Bluebeard (12 page)

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:

     
T
HE 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.