Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [17]
He said things like “He stopped being an Armenian when he changed his name,” and “If he grew up in Moscow, he’s a Russian not an Armenian,” and “You know what a letter like that would mean to me? ‘The next one asks for money.’”
And Mother said to him in Armenian: “Can’t you see we’re fishing? If you make so much noise talking, you’ll scare the fish away.”
In Turkish Armenia, incidentally, or so I’ve been told, it was the women and not the men who were the fisherfolk.
And what a terrific bite my letter got!
We hooked Dan Gregory’s mistress, a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl named Marilee Kemp!
This woman would become the very first woman I ever made love to—at the age of nineteen! And, oh, my God, what a fuddy-duddy old poop I am, thinking about that sexual initiation as though it were as marvelous as the Chrysler Building—while the fifteen-year-old daughter of my cook is taking birth-control pills!
Marilee Kemp said that she was Mr. Gregory’s assistant, and that she and he had been deeply moved by my letter. Mr. Gregory, as I might imagine, was a very busy man, and had asked her to reply for him. This was a four-page letter, written in a scrawl almost as childish as my own. She was then only twenty-one years old—the daughter of an illiterate coal miner in West Virginia.
When she was thirty-seven, she would be the Countess Portomaggiori, with a pink palace in Florence, Italy. When she was fifty, she would be the biggest Sony distributor in Europe, and that old continent’s greatest collector of American postwar modern art.
My father said she had to be crazy to write such a long letter to a stranger, and nothing but a boy at that, so far away.
Mother said she must be very lonely, which was true. Gregory kept her as a pet around the house, because she was so beautiful, and he used her as a model sometimes. But she was certainly no assistant in his business. He had no interest in her opinions about anything.
He never included her in his dinner parties, either, never took her on trips or to a show or out to restaurants or to other people’s parties, or introduced her to his famous friends.
Marilee Kemp wrote me seventy-eight letters between 1927 and 1933. I can count them because I still have them, now bound in a hand-tooled leather volume in a slipcase in the library. The binding and slipcase were a gift from dear Edith on our tenth wedding anniversary. Mrs. Berman has found it, as she has found everything of any emotional significance here but the keys to the barn.
She has read all the letters without first asking me if I considered them private, which I surely do. And she has said to me, and this is the first time she has ever sounded awed: “Just one of this woman’s letters says more wonderful things about life than every picture in this house. They’re the story of a scorned and abused woman discovering that she was a great writer, because that is what she became. I hope you know that.”
“I know that,” I said. It was certainly true: each letter is deeper, more expressive, more confident and self-respecting than the one before.
“How much education did she have?” she asked.
“One year of high school,” I said.
Mrs. Berman shook her head in wonder. “What a year that must have been,” she said.
As for my side of the correspondence: my main messages were pictures I had made, which I thought she would show to Dan Gregory, with brief notes attached.
After I told Marilee that Mother had died of tetanus from the cannery, her letters became very motherly, although she was only nine years older than me. And the first of these motherly letters came not from New York City but from Switzerland, where, she said in the letter, she had gone to ski.
Only after I visited her in her palace in Florence after the war did she tell me the truth: Dan Gregory had sent her alone to a clinic there to get rid of the fetus she was carrying.
“I should have thanked Dan for that,” she said to me in Florence. “That’s when I got interested in foreign languages.” She laughed.
Mrs. Berman has