taken care of," he said. "I hope I haven't done anything wrong so far. There weren't any other Mohammedans to advise me. I would have had to go all the way to Los Angeles."

  I didn't want to spoil his good time, so I told him that everything looked perfect to me. "Just don't eat pork too near the casket," I said.

  "That's all?" he said.

  "That--" I said, "and of course you say 'Praise Allah' when you close the lid."

  Which he did.

  9

  HOW GOOD were those pictures of mine which Dan Gregory looked at so briefly before he shoved Marilee down the stairs? Technically, if not spiritually, they were pretty darn good for a kid my age--a kid whose self-imposed lessons had consisted of copying, stroke by stroke, illustrations by Dan Gregory.

  I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

  I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives--maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to t
ell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.

  That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

  The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist."

  How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"

  So when I became an apprentice to Dan Gregory, I was going into the ring with the world's champion of commercial art. His illustrations must have made any number of gifted young artists give up on art, thinking, "My God, I could never do anything that wonderful."

  I was a really cocky kid, I now realize. From the very first, when I began copying Gregory, I was saying to myself, in effect, "If I work hard enough, by golly, I can do that, too!"

  So there I was in Grand Central Station, with everybody but me being hugged and kissed by everybody, seemingly. I had doubted that Dan Gregory would come to greet me, but where was Marilee?

  Did she know what I looked like? Of course. I had sent her many self-portraits, and snapshots taken by my mother, too.

  Father, by the way, refused to touch a camera, saying that all it caught was dead skin and toenails and hair which people long gone had left behind. I guess he thought photographs were a poor substitute for all the people killed in the massacre.

  Even if Marilee hadn't seen those pictures of me, I would have been easy to spot, since I was the darkest passenger by far on any of the Pullman cars. Any passenger much darker than me in those days would have been excluded by custom from Pullman cars--and almost all hotels and theaters and restaurants.

  Was I sure I could spot Marilee at the station? Funnily enough: no. She had sent me nine photographs over the years, which are now bound together with her letters. They were made with the finest equipment by Dan Gregory himself, who could easily have become a successful photographer. But Gregory had also costumed and posed her each time as a character in some story he was illustrating--the Empress Josephine, an F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper, a cave woman, a pioneer wife, a mermaid, tail and all, and so on. It was and remains hard to believe that these weren't pictures of nine different women.

  There were many beauties on the platform, since the Twentieth Century Limited was the most glamorous train of its time. So I locked eyes with woman after woman, hoping to fire the flashbulb of recognition inside her skull. But all I succeeded in doing, I am afraid, was to confirm for each woman that the darker races were indeed leeringly lecherous, being closer than the whiter ones to the gorillas, the chimpanzees.

  Polly Madison, a.k.a. Circe Berman, has just come and gone, having read what is in my typewriter without asking if I minded. I mind a lot!

  "I'm in the middle of a sentence," I said.

  "Who isn't?" she said. "I just wondered if it wasn't making you feel creepy, writing about people so long ago.

  "Not that I've noticed," I said. "I've gotten upset by a lot of things I hadn't thought about for years, but that's about the size of it. Creepy? No."

  "Just think about it," she said. "You know about all sorts of terrible things that are going to happen to these people, yourself included. Wouldn't you like to hop into a time machine and go back and warn them, if you could?" She described an eerie scene in the Los Angeles railroad station back in 1933. "An Armenian boy with a cardboard suitcase and a portfolio is saying good-bye to his immigrant father. He is about to seek his fortune in a great city twenty-five hundred miles away. An old man wearing an eye patch, who has just arrived in a time machine from 1987, sidles up. What does the old man say to him?"

  "I'd have to think about it," I said. I shook my head. "Nothing. Cancel the time machine."

  "Nothing?" she said.

  I told her this: "I want him to believe for as long as possible that he is going to become a great painter and a good father."

