Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [34]
She swore that the city of New York could be a Fountain of Youth for me, if only I would retrace some of the steps I had taken when I first got there from California so long ago. “Your muscles will tell you that they are nearly as springy as they were back then,” she said. “If you will only let it,” she said, “your brain will show you that it can be exactly as cocky and excited as it was back then.”
It sounded good. But guess what? She was assembling a booby trap.
Her promise came true for a little while, not that she gave a damn whether it was hollow or not. All she wanted was to get me out of here for a little while, so she could do what she pleased with this property.
At least she didn’t break into the potato barn, which she could have done herself, given enough time—and a crowbar and an axe. She had only to go into the carriage house to find a crowbar and an axe.
I really did feel spry and cocky again when I retraced my first steps from Grand Central Station to the three brownstones which had been the mansion of Dan Gregory. They were three separate houses again, as I already knew. They had been made separate again about the time my father died, three years before the United States got into the war. Which war? The Peloponnesian War, of course. Doesn’t anybody but me remember the Peloponnesian War?
I begin again:
Dan Gregory’s mansion became three separate brownstones again soon after he and Marilee and Fred Jones left for Italy to take part in Mussolini’s great social experiment. Although he and Fred were well into their fifties by then, they would ask for and receive permission from Mussolini himself to don Italian infantry officers’ uniforms, but without any badges of rank or unit, and to make paintings of the Italian Army in action.
They would be killed almost exactly one year before the United States joined the war—against Italy, by the way, and against Germany and Japan and some others. They were killed around December seventh of 1940 at Sidi Barrani, Egypt, where only thirty thousand British overwhelmed eighty thousand Italians, I learn from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, capturing forty thousand Italians and four hundred guns.
When the Britannica talks about captured guns, it doesn’t mean rifles and pistols. It means great big guns.
Yes, and since Gregory and his sidekick Jones were such weapons nuts, let it be said that it was Matilda tanks, and Stens and Brens and Enfield rifles with fixed bayonets which did them in.
Why did Marilee go to Italy with Gregory and Jones? She was in love with Gregory, and he was in love with her.
How is that for simplicity?
The easternmost house of the three which used to belong to Gregory, I only discovered on this most recent trip to New York, is now the office and dwelling of the Delegation to the United Nations of the Emirate of Salibaar. That was the first I had ever heard of the Emirate of Salibaar, which I can’t find anywhere in my Encyclopaedia Britannica. I can only find a desert town by that name, population eleven thousand, about the population of San Ignacio. Circe Berman says it is time I got a new encyclopedia, and some new neckties, too.
The big oak door and its massive hinges are unchanged, except that the Gorgon knocker is gone. Gregory took it with him to Italy, and I saw it again on the front door of Marilee’s palace in Florence after the war.
Maybe it has now migrated elsewhere, since Italy’s and my beloved Contessa Portomaggiore died of natural causes in her sleep in the same week my beloved Edith passed away.
Some week for old Rabo Karabekian!
The middle brownstone has been divided into five apartments, one on each floor, including the basement, as I learned by the mailboxes and doorbells in the foyer.
But don’t mention foyers to me! More about that in a little bit! All things in good time.
That middle house used to contain the guest