Deadeye Dick Page 0,19

of Hitler, but was now reformed, supposedly.

The same man asked what music was playing on the phonograph.

“Chopin,” said Father. And then, when the agent appeared to have another question, Father guessed it and answered it: “A Pole,” he said. “A Pole, a Pole, a Pole.”

And Felix and I, comparing notes here in Haiti, now realize that all our distinguished visitors from out of town had been tipped off that Father was a phony as a painter. Not one of them ever asked to see examples of Father’s work.

• • •

If somebody had been ignorant enough or rude enough to ask, he would have shown them, I suppose, a small canvas clamped into the rugged framework of his easel. His easel was capable of holding a canvas eight feet high and twelve feet wide, I would guess. As I have already said, and particularly in view of the room’s other decorations, it was easily mistaken for a guillotine.

The small canvas, whose back was turned toward visitors, was where a guillotine’s fallen blade might be. It was the only picture I ever saw on the easel, as long as Father and I were on the same planet together, and some of our guests must have gone to the trouble of looking at its face. I think Mrs. Roosevelt did. I am sure the Secret Service agents did. They wanted to see everything.

And what they saw on that canvas were brushstrokes laid down exuberantly and confidently, and promisingly, too, in prewar Vienna, when Father was only twenty years old. It was only a sketch so far—of a nude model in the studio he rented after he moved out of the home of our relatives over there. There was a skylight. There was wine and cheese and bread on a checkered tablecloth.

Was Mother jealous of that naked model? No. How could she be? When that picture was begun, Mother was only eleven years old.

• • •

That rough sketch was the only respectable piece of artwork by my father that I ever saw. After he died in 1960, and Mother and I moved into our little two bedroom shitbox out in Avondale, we hung it over our fireplace. That was the same fireplace that would eventually kill Mother, since its mantelpiece had been made with radioactive cement left over from the Manhattan Project, from the atomic bomb project in World War Two.

It is still somewhere in the shitbox, I presume, since Midland City is now being protected against looters by the National Guard. And its special meaning for me is this: It is proof that sometime back when my father was a young, young man, he must have had a moment or two when he felt that he might have reason to take himself and his life seriously.

I can hear him saying to himself in astonishment, after he had roughed in that promising painting: “My God! I’m a painter after all!”

Which he wasn’t.

• • •

So, during a lunch of chitlins, topped off with coffee and crackers and Liederkranz, Mrs. Roosevelt told us how proud and unselfish and energetic the men and women were over the tank-assembly line at Green Diamond Plow. They were working night and day over there. And even at lunchtime of Mother’s Day, the studio trembled as tanks rumbled by outside. The tanks were on the way to the proving ground which used to be John Fortune’s dairy farm, and which would later become the Marítimo Brother’s jumble of little shitboxes known as Avondale.

Mrs. Roosevelt knew that Felix had just left for the Army, and she prayed that he would be safe. She said that the hardest part of her husband’s job was that there was no way to win a battle without many persons being injured or killed.

Like Father, she assumed, because I was so tall, that I must be about sixteen. Anyway, she guessed it was touch-and-go whether I myself would be drafted by and by. She certainly hoped not.

For my own part, I hoped that my voice changed before then.

She said that there would be a wonderful new world when the war was won. Everybody who needed food or medicine would get it, and people could say anything they wanted, and could choose any religion that appealed to them. Leaders wouldn’t dare to be unjust anymore, since all the other countries would gang up on them. For this reason, there could never be another Hitler. He would be squashed like a bug before he got very far.

And then Father