Bluebeard (31 page)

“How
could
I?” I said.

“J already have,” she said. “You’re still a little boy, and I need a man to take care of me. Dan is a man.”

So I slunk to my room, confused and humiliated. I packed up my belongings. She did not see me out. I had no idea what room she had gone to, or what she might be doing there. Nobody saw me out.

And I left that house forever as the sun went down on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1936, without a backward glance at the Gorgon on the front door of Dan Gregory.

I spent my first night on my own only a block away, at the Vanderbilt YMCA, but would not see or hear from her again for fourteen years. It seemed to me that she had dared me to become a great financial
success, and then to come back and take her away from Dan Gregory. I fantasized about that as a real possibility for perhaps a month or two. Such things happened all the time in stories Dan Gregory was given to illustrate.

She would not see me again until I was worthy of her. Dan Gregory was working on a new edition of
Tales of King Arthur and His Knights
when he got rid of me. Marilee had posed as Guinevere. I would bring her the Holy Grail.

But the Great Depression soon made clear to me that I would never amount to anything. I couldn’t even provide decent food and a bed for my worthless self, and was frequently a bum among bums in soup kitchens and shelters for the homeless. I improved myself in libraries while keeping warm, reading histories and novels and poems said to be great—and encyclopedias and dictionaries, and the latest self-help books about how to get ahead in the United States of America, how to learn from failures, how to make strangers like and trust you immediately, how to start your own business, how to sell anybody anything, how to put yourself into the hands of God and stop wasting so much time and precious energy worrying. How to eat right.

I was certainly a child of Dan Gregory, and of the times, too, when I tried to make my vocabulary and familiarity with great issues and events and personalities throughout recorded time equal to those of graduates of great universities. My accent, moreover, was as synthetic
as Gregory’s, and so, by the way, was Marilee’s. Marilee and I, a coal miner’s daughter and an Armenian shoemaker’s son, remember, had sense enough not to pretend to be upper-class British. We obscured our humble origins in vocal tones and inflections which had no name back then, as nearly as I can remember, but which are now known as “trans-Atlantic”—cultivated, pleasant to the ear, and neither British nor American. Marilee and I were brother and sister in that regard: we sounded the same.

But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.

My parents were born into biological families, and big ones, too, which were respected by Armenians in Turkey. I, born in America far from any other Armenians, save for my parents, eventually became a member of two artificial extended families which were reasonably respectable, although surely not the social equals of Harvard or Yale:

1. The Officer Corps of the United States Army in time of war,
   

2. the Abstract Expressionist school of painting after the war.
   

     
I
COULD NOT GET WORK
with any of the companies which had come to know me as Dan Gregory’s messenger boy. He had told them, I imagine, although I have no proof of this, that I was self-serving, disloyal, untalented, and so on. True enough. Jobs were so scarce anyway, so why should they give one to anyone as unlike themselves as an Armenian? Let the Armenians take care of their own unemployed.

And it was, in fact, an Armenian who came to my rescue while I was caricaturing willing sitters in Central Park—for the price of a cup of coffee and little more. He was neither a Turkish nor a Russian Armenian, but a Bulgarian Armenian, whose parents had taken him to Paris, France, in his infancy. He and they had become members of the lively and prosperous Armenian community in that city, then the Art Capital of the World. As I have said, my own parents and I would have become Parisians, too, had we not been diverted to San Ignacio, California, by the criminal Vartan Mamigonian. My savior’s original name had been Marktich
Kouyoumdjian, subsequently Frenchified to Marc Coulomb.

The Coulombs, then as now, were giants in the tourist industry, with travel agencies all over the world, and orchestrators of tours to almost anywhere. When he struck up a conversation with me in Central Park, Marc Coulomb was only twenty-five, and had been sent from Paris to find an advertising agency to make his family’s services better known in the U.S.A. He admired my facility with drawing materials, and said that, if I really wished to become an artist, I would have to come to Paris.

There was an irony lying in wait in the distant future, of course: I would eventually become a member of that small group of painters which would make New York City and not Paris the Art Capital of the World.

Purely on the basis of race prejudice, I think, one Armenian taking care of another, he bought me a suit, a shirt, a necktie, and a new pair of shoes, and took me to the advertising agency he liked best, which was Leidveld and Moore. He told them they could have the Coulomb account if they would hire me as an artist. Which they did.

I never saw or heard from him again. But guess what? On this very morning, as I am thinking about Marc Coulomb hard for the first time in half a century,
The New York Times
carries his obituary. He was a hero of the French Resistance, they say, and was, at the time of his death, chairman of the board of Coulomb Frères
et Cie, the most extensive travel organization in the world.

What a coincidence! But that is all it is. One mustn’t take such things too seriously.

Bulletin from the present: Circe Berman has gone mad for dancing. She gets somebody, simply anybody of any age or station, to squire her to every public dance she hears about within thirty miles of here, many of them fund-raisers for volunteer fire departments. The other morning she came home at three in the morning wearing a fire hat.

She is after me to take ballroom dancing lessons being offered at the Elks Lodge in East Quogue.

I said to her: “I am not going to sacrifice my one remaining shred of dignity on the altar of Terpsichore.”

I experienced modest prosperity at Leidveld and Moore. It was there that I did my painting of the most beautiful ocean liner in the world, the
Normandie.
In the foreground was the most beautiful automobile in the world, the Cord. In the background was the most beautiful skyscraper in the world, the Chrysler Building. Getting out of the Cord was the most beautiful actress in the world, who was Madeleine Carroll. What a time to be alive!

Improved diet and sleeping conditions did me the disservice of sending me one evening to the Art
Students League with a portfolio under my arm. I wished to take lessons in how to be a serious painter, and presented myself and my work to a teacher named Nelson Bauerbeck, a representational painter, as were almost all of the painting teachers then. He was principally known as a portraitist, and his work can still be viewed in at least one place I know of—at New York University, my old alma mater. He did portraits of two of that institution’s presidents before my time. He made them immortal, as only paintings can.