so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: “Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?”
“No,” I said.
“Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?”
“No,” I said.
“You may be entitled to the Survivor’s Syndrome, but you didn’t get it,” she said. “Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”
“How do you know so much about the Survivor’s Syndrome?” I asked her. This wasn’t a boorish question to ask her, since she had told me during our first meeting on the beach that she and her husband, although both Jewish, had had no knowledge of relatives they might have had in Europe and who might have beenkilled during the Holocaust. They were both from families which had been in the United States for several generations, and which had lost all contact with European relatives.
“I wrote a book about it,” she said. “Rather—I wrote about people like you: children of a parent who had survived some sort of mass killing. It’s called
The Underground.”
Needless to say, I have not read that or any of the Polly Madison books, although they seem, now that I have started looking around for them, as available as packs of chewing gum.
Not that I would need to leave the house to get a copy of
The Underground
or any other Polly Madison book, Mrs. Berman informs me. The cook’s daughter Celeste has every one of them.
Mrs. Berman, the most ferocious enemy of privacy I ever knew, has also discovered that Celeste, although
only fifteen
, already takes birth-control pills.
The formidable widow Berman told me the plot of
The Underground
, which is this: Three girls, one black, one Jewish and one Japanese, feel drawn together and separate from the rest of their classmates for reasons they can’t explain. They form a little club which they call, again for reasons they can’t explain, “The Underground.”
But then it turns out that all three have a parent or grandparent who has survived some man-made catastrophe, and who, without meaning to, passed on to them the idea that the wicked were the living and that the good were dead.
The black is descended from a survivor of the massacre of Ibos in Nigeria. The Japanese is a descendant of a survivor of the atom-bombing of Nagasaki. The Jew is a descendant of a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.
“The Underground
is a wonderful title for a book like that,” I said.
“You bet it is,” she said. “I am very proud of my titles.” She really thinks that she is the cat’s pajamas, and that everybody else is dumb, dumb, dumb!
She said that painters should hire writers to name their pictures for them. The names of the pictures on my walls here are “Opus Nine” and “Blue and Burnt Orange” and so on. My own most famous painting, which no longer exists, and which was sixty-four feet long and eight feet high, and used to grace the entrance lobby of the GEFFCo headquarters on Park Avenue, was called simply, “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.” Windsor Blue was a shade of Sateen Dura-Luxe, straight from the can.
“The titles are
meant
to be uncommunicative,” I said.
“What’s the point of being alive,” she said, “if you’re not going to
communicate?”
She still has no respect for my art collection, although, during the five weeks she has now been in residence, she has seen immensely respectable people from as far away as Switzerland and Japan worship some of them as though the pictures were gods almost. She was here when I sold a Rothko right off the wall to a man from the Getty Museum for a million and a half dollars.
What she said about that was this: “Good riddance of bad rubbish. It was rotting your brain because it was about absolutely nothing. Now give the rest of them the old heave-ho!”
She asked me just now, while we were talking about
Carmen Caine, Madison Adler