World War. A real neutrom bomb, detonated in a populated area, would cause a lot more suffering and destruction than I have described.
I have also misrepresented Creole, just as the viewpoint character, Rudy Waltz, learning that French dialect, might do. I say that it has only one tense—the present. Creole only seems to have that one tense to a beginner, especially if those speaking it to him know that the present tense is the easiest tense for him.
Peace.
—K.V.
Who is Celia? What is she?
That all her swains commend her?
—OTTO WALTZ
(1892-1960)
1
TO THE AS-YET-UNBORN, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that.
They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old.
Blah blah blah.
• • •
My father was Otto Waltz, whose peephole opened in 1892, and he was told, among other things, that he was the heir to a fortune earned principally by a quack medicine known as “Saint Elmo’s Remedy.” It was grain alcohol dyed purple, flavored with cloves and sarsaparilla root, and laced with opium and cocaine. As the joke goes: It was absolutely harmless unless discontinued.
He, too, was a Midland City native. He was an only child, and his mother, on the basis of almost no evidence whatsoever, concluded that he could be another Leonardo da Vinci. She had a studio built for him on a loft of the carriage house behind the family mansion when he was only ten years old, and she hired a rapscallion German cabinetmaker, who had studied art in Berlin in his youth, to give Father drawing and painting lessons on weekends and after school.
It was a sweet racket for both teacher and pupil. The teacher’s name was August Gunther, and his peephole must have opened in Germany around 1850. Teaching paid as well as cabinetmaking, and, unlike cabinetmaking, allowed him to be as drunk as he pleased.
After Father’s voice changed, moreover, Gunther could take him on overnight visits by rail to Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Louisville and Cleveland and so on, ostensibly to visit galleries and painters’ studios. The two of them also managed to get drunk, and to become darlings of the fanciest whorehouses in the Middle West.
Was either one of them about to acknowledge that Father couldn’t paint or draw for spur apples?
• • •
Who else was there to detect the fraud? Nobody. There wasn’t anybody else in Midland City who cared enough about art to notice if Father was gifted or not. He might as well have been a scholar of Sanskrit, as far as the rest of the town was concerned.
Midland City wasn’t a Vienna or a Paris. It wasn’t even a St. Louis or a Detroit. It was a Bucyrus. It was a Kokomo.
• • •
Gunther’s treachery was discovered, but too late. He and Father were arrested in Chicago after doing considerable property damage in a whorehouse there, and Father was found to have gonorrhea, and so on. But Father was by then a fully committed, eighteen-year-old good-time Charley.
Gunther was denounced and fired and blacklisted. Grandfather and Grandmother Waltz were tremendously influential citizens, thanks to Saint Elmo’s Remedy. They spread the word that nobody of quality in Midland City was ever to hire Gunther for cabinetwork or any other sort of work—ever again.
Father was sent to relatives in Vienna, to have his gonorrhea treated and to enroll in the world-famous Academy of Fine Arts. While he was on the high seas, in a first-class cabin aboard the Lusitania, his parents’ mansion burned down. It was widely suspected that the showplace was torched by August Gunther, but no proof was found.
Father’s parents, rather than rebuild, took up residence in their thousand-acre farm out near Shepherdstown—leaving behind the carriage house and a cellar hole. This was in 1910—four years before the outbreak of the First World War.
• • •
So Father presented himself at the Academy of Fine Arts with a portfolio of pictures he had created