Bluebeard (19 page)

Her promise came true for a little while, not that she gave a damn whether it was hollow or not. All she wanted was to get me out of here for a little while, so she could do what she pleased with this property.

At least she didn’t break into the potato barn, which she could have done herself, given enough time—and a crowbar and an axe. She had only to go into the carriage house to find a crowbar and an axe.

I really did feel spry and cocky again when I retraced my first steps from Grand Central Station to the three brownstones which had been the mansion of Dan Gregory. They were three separate houses again, as I already knew. They had been made separate again about the time my father died, three years before the United States got into the war. Which war? The Peloponnesian War, of course. Doesn’t anybody but me remember the Peloponnesian War?

I begin again:

Dan Gregory’s mansion became three separate brownstones again soon after he and Marilee and Fred Jones left for Italy to take part in Mussolini’s great social experiment. Although he and Fred were well into their fifties by then, they would ask for and receive permission from Mussolini himself to don Italian infantry officers’ uniforms, but without any badges of rank or unit, and to make paintings of the Italian Army in action.

They would be killed almost exactly one year before the United States joined the war—against Italy, by the way, and against Germany and Japan and some others. They were killed around December seventh of 1940 at Sidi Barrani, Egypt, where only thirty thousand British overwhelmed eighty thousand Italians, I learn from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, capturing forty thousand Italians and four hundred guns.

When the
Britannica
talks about captured guns, it doesn’t mean rifles and pistols. It means great big guns.

Yes, and since Gregory and his sidekick Jones were such weapons nuts, let it be said that it was Matilda tanks, and Stens and Brens and Enfield rifles with fixed bayonets which did them in.

Why did Marilee go to Italy with Gregory and Jones? She was in love with Gregory, and he was in love with her.

How is that for simplicity?

The easternmost house of the three which used to belong to Gregory, I only discovered on this most recent trip to New York, is now the office and dwelling of the Delegation to the United Nations of the Emirate of Salibaar. That was the first I had ever heard of the Emirate of Salibaar, which I can’t find anywhere in my
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I can only find a desert town by that
name, population eleven thousand, about the population of San Ignacio. Circe Berman says it is time I got a new encyclopedia, and some new neckties, too.

The big oak door and its massive hinges are unchanged, except that the Gorgon knocker is gone. Gregory took it with him to Italy, and I saw it again on the front door of Marilee’s palace in Florence after the war.

Maybe it has now migrated elsewhere, since Italy’s and my beloved Contessa Portomaggiore died of natural causes in her sleep in the same week my beloved Edith passed away.

Some
week
for old Rabo Karabekian!

The middle brownstone has been divided into five apartments, one on each floor, including the basement, as I learned by the mailboxes and doorbells in the foyer.

But don’t mention foyers to me! More about that in a little bit! All things in good time.

That middle house used to contain the guest room where I was first incarcerated, and Gregory’s grand dining room right below that, and his research library below that, and the storage room for his art materials in the basement. I was mostly curious, though, about the top floor, which used to be the part of Gregory’s studio with the big, leaky skylight. I wanted to know whether there was still a skylight up there, and, if so, if anybody
had ever found a way to stop its leaks, or whether there were still pots and pans making John Cage music underneath it when it rained or snowed.

But there was nobody to ask, so I never found out. So there is one storytelling fizzle for you, dear Reader. I never found out.

And here is another one. The house to the west of that one is, judging from the mailboxes and bells, evidentally a triplex at the bottom, with a duplex on top of that. It was this third of Gregory’s establishment which the live-in servants had inhabited, and where I, too, was given a small but cheerful bedroom. Fred Jones’s bedroom, by the way, was right in back of Gregory’s and Marilee’s room in the Emirate of Salibaar.

This woman came out of the brownstone with the duplex and triplex. She was old and trembly, but her posture was good, and it was easy to see that she had been very beautiful at one time. I locked my gaze to hers, and a flash of recognition went off in my skull. I knew
her
, but she didn’t know
me.
We had never met. I realized that I had seen her in motion pictures when she was much younger. A second later, I came up with her name. She was Barbira Mencken, the ex-wife of Paul Slazinger. He had lost touch with her years ago, had no idea where she lived. She hadn’t done a movie or a play for a long, long time, but there she was. Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn also live in that same general neighborhood.

I didn’t speak to her. Should I have spoken to her? What would I have had to say to her? “Paul is fine and sends his best”? Or how about this one: “Tell me how your parents died”?

I had supper at the Century Club, to which I have belonged for many years. There was a new maître d’, and I asked him what had happened to the old one, Roberto. He said that Roberto had been killed by a bicycle messenger going the wrong way on a one-way street right in front of the club.

I said that was too bad, and he heartily agreed with me.

I didn’t see anybody I knew, which was hardly surprising, since everybody I know is dead. But I made friends in the bar with a man considerably my junior, who was a writer of young adult novels, like Circe Berman. I asked him if he had ever heard of the Polly Madison books and he asked me if I had ever heard of the Atlantic Ocean.

So we had supper together. His wife was out of town lecturing, he said. She was a prominent sexologist.