Bluebeard Page 8

  Now he spoke, and rolled his shoulders some, so I could see where he was. And he said this: "I was never welcome anywhere either." He was using his British accent again, which was the only one he ever used, except in fun. He went on: "It was very good for me to be so unwelcome, so unappreciated by my own master, because look what I have become."

  He said that his father, the horse trainer, had come close to killing him when he was an infant because his father couldn't stand to hear him cry. "If I started to cry, he did everything he could to make me stop right away," he said. "He was only a child himself, which is easy to forget about a father. How old are you?"

  I spoke my first word to him: "Seventeen."

  "My father was only one year older than you are when I was born," said Dan Gregory. "If you start copulating right now, you, too, can have a squalling baby by the time you're eighteen, in a big city like this one--and far from home. You think you're going to set this city on its ear as an artist, do you? Well--my father thought he was going to set Moscow on its ear as a horse trainer, and he found out quickly enough that the horse world there was run by Polacks, and that the highest he was ever going to rise, no matter how good he was, was to the rank of lowest stableboy. He had stolen my mother away from her people and all she knew when she was only sixteen, promising her that they would soon be rich and famous in Moscow."

  He stood and faced me. I had not budged from the top of the stairs. The new rubber heels I had put on my old broken shoes were cantilevered in air past the lip of the top step, so reluctant was I to come any farther into this dumbfoundingly complex and mirrored environment.

  Gregory himself was only a head and hands now, since his caftan was black. The head said to me, "I was born in a stable like Jesus Christ, and I cried like this:"

  From his throat came a harrowing counterfeit of the cries of an unwanted baby who could do nothing but cry and cry.

  My hair stood on end.

  12

  DAN GREGORY, or Gregorian, as he was known in the Old World, was rescued from his parents when he was about five years old by the wife of an artist named Beskudnikov, who was the engraver of plates for Imperial bonds and paper currency. She did not love him. He was simply a stray, mangy animal in the city she could not stand to see abused. So she did with him what she had done with several stray cats and dogs she had brought home--handed him over to the servants to clean and raise.

  "Her servants felt about me the way my servants feel about you," Gregory said to me. "I was just one more job to do, like shoveling ashes from the stoves or cleaning the lamp chimneys or beating the rugs."

  He said he studied what the dogs and cats did to get along, and then he did that, too. "The animals spent a lot of time in Beskudnikov's workshop, which was behind his house," he said. "The apprentices and journeymen would pet them and give them food, so I did that, too. I did some things that other animals couldn't do. I learned all the languages spoken there. Beskudnikov himself had studied in England and France, and he liked to give his helpers orders in one or the other of those languages, which he expected all of them to understand. Very soon I made myself useful as a translator, telling them exactly what their master had said to them. I already knew Polish and Russian, which the servants had taught me."

  "And Armenian," I suggested.

  "No," he said. "All I ever learned from my drunken parents was how to bray like a jackass or gibber like a monkey--or snarl like a wolf."

  He said that he also mastered every craft practiced in the shop, and, like me, had a knack for catching in a quick sketch a passable likeness of almost anybody or anything. "At the age often I myself was made an apprentice," he said.

  "By the age of fifteen," he went on, "it was obvious to everyone that I was a genius. Beskudnikov himself felt threatened, so he assigned me a task which everyone agreed was impossible. He would promote me to journeyman only after I had drawn by hand a one-ruble note, front and back, good enough to fool the sharp-eyed merchants in the marketplace."

  He grinned at me. "The penalty for counterfeiting in those days," he said, "was a public hanging in that same marketplace."

  Young Dan Gregorian spent six months making what he and all his co-workers agreed was a perfect note. Beskudnikov called the effort childish, and tore it into little pieces.

  Gregorian made an even better one, again taking six months to do so. Beskudnikov declared it to be worse than the first, and threw it into the fire.

  Gregorian made still a better one, spending a full year on it this time. All the while, of course, he was also carrying out his regular chores around the shop and house. When he completed his third counterfeit, however, he put it in his pocket. He showed Beskudnikov the genuine ruble he had been copying instead.

  As he had expected, the old man laughed at that one, too. But before Beskudnikov could destroy it, young Gregorian snatched it away and ran out into the marketplace. He bought a box of cigars with the genuine ruble, telling the tobacconist that the note was surely genuine, since it had come from Beskudnikov, engraver of the plates for the Imperial paper currency.

  Beskudnikov was horrified when the boy returned with the cigars. He had never meant for him to actually spend his counterfeit in the marketplace. He had named negotiability simply as his standard for excellence. His bugging eyes and sweaty brow and gasping proved that he was an honest man whose judgment was clouded by jealousy. Because his brilliant apprentice had handed him the ruble, his own work, incidentally, it really did look like a fake to him.

  What could the old man do, now? The tobacconist would surely recognize the note as a fake, too, and know where it had come from. After that? The law was the law. The Imperial engraver and his apprentice would be hanged side by side in the marketplace.

  "To his eternal credit," Dan Gregory said to me, "he himself resolved to retrieve what he thought was a fatal piece of paper. He asked me for the ruble I had copied. I of course handed him my perfect counterfeit."

