Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [28]
On the Liberty cover, as in real life, the lines in the Gorgon’s malevolent face and the creases between the writhing asps were infected with verdigris. Nobody could counterfeit verdigris like Dan Gregory. There was a holly wreath around the knocker on the cover, which had been taken down by the time I got there. Some of the leaves had been brown around the edges or spotted. Nobody could counterfeit plant diseases like Dan Gregory.
So I lifted the Gorgon’s heavy necklace and let it fall. The boom reverberated in an entrance hall whose chandelier and spiral staircase would also be old stuff to me. I had seen them in an illustration of a story about a fabulously rich girl who fell in love with her family’s chauffeur: in Collier’s, I believe.
The face of the man who answered my boom was also well known to me, if not his name, since he had been a model for many of Gregory’s pictures—including one about a rich girl and her chauffeur. He had been the chauffeur, who in the story would save the girl’s father’s business after everybody but the girl scorned him as being nothing but a chauffeur. That story, incidentally, was made into the movie You’re Fired, the second movie to star sound as well as images. The first one was The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, who was a friend of Dan Gregory until they had a falling out about Mussolini during my first night there.
The man who opened the door to me had a very good face for an American-style hero, and had in fact been an aviator during the First World War. He was truly Gregory’s assistant, what Marilee Kemp had only claimed to be, and would become the only friend who stuck with Gregory to the bitter end. He, too, would be shot while wearing an Italian uniform in Egypt during not his First but his Second World War.
So says this one-eyed Armenian fortune-teller as he peers into his crystal ball.
“Can I help you?” he said. There wasn’t a flicker of recognition in his eyes, although he knew who I was and that I would be coming to the house at any time. He and Gregory had resolved to give me a chilly welcome. I can only guess at their deliberations prior to my arrival, but they must have been along the lines of my being a parasite which Marilee had brought into the house, a thief who had already stolen hundreds of dollars’ worth of art materials.
They must have persuaded themselves, too, that Marilee was wholly to blame for her backward somersaults down the studio staircase, and that she had unjustly blamed Gregory. As I say, I myself would believe that until she told me the truth of the matter after the war.
So, just to start somewhere in proving that I was right to be on the doorstep, I asked for Marilee.
“She’s in the hospital,” he said, still barring the way.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I told him my name.
“That’s what I figured,” he said. But still he wasn’t going to ask me in.
So then Gregory, who was about halfway down the spiral staircase, asked him who was at the door, and the man, whose name was Fred Jones, said, as though “apprentice” were another name for tapeworm, “It’s your apprentice.”
“My what?” said Gregory.
“Your apprentice,” said Jones.
And Gregory now addressed a problem I myself had pondered: what was a painter’s apprentice supposed to do in modern times, when paints and brushes and so on no longer had to be made right in the painter’s workplace?
He said this: “I need an apprentice about as much as I need a squire or a troubadour.”
His accent wasn’t Armenian or Russian—or American. It was British upper class. If he had so chosen, up there on the spiral staircase, looking at Fred Jones, not at me, he might have sounded like a movie gangster or cowboy, or a German or Irish or Italian or Swedish immigrant, and who knows what else? Nobody could counterfeit more accents from stage, screen and radio than Dan Gregory.
That was only the beginning of the hazing they had planned so lovingly. This was in the late