Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page A

She was then only twenty-one years old—the daughter of an illiterate coal miner in West Virginia.
    When she was thirty-seven, she would be the Countess Portomaggiori, with a pink palace in Florence, Italy. When she was fifty, she would be the biggest Sony distributor in Europe, and that old continent’s greatest collector of American postwar modern art.

    My father said she had to be crazy to write such a long letter to a stranger, and nothing but a boy at that, so far away.
    Mother said she must be very lonely, which was true. Gregory kept her as a pet around the house, because she was so beautiful, and he used her as a model sometimes. But she was certainly no assistant in his business. He had no interest in her opinions about anything.
    He never included her in his dinner parties, either, never took her on trips or to a show or out to restaurants or to other people’s parties, or introduced her to his famous friends.

    Marilee Kemp wrote me seventy-eight letters between 1927 and 1933. I can count them because I still have them, now bound in a hand-tooled leather volume in a slipcase in the library. The binding and slipcase were a gift from dear Edith on our tenth wedding anniversary. Mrs. Berman has found it, as she has found everything of any emotional significance here but the keys to the barn.
    She has read all the letters without first asking me if I considered them private, which I surely do. And she has said to me, and this is the first time she has ever sounded awed: “Just one of this woman’s letters says more wonderful things about life than every picture in this house. They’re the story of a scorned and abused woman discovering that she was a great writer, because that
is
what she became. I hope you know that.”
    “I know that,” I said. It was certainly true: each letter is deeper, more expressive, more confident and self-respecting than the one before.
    “How much education did she have?” she asked.
    “One year of high school,” I said.
    Mrs. Berman shook her head in wonder. “What a year that must have been,” she said.

    As for my side of the correspondence: my main messages were pictures I had made, which I thought she would show to Dan Gregory, with brief notes attached.
    After I told Marilee that Mother had died of tetanus from the cannery, her letters became very motherly,although she was only nine years older than me. And the first of these motherly letters came not from New York City but from Switzerland, where, she said in the letter, she had gone to ski.
    Only after I visited her in her palace in Florence after the war did she tell me the truth: Dan Gregory had sent her alone to a clinic there to get rid of the fetus she was carrying.
    “I should have thanked Dan for that,” she said to me in Florence. “That’s when I got interested in foreign languages.” She laughed.

    Mrs. Berman has just told me that my cook has had not just one abortion, like Marilee Kemp, but three—and not in Switzerland but in a doctor’s office in Southampton. This wearied me, but then, almost everything about the modern world wearies me.
    I didn’t ask where the cook’s carrying Celeste for a full nine months fit in with the abortions. I didn’t want to know, but Mrs. Berman gave me the information anyway. “Two abortions before Celeste, and one after,” she said.
    “The cook told you that?” I said.
    “Celeste told me,” she said. “She also told me that her mother was thinking of having her tubes tied.”
    “I’m certainly glad to know all this,” I said, “in case of an emergency.”

    Back to the past I go again, with the present nipping at my ankles like a rabid fox terrier:
    My mother died believing that I had become a protégé of Dan Gregory, from whom I had never heard directly. Before she got sick, she predicted that “Gregorian” would send me to art school, that “Gregorian” would persuade magazines to hire me as an illustrator when I was old enough, that