Bluebeard (43 page)

“Put them in the potato barn,” she said, “and bury them under potatoes. Potatoes we can always use.”

That truck should have been an armored car in a convoy of state police, considering what some of the paintings in there are worth today. I myself considered them valuable, but certainly not
that
valuable. So I could not bring myself to put them in the barn, which was then a musty place, having been home for so long for nothing but potatoes and the earth and bacteria and fungi which so loved to cling to them.

So I rented a dry, clean space under lock and key at Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage out here instead. The rental over the years would absorb a major part of my income. Nor did I overcome my habit of helping painter pals in trouble with whatever cash I had or could lay my hands on, and accepting pictures in return. At least Dorothy did not have to look at the detritus of this habit. Every painting which settled a debt in full went straight from the needy painter’s studio to Home Sweet Home.

Her parting words to Kitchen and me when we at last got the pictures out of the apartment were these: “One thing I like about the Hamptons: every so often you see a sign that says ‘Town Dump.’”

If Kitchen had been a perfect Fred Jones to my Dan Gregory, he would have driven the truck. But he was very much the passenger, and I was the chauffeur. He had grown up with chauffeurs, so he didn’t think twice when he got in on the passenger side.

I talked about my marriage and the war and the Great Depression, and about how much older Kitchen and I both were, compared with the typical returning veteran. “I should have started a family and settled down years ago,” I said. “But how could I have done that when I was the right age to do it? What women did I know anyway?”

“All the returning veterans in the movies are our age or older,” he said. That was true. In the movies you seldom saw the babies who had done most of the heavy fighting on the ground in the war.

“Yes—” I said, “and most of the actors in the movies never even went to war. They came home to the wife and kids and swimming pool after every grueling day in front of the cameras, after firing off blank cartridges while men all around them were spitting catsup.”

“That’s what the young people will think our war was fifty years from now,” said Kitchen, “old men and blanks and catsup.” So they would. So they do.

“Because of the movies,” he predicted, “nobody will believe that it was babies who fought the war.”

“Three years out of our lives,” he said about the war.

“You keep forgetting I was a regular,” I said. “It was eight years out of mine. And there went my youth, and God, I still want it.” Poor Dorothy thought she was marrying a mature, fatherly retired military gentleman. What she got instead was an impossibly self-centered and undisciplined jerk of nineteen or so!

“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

“Your what and your what?” he said.

“My soul and my meat,” I said.

“They’re separate?” he said.

“I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.”

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”

“Flense?”
he said. “What’s flense?”

“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”

“Where would you ever come across a word like
flense?”
he said.

And I said: “In an edition of
Moby Dick
illustrated by Dan Gregory.”

He talked about his father, who is still alive, by the way, and who has just celebrated his hundredth birthday! Think of that.

He adored his father. He also said that he would never want to compete with him, to try to beat him at anything. “I would hate that,” he said.

“Hate what?” I said.

“To beat him,” he said.

He said that the poet Conrad Aiken had lectured at Yale when Kitchen was in law school there, and had said that sons of gifted men went into fields occupied by their fathers, but where their fathers were weak. Aiken’s own father had been a great physician and politician and ladies’ man, but had also fancied himself a poet. “His poetry was no damn good, so Aiken became a poet,” said Kitchen. “I could never do such a thing to my old man.”

What he
would
do to his father six years later, in the front yard of Kitchen’s shack about six miles from here, was take a shot at him with a pistol. Kitchen was drunk then, as he often was, and his father had come for the umpteenth time to beg him to get treatment for his
alcoholism. It can never be proved, but that shot had to have been intended as a gesture.

When Kitchen saw that he had actually gunned down his father, with a bullet in the shoulder, it turned out, nothing would do but that Kitchen put the pistol barrel in his own mouth and kill himself.

It was an accident.

It was on that fateful truck trip, too, that I got my first look at Edith Taft Fairbanks, who would be my second wife. I had negotiated the rental of the barn from her husband, who was an affable idler, who seemed a useless, harmless waster of life to me back then, but who would become the role model I kept in mind when he died and I became her husband.

Prophetically, she was carrying a tamed raccoon in her arms. She was a magical tamer of almost any sort of animal, an overwhelmingly loving and uncritical nurturer of anything and everything that looked half alive. That’s what she would do to me when I was living as a hermit in the barn and she needed a new husband: she tamed me with nature poems and good things to eat which she left outside my sliding doors. I’m sure she tamed her first husband, too, and thought of him lovingly and patronizingly as some kind of dumb animal.

She never said what kind of animal she thought he was. I know what kind of animal she thought I was, because she came right out and said it to a female relative from Cincinnati at our wedding reception, when I
was all dressed up in my Izzy Finkelstein suit: “I want you to meet my tamed raccoon.”

I will be
buried
in that suit, too. It says so in my will: “I am to be buried next to my wife Edith in Green River Cemetery in the dark blue suit whose label says: ‘Made to order for Rabo Karabekian by Isadore Finkelstein.’” It wears and wears.