Bluebeard (13 page)

Now I yearned to get back on the railroad train! I had been so
happy
there! How I adored that train! God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Nowadays, of course, everything must be done with plutonium and laser beams.

And could Dan Gregory ever paint pictures of railroad trains! He used to work from blueprints he got from the manufacturers, so that a misplaced rivet or whatever wouldn’t spoil his picture for a railroad man. And if he had done a picture of the Twentieth Century Limited the day I arrived, the stains and dirt on the outside would be native to the run between Chicago and New York. Nobody could paint grime like Dan Gregory.

And where was he now? Where was Marilee? Why hadn’t they sent someone to meet me with his great Marmon touring car?

He knew exactly when I was coming. He was the one who had picked the date, an easy one to remember.
It was Saint Valentine’s Day. And he had done me so many kindnesses through the mail, and not through Marilee or any flunky. All the messages were in his own handwriting. They were brief, but they were incredibly generous, too. I was not only to buy a warm suit for myself at his expense, but one for Father, too.

His notes were so compassionate! He didn’t want me to get scared or make a fool of myself on the trains, so he told me how to act in a Pullman berth and on the dining car, and how much and when to tip the waiters and porters, and how to change trains in Chicago. He couldn’t have been nicer to his own son, if he had had a son.

He even went to the trouble of sending me expense money as postal money orders rather than personal checks, which indicated that he knew about the failure of the only bank in San Ignacio.

What I didn’t know was that, back in December, when he sent me the telegram, Marilee was in the hospital with both legs and one arm broken. He had given her a shove in his studio which sent her backwards and down the staircase. She looked dead when she hit the bottom, and two servants happened to be standing there—at the bottom of the stairs.

So Gregory was scared and remorseful. When he visited Marilee in the hospital the first time, all shamefaced, he told her he was sorry and loved her so much that he would give her anything she could think to ask for—
anything.

He probably thought it was going to be diamonds
or something like that, but she asked for a human being. She asked for me.

Circe Berman has just suggested that I was a replacement for the Armenian baby which had been taken from her womb in Switzerland.

Maybe so.

And then Marilee told Gregory what to say to me in the telegram and then his letters, and how much money to send me for what, and on and on. She was still in the hospital when I reached New York, but she certainly didn’t expect him to stand me up at the station.

But that’s what he did.

He was turning mean again.

That wasn’t the whole story, either. I wouldn’t get the
whole
story until I visited Marilee in Florence after the war. Gregory, incidentally, had been dead and buried in Egypt for about ten years by then.

Only after the war did Marilee, reborn as the Con-tessa Portomaggiore, tell me that I was the reason she had been pushed down the stairs back in 1932. She had sheltered me from that abashing information, and so, from very different motives, certainly, had Dan Gregory.

But she came up to his studio the night he nearly
killed her, to get him to give his serious attention to pictures of mine for the very first time. In all the years I had been sending pictures to New York, he had never looked at one. Marilee thought that this time might be different, since Gregory was happier than she had ever seen him. Why? He had that afternoon received a letter of thanks from the man he believed to be the most brilliant leader on earth, the Italian dictator Mussolini, the man who made his enemies drink castor oil.

Mussolini had thanked him for a portrait of himself which Gregory had painted as a gift. Mussolini was depicted as a general of Alpine troops on a mountaintop at sunrise, and you can bet that every bit of leather and piping and braid and brass and pleating, and all the decorations, were exactly as they should be. Nobody could paint uniforms like Dan Gregory.

Gregory would be shot dead in Egypt eight years later, incidentally, by the British, while wearing an Italian uniform.

But the point is this: Marilee spread out my pictures on a refectory table in his studio, and he knew what they were. As she had hoped, he ambled over to them with all possible amiability. The moment he looked at them closely, though, he flew into a rage.

But it wasn’t the nature of my pictures which infuriated him. It was the quality of the art materials I had used. No boy artist in California could afford such expensive
imported colors and paper and canvas. Marilee, obviously, had taken them from his supply room.

So he gave her a shove, and she fell backwards down the stairs.

Somewhere in here I want to tell about the suit I ordered from Sears, Roebuck along with my own. Father and I measured each other up for the suits, which was strange even in itself, since I can’t recall our ever having touched before.

But when the suits arrived, it was obvious that somebody somewhere had misplaced a decimal point where Father’s pants were concerned. As short as his legs were, his pants were much shorter. As scrawny as he was around the middle, he couldn’t button the pants at the waist. The coat was just perfect, though.

So I said to him, “I’m really sorry about the pants. You’ll have to send them back.”

And he said, “No. I like it very much. It’s a very good funeral suit.”

And I said, “What do you mean, “funeral suit”?” I had this vision of his going to other people’s funerals without any pants on—not that he had ever gone to anybody’s funeral but my mother’s, as far as I know.

And he said, “You don’t have to wear pants to your own funeral,” he said.

When I went back to San Ignacio for his funeral five years later, he was laid out in the
coat
of that suit at least, but the bottom half of the casket was closed, so I had to ask the mortician if Father had pants on.