Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [78]
“At this point in my life, sir,” said Kitchen, “I am a waste of time for women, and women are a waste of time for me.”
The old man stood. “I thank you for being so frank and polite with me,” he said.
“I try,” said Kitchen.
The old gentleman departed. We made guesses as to who and what he might have been. Finkelstein said, I remember, that whoever he was, his clothes had come from England.
I said I was going to have to borrow or rent a car the next day—to get the house out here ready for my family. I also wanted to have another look at the potato barn I’d rented.
Kitchen asked if he could come along, and I said, “Sure.”
And there was this spray rig waiting for him in Montauk. Talk about fate!
Before we dropped off to sleep on our cots that night, I asked him if he had the least idea who the old gentleman who had questioned him so closely could have been.
“I’ll make a really wild guess,” he said.
“What is it?” I said.
“I could be wrong, but I think that was my father,” he said. “Looked like Dad, sounded like Dad, dressed like Dad, made wry jokes like Dad. I watched him like a hawk, Rabo, and I said to myself, ‘Either this is a very clever imitator, or this is the man who fathered me.’ You’re smart, and you’re my best and only friend. Tell me: if he was simply a good imitator of my father, what could his game have been?”
32
I WOUND UP RENTING a truck instead of a car for Kitchen’s and my fateful foray out here. Talk about Fate: if I hadn’t rented a truck, Kitchen might be practicing law now, since there is no way we could have fit the spray rig into a closed sedan, which is the kind of car I would have rented.
Every so often, but not often enough, God knows, I would think of something which would make my wife and family a little less unhappy, and the truck was a case in point. The least I could do was get all the canvases out of our apartment, since they made poor Dorothy feel sick as a dog, even when she was well.
“You’re not going to put them in the new house, are you?” she said.
That is what I had intended to do. I have never been famous for thinking far ahead. But I said, “No.” I formulated a new scheme, which was to put them into the potato barn, but I didn’t say so. I hadn’t had the nerve to tell her I had rented a potato barn. But she’d found out about it someway. She would find out someway, too, that I had bought myself and Painters X, Y and Z and Kitchen tailor-made suits of the finest materials and workmanship the night before.
“Put them in the potato barn,” she said, “and bury them under potatoes. Potatoes we can always use.”
That truck should have been an armored car in a convoy of state police, considering what some of the paintings in there are worth today. I myself considered them valuable, but certainly not that valuable. So I could not bring myself to put them in the barn, which was then a musty place, having been home for so long for nothing but potatoes and the earth and bacteria and fungi which so loved to cling to them.
So I rented a dry, clean space under lock and key at Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage out here instead. The rental over the years would absorb a major part of my income. Nor did I overcome my habit of helping painter pals in trouble with whatever cash I had or could lay my hands on, and accepting pictures in return. At least Dorothy did not have to look at the detritus of this habit. Every painting which settled a debt in full went straight from the needy painter’s studio to Home Sweet Home.
Her parting words to Kitchen and me when we at last got the pictures out of the apartment were these: “One thing I like about the Hamptons: every so often you see a sign that says ‘Town Dump.’”
If Kitchen had been a perfect Fred Jones to my Dan Gregory, he would have driven the truck. But he was very much the passenger, and I was the chauffeur. He had grown up with chauffeurs, so he didn’t think twice when he got in on the passenger side.
I talked about my marriage and the war and the Great Depression,