Bluebeard (10 page)

When she was thirty-seven, she would be the Countess Portomaggiori, with a pink palace in Florence, Italy. When she was fifty, she would be the biggest Sony distributor in Europe, and that old continent’s greatest collector of American postwar modern art.

My father said she had to be crazy to write such a long letter to a stranger, and nothing but a boy at that, so far away.

Mother said she must be very lonely, which was true. Gregory kept her as a pet around the house, because she was so beautiful, and he used her as a model sometimes. But she was certainly no assistant in his business. He had no interest in her opinions about anything.

He never included her in his dinner parties, either, never took her on trips or to a show or out to restaurants or to other people’s parties, or introduced her to his famous friends.

Marilee Kemp wrote me seventy-eight letters between 1927 and 1933. I can count them because I still have them, now bound in a hand-tooled leather volume in a slipcase in the library. The binding and slipcase were a gift from dear Edith on our tenth wedding anniversary. Mrs. Berman has found it, as she has found everything of any emotional significance here but the keys to the barn.

She has read all the letters without first asking me if I considered them private, which I surely do. And she has said to me, and this is the first time she has ever sounded awed: “Just one of this woman’s letters says more wonderful things about life than every picture in this house. They’re the story of a scorned and abused woman discovering that she was a great writer, because that
is
what she became. I hope you know that.”

“I know that,” I said. It was certainly true: each letter is deeper, more expressive, more confident and self-respecting than the one before.

“How much education did she have?” she asked.

“One year of high school,” I said.

Mrs. Berman shook her head in wonder. “What a year that must have been,” she said.

As for my side of the correspondence: my main messages were pictures I had made, which I thought she would show to Dan Gregory, with brief notes attached.

After I told Marilee that Mother had died of tetanus from the cannery, her letters became very motherly,
although she was only nine years older than me. And the first of these motherly letters came not from New York City but from Switzerland, where, she said in the letter, she had gone to ski.

Only after I visited her in her palace in Florence after the war did she tell me the truth: Dan Gregory had sent her alone to a clinic there to get rid of the fetus she was carrying.

“I should have thanked Dan for that,” she said to me in Florence. “That’s when I got interested in foreign languages.” She laughed.

Mrs. Berman has just told me that my cook has had not just one abortion, like Marilee Kemp, but three—and not in Switzerland but in a doctor’s office in Southampton. This wearied me, but then, almost everything about the modern world wearies me.

I didn’t ask where the cook’s carrying Celeste for a full nine months fit in with the abortions. I didn’t want to know, but Mrs. Berman gave me the information anyway. “Two abortions before Celeste, and one after,” she said.

“The cook told you that?” I said.

“Celeste told me,” she said. “She also told me that her mother was thinking of having her tubes tied.”

“I’m certainly glad to know all this,” I said, “in case of an emergency.”

Back to the past I go again, with the present nipping at my ankles like a rabid fox terrier:

My mother died believing that I had become a protégé of Dan Gregory, from whom I had never heard directly. Before she got sick, she predicted that “Gregorian” would send me to art school, that “Gregorian” would persuade magazines to hire me as an illustrator when I was old enough, that “Gregorian” would introduce me to all his rich friends, who would tell me how I could get rich, too, investing the money I made as an artist in the stock market. In 1928, the stock market never seemed to do anything but go up and up, just like the one we have today! Whoopee!

So she not only missed the stock market crash a year later, but the realization a couple of years after the crash that I wasn’t even indirectly in touch with Dan Gregory, that he probably didn’t even know I was alive, that the effusive praise for the artwork I was sending to New York for criticism wasn’t coming from the highest paid artist in American history, but from what my father called in Armenian: “… maybe his cleaning woman, maybe his cook, maybe his whore.”

     
I
REMEMBER THE AFTERNOON
I came home from school when I was about fifteen or so, and Father was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table in our little kitchen, with Marilee’s letters in a stack before him. He had reread them all.

This was not a violation of my privacy. The letters were family property—if you can call only two people a family. They were like bonds we had accumulated, gilt-edged securities of which I would be the beneficiary when they and I reached maturity. Once they paid off, I would be able to take care of Father, too, and he sure needed help. His savings had been wiped out by the failure of the Luma County Savings and Loan Association, which we and everybody in town had taken to calling “El Banco Busto.” There was no federal insurance scheme for bank deposits back then.

El Banco Busto, moreover, had held the mortgage on the little building whose first floor was Father’s shop and whose second story was our home. Father used to own the building, thanks to a loan from the bank. After
the bank failed, though, its receivers liquidated all its assets, foreclosing all the mortgages which were in arrears, which was most of them. Guess why they were in arrears? Practically everybody had been dumb enough to entrust their savings to El Banco Busto.

So the father I found reading Marilee’s letters in the afternoon was a man who had become a mere tenant in a building he used to own. As for the shop downstairs: it was vacant, since he couldn’t afford to rent that, too. All his machinery had been sold at auction anyway in order to get a few pennies for what we were: people who had been dumb enough to entrust his or her savings to El Banco Busto.

What a comedy!

Father looked up from Marilee’s letters when I came in with my schoolbooks, and he said, “You know what this woman is? She has promised you everything, but she has nothing to give.” He named the Armenian sociopath who had swindled him and Mother in Cairo. “She is the new Vartan Mamigonian,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

And he said exactly as though the handwritten letters were bonds or insurance policies or whatever: “I have just read the fine print.” He went on to say that Marilee’s first letters had been rich in phrases like “Mr. Gregory says,” and “Mr. Gregory feels,” and “Mr. Gregory wants you to know,” but that, since the third letter, such locutions had entirely disappeared. “This is a
nobody,” he said, “who will never be anybody, who is trying to get somebody anyway, by stealing the reputation of Gregorian!”

I felt no shock. Some part of me had noticed the same thing about the letters. Some other part of me had managed to bury the bad, bad implications.