Bluebeard (17 page)

I complained to Slazinger and Mrs. Berman at supper last night that the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible. “They don’t even know anything about the Vietnam War or the Empress Josephine, or what a Gorgon is,” I said.

Mrs. Berman defended them. She said that it was a little late for them to do anything about the Vietnam War, and that they had more interesting ways of learning
about vanity and the power of sex than studying a woman who had lived in another country one hundred and seventy-five years ago. “All that anybody needs to know about a Gorgon,” she said, “is that there
is
no such thing.”

Slazinger, who still believes her to be only semiliterate, patronized her most daintily with these words: “As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”

“Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.

“Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man.

And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”

I happened to see in
The New York Times
the other day a picture of a French Empire escritoire which was auctioned off to a Kuwaiti for three quarters of a million dollars, and I am almost certain it was in Gregory’s guest room back in 1933.

There were two anachronisms in that room, both pictures by Gregory. Over the fireplace was his illustration of the moment in
Robinson Crusoe
when the castaway narrator sees a human footprint on the beach of
the island of which he had believed himself to be the sole resident. Over the escritoire was his illustration of the moment when Robin Hood and Little John, strangers who are about to become the best of friends, meet in the middle of a log crossing a stream, each armed with a quarterstaff, and neither one of them willing to back up so that the other one can get to where he would very much like to be.

Robin Hood winds up in the drink, of course.

     
I
FELL ASLEEP
on the floor of that room. I certainly wasn’t going to muss the bed or disturb anything. I dreamed I was back on the train, with its
clickety-clack, clickety-clack, ding-ding-ding
and
whoo-ah.
The
ding-ding-ding
wasn’t coming from the train, of course, but from signals at crossings, where anybody who didn’t give us the right-of-way would be ripped to smithereens. Serve ‘em right! They were nothing. We were everything.

A lot of the people who had to stop for us or be killed were farmers and their families, with all their possessions tied every which way on broken-down trucks. Windstorms or banks had taken away their farms, just as surely as the United States Cavalry had taken the same land from the Indians in their grandfathers’ time. The farms that were whisked away by the winds: where are they now? Growing fish food on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

These defeated white Indians at the crossings were nothing new to me. I had seen plenty of them passing through San Ignacio, asking the likes of me or my father,
or even an emotionally opaque Luma Indian, if we knew of somebody who needed anybody to do work of any kind.

And I was awakened from my railroad dream at midnight by Fred Jones. He said that Mr. Gregory would see me now. He found it unremarkable that I was sleeping on the floor. When I opened my eyes, the tips of his shoes were inches from my nose.

Shoes have played a very important part in the history of the noble Karabekians.

Fred led me to the foot of the staircase down which Marilee had tumbled, which would deliver me up to one end of the holy of holies, the studio. It looked dark up there. I was to climb the stairs alone. It was easy to believe that there was a gallows tree dangling a noose over a trap door up there.

So up I went. I stopped at the head of the stairs, and perceived an impossibility: six free-standing chimneys and fireplaces, with a coal fire glowing in the hearth of every one.

Let me explain architecturally what was really going on. Gregory, you see, had bought three typical New York brownstones, each one three windows wide, four floors high, and fifty feet deep, with two fireplaces on each floor. I had supposed that he owned only the townhouse with the oak door and the Gorgon knocker infected with verdigris. So I was unprepared for the vista on the top floor, which seemed to violate all laws of
time and space by going on and on and on. Down on the lower floors, including the basement, he had joined up to three houses with doors and archways. On the top floor, though, he had ripped out the dividing walls entirely, from end to end and side to side, leaving only those six free-standing fireplaces.

The only illumination that first night came from the six coal fires, and from pale zebra stripes on the ceiling. The stripes were light from a streetlamp below—cut to ribbons by nine windows overlooking East Forty-eighth Street.

Where was Dan Gregory? I could not see him at first. He was motionless and silent—and shapeless in a voluminous black caftan, displaying his back to me, and low, hunched over on a camel saddle before a fireplace in the middle, about twenty feet from me. I identified the objects on the mantelpiece above him before I understood where he was. They were the whitest things in the grotto. They were eight human skulls, an octave arranged in order of size, with a child’s at one end and a great-grandfather’s at the other—a marimba for cannibals.

There was a kind of music up there, a tedious fugue for pots and pans deployed under a leaking skylight to the right of Gregory. The skylight was under a blanket of melting snow.

“Ker-plunk.”
Silence.
“Plink-pank.”
Silence.
“Ploop.”
Silence. That was how the song of the skylight went as my gaze probed Dan Gregory’s one indubitable masterpiece, that studio—his one work of breathtaking originality.

A simple inventory of the weapons and tools and idols and icons and hats and helmets and ship models and airplane models and stuffed animals, including a crocodile and an upright polar bear, in the masterpiece would be amazing enough. But think of this: there were fifty-two mirrors of every conceivable period and shape, many of them hung in unexpected places at crazy angles, to multiply even the bewildered observer to infinity. There at the top of the stairs, with Dan Gregory invisible to me, I myself was everywhere!

I know there were fifty-two mirrors because I counted them the next day. Some I was supposed to polish every week. Others I was not to dust on penalty of
death
, according to my master. Nobody could counterfeit images in dusty mirrors like Dan Gregory.

Now he spoke, and rolled his shoulders some, so I could see where he was. And he said this: “I was never welcome anywhere either.” He was using his British accent again, which was the only one he ever used, except in fun. He went on: “It was very good for me to be so unwelcome, so unappreciated by my own master, because look what I have become.”

He said that his father, the horse trainer, had come close to killing him when he was an infant because his father couldn’t stand to hear him cry. “If I started to cry, he did everything he could to make me stop right away,” he said. “He was only a child himself, which is easy to forget about a father. How old are you?”

I spoke my first word to him: “Seventeen.”

“My father was only one year older than you are when I was born,” said Dan Gregory. “If you start copulating right now, you, too, can have a squalling baby by the time you’re eighteen, in a big city like this one—and far from home. You think you’re going to set this city on its ear as an artist, do you? Well—my father thought he was going to set Moscow on its ear as a horse trainer, and he found out quickly enough that the horse world there was run by Polacks, and that the highest he was ever going to rise, no matter how good he was, was to the rank of lowest stableboy. He had stolen my mother away from her people and all she knew when she was only sixteen, promising her that they would soon be rich and famous in Moscow.”