Bluebeard (14 page)

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.

     
H
OW 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 tell 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 communiqué: “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.”