My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

  “Who was I to stand in the way of history?” she tells me. “The story touched me so deeply, Joseph, I knew I could never be selfish about it. Skǝbell had been given a sacred mission, and now I was part of that mission, and—oh, Joseph!—with Mac’s help, I did ever’thing on earth I could think of on Skǝbell’s behalf. I sent a passel of letters and photographs to museums all over the world, and I got a treasure trove of letters back, and I can send them to you, if you want.”

  She explains: “We wanted to get the painting to somebody who understood what it was and who had the financial wherewithal to ensure that the painting receives the honor it deserves. Mac thought the best person in the world for that was a Dr. Lazlo Tauber. Y’ever hear of him?”

  Tauber was a surgeon and a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, it seems. As a young doctor, rather than fleeing Budapest, he remained in the city, tending to the wounded, working day and night in a makeshift hospital, and later, in America, he became a millionaire investor and a noted philanthropist.

  “Mac thought Dr. Tauber’d be just the right person to get the painting up somewheres, and I knew in my heart that if we could just show the painting to him, if he could just see it, he’d want to help us, I just knew he would.”

  Though Tauber was a busy man, a meeting was arranged.

  “We were supposed to meet him at O’Hare Airport, in between his flights. That’s how busy he was: that was the only time he could give us. So I took the painting up there with my brother—and good Lord, Joseph, was it cold in Chicago!—but we must’ve gotten our signals crossed, because he never showed up. He never did, and I didn’t know what to do then, until I saw your name in the phone book.”

  WHEN I WAS twenty-three or so, I lived in Taos, New Mexico.

  In those days, films were screened almost every night at the Taos Community Auditorium, and on Saturday mornings there was a children’s film festival. I remember going one Saturday morning to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a film I’d loved as a kid. One of my teachers had read the book to us in elementary school: a chapter each day after lunch. But watching the film now as an adult, I saw it in a different light.

  The plot—in case you’re unfamiliar with the story—involves five golden tickets hidden in hundreds of thousands of Willy Wonka chocolate bars. These tickets entitle whoever is lucky enough to find one to a trip through Willie Wonka’s mysterious candy factory. The first four tickets are found by rich or spoiled or obnoxious children who in no way deserve them, four really terrible kids: Mike Teevee, an early TV addict; Augustus Gloop, a glutton; Veruca Salt, a spoiled rich girl, Violet Beauregarde, a jaw-breaking gum chewer.

  Roald Dahl, the author of the book, was said to have hated children. According to legend, he was angry that his success had come to him as a children’s writer, that his literary fiction had been rejected by the publishers, and as a consequence, it wasn’t hard for him to imagine all sorts of horrible things happening to all sorts of children. He was also supposed to have been a terrible antisemite who was so cruel to his wife, the actress Patricia O’Neal, that she had a nervous breakdown.

  I don’t know if any of this is true.

  There’s a fifth ticket, and though its discovery is dramatically delayed, there’s never any doubt that Charlie, the film’s protagonist and a child whose family is so poor they can afford to buy only one bar of chocolate during the time of the contest, will find it.

  And, of course, he does.

  I loved the book when I was in second grade, and I loved the film when I was slightly older, but watching it at twenty-three, I realized the sort of thing a twenty-three-year-old watching a favorite childhood movie might realize: that basically we’re all Charlies, each of us the protagonist of his own life story, and who doesn’t expect great and redemptive things to befall him—a golden ticket!

  Now, Millie, it seemed to me, had been given a golden ticket, and why should her destiny be less remarkable than anyone’s? Her story was improbable, but you hear improbable stories like this all the time, stories about a valuable painting left out on the curb as trash and rescued moments before the garbage truck reaches it; stories about rare Beatles recordings turning up in flea markets; the so-called Mexican Suitcase filled with the lost photos of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Fred Stein.

  What’s so remarkable about a historically significant painting being bought at a synagogue art sale and hung on the wall of a notions shop in Lockhart, Texas, where it might be hanging to this very day if an art critic from Austin hadn’t been there for God knows what reason?

  (I think Millie told me that Mac had been giving a lecture in Lockhart and that he was walking to clear his mind after it or something like that.)

  The thought occurred to me that maybe I’d found a golden ticket as well. I’d just started out as a fiction writer. I’d won Story magazine’s Short Short-Story Contest, it’s true, but I’d done so with a tiny little short story, a postmodern fairy tale about the Holocaust. It was barely a thousand words long, and though it was the best thing I’d written, I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I mean, I’d have to have written sixty more of these little fairy tales in order to make a book.

  But now—now!—thanks to Millie, here was a story with all the themes I’d been working on. Maybe I could write a book about the painting. Or about Skǝbell. Maybe I could write a novel about Millie calling me with all these stories about the painting. As a character in the drama, I could investigate the provenance of the painting and research the life of Skǝbell. The image of these nine men flinging him onto the deck of that ship, that sense of hurtling, of being propelled into flight: There is something in that, I thought.

  And then another thought occurred to me: What if Skǝbell is Lepke?

  MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, CHAIM Skibelski, the protagonist of the short short story I thought Millie might have read, but which it seems that she hadn’t, had ten children. His four daughters all perished in the war with their husbands and their children. Of the sons, four of them were in America when the war began; and of the two who were left in Europe, only one survived. This was my uncle Sidney. He and his wife, Regina, and his brother Lepke illegally crossed into Russia when the Germans invaded Poland. They were arrested and sent to Russian labor camps and, though Sidney and Regina both survived, Lepke was never seen again.

  The only thing I was ever told about Lepke was that he wasn’t as klug, as smart, as the other brothers who, whether in Poland or America, were all astute deal makers and businessmen. I had originally thought Lepke was mentally slow, but once I was talking to my mother about it, and she suggested that perhaps Lepke simply wasn’t as bright in business. All his brothers and his father were bright in business. It was kind of a family trait, and perhaps this is what they meant when they said that Lepke wasn’t klug.

  Now, I’m not very bright in business. I have no head for numbers. Money is like a foreign language to me. I’m a writer, an artist. Maybe, I thought, that’s what Lepke had been. Maybe Lepke was an artist. Maybe Lepke was . . . Skǝbell!

  Maybe after all these years, I’d found Lepke!

  It made a kind of sense. Separated from his sister-in-law and his brother at the Russian border, Lepke returns home and begins working with the underground, a clandestine cell of resistance fighters, ten men who’ve pledged themselves to one another, until that fateful night, when, the enemy descending on them, a decision is made: You’re an artist! You’re a storyteller! You must live to tell our story! And they fling him on board ship, and like all his brothers before and after him, he makes his way to Texas somehow, where, like his brothers, he shortens his name, Americanizing it from Skibelski to Skǝbell. Or rather Skibell (which our family pronounces, against all orthographic convention, as SKY-bell).

  What a story! I thought. What a novel! What this will mean to my family! All my life they’d told me that I’d never make it as a writer, that no one makes it as a writer, that my dreams were narishkeit, foolishness, but now, thanks to me and my narishkeit,
we’d found Lepke!

  THERE WERE ONLY a few problems with this, but they were pretty much insurmountable.

  To begin with, Raoul Wallenberg was active in Hungary. Though people were displaced, of course, my family came from Russia, Lithuania, eastern Poland. Secondly: from Millie’s description, Skǝbell’s painting sounded like a painting I’d seen before, and it hadn’t been painted by a half-mad resistance fighter either. It had been painted by my cousin Jerry, and it hung in my aunt Norma’s living room, a big monochrome canvas with the faces of men staring out from it. Jerry’s