Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [77]
So they shot him before they realized that he was just a boy.
And here is a surprise: when Finkelstein died of a stroke three years later, when we were all starting to do quite well financially, it turned out that he had been a secret painter all along!
His young widow Rachel, who looked a lot like Circe Berman, now that I think about it, gave him a one-man show in his shop before she closed it up forever. His stuff was unambitious but strong: as representational as he could make it, much like what his fellow war heroes Winston Churchill and Dwight David Eisenhower used to do.
Like them, he enjoyed paint. Like them, he appreciated reality. That was the late painter Isadore Finkelstein.
After we had been measured for suits we went back down to the tavern for more food and drink and talk, talk, talk, we were joined by a seemingly rich and distinguished gentleman, about sixty years old. I had never seen him before, and neither had any of the others, as nearly as I could tell.
“I hear you are painters,” he said. “Do you mind if I just sit here and listen in?” He was between me and Pollock, and across the table from Kitchen.
“Most of us are painters,” I said. We weren’t about to be rude to him. It was possible that he was an art collector, or maybe on the board of directors of an important museum. We knew what all the critics and dealers looked like. He was much too honest, obviously, to take part in either of those scruffy trades.
“Most of you are painters,” he echoed. “Aha! So the simplest thing would be for you to tell me who isn’t one.”
Finkelstein and Slazinger so identified themselves.
“Oh—guessed wrong,” he said. He indicated Kitchen. “I wouldn’t have thought he was a painter, either,” he said, “despite his rough clothes. A musician maybe, or a lawyer or a professional athlete, maybe. A painter? He sure fooled me.”
He had to be a clairvoyant, I thought, to home in on the truth about Kitchen with such accuracy! Yes, and he kept his attention locked on Kitchen, as though he were reading his mind. Why would he be more fascinated by somebody who had yet to paint a single interesting picture, than by Pollock, whose work was causing such controversy, and who was sitting right next to him?
He asked Kitchen if he had by any chance seen service in the war.
Kitchen said that he had. He did not elaborate.
“Did that have something to do with your decision to be a painter?” asked the old gentleman.
“No,” said Kitchen.
Slazinger would say to me later that he thought that the war had embarrassed Kitchen about how privileged he had always been, easily mastering the piano, easily getting through the best schools, easily beating most people at almost any game, easily getting to be a lieutenant colonel in no time at all, and so on. “To teach himself something about real life,” said Slazinger, “he picked one of the few fields where he could not help being a hopeless bungler.”
Kitchen said as much to his questioner. “Painting is my Mount Everest,” he said. Mount Everest hadn’t been climbed yet. That wouldn’t happen until 1953, the same year Finkelstein would be buried and have his one-man show.
The old gentleman sat back, seemingly much pleased by this answer.
But then he got much too personal, in my opinion, asking Kitchen if he was independently wealthy, or if his family was supporting him while he made such an arduous climb. I knew that Kitchen would become a very rich man if he outlived his mother and father, and that his parents had refused to give him any money, in the hopes of forcing him to start practicing law or enter politics or take a job on Wall Street, where success was assured.
I didn’t think that was any of the old gentleman’s business, and I wanted Kitchen to tell him so. But Kitchen told him all—and when he was done answering, his expression indicated that he was ready for another question, no matter what it might be.
This was the next one: “You are married, of course?”
“No,” said Kitchen.
“But you like women?” said the old gentleman.
He was putting that question to a man who before