  Beskudnikov told the tobacconist a preposterous story about how the ruble his apprentice had spent on cigars had great sentimental value. It was a matter of indifference to the tobacconist, who traded him the real one for the fake.

  The old man returned to the workshop beaming. The moment he was inside, however, he promised Gregorian the beating of his life. Until that time, Gregorian had always stood still for his beatings, as a good apprentice should.

  This time the boy ran a short distance away and turned to laugh at his master.

  "How dare you laugh at a time like this?" cried Beskudnikov.

  "I dare to laugh at you now and for the rest of my life," the apprentice replied. He told what he had done with his counterfeit ruble and the real one. "You can teach me no more. I have surpassed you by far," he said. "I am such a genius that I have tricked the engraver of the Imperial currency into passing a counterfeit ruble in the marketplace. My last words on Earth will be a confession to you, should we find ourselves side by side with nooses around our necks in the marketplace. I will say, 'You were right after all. I wasn't as talented as I thought I was. Good-bye, cruel world, good-bye.'"

  13

  COCKY DAN GREGORIAN left Beskudnikov's employ that day, and easily became a journeyman under another master engraver and silk screen artist, who made theatrical posters and illustrations for children's books. His counterfeit was never detected, or at any rate was not traced to him or Beskudnikov.

  "And Beskudnikov surely never told anyone the true story," he said to me, "of how he and his most promising apprentice came to a parting of the ways."

  He said he had so far done me the favor of making me feel unwelcome. "Since you are so much older than I was when I surpassed Beskudnikov," he went on, "we should waste no time in assigning you work roughly equivalent to copying a ruble by hand." He appeared to consider many possible projects, but I am sure he had settled on the most diabolical one imaginable well before my arrival.

  "Aha!" he said. "I've got it! I want you to set up an easel about where you'
re standing now. You should then paint a picture of this room--indistinguishable from a photograph. Does that sound fair? I hope not."

  I swallowed hard. "No, sir," I said, "it sure isn't fair."

  And he said, "Excellent!"

  I have just been to New York City for the first time in two years. It was Circe Berman's idea that I do this, and that I do it alone--so as to prove to myself that I was still a perfectly healthy man, in no way in need of assistance, in no way an invalid. It is now the middle of August. She has been here for two months and a little more, which means that I have been writing this book for two months!

  She swore that the city of New York could be a Fountain of Youth for me, if only I would retrace some of the steps I had taken when I first got there from California so long ago. "Your muscles will tell you that they are nearly as springy as they were back then," she said. "If you will only let it," she said, "your brain will show you that it can be exactly as cocky and excited as it was back then."

  It sounded good. But guess what? She was assembling a booby trap.

  Her promise came true for a little while, not that she gave a damn whether it was hollow or not. All she wanted was to get me out of here for a little while, so she could do what she pleased with this property.

  At least she didn't break into the potato barn, which she could have done herself, given enough time--and a crowbar and an axe. She had only to go into the carriage house to find a crowbar and an axe.

  I really did feel spry and cocky again when I retraced my first steps from Grand Central Station to the three brownstones which had been the mansion of Dan Gregory. They were three separate houses again, as I already knew. They had been made separate again about the time my father died, three years before the United States got into the war. Which war? The Peloponnesian War, of course. Doesn't anybody but me remember the Peloponnesian War?

  I begin again:

  Dan Gregory's mansion became three separate brownstones again soon after he and Marilee and Fred Jones left for Italy to take part in Mussolini's great social experiment. Although he and Fred were well into their fifties by then, they would ask for and receive permission from Mussolini himself to don Italian infantry officers' uniforms, but without any badges of rank or unit, and to make paintings of the Italian Army in action.

  They would be killed almost exactly one year before the United States joined the war--against Italy, by the way, and against Germany and Japan and some others. They were killed around December seventh of 1940 at Sidi Barrani, Egypt, where only thirty thousand British overwhelmed eighty thousand Italians, I learn from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, capturing forty thousand Italians and four hundred guns.

  When the Britannica talks about captured guns, it doesn't mean rifles and pistols. It means great big guns.

  Yes, and since Gregory and his sidekick Jones were such weapons nuts, let it be said that it was Matilda tanks, and Stens and Brens and Enfield rifles with fixed bayonets which did them in.

  Why did Marilee go to Italy with Gregory and Jones? She was in love with Gregory, and he was in love with her.

  How is that for simplicity?

  The easternmost house of the three which used to belong to Gregory, I only discovered on this most recent trip to New York, is now the office and dwelling of the Delegation to the United Nations of the Emirate of Salibaar. That was the first I had ever heard of the Emirate of Salibaar, which I can't find anywhere in my Encyclopaedia Britannica. I can only find a desert town by that name, population eleven thousand, about the population of San Ignacio. Circe Berman says it is time I got a new encyclopedia, and some new neckties, too.

  The big oak door and its massive hinges are unchanged, except that the Gorgon knocker is gone. Gregory took it with him to Italy, and I saw it again on the front door of Marilee's palace in Florence after the war.

