Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [18]
I didn’t ask where the cook’s carrying Celeste for a full nine months fit in with the abortions. I didn’t want to know, but Mrs. Berman gave me the information anyway. “Two abortions before Celeste, and one after,” she said.
“The cook told you that?” I said.
“Celeste told me,” she said. “She also told me that her mother was thinking of having her tubes tied.”
“I’m certainly glad to know all this,” I said, “in case of an emergency.”
Back to the past I go again, with the present nipping at my ankles like a rabid fox terrier:
My mother died believing that I had become a protégé of Dan Gregory, from whom I had never heard directly. Before she got sick, she predicted that “Gregorian” would send me to art school, that “Gregorian” would persuade magazines to hire me as an illustrator when I was old enough, that “Gregorian” would introduce me to all his rich friends, who would tell me how I could get rich, too, investing the money I made as an artist in the stock market. In 1928, the stock market never seemed to do anything but go up and up, just like the one we have today! Whoopee!
So she not only missed the stock market crash a year later, but the realization a couple of years after the crash that I wasn’t even indirectly in touch with Dan Gregory, that he probably didn’t even know I was alive, that the effusive praise for the artwork I was sending to New York for criticism wasn’t coming from the highest paid artist in American history, but from what my father called in Armenian: “… maybe his cleaning woman, maybe his cook, maybe his whore.”
7
I REMEMBER THE AFTERNOON I came home from school when I was about fifteen or so, and Father was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table in our little kitchen, with Marilee’s letters in a stack before him. He had reread them all.
This was not a violation of my privacy. The letters were family property—if you can call only two people a family. They were like bonds we had accumulated, gilt-edged securities of which I would be the beneficiary when they and I reached maturity. Once they paid off, I would be able to take care of Father, too, and he sure needed help. His savings had been wiped out by the failure of the Luma County Savings and Loan Association, which we and everybody in town had taken to calling “El Banco Busto.” There was no federal insurance scheme for bank deposits back then.
El Banco Busto, moreover, had held the mortgage on the little building whose first floor was Father’s shop and whose second story was our home. Father used to own the building, thanks to a loan from the bank. After the bank failed, though, its receivers liquidated all its assets, foreclosing all the mortgages which were in arrears, which was most of them. Guess why they were in arrears? Practically everybody had been dumb enough to entrust their savings to El Banco Busto.
So the father I found reading Marilee’s letters in the afternoon was a man who had become a mere tenant in a building he used to own. As for the shop downstairs: it was vacant, since he couldn’t afford to rent that, too. All his machinery had been sold at auction anyway in order to get a few pennies for what we were: people who had been dumb enough to entrust his or her savings to El Banco Busto.
What a comedy!
Father looked up from Marilee’s letters when I came in with my schoolbooks, and he said, “You know what this woman is? She has promised you everything, but she has nothing to give.” He named the Armenian sociopath who had swindled him and Mother in Cairo. “She is the new Vartan Mamigonian,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
And he said exactly as though the handwritten letters were bonds or insurance policies or whatever: “I have just read the fine print.” He went on to say that Marilee’s first letters had been rich in phrases like “Mr. Gregory says,” and “Mr. Gregory feels,” and