Bluebeard, Page 3

  "If you didn't have such a kind face," she said, "I would suspect that you were making fun of me."

  But listen to this, which she only told me at breakfast this morning. Just listen to this and then tell me who was toying with whom at that supper, which is now two weeks ago: Mrs. Berman is not an amateur writing a biography of her late husband. That was just a story to cover her true identity and purpose for being here. She swore me to secrecy, and then confessed that she was really in the Hamptons to research and write a novel about working-class adolescents living in a resort community teeming in the summer time with the sons and daughters of multimillionaires.

  And this wasn't going to be her first novel either. It would be the twenty-first in a series of shockingly frank and enormously popular novels for young readers, several of which had been made into motion pictures. She had written them under the name of "Polly Madison."

  I certainly will keep this a secret, too, if only to save the life of Paul Slazinger. If he finds out who she really is now, after all his posturing as a professional writer, he will do what Terry Kitchen, the only other best friend I ever had, did. He will commit suicide.

  In terms of commercial importance in the literary marketplace, Circe Berman is to Paul Slazinger what General Motors is to a bicycle factory in Albania!

  Mum's the word!

  She said that first night that she collected pictures, too.

  I asked her what kind, and she said, "Victorian chromos of little girls on swings." She said she had more than a hundred of them, all different, but all of little girls on swings.

  "I suppose you think that's terrible," she said.

  "Not at all," I said, "just as long as you keep them safely caged in Baltimore."

  That first night, I remember, too, she asked Slazinger and me, and then the cook and her daughter, too, if we knew any true stories about local girls from relatively poor families who had married the sons of rich people.

  Slazinger said, "I don't think you'll even see that in the movies anymore."

  Celeste told her, "The rich marry the rich. Where have you been all your life?"

  To get back to the past, which is what this book is supposed to be all about: My mother gathered up the jewels that had fallen from the dead woman's mouth, but not the ones still inside there. Whenever she told the story, she was emphatic about that: she hadn't fished anything from the woman's mouth. Whatever had stayed in there was still the woman's very personal property.

  And Mother crawled away after nightfall, after the killers had all gone home. She wasn't from my father's village, and she would not meet him until they both crossed the lightly guarded border with Persia, about seventy miles from the scene of the massacre.

  Persian Armenians took them in. After they decided to go together to Egypt. My father did most of the talking, since Mother had a mouthful of jewels. When they got to the Persian Gulf, mother sold the first of those compact treasures in order to buy them passage on a small freighter to Cairo, via the Red Sea. And it was in Cairo that they met the criminal Vartan Mamigonian, a survivor of an earlier massacre.

  "Never trust a survivor," my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, "until you find out what he did to stay alive."

  This Mamigonian had grown rich manufacturing military boots for the British Army and the German Army, which would soon be fighting each other in World War One. He offered my parents low-paid work of the dirtiest kind. They were fools enough to tell him, since he was a fellow Armenian survivor, about Mother's jewels and their plans to marry and go to Paris to join the large and highly cultivated Armenian colony there.

  Mamigonian became their most ardent advisor and protector, eager to find them a safe place for the jewels in a city notorious for its heartless thieves. But they had already put them in a bank.

  So Mamigonian constructed a fantasy which he proposed to trade for the jewels. He must have found San Ignacio, California, in an atlas, since no Armenian had ever been there, and since no news of that sleepy farming town could have reached the Near East in any form. Mamigonian said he had a brother in San Ignacio. He forged letters from the brother to prove it. The letters said, moreover, that the brother had become extremely rich in a short time there. There were many other Armenians there, all doing well. They were looking for a teacher for their children who was fluent in Armenian and familiar with the great literature in that language.

  As an inducement to such a teacher, they would sell him a house and twenty acres of fruit trees at a fraction of their true value. Mamigonian's "rich brother" enclosed a photo of the house, and a deed to it as well.

  If Mamigonian knew a good teacher in Cairo who might be interested, this nonexistent brother wrote, Mamigonian was authorized to sell him the deed. This would secure the teaching job for Father, and make him one of the larger property owners in idyllic San Ignacio.

  4

  I HAVE BEEN in the art business, the picture business, so long now that I can daydream about the past as though it were a vista through a series of galleries like the Louvre, perhaps--home of the "Mona Lisa," whose smile has now outlived by three decades the postwar miracle of Sateen Dura-Luxe. The pictures in what must be the final gallery of my life are real. I can touch them, if I like, or, following the recommendations of the widow Berman, a.k.a. "Polly Madison," sell them to the highest bidder or in some other way, in her thoughtful words. "Get them the hell out of here."

  In the imaginary galleries in the distance are my own Abstract Expressionist paintings, miraculously resurrected by the Great Critic for Judgment Day, and then pictures by Europeans, which I bought for a few dollars or chocolate bars or nylon stockings when a soldier, and then advertisements of the sort I had been laying out and illustrating before I joined the Army--at about the time news of my father's death in the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio came.

