Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [20]
“An audience of one?” I said.
“That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs. Just look at how her handwriting improved and her vocabulary grew. Look at all the things she found to talk about, as soon as she realized you were hanging on every word. She certainly couldn’t write for that bastard Gregory. There was no point in writing to the folks back home, either. They couldn’t even read! Did you really believe her when she said she was describing things she saw around the city because you might want to paint pictures of them?”
“Yes—” I said, “I guess I did.” Marilee wrote long descriptions of breadlines for all the people who had been put out of work by the Depression, and of men in nice suits who obviously used to have money, but who were now selling apples on street corners, and of a legless man on a sort of skateboard, who was a World War One veteran or was pretending to be one, selling pencils in Grand Central Station, and of high-society people thrilled to be hobnobbing with gangsters in speakeasies—that sort of thing.
“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”
“Who’s the one person you write for?” I asked.
And she said, “This is going to sound very strange, because you’d think it would be somebody the same age as my readers, but it isn’t. That’s the secret ingredient of my books, I think. That’s why they seem so strong and trustworthy to young people, why I don’t sound like one dumb teenager talking to another one. I don’t put anything down on paper which Abe Berman wouldn’t find interesting and truthful.”
Abe Berman, of course, was her brain surgeon husband who died of a stroke seven months ago.
She has asked me for the keys to the barn again. I told her if she ever even mentioned the barn again, I was going to tell everybody that she was really Polly Madison—invite the local papers to come on over and interview her, and so on. If I actually did that, it would not only wreck Paul Slazinger: it would also attract a lynch mob of religious fundamentalists to our doorstep.
I happened to watch the sermon of a television evangelist the other night, and he said Satan was making a four-pronged attack on the American family with communism, drugs, rock and roll, and books by Satan’s sister, who was Polly Madison.
To return to my correspondence with Marilee Kemp: My notes to her cooled after father denounced her as the new Vartan Mamigonian. I was no longer counting on her for anything. Simply as part of the growing-up process, I didn’t want her to go on trying to be my substitute mother. I was becoming a man, and didn’t need a mother anymore, or so I thought.
Without any help from her, in fact, I had started to make money as an artist, as young as I was, and right there in bankrupt little San Ignacio. I had gone to the local paper, the Luma County Clarion, looking for work of any kind after school, and had mentioned that I could draw pretty well. The editor asked me if I could draw a picture of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Dan Gregory’s hero of heroes, incidentally, and I did so in two or three minutes maybe, without having to refer to a photograph.
Then he had me draw a beautiful female angel, and I did that.
Then he had me draw a picture of Mussolini pouring a quart of something into the mouth of the angel. He had me label the bottle CASTOR OIL and the angel WORLD PEACE. Mussolini liked to punish people by making them drink a quart of castor oil. That sounded like a comical way to teach somebody a lesson, but it wasn’t. The victims often vomited and shit themselves to death. Those who survived were all torn up inside.
That is how I became a paid political cartoonist at a tender age. I did one cartoon a week, with the editor telling me exactly what to draw.
Much to my surprise, Father began to blossom as an artist, too. In all the guessing about