Bluebeard (16 page)

The man who opened the door to me had a very good face for an American-style hero, and had in fact been an aviator during the First World War. He was truly Gregory’s assistant, what Marilee Kemp had only claimed to be, and would become the only friend who stuck with Gregory to the bitter end. He, too, would be shot while wearing an Italian uniform in Egypt during not his First but his Second World War.

So says this one-eyed Armenian fortune-teller as he peers into his crystal ball.

“Can I help you?” he said. There wasn’t a flicker of recognition in his eyes, although he knew who I was and that I would be coming to the house at any time. He and Gregory had resolved to give me a chilly welcome. I can only guess at their deliberations prior to my arrival, but they must have been along the lines of my being a parasite which Marilee had brought into the house, a thief who had already stolen hundreds of dollars’ worth of art materials.

They must have persuaded themselves, too, that Marilee was wholly to blame for her backward somersaults down the studio staircase, and that she had unjustly blamed Gregory. As I say, I myself would believe that until she told me the truth of the matter after the war.

So, just to start somewhere in proving that I was right to be on the doorstep, I asked for Marilee.

“She’s in the hospital,” he said, still barring the way.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I told him my name.

“That’s what I figured,” he said. But still he wasn’t going to ask me in.

So then Gregory, who was about halfway down the spiral staircase, asked him who was at the door, and the man, whose name was Fred Jones, said, as though “apprentice” were another name for tapeworm, “It’s your apprentice.”

“My what?” said Gregory.

“Your apprentice,” said Jones.

And Gregory now addressed a problem I myself had pondered: what was a painter’s apprentice supposed to do in modern times, when paints and brushes and so on no longer had to be made right in the painter’s workplace?

He said this: “I need an apprentice about as much as I need a squire or a troubadour.”

His accent wasn’t Armenian or Russian—or American. It was British upper class. If he had so chosen, up there on the spiral staircase, looking at Fred Jones, not at me, he might have sounded like a movie gangster or cowboy, or a German or Irish or Italian or Swedish immigrant, and who knows what else? Nobody
could counterfeit more accents from stage, screen and radio than Dan Gregory.

That was only the
beginning
of the hazing they had planned so lovingly. This was in the late afternoon, and Gregory went back upstairs without greeting me, and Fred Jones took me down into the basement, where I was served a supper of cold leftovers in the servants’ dining room off the kitchen.

That room was actually a pleasant one, furnished with early American antiques which Gregory had used in illustrations. I remembered the long table and the corner cupboard full of pewter and the rustic fireplace with a blunderbuss resting on pegs driven into its chimney breast, from a painting he had done of Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony.

I was put at one end of the table, with my silverware thrown down any which way, and no napkin. I still remember no napkin. While at the other end five places were very nicely set, with linen napkins and crystal and fine china and neatly deployed silverware, and with a candelabrum at their center. The servants were going to have a fine dinner party to which the apprentice was not invited. I was not to consider myself one of them.

Nor did any of the servants speak to me. I might as well have been a bum off the street. Fred Jones moreover stood over me while I ate—like a sullen prison guard.

While I was eating, and more lonesome than I had ever been in my life, a Chinese laundryman, Sam Wu,
came in with clean shirts for Gregory.
Pow!
A flash of recognition went off in my skull. I
knew
him! And he must know me! Only days later would I realize why I thought I knew Sam Wu, although he certainly didn’t know me. All dressed up in silk robes and wearing a skullcap, this simperingly polite laundryman had been the model for Dan Gregory’s pictures of one of the most sinister characters in all of fiction, the Yellow Menace personified, the master criminal Fu Manchu!

Sam Wu would eventually become Dan Gregory’s cook, and then go back to being a laundryman again. And he would be the person to whom I sent the paintings I bought in France during the war.

It was a curious and touching relationship we had during the war. I happened to run into Sam in New York City just before I went overseas, and he asked for my address. He had heard on the radio, he said, about how lonesome soldiers could be overseas, and that people should write to them often. He said I was the only soldier he knew well, so he would write to me.

It became a joke in our platoon at mail call. People would say to me things like: “What’s the latest news from Chinatown?” or “No letter from Sam Wu this week? Maybe somebody poisoned his chow mein,” and so on.

After I got my pictures from him after the war, I never heard from him again. He may not even have liked me much. For him, I was strictly a wartime activity.

Back to 1933:

Since supper was so nasty, I would not have been surprised to be escorted next to a windowless room by the furnace, and told that that was to be my bedroom. But I was led up three flights of stairs to the most sumptuous chamber any Karabekian had ever occupied, and told to wait there until Gregory had time to see me, which would be in about six hours, at about midnight, Fred Jones estimated. Gregory was giving a dinner party in the dining room right below me for, among others, Al Jolson and the comedian W. C. Fields, and the author whose stories Gregory had illustrated countless times, Booth Tarkington. I would never meet any of them because they would never come back to the house again—after a bitter argument with Gregory about Benito Mussolini.

About this room Jones put me in: It was Dan Gregory’s counterfeit, with genuine French antiques, of the bedroom of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine. The chamber was a guest room and not Gregory’s and Marilee’s bedroom. Imprisoning me there for six hours was subtle sadism of a high order indeed. For one thing, Jones, with a perfectly straight face, indicated that this was to be my bedroom during my apprenticeship, as though anybody but a person as lowborn as myself would find it a perfectly ordinary place to sleep. For another: I didn’t dare touch anything. Just to be sure I didn’t, Jones said
to me, “Please be as quiet as possible, and don’t touch anything.”

One might have thought they were trying to get rid of me.

I have just given this snap quiz to Celeste and her friends out by the tennis courts: “Identify the following persons in history: ‘W. C. Fields, the Empress Josephine, Booth Tarkington, and Al Jolson.’”

The only one they got was W. C. Fields, whose old movies are shown on TV.

And I say I never met Fields, but that first night I tiptoed out of my gilded cage and to the top of the spiral staircase to listen to the arrival of the famous guests. I heard the unmistakable bandsaw twang of Fields as he introduced the woman with him to Gregory with these words: “This, my child, is Dan Gregory, the love child of Leonardo da Vinci’s sister and a sawed-off Arapahoe.”