Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [10]
As an inducement to such a teacher, they would sell him a house and twenty acres of fruit trees at a fraction of their true value. Mamigonian’s “rich brother” enclosed a photo of the house, and a deed to it as well.
If Mamigonian knew a good teacher in Cairo who might be interested, this nonexistent brother wrote, Mamigonian was authorized to sell him the deed. This would secure the teaching job for Father, and make him one of the larger property owners in idyllic San Ignacio.
4
I HAVE BEEN in the art business, the picture business, so long now that I can daydream about the past as though it were a vista through a series of galleries like the Louvre, perhaps—home of the “Mona Lisa,” whose smile has now outlived by three decades the postwar miracle of Sateen Dura-Luxe. The pictures in what must be the final gallery of my life are real. I can touch them, if I like, or, following the recommendations of the widow Berman, a.k.a. “Polly Madison,” sell them to the highest bidder or in some other way, in her thoughtful words. “Get them the hell out of here.”
In the imaginary galleries in the distance are my own Abstract Expressionist paintings, miraculously resurrected by the Great Critic for Judgment Day, and then pictures by Europeans, which I bought for a few dollars or chocolate bars or nylon stockings when a soldier, and then advertisements of the sort I had been laying out and illustrating before I joined the Army—at about the time news of my father’s death in the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio came.
Still farther away are the magazine illustrations of Dan Gregory, whose apprentice I was from the time I was seventeen until he threw me out. I was one month short of being twenty when he threw me out. Beyond the Dan Gregory Gallery are unframed works I made in my boyhood, as the only artist of any age or sort ever to inhabit San Ignacio.
The gallery at the farthest remove from me in my dotage, though, just inside the door I entered in 1916, is devoted to a photograph, not a painting. Its subject is a noble white house with a long winding driveway and porte-cochere, supposedly in San Ignacio, which Vartan Mamigonian in Cairo told my parents they were buying with most of Mother’s jewelry.
That picture, along with a bogus deed, crawling with signatures and spattered with sealing wax, was in my parents’ bedside table for many years—in the tiny apartment over Father’s shoe repair shop. I assumed that he had thrown them out with so many other mementos after Mother died. But as I was about to board a railroad train in 1933, to seek my fortune in New York City during the depths of the Great Depression, Father made me a present of the photograph. “If you happen to come across this house,” he said in Armenian, “let me know where it is. Wherever it is, it belongs to me.”
I don’t own that picture anymore. Coming back to New York City after having been one of three persons at Father’s funeral in San Ignacio, which I hadn’t seen for five years, I ripped the photograph to bits. I did that because I was angry at my dead father. It was my conclusion that he had cheated himself and my mother a lot worse than they had been cheated by Vartan Mamigonian. It wasn’t Mamigonian who made my parents stay in San Ignacio instead of moving to Fresno, say, where there really was an Armenian colony, whose members supported each other and kept the old language and customs and religion alive, and at the same time became happier and happier to be in California. Father could have become a beloved teacher again!
Oh, no—it wasn’t Mamigonian who tricked him into being the unhappiest and loneliest of all the world’s cobblers.
Armenians have done brilliantly in this country during the short time they’ve been here. My neighbor to the west is F. Donald Kasabian, executive vice-president of Metropolitan Life—so that right here in exclusive East Hampton, and right on the beach, too, we have two Armenians side by side. What used to be J.