Bluebeard (11 page)

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-fébvre-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.” Marilee 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.