Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [9]
And this wasn’t going to be her first novel either. It would be the twenty-first in a series of shockingly frank and enormously popular novels for young readers, several of which had been made into motion pictures. She had written them under the name of “Polly Madison.”
I certainly will keep this a secret, too, if only to save the life of Paul Slazinger. If he finds out who she really is now, after all his posturing as a professional writer, he will do what Terry Kitchen, the only other best friend I ever had, did. He will commit suicide.
In terms of commercial importance in the literary marketplace, Circe Berman is to Paul Slazinger what General Motors is to a bicycle factory in Albania!
Mum’s the word!
She said that first night that she collected pictures, too.
I asked her what kind, and she said, “Victorian chromos of little girls on swings.” She said she had more than a hundred of them, all different, but all of little girls on swings.
“I suppose you think that’s terrible,” she said.
“Not at all,” I said, “just as long as you keep them safely caged in Baltimore.”
That first night, I remember, too, she asked Slazinger and me, and then the cook and her daughter, too, if we knew any true stories about local girls from relatively poor families who had married the sons of rich people.
Slazinger said, “I don’t think you’ll even see that in the movies anymore.”
Celeste told her, “The rich marry the rich. Where have you been all your life?”
To get back to the past, which is what this book is supposed to be all about: My mother gathered up the jewels that had fallen from the dead woman’s mouth, but not the ones still inside there. Whenever she told the story, she was emphatic about that: she hadn’t fished anything from the woman’s mouth. Whatever had stayed in there was still the woman’s very personal property.
And Mother crawled away after nightfall, after the killers had all gone home. She wasn’t from my father’s village, and she would not meet him until they both crossed the lightly guarded border with Persia, about seventy miles from the scene of the massacre.
Persian Armenians took them in. After they decided to go together to Egypt. My father did most of the talking, since Mother had a mouthful of jewels. When they got to the Persian Gulf, mother sold the first of those compact treasures in order to buy them passage on a small freighter to Cairo, via the Red Sea. And it was in Cairo that they met the criminal Vartan Mamigonian, a survivor of an earlier massacre.
“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”
This Mamigonian had grown rich manufacturing military boots for the British Army and the German Army, which would soon be fighting each other in World War One. He offered my parents low-paid work of the dirtiest kind. They were fools enough to tell him, since he was a fellow Armenian survivor, about Mother’s jewels and their plans to marry and go to Paris to join the large and highly cultivated Armenian colony there.
Mamigonian became their most ardent advisor and protector, eager to find them a safe place for the jewels in a city notorious for its heartless thieves. But they had already put them in a bank.
So Mamigonian constructed a fantasy which he proposed to trade for the jewels. He must have found San Ignacio, California, in an atlas, since no Armenian had ever been there, and since no news of that sleepy farming town could have reached the Near East in any form. Mamigonian said he had a brother in San Ignacio. He forged letters from the brother to prove it. The letters said, moreover, that the brother had become extremely rich in a short time there. There were many other Armenians there, all doing well. They were looking