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Mother’s jewelry.
    That picture, along with a bogus deed, crawling with signatures and spattered with sealing wax, was in my parents’ bedside table for many years—in the tiny apartment over Father’s shoe repair shop. I assumed that he had thrown them out with so many other mementos after Mother died. But as I was about to board a railroad train in 1933, to seek my fortune in New York City during the depths of the Great Depression, Father made me a present of the photograph. “If you happen to come across this house,” he said in Armenian, “let me know where it is. Wherever it is, it belongs to me.”

    I don’t own that picture anymore. Coming back to New York City after having been one of three persons at Father’s funeral in San Ignacio, which I hadn’t seen forfive years, I ripped the photograph to bits. I did that because I was angry at my dead father. It was my conclusion that he had cheated himself and my mother a lot worse than they had been cheated by Vartan Mamigonian. It wasn’t Mamigonian who made my parents stay in San Ignacio instead of moving to Fresno, say, where there really
was
an Armenian colony, whose members supported each other and kept the old language and customs and religion alive, and at the same time became happier and happier to be in California. Father could have become a beloved teacher again!
    Oh, no—it wasn’t Mamigonian who tricked him into being the unhappiest and loneliest of all the world’s cobblers.

    Armenians have done brilliantly in this country during the short time they’ve been here. My neighbor to the west is F. Donald Kasabian, executive vice-president of Metropolitan Life—so that right here in exclusive East Hampton, and right on the beach, too, we have
two
Armenians side by side. What used to be J. P. Morgan’s estate in Southampton is now the property of Kevork Hovanessian, who also owned Twentieth Century-Fox until he sold it last week.
    And Armenians haven’t succeeded only in business here. The great writer William Saroyan was an Armenian, and so is Dr. George Mintouchian, the new president of the University of Chicago. Dr. Mintouchian is arenowned Shakespeare scholar, something my father could have been.
    And Circe Berman has just come into the room and read what is in my typewriter, which is ten of the lines above. She is gone again. She said again that my father
obviously
suffered from Survivor’s Syndrome.
    “Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said. “So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Nine times out of ten it’s a cannibal or billionaire!”
    “You still haven’t forgiven your father for being what he had to be,” she said. “That’s why you’re yelling now.”
    “I wasn’t yelling,” I said.
    “They can hear you in Portugal,” she said. That’s where you wind up if you put out to sea from my private beach and sail due east, as she had figured out from the globe in the library. You wind up in Oporto, Portugal.
    “You envy your father’s ordeal,” she said.
    “I had an ordeal of my own!” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a one-eyed man.”
    “You told me yourself that there was almost no pain, and that it healed right away,” she said, which was true. I don’t remember being hit, but only the approach of a white German tank and German soldiers all in white across a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg. I was unconscious when I was taken prisoner, and waskept that way by morphine until I woke up in a German military hospital in a church across the border, in Germany. She was right: I had to endure no more pain in the war than a civilian experiences in a dentist’s chair.
    The wound healed so quickly that I was soon shipped off to a camp as just another unremarkable prisoner.

    Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor’s Syndrome as my father,