Bluebeard (6 page)

This Mamigonian had grown rich manufacturing military boots for the British Army and the German Army, which would soon be fighting each other in World War One. He offered my parents low-paid work of the dirtiest kind. They were fools enough to tell him, since he was a fellow Armenian survivor, about Mother’s jewels and their plans to marry and go to Paris to join the large and highly cultivated Armenian colony there.

Mamigonian became their most ardent advisor and protector, eager to find them a safe place for the jewels in a city notorious for its heartless thieves. But they had already put them in a bank.

So Mamigonian constructed a fantasy which he proposed to trade for the jewels. He must have found San Ignacio, California, in an atlas, since no Armenian had ever been there, and since no news of that sleepy farming town could have reached the Near East in any form. Mamigonian said he had a brother in San Ignacio. He forged letters from the brother to prove it. The letters said, moreover, that the brother had become extremely rich in a short time there. There were many other Armenians there, all doing well. They were looking for a teacher for their children who was fluent in Armenian and familiar with the great literature in that language.

As an inducement to such a teacher, they would sell him a house and twenty acres of fruit trees at a fraction of their true value. Mamigonian’s “rich brother” enclosed a photo of the house, and a deed to it as well.

If Mamigonian knew a good teacher in Cairo who might be interested, this nonexistent brother wrote, Mamigonian was authorized to sell him the deed. This would secure the teaching job for Father, and make him one of the larger property owners in idyllic San Ignacio.

     
I
HAVE BEEN
in the art business, the picture business, so long now that I can daydream about the past as though it were a vista through a series of galleries like the Louvre, perhaps—home of the “Mona Lisa,” whose smile has now outlived by three decades the postwar miracle of Sateen Dura-Luxe. The pictures in what must be the final gallery of my life are real. I can touch them, if I like, or, following the recommendations of the widow Berman, a.k.a. “Polly Madison,” sell them to the highest bidder or in some other way, in her thoughtful words. “Get them the hell out of here.”

In the imaginary galleries in the distance are my own Abstract Expressionist paintings, miraculously resurrected by the Great Critic for Judgment Day, and then pictures by Europeans, which I bought for a few dollars or chocolate bars or nylon stockings when a soldier, and then advertisements of the sort I had been laying out and illustrating before I joined the Army—at about the time news of my father’s death in the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio came.

Still farther away are the magazine illustrations of Dan Gregory, whose apprentice I was from the time I was seventeen until he threw me out. I was one month short of being twenty when he threw me out. Beyond the Dan Gregory Gallery are unframed works I made in my boyhood, as the only artist of any age or sort ever to inhabit San Ignacio.

The gallery at the farthest remove from me in my dotage, though, just inside the door I entered in 1916, is devoted to a photograph, not a painting. Its subject is a noble white house with a long winding driveway and porte-cochere, supposedly in San Ignacio, which Vartan Mamigonian in Cairo told my parents they were buying with most of Mother’s jewelry.

That picture, along with a bogus deed, crawling with signatures and spattered with sealing wax, was in my parents’ bedside table for many years—in the tiny apartment over Father’s shoe repair shop. I assumed that he had thrown them out with so many other mementos after Mother died. But as I was about to board a railroad train in 1933, to seek my fortune in New York City during the depths of the Great Depression, Father made me a present of the photograph. “If you happen to come across this house,” he said in Armenian, “let me know where it is. Wherever it is, it belongs to me.”

I don’t own that picture anymore. Coming back to New York City after having been one of three persons at Father’s funeral in San Ignacio, which I hadn’t seen for
five years, I ripped the photograph to bits. I did that because I was angry at my dead father. It was my conclusion that he had cheated himself and my mother a lot worse than they had been cheated by Vartan Mamigonian. It wasn’t Mamigonian who made my parents stay in San Ignacio instead of moving to Fresno, say, where there really
was
an Armenian colony, whose members supported each other and kept the old language and customs and religion alive, and at the same time became happier and happier to be in California. Father could have become a beloved teacher again!

Oh, no—it wasn’t Mamigonian who tricked him into being the unhappiest and loneliest of all the world’s cobblers.

Armenians have done brilliantly in this country during the short time they’ve been here. My neighbor to the west is F. Donald Kasabian, executive vice-president of Metropolitan Life—so that right here in exclusive East Hampton, and right on the beach, too, we have
two
Armenians side by side. What used to be J. P. Morgan’s estate in Southampton is now the property of Kevork Hovanessian, who also owned Twentieth Century-Fox until he sold it last week.

And Armenians haven’t succeeded only in business here. The great writer William Saroyan was an Armenian, and so is Dr. George Mintouchian, the new president of the University of Chicago. Dr. Mintouchian is a
renowned Shakespeare scholar, something my father could have been.

And Circe Berman has just come into the room and read what is in my typewriter, which is ten of the lines above. She is gone again. She said again that my father
obviously
suffered from Survivor’s Syndrome.

“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said. “So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Nine times out of ten it’s a cannibal or billionaire!”

“You still haven’t forgiven your father for being what he had to be,” she said. “That’s why you’re yelling now.”

“I wasn’t yelling,” I said.

“They can hear you in Portugal,” she said. That’s where you wind up if you put out to sea from my private beach and sail due east, as she had figured out from the globe in the library. You wind up in Oporto, Portugal.

“You envy your father’s ordeal,” she said.

“I had an ordeal of my own!” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a one-eyed man.”

“You told me yourself that there was almost no pain, and that it healed right away,” she said, which was true. I don’t remember being hit, but only the approach of a white German tank and German soldiers all in white across a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg. I was unconscious when I was taken prisoner, and was
kept that way by morphine until I woke up in a German military hospital in a church across the border, in Germany. She was right: I had to endure no more pain in the war than a civilian experiences in a dentist’s chair.

The wound healed so quickly that I was soon shipped off to a camp as just another unremarkable prisoner.

Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor’s Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: “Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?”

“No,” I said.

“You may be entitled to the Survivor’s Syndrome, but you didn’t get it,” she said. “Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”

“How do you know so much about the Survivor’s Syndrome?” I asked her. This wasn’t a boorish question to ask her, since she had told me during our first meeting on the beach that she and her husband, although both Jewish, had had no knowledge of relatives they might have had in Europe and who might have been
killed during the Holocaust. They were both from families which had been in the United States for several generations, and which had lost all contact with European relatives.

“I wrote a book about it,” she said. “Rather—I wrote about people like you: children of a parent who had survived some sort of mass killing. It’s called
The Underground.”

Needless to say, I have not read that or any of the Polly Madison books, although they seem, now that I have started looking around for them, as available as packs of chewing gum.

Not that I would need to leave the house to get a copy of
The Underground
or any other Polly Madison book, Mrs. Berman informs me. The cook’s daughter Celeste has every one of them.

Mrs. Berman, the most ferocious enemy of privacy I ever knew, has also discovered that Celeste, although
only fifteen
, already takes birth-control pills.