Bluebeard (4 page)

You
could
say that he became his own Turk over here, knocking himself down and spitting on himself. He could have studied English and become a respected teacher there in San Ignacio, and started writing poetry again, or maybe translated the Armenian poets he loved so much into English. But that wasn’t
humiliating
enough. Nothing would do but that he, with all his education, become what his father and grandfather had been, which was a cobbler.

He was good at that craft, which he had learned as a boy, and which I would learn as a boy. But how he
complained]
At least he pitied himself in Armenian, which only Mother and I could understand. There weren’t any other Armenians within a hundred miles of San Ignacio.

“I am looking for William Shakespeare, your greatest poet,”
he might say as he worked.
“Have you ever heard of him?”
He knew Shakespeare backwards and forwards in Armenian, and would often quote him. “To be or not to be …”for example, as far as he was concerned, was,
“Linel kam chlinel
…”

“Tear out my tongue if you catch me speaking Armenian,”
he might say. That was the penalty the Turks set in the seventeenth century for speaking any language but Turkish: a ripped-out tongue.

“Who are those people and what am I doing here?”
he might say, with cowboys and Chinese and Indians passing by outside.

“When is San Ignacio going to erect a statue of Mesrob Mashtots?”
he might say. Mesrob Mashtots was the inventor of the Armenian alphabet, unlike any other, about four hundred years before the birth of Christ. Armenians, incidentally, were the first people to make Christianity their national religion.

“One million, one million, one million,”
he might say. This is the generally accepted figure for the number of Armenians killed by the Turks in the massacre from which my parents escaped. That was two thirds of Turkey’s Armenians, and about half the Armenians in the whole wide world. There are about six million of us now, including my two sons and three grandchildren, who know nothing and care nothing about Mesrob Mashtots.

“Musa Dagh!”
he might say. This was the name of a place in Turkey where a small band of Armenian civilians fought Turkish militiamen to a standstill for forty days and forty nights before being exterminated—about the time my parents, with me in my mother’s belly, arrived safe and sound in San Ignacio.

“Thank you, Vartan Mamigonian,”
he might say. This was the name of a great Armenian national hero, who led a losing army against the Persians in the fifth century. The Vartan Mamigonian Father had in mind, however, was an Armenian shoe manufacturer in Cairo, Egypt, to which polyglot metropolis my parents escaped after the massacre. It was he, a survivor of an earlier
massacre, who persuaded my naive parents, who had met on a road to Cairo, that they would find the streets paved with gold, if only they could find their way to, of all places, San Ignacio, California. But that is a story I will tell at another time.

“If anybody has discovered what life is all about,”
Father might say,
“it is too late. I am no longer interested.”

“
Never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day,”
he might say. These, of course, are words from the American song “Home on the Range,” which he had translated into Armenian. He found them idiotic.

“Tolstoi made shoes,”
he might say. This was a fact, of course: the greatest of Russian writers and idealists had, in an effort to do work that mattered, made shoes for a little while. May I say that I, too, could make shoes if I had to.

Circe Berman says she can make
pants
if she has to. As she would tell me when we met on the beach, her father had a pants factory in Lackawanna, New York, until he went bankrupt and hanged himself.

If my father had managed to survive
Captains Courageous
, starring Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew, and had lived to see the paintings I did after the war, several of which drew serious critical attention, and a few of which I sold for what was quite a bit of money
back then, he surely would have been among the great American majority which snorted and jeered at them. He wouldn’t have razzed just me. He would have razzed my Abstract Expressionist pals, too, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and Terry Kitchen and so on, painters who are now, unlike myself, acknowledged to be some of the most brilliant artists ever to have been produced not just by the United States but by the whole damn world. But what sticks in my mind like a thorn now, and I haven’t thought about this for years: he would have had no hesitation in razzing his own son, in razzing me.

So, thanks to the conversation Mrs. Berman struck up with me on the beach only two weeks ago, I am in a frenzy of adolescent resentment against a father who was buried almost fifty years ago! Let me off this hellish time machine!

But there is no getting off this hellish time machine. I have to think now, even though it is the last I would ever want to think about, if I had a choice, that my own father would have laughed as hard as anybody when my paintings, thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing of my canvases and the acrylic wall-paint and colored tapes I had applied to them, all destroyed themselves.

I mean—people who had paid fifteen-or twenty-or even thirty thousand dollars for a picture of mine found themselves gazing at a blank canvas, all ready for a new picture, and ringlets of colored tapes and what looked like moldy Rice Krispies on the floor.

It was a postwar miracle that did me in. I had better explain to my young readers, if any, that the Second World War had many of the promised characteristics of Armageddon, a final war between good and evil, so that nothing would do but that it be followed by miracles. Instant coffee was one. DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and almost did. Nuclear energy was going to make electricity so cheap that it might not even be metered. It would also make another war unthinkable. Talk about loaves and fishes! Antibiotics would defeat all diseases. Lazarus would never die: How was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete?

Yes, and there were miraculous breakfast foods and would soon be helicopters for every family. There were miraculous new fibers which could be washed in cold water and need no ironing afterwards! Talk about a war well worth fighting!

During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was
fubar
, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” Well—the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles, but, back in the early 1960s, I was one of the first persons to be totally wrecked by one—an acrylic wall-paint whose colors, according to advertisements of the day, would “… outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa.”

The name of the paint was Sateen Dura-Luxe. Mona Lisa is still smiling. And your local paint dealer, if
he has been in the business any length of time, will laugh in your face if you ask for Sateen Dura-Luxe.

“Your father had the Survivor’s Syndrome,” said Circe Berman to me on my beach that day. “He was ashamed not to be dead like all his friends and relatives.”

“He was ashamed that I wasn’t dead, too,” I said.

“Think of it as a noble emotion gone wrong,” she said.

“He was a very upsetting father,” I said. “I’m sorry now that you’ve made me remember him.”

“As long as we’ve brought him back,” she said, “why don’t you forgive him now?”

“I’ve done it a hundred times already,” I said. “This time I’m going to be smart and get a receipt.” I went on to assert that Mother was more entitled to Survivor’s Syndrome than Father, since she had been right in the middle of the killing, pretending to be dead with people lying on top of her, and with screams and blood everywhere. She wasn’t all that much older then than the cook’s daughter, Celeste.

While Mother was lying there, she was looking right into the face of the corpse of an old woman who had no teeth, only inches away. The old woman’s mouth was open, and inside it and on the ground below it was a fortune in unset jewels.

“If it weren’t for those jewels,” I told Mrs. Berman, “I would not be a citizen of this great country, and would be in no position to tell you that you are now
trespassing on my private property. That’s my house there, on the other side of the dunes. Would you be offended if a lonely and harmless old widower invited you thence for a drink, if you drink, and then supper with an equally harmless old friend of mine?” I meant Paul Slazinger.

She accepted. And after supper I heard myself saying, “If you’d rather stay here instead of the inn, you’re certainly welcome.” And I made her the same guarantee I made many times to Slazinger: “I promise not to bother you.”

So let’s be honest. I said a little earlier that I had no idea how she had come to share this house with me. Let’s be honest. I
invited
her.

     
S
HE HAS TURNED
me and this household upside down!

I should have known how manipulative she was from the very first words she ever said to me: “Tell me how your parents died.” I mean—those were the words of a woman who was quite used to turning people in any direction she chose, as though they were machine bolts and she were a monkey wrench.