Bluebeard (23 page)

“The one with the two little black boys and the two little white boys,” she said.

I ransacked my mind for any painting in the house which might have been misread in that way by an imaginative and simple person. Which one had two black blobs and two white ones? Again: it sounded a lot like a Rothko.

But then I caught on that she was talking about a painting I had never considered a part of my collection, but simply a souvenir. It was by none other than Dan Gregory! It was a magazine illustration for a Booth Tarkington story about an encounter in the back alley of a middle-western town, not in this century but in the one before, between two white boys and two black—about ten years old.

In the picture, they were obviously wondering if they could be playmates, or whether they had better go their separate ways.

In the story, the two black boys had very comical
names: “Herman” and “Verman.” I often heard it said that nobody could paint black people like Dan Gregory, but he did it entirely from photographs. One of the first things he ever said to me was that he would never have a black person in his house.

I thought that was great. I thought everything he said was great for a little while. I was going to become what
he
was, and regrettably
did
in many ways.

I sold that painting of the two black boys and the two white boys to a real-estate and insurance millionaire in Lubbock, Texas, who has the most complete collection of Dan Gregory paintings in the world, he told me. As far as I know, he has the
only
such collection, for which he has built a large private museum.

He discovered somehow that I used to be Gregory’s apprentice, and he called me up to ask if I had any of my master’s works I was willing to part with. I had only that one, which I hadn’t looked at for years, since it hung in the bathroom of one of the many guest rooms here which I had had no reason to enter.

“You sold the only picture that was really about something,” said Allison White. “I used to look at it and try and guess what would happen next.”

Oh: one last thing Allison White said to me before she and Celeste went upstairs to their quarters which had priceless ocean views: “We’ll get out of your way
now,” she said, “and we don’t care if we never find out what’s in the potato barn.”

So there I was all alone downstairs. I was afraid to go upstairs. I didn’t want to be in the house at all, and seriously considered taking up residence again as what I had been to dear Edith after her first husband died: a half-tamed old raccoon in the potato barn.

So I went walking for hours on the beach—all the way to Sagaponack and back again, reliving my blank-brained, deep-breathing hermit days.

There was a note on the kitchen table from the cook, from
Allison White
, saying my supper was in the oven. So I ate it. My appetite is always good. I had a few drinks, and listened to some music. There was one thing I learned during my eight years as a professional soldier which proved to be very useful in civilian life: how to fall asleep almost anywhere, no matter how bad the news may be.

I was awakened at two in the morning by someone’s rubbing the back of my neck
so
gently. It was Circe Berman.

“Everybody’s leaving,” I said. “The cook gave notice. In two weeks, she and Celeste will be gone.”

“No, no,” she said. “I’ve talked to them, and they’re staying.”

“Thank God!” I said. “What did you
say
to them? They hate it here.”

“I promised them I wasn’t leaving,” she said, “so
they’ll stay, too. Why don’t you go up to bed now? You’ll be very stiff in the morning if you spend all night down here.”

“O.K.,” I said groggily.

“Mama’s been out dancing, but she’s home again,” she said. “Go to bed, Mr. Karabekian. All’s well with the world.”

“I’ll never see Slazinger again,” I said.

“What do you care?” she said. “He never liked you and you never liked him. Don’t you know
that?”

     
W
E MADE SOME SORT
of contract that night. It was as though we had been negotiating its terms for quite some time: she wanted this, I wanted that.

For reasons best known to herself, the widow Berman wants to go on living and writing here rather than return to Baltimore. For reasons all too clear to myself, I am afraid, I want someone as vivid as she is to keep me alive.

What is the biggest concession she has made? She no longer mentions the potato barn.

To return to the past:

After Dan Gregory at our first meeting ordered me to make a super-realistic painting of his studio, he said that there was a very important sentence he wanted me to learn by heart. This was it: “The Emperor has no clothes.”

“Let me hear you say it,” he said. “Say it several times.”

So I did. “The Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes, the Emperor has no clothes.”

“That was a really fine performance,” he said, “really topping, really first rate.” He clapped his hands appreciatively.

How was I supposed to respond to that? I felt like
Alice in Wonderland.

“I want you to say that out loud and with just that degree of conviction,” he said, “anytime anyone has anything good to say about so-called modern art.”

“O.K.,” I said.

“It’s the work of swindlers and lunatics and degenerates,” he said, “and the fact that many people are now taking it seriously proves to me that the world has gone mad. I hope you agree.”

“I do, I do,” I said. It sounded right to me.

“Mussolini thinks so, too,” he said. “Do you admire Mussolini as much as I do?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You know the first two things Mussolini would do if he took over this country?” he said.

“No, sir,” I said.

“He would burn down the Museum of Modern Art and outlaw the word
democracy.
After that he would make up a word for what we really are, make us face up to what we really are and always have been, and then strive for efficiency. Do your job right or drink castor oil!”

About a year later, I got around to asking him what he thought the people of the United States really were,
and he said, “Spoiled children, who are begging for a frightening but just Daddy to tell them exactly what to do.”

“Draw everything the way it really is,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He pointed to a clipper ship model on a mantelpiece in the murky distance. “That, my boy, is the
Sovereign of the Seas,”
he said, “which, using nothing but wind power, was faster than most freighters are today! Think of that!”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And when you put it into the wonderful picture you are going to paint of this studio, you and I are going to go over your rendering of it with a magnifying glass. Any line in the rigging I care to point to: I expect you to tell me its name and what its function is.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Pablo Picasso could never do that,” he said.

“No, sir,” I said.

He removed from a gun rack a Springfield 1906 rifle, then the basic weapon for the United States Infantry. There was an Enfield rifle in there, too, the basic weapon of the British Infantry, a sort of gun which may have killed him. “When you include this perfect killing machine in your picture,” he said of the Springfield, “I want it so real that I can load it and shoot a burglar.” He pointed to a nubbin near the muzzle and asked me what it was.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said.

“The bayonet stud,” he said. He promised me that he was going to triple or quadruple my vocabulary, starting with the parts of the rifle, each of which had a specific name. We would go from that simple exercise, he said, required of every Army recruit, to the nomenclature of all the bones, sinews, organs, tubes and wires in the human body, required of every student in medical school. This had been required of him as well, he said, during his Moscow apprenticeship.

He asserted that there would be a spiritual lesson for me in my study of the simple rifle and then the bewilderingly complex human body, since it was the human body the rifle was meant to destroy.

“Which represents good and which represents evil—” he asked me, “the rifle or the rubbery, jiggling, giggling bag of bones we call the body?”

I said that the rifle was evil and the body was good.

“But don’t you know that this rifle was designed to be used by Americans defending their homes and honor against wicked enemies?” he said.

So I said a lot depended on whose body and whose rifle we were talking about, that either one of them could be good or evil.

“And who renders the final decision on that?” he said.

“God?” I said.

“I mean here on
Earth,”
he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Painters—and storytellers, including poets and
playwrights and historians,” he said. “They are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!”

How was
that
for delusions of moral grandeur!