  Only half an hour later: she has popped in and out again. "I just thought of something maybe you could use somewhere," she said. "What made me think of it was what you wrote earlier about how, after your father started making beautiful cowboy boots, you looked into his eyes and there wasn't anybody home anymore--or when your friend Terry Kitchen started painting his best pictures with his spray gun, and you looked into his eyes and there wasn't anybody home anymore."

  I gave up. I switched off this electric typewriter. Where did I learn to touch-type? I had taken a course in typing after the war, when I thought I was going to become a businessman.

  I sat back in this chair and I closed my eyes. Ironies go right over her head, and especially those relating to privacy, but I tried one anyway. "I'm all ears," I said.

  "I never told you the very last thing Abe said before he died, did I?" she said.

  "Never did," I agreed.

  "That was what I was thinking about that first day--when you came down on the beach," she said.

  "O.K.," I said.

  At the very end, her brain-surgeon husband couldn't talk anymore, but he could still scrawl short messages with his left hand, although he was normally right handed. His left hand was all he had left that still worked a little bit.

  According to Circe, this was his ultimate communique: "I was a radio repairman."

  "Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth," she said, "or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?"

  "I think I do," I said.

  "Just because music comes from a little box we call a radio," she said, and here she came over and rapped me on my pate with her knuckles as though it were a radio, "that doesn't mean there's a symphony orchestra inside."

  "What's that got to do with Father and Terry Kitchen?" I said.

  "Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something they'd never done before, and their personalities changed, too--" she said, "maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do."

  I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. "So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios," he mused, "and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on."

  "That's the theory," I said.

  He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before. He said, too, that toward the end of his marriage to Barbira Mencken, the actress, she acted "as though she was wearing headphones and listening to the 1812 Overture in stereo. That's when she was becoming a real actress, and not just another pretty girl onstage that everybody liked a lot. She wasn't even 'Barbara' anymore. All of a sudden she was 'Bar-beer-ah!'"

  He said that the first he heard of the name change was during the divorce proceedings, when her lawyer referred to her as "Barbira," and spelled it for the court stenographer.

  Out in the courthouse corridor afterwards, Slazinger asked her: "Whatever happened to Barbara?"

  She said Barbara was dead!

  So Slazinger said to her: "Then what on Earth did we waste all this money on lawyers for?"

  I said that I had seen the same sort of thing happen to Terry Kitchen the first ti
me he played with a spray rig, shooting bursts of red automobile paint at an old piece of beaverboard he'd leaned against the potato barn. All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn't hear.

  Red was the only color he had to play with. We'd gotten two cans of the red paint along with the spray rig, which we'd bought from an automobile repair shop in Montauk a couple of hours before. "Just look at it! Just look at it!" he'd say, after every burst.

  "He'd just about given up on being a painter, and was going into law practice with his father before we got that spray rig," I said.

  "Barbira was just about to give up being an actress and have a baby instead," said Slazinger. "And then she got the part of Tennessee Williams's sister in The Glass Menagerie."

  Actually, now that I think back: Terry Kitchen went through a radical personality change the moment he saw the spray rig for sale, and not when he fired those first bursts of red at the beaverboard. I happened to spot the rig, and said that it was probably war surplus, since it was identical with rigs I had used in the Army for camouflage.

  "Buy it for me," he said.

  "What for?" I said.

  "Buy it for me," he said again. He had to have it, and he wouldn't even have known what it was if I hadn't told him.

  He never had any money, although he was from a very rich old family, and the only money I had was supposed to go for a crib and a youth bed for the house I'd bought in Springs. I was in the process of moving my family, much against their will, from the city to the country.

  "Buy it for me," he said again.

  And I said, "O.K., take it easy. O.K., O.K."

  And now, let us hop into our trusty old time machine, and go back to 1932 again:

  Was I angry to be stood up at Grand Central Station? Not a bit. As long as I believed Dan Gregory to be the greatest artist alive, he could do no wrong. And before I was done with him and he with me, I would have to forgive him for a lot worse things than not meeting my train.