Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [86]
Having done all that, I found I was able to take up residence in this house again, to hire new servants, and to become the empty and peaceful old man to whom Circe Berman addressed this question on the beach four months ago: “Tell me how your parents died.”
On her last night in the Hamptons, she now said to me: “Animal, vegetable and mineral? All three?”
“Word of honor,” I said. “All three, all three.” With colors and binders taken from creatures and plants and the ground beneath us, every painting was surely all three, all three.
“Why won’t you show it to me?” she said.
“Because it is the last thing I have to give to the world,” I said. “I don’t want to be around when people say whether it is any good or not.”
“Then you are a coward,” she said, “and that is how I will remember you.”
I thought that over, and then I heard myself say: “All right, I will go get the keys. And then, Mrs. Berman, I would be most grateful if you would come with me.”
Out into the dark we went, a flashlight beam dancing before us. She was subdued, humble, awed and virginal. I was elated, high as a kite and absolutely petrified.
We walked on flagstones at first, but then they veered off in the direction of the carriage house. After that we trod the stubble path cut through the wilderness by Franklin Cooley and his mowing machine.
I unlocked the barn doors and reached inside, my fingers on the light switch. “Scared?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“So am I,” I said.
Remember now: we were standing at the extreme right end of a painting eight feet high and sixty-four feet long. When I turned on the floodlights, we would be seeing the picture compressed by foreshortening to a seeming triangle eight feet high, all right, but only five feet wide. There was no telling from that vantage point what the painting really was—what the painting was all about.
I flicked on the switch.
There was a moment of silence, and then Mrs. Berman gasped in wonderment.
“Stay right where you are,” I told her, “and tell me what you think of it.”
“I can’t come any farther?” she said.
“In a minute,” I said, “but first I want to hear you say what it looks like from here.”
“A big fence,” she said.
“Go on,” I said.
“A very big fence, an incredibly high and long fence,” she said, “every square inch of it encrusted with the most gorgeous jewelry.”
“Thank you very much,” I said. “And now take my hand and close your eyes. I am going to lead you to the middle, and you can look again.”
She closed her eyes, and she followed me as unresistingly as a toy balloon.
When we were in the middle, with thirty-two feet of the painting extending to either side, I told her to open her eyes again.
We were standing on the rim of a beautiful green valley in the springtime. By actual count, there were five thousand, two hundred and nineteen people on the rim with us or down below. The largest person was the size of a cigarette, and the smallest a flyspeck. There were farmhouses here and there, and the ruins of a medieval watchtower on the rim where we stood. The picture was so realistic that it might have been a photograph.
“Where are we?” said Circe Berman.
“Where I was,” I said, “when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in Europe.”
35
IT IS ALL PART of the regular tour of my museum now. First come the doomed little girls on swings in the foyer, and then the earliest works of the first Abstract Expressionists, and then the perfectly tremendous whatchamacallit in the potato barn. I have unspiked the sliding doors at the far end of the barn, so that the greatly increased flow of visitors can move past the whatchamacallit without eddies and backwash. In one end they go, and out the other. Many of them will go through two times or more: not the whole show, just through the potato barn.
Ha!
No solemn critic has yet appeared. Several laymen and laywomen have asked me, however, to say what sort of a painting I would call it. I told them