Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [89]
Such was the story I made up for Circe Berman.
Circe provided the missing link in the narrative. “So she wandered into Happy Valley, looking for other Gypsies,” she said.
“Right!” I said. “But there weren’t many Gypsies to be found anywhere in Europe. Most of them had been rounded up and gassed in extermination camps, which was fine with everybody. Who likes thieves?”
She took a closer look at the dead woman and turned away in disgust. “Ugh!” she said. “What’s coming from her mouth? Blood and maggots?”
“Rubies and diamonds,” I said. “She smells so awful, and looks like such bad luck, that nobody has come close enough to notice yet.”
“And of all these people here,” she said wonderingly, “who will be the first to notice?”
I indicated the former concentration camp guard in the rags of a scarecrow. “This man,” I said.
36
“SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS,” she mar veled. “Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms.”
The uniforms, what was left of them, were as authentic as I could make them. That was my homage to my master, Dan Gregory.
“Fathers are always so proud, the first time they see their sons in uniform,” she said.
“I know Big John Karpinski was,” I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John’s son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would finally amount to something.
But then Little John came home in a body bag.
Big John and his wife Dorene, incidentally, are dividing their farm, where three generations of Karpinskis grew up, into six-acre lots. It was in the local paper yesterday. Those lots will sell like hotcakes, since so many of the second-story windows of houses built on them, overlooking my property, will have a water view.
Big John and Dorene will become cash millionaires in a condominium in Florida, where winter never comes. So they are losing their own sacred plot of earth at the foot of their own Mount Ararat, so to speak—without experiencing that ultimate disgrace: a massacre.
“Was your father proud of you when he saw you for the first time in a uniform?” Circe asked me.
“He didn’t live to see it,” I said, “and I’m glad he didn’t. If he had, he would have thrown an awl or a boot at me.”
“Why?” she said.
“Don’t forget that it was young soldiers whose parents thought they were finally going to amount to something who killed everybody he’d ever known and loved. If he’d seen me in a uniform, he would have bared his teeth like a dog with rabies. He would have said, ‘Swine!’ He would have said, ‘Pig!’ He would have said, ‘Murderer! Get out of here!’”
“What do you think will eventually become of this painting?” she said.
“It’s too big to throw away,” I said. “Maybe it’ll go to that private museum in Lubbock, Texas, where they have most of the paintings of Dan Gregory. I thought it might wind up behind the longest bar in the world, wherever that is—probably in Texas, too. But the customers would be climbing up on the bar all the time, trying to see what was really going on—kicking over glasses, stepping on the complimentary hors d’oeuvres.”
I said that it would eventually be up to my two sons, Terry and Henri, to decide what was to become of “Now It’s the Women’s Turn.”
“You’re leaving it to them?” she said. She knew that they hated me, and had had their last name legally changed to that of Dorothy’s second husband, Roy—the only real father they’d ever had.
“You think it’s kind of a joke to leave them this?” said Circe. “You think it’s worthless? I’m here to tell you this is a terribly important painting someway.”
“I think maybe it’s terribly important the same way a head-on collision is important,