Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
I felt no shock. Some part of me had noticed the same thing about the letters. Some other part of me had managed to bury the bad, bad implications.
I asked Father what had triggered this investigation at this time. He indicated ten books which had arrived for me from Marilee soon after I left for school. He had stacked them on the drainboard of our sink, a sink full of dirty dishes and pans. I examined them. They were young people’s story classics of the day, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Adventures of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Tanglewood Tales, Gulliver’s Travels, Tales from Shakespeare and so on. Reading matter for young people before the Second World War was a dozen universes removed from the unwanted pregnancies and incest and minimum-wage slavery and treacherous high school friendships and so on in the novels of Polly Madison.
Marilee had sent me these books because they were vibrantly illustrated by Dan Gregory. They were not only the most beautiful artifacts in our apartment: they were about the most beautiful artifacts in all of Luma County, and I responded to them as such. “How nice of her!” I exclaimed. “Would you look at these! Would you look at these?”
“I have,” he said.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “they are beautiful. But maybe you can explain to me why Mr. Gregorian, who thinks so highly of you, hasn’t signed at least one of them, and perhaps scribbled a little note of encouragement to my gifted son?”
All this was said in Armenian. He never talked anything but Armenian at home after the failure of El Banco Busto.
Whether the advice and encourgement had come from Gregory or Marilee didn’t matter much to me at that point. If I do say so myself, I had become one hell of a good artist for a kid in any case. I was so conceited about my prospects, with or without help from New York City, that I defended Marilee mainly to cheer up Father.
“If this Marilee, whoever she is, whatever she is, thinks so much of your pictures,” he said, “why doesn’t she sell some of them and send you the money?”
“She’s been extremely generous,” I replied—and so she had been: generous with her time, but also with the finest artist’s materials then available anywhere. I had no idea of their value, and neither did she. She had taken them without permission from the supply room in the basement of Gregory’s mansion. I myself would see that room in a couple of years, and there was enough stuff in there to take care of Gregory’s needs, as prolific as he was, for a dozen lifetimes. She didn’t think he would miss what she sent me, and she didn’t ask permission because she was scared to death of him.
He used to hit and kick her a lot.
But about the actual value of the stuff: the paints I was using sure weren’t Sateen Dura-Luxe. They were Mussini oils and Horadam watercolors from Germany. My brushes came from Winsor and Newton in England. My pastels and colored pencils and inks came from Le-fébvre-Foinet in Paris. My canvas came from Claessen’s in Belgium. No other artist west of the Rockies had such priceless art supplies!
For that matter, Dan Gregory was the only illustrator I ever knew who expected his pictures to take their places among the great art treasures of the world, who used materials which might really do what Sateen Dura-Luxe was supposed to do: outlast the smile on the “Mona Lisa.” The rest of them were satisfied if their work survived the trip to the print shop. They commonly sneered that they did such hack work only for money, that it was art for people who didn’t know anything about art—but not Dan Gregory.
“She is using you,” said my father.
“Tor what?” I said.
“So she can feel like a big shot,” he said.
The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. “You were her