  Maybe it has now migrated elsewhere, since Italy's and my beloved Contessa Portomaggiore died of natural causes in her sleep in the same week my beloved Edith passed away.

  Some week for old Rabo Karabekian!

  The middle brownstone has been divided into five apartments, one on each floor, including the basement, as I learned by the mailboxes and doorbells in the foyer.

  But don't mention foyers to me! More about that in a little bit! All things in good time.

  That middle house used to contain the guest room where I was first incarcerated, and Gregory's grand dining room right below that, and his research library below that, and the storage room for his art materials in the basement. I was mostly curious, though, about the top floor, which used to be the part of Gregory's studio with the big, leaky skylight. I wanted to know whether there was still a skylight up there, and, if so, if anybody had ever found a way to stop its leaks, or whether there were still pots and pans making John Cage music underneath it when it rained or snowed.

  But there was nobody to ask, so I never found out. So there is one storytelling fizzle for you, dear Reader. I never found out.

  And here is another one. The house to the west of that one is, judging from the mailboxes and bells, evidentally a triplex at the bottom, with a duplex on top of that. It was this third of Gregory's establishment which the live-in servants had inhabited, and where I, too, was given a small but cheerful bedroom. Fred Jones's bedroom, by the way, was right in back of Gregory's and Marilee's room in the Emirate of Salibaar.

  This woman came out of the brownstone with the duplex and triplex. She was old and trembly, but her posture was good, and it was easy to see that she had been very beautiful at one time. I locked my gaze to hers, and a flash of recognition went off in my skull. I knew her, but she didn't know me. We had never met. I realized that I had seen her in motion pictures when she was much younger. A second later, I came up with her name. She was Barbira Mencken, the ex-wife of Paul Slazinger. He had lost touch with her years ago, had no idea where she lived. She hadn't done a movie or a play for a long, long time, but there she was. Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn also live in that same general neighborhood.

  I didn't speak to her. Should I have spoken to her? What would I have had to say to her? "Paul is fine and sends his best"? Or how about this one: "Tell me how your parents died"?

  I had supper at the Century Club, to which I have belonged for many years. There was a new maitre d', and I asked him what had happened to the old one, Roberto. He said that Roberto had been killed by a bicycle messenger going the wrong way on a one-way street right in front of the club.

  I said that was too bad, and he heartily agreed with me.

  I didn't see anybody I knew, which was hardly surprising, since everybody I know is dead. But I made friends in the bar with a man considerably my junior, who was a writer of young adult novels, like Circe Berman. I asked him if he had ever heard of the Polly Madison books and he asked me if I had ever heard of the Atlantic Ocean.

  So we had supper together. His wife was out of town lecturing, he said. She was a prominent sexologist.

  I asked him as delicately as I could if making love to a woman so sophisticated in sexual techniques was in any way unusually burdensome. He replied, rolling his eyes at the ceiling, that I had certainly hit the nail on the head. "I have to reassure her that I really love her practically incessantly," he said.

  I spent an uneventful late evening watching pornographic TV programs in my room at the Algonquin Hotel. I watched and didn't watch at the very same time.

  I planned to catch a train back the next afternoon, but met a fellow East Hamptonite, Floyd Pomerantz, at breakfast. He, too, was headed home later in the day, and offered me a ride in his Cadillac stretch limousine. I accepted with alacrity.

  What a satisfactory form of transportation that proved to be! That Cadillac was better than womblike. The Twentieth Century Limited, as I have said, really was womblike, in constant motion, with all sorts of unexplained thumps and bangs outside. But the Cadillac was coffinlike. Pomerantz and I got to be dead in there. The hell with this baby stuff. It was so cozy, two of us in a s
ingle, roomy, gangster-style casket. Everybody should be buried with somebody else, just about anybody else, whenever feasible.

  Pomerantz talked some about picking up the pieces of his life and trying to put them back together again. He is Circe Berman's age, which is forty-three. Three months before, he had been given eleven million dollars to resign as president of a big TV network. "Most of my life still lies ahead of me," he said.

  "Yes," I said. "I guess it does."

  "Do you think there is still time for me to be a painter?" he said.

  "Never too late," I said.

  Earlier, I knew, he had asked Paul Slazinger if there was still time for him to become a writer. He thought people might be interested in his side of the story about what happened to him at the network.

  Slazinger said afterwards that there ought to be some way to persuade people like Pomerantz, and the Hamptons teem with people like Pomerantz, that they had already extorted more than enough from the economy. He suggested that we build a Money Hall of Fame out here, with busts of the arbitrageurs and hostile-takeover specialists and venture capitalists and investment bankers and golden handshakers and platinum parachutists in niches, with their statistics cut into stone--how many millions they had stolen legally in how short a time.

  I asked Slazinger if I deserved to be in the Money Hall of Fame. He thought that over, and concluded that I belonged in some sort of Hall of Fame, but that all my money had come as a result of accidents rather than greed.

  "You belong in the Dumb Luck Hall of Fame," he said. He thought it should be built in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, maybe, but then changed his mind. "The Klondike, I think," he said. "People should have to come by dogsled or on snowshoes if they want to see Rabo Karabekian's bust in the Dumb Luck Hall of Fame."