  Still farther away are the magazine illustrations of Dan Gregory, whose apprentice I was from the time I was seventeen until he threw me out. I was one month short of being twenty when he threw me out. Beyond the Dan Gregory Gallery are unframed works I made in my boyhood, as the only artist of any age or sort ever to inhabit San Ignacio.

  The gallery at the farthest remove from me in my dotage, though, just inside the door I entered in 1916, is devoted to a photograph, not a painting. Its subject is a noble white house with a long winding driveway and porte-cochere, supposedly in San Ignacio, which Vartan Mamigonian in Cairo told my parents they were buying with most of Mother's jewelry.

  That picture, along with a bogus deed, crawling with signatures and spattered with sealing wax, was in my parents' bedside table for many years--in the tiny apartment over Father's shoe repair shop. I assumed that he had thrown them out with so many other mementos after Mother died. But as I was about to board a railroad train in 1933, to seek my fortune in New York City during the depths of the Great Depression, Father made me a present of the photograph. "If you happen to come across this house," he said in Armenian, "let me know where it is. Wherever it is, it belongs to me."

  I don't own that picture anymore. Coming back to New York City after having been one of three persons at Father's funeral in San Ignacio, which I hadn't seen for five years, I ripped the photograph to bits. I did that because I was angry at my dead father. It was my conclusion that he had cheated himself and my mother a lot worse than they had been cheated by Vartan Mamigonian. It wasn't Mamigonian who made my parents stay in San Ignacio instead of moving to Fresno, say, where there really was an Armenian colony, whose members supported each other and kept the old language and customs and religion alive, and at the same time became happier and happier to be in California. Father could have become a beloved teacher again!

  Oh, no--it wasn't Mamigonian who tricked him into being the unhappiest and loneliest of all the world's cobblers.

  Armenians have done brilliantly in this country during the short time they've been here. My neighbor to the west is F. Donald Kasabian, executive vice-president of Metropolitan Life--
so that right here in exclusive East Hampton, and right on the beach, too, we have two Armenians side by side. What used to be J. P. Morgan's estate in Southampton is now the property of Kevork Hovanessian, who also owned Twentieth Century-Fox until he sold it last week.

  And Armenians haven't succeeded only in business here. The great writer William Saroyan was an Armenian, and so is Dr. George Mintouchian, the new president of the University of Chicago. Dr. Mintouchian is a renowned Shakespeare scholar, something my father could have been.

  And Circe Berman has just come into the room and read what is in my typewriter, which is ten of the lines above. She is gone again. She said again that my father obviously suffered from Survivor's Syndrome.

  "Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said. "So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Nine times out of ten it's a cannibal or billionaire!"

  "You still haven't forgiven your father for being what he had to be," she said. "That's why you're yelling now."

  "I wasn't yelling," I said.

  "They can hear you in Portugal," she said. That's where you wind up if you put out to sea from my private beach and sail due east, as she had figured out from the globe in the library. You wind up in Oporto, Portugal.

  "You envy your father's ordeal," she said.

  "I had an ordeal of my own!" I said. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm a one-eyed man."

  "You told me yourself that there was almost no pain, and that it healed right away," she said, which was true. I don't remember being hit, but only the approach of a white German tank and German soldiers all in white across a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg. I was unconscious when I was taken prisoner, and was kept that way by morphine until I woke up in a German military hospital in a church across the border, in Germany. She was right: I had to endure no more pain in the war than a civilian experiences in a dentist's chair.

  The wound healed so quickly that I was soon shipped off to a camp as just another unremarkable prisoner.

  Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor's Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: "Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?"

  "No," I said.

  "Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?"

  "No," I said.

  "You may be entitled to the Survivor's Syndrome, but you didn't get it," she said. "Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?"

  "How do you know so much about the Survivor's Syndrome?" I asked her. This wasn't a boorish question to ask her, since she had told me during our first meeting on the beach that she and her husband, although both Jewish, had had no knowledge of relatives they might have had in Europe and who might have been killed during the Holocaust. They were both from families which had been in the United States for several generations, and which had lost all contact with European relatives.

  "I wrote a book about it," she said. "Rather--I wrote about people like you: children of a parent who had survived some sort of mass killing. It's called The Underground."

  Needless to say, I have not read that or any of the Polly Madison books, although they seem, now that I have started looking around for them, as available as packs of chewing gum.

  Not that I would need to leave the house to get a copy of The Underground or any other Polly Madison book, Mrs. Berman informs me. The cook's daughter Celeste has every one of them.

  Mrs. Berman, the most ferocious enemy of privacy I ever knew, has also discovered that Celeste, although only fifteen, already takes birth-control pills.

  The formidable widow Berman told me the plot of The Underground, which is this: Three girls, one black, one Jewish and one Japanese, feel drawn together and separate from the rest of their classmates for reasons they can't explain. They form a little club which they call, again for reasons they can't explain, "The Underground."

  But then it turns out that all three have a parent or grandparent who has survived some man-made catastrophe, and who, without meaning to, passed on to them the idea that the wicked were the living and that the good were dead.

  The black is descended from a survivor of the massacre of Ibos in Nigeria. The Japanese is a descendant of a survivor of the atom-bombing of Nagasaki. The Jew is a descendant of a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.

  "The Underground is a wonderful title for a book like that," I said.

  "You bet it is," she said. "I am very proud of my titles." She really thinks that she is the cat's pajamas, and that everybody else is dumb, dumb, dumb!

  She said that painters should hire writers to name their pictures for them. The names of the pictures on my walls here are "Opus Nine" and "Blue and Burnt Orange" and so on. My own most famous painting, which no longer exists, and which was sixty-four feet long and eight feet high, and used to grace the entrance lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue, was called simply, "Windsor Blue Number Seventeen." Windsor Blue was a shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe, straight from the can.

  "The titles are meant to be uncommunicative," I said.

  "What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?"

  She still has no respect for my art collection, although, during the five weeks she has now been in residence, she has seen immensely respectable people from as far away as Switzerland and Japan worship some of them as though the pictures were gods almost. She was here when I sold a Rothko right off the wall to a man from the Getty Museum for a million and a half dollars.

  What she said about that was this: "Good riddance of bad rubbish. It was rotting your brain because it was about absolutely nothing. Now give the rest of them the old heave-ho!"

  She asked me just now, while we were talking about the Survivor's Syndrome, if my father wanted to see the Turks punished for what they had done to the Armenians.

  "I asked him the same thing when I was about eight years old, I guess, and thinking maybe life would be spicier if we wanted revenge of some kind," I said.

  "Father put down his tools there in his little shop, and he stared out the window," I went on, "and I looked out the window, too. There were a couple of Luma Indian men out there, I remember. The Luma reservation was only five miles away, and sometimes people passing through town would mistake me for a Luma boy. I liked that a lot. At the time I thought it certainly beat being an Armenian.

  "Father finally answered my question this way: 'All I want from the Turks is an admission that their country is an uglier and even more joyless place, now that we are gone.'"

  I went for a manly tramp around my boundaries after lunch today, and encountered my neighbor to the north on our mutual border, which runs about twenty feet north of my potato barn. His name is John Karpinski. He is a native. He is a potato farmer like his father, although his fields must now be worth about eighty thousand dollars an acre, since the second-story windows of houses built on them would have an ocean view. Three generations of Karpinskis have been raised on all that property, so that to them, in an Armenian manner of speaking, it is their own sacred ancestral bit of ground at the foot of Mount Ararat.

  Karpinski is a huge man, almost always in bib-overalls, and everybody calls him "Big John." Big John is a wounded war veteran like Paul Slazinger and me, but he is younger than us, so his war was a different war. His war was the Korean War.

  And then his only son "Little John" was killed by a land mine in the Vietnam War.

  One war to a customer.

  My potato barn and the six acres that came with it used to belong to Big John's father, who sold them to Dear Edith and her first husband.

  Big John expressed curiosity about Mrs. Berman. I promised him that our relationship was platonic, and that she had more or less invited herself, and that I would be glad when she r
eturned to Baltimore.

  "She sounds like a bear," he said. "If a bear gets in your house, you had better go to a motel until the bear is ready to leave again."

  There used to be lots of bears on Long Island, but there certainly aren't bears anymore. He said his knowledge of bears came from his father, who, at the age of sixty, was treed by a grizzly in Yellowstone Park. After that, John's father read every book about bears he could get his hands on.

  "I'll say this for that bear--" said John, "it got the old man reading books again."

  Mrs. Berman is so God damn nosy! I mean--she comes in here and reads what is in my typewriter without feeling the need to ask permission first.

  "How come you never use semicolons?" she'll say. Or: "How come you chop it all up into little sections instead of letting it flow and flow?" That sort of thing.

  And when I listen to her moving about this house, I not only hear her footsteps: I hear the opening and closing of drawers and cupboards, too. She has investigated every nook and cranny, including the basement. She came up from the basement one day and said, "Do you know you've got sixty-three gallons of Sateen Dura-Luxe down there?" She had counted them!

  It is against the law to dispose of Sateen Dura-Luxe in an ordinary dump because it has been found to degrade over time into a very deadly poison. To get rid of the stuff legally, I would have to ship it to a special disposal area near Pitchfork, Wyoming, and I have never got around to doing that. So there it sits in the basement after all these years.

  The one place on the property she hasn't explored is my studio, the potato barn. It is a very long and narrow structure without windows, with sliding doors and a potbellied stove at either end, built for the storage of potatoes and nothing else. The idea was this: a farmer might maintain an even temperature in there, no matter what the weather, with the stoves and the doors, so that his potatoes would neither freeze nor sprout until he was ready to market them.