Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [29]
That room was actually a pleasant one, furnished with early American antiques which Gregory had used in illustrations. I remembered the long table and the corner cupboard full of pewter and the rustic fireplace with a blunderbuss resting on pegs driven into its chimney breast, from a painting he had done of Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony.
I was put at one end of the table, with my silverware thrown down any which way, and no napkin. I still remember no napkin. While at the other end five places were very nicely set, with linen napkins and crystal and fine china and neatly deployed silverware, and with a candelabrum at their center. The servants were going to have a fine dinner party to which the apprentice was not invited. I was not to consider myself one of them.
Nor did any of the servants speak to me. I might as well have been a bum off the street. Fred Jones moreover stood over me while I ate—like a sullen prison guard.
While I was eating, and more lonesome than I had ever been in my life, a Chinese laundryman, Sam Wu, came in with clean shirts for Gregory. Pow! A flash of recognition went off in my skull. I knew him! And he must know me! Only days later would I realize why I thought I knew Sam Wu, although he certainly didn’t know me. All dressed up in silk robes and wearing a skullcap, this simperingly polite laundryman had been the model for Dan Gregory’s pictures of one of the most sinister characters in all of fiction, the Yellow Menace personified, the master criminal Fu Manchu!
Sam Wu would eventually become Dan Gregory’s cook, and then go back to being a laundryman again. And he would be the person to whom I sent the paintings I bought in France during the war.
It was a curious and touching relationship we had during the war. I happened to run into Sam in New York City just before I went overseas, and he asked for my address. He had heard on the radio, he said, about how lonesome soldiers could be overseas, and that people should write to them often. He said I was the only soldier he knew well, so he would write to me.
It became a joke in our platoon at mail call. People would say to me things like: “What’s the latest news from Chinatown?” or “No letter from Sam Wu this week? Maybe somebody poisoned his chow mein,” and so on.
After I got my pictures from him after the war, I never heard from him again. He may not even have liked me much. For him, I was strictly a wartime activity.
Back to 1933:
Since supper was so nasty, I would not have been surprised to be escorted next to a windowless room by the furnace, and told that that was to be my bedroom. But I was led up three flights of stairs to the most sumptuous chamber any Karabekian had ever occupied, and told to wait there until Gregory had time to see me, which would be in about six hours, at about midnight, Fred Jones estimated. Gregory was giving a dinner party in the dining room right below me for, among others, Al Jolson and the comedian W. C. Fields, and the author whose stories Gregory had illustrated countless times, Booth Tarkington. I would never meet any of them because they would never come back to the house again—after a bitter argument with Gregory about Benito Mussolini.
About this room Jones put me in: It was Dan Gregory’s counterfeit, with genuine French antiques, of the bedroom of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine. The chamber was a guest room and not Gregory’s and Marilee’s bedroom. Imprisoning me there for six hours was subtle sadism of a high order indeed. For one thing, Jones, with a perfectly straight face, indicated that this was to be my bedroom during my apprenticeship, as though anybody but a person as lowborn as myself would find it a perfectly ordinary place to sleep. For another: I didn’t dare touch anything. Just to be sure I didn’t, Jones said to me, “Please be as quiet as possible, and don’t touch anything.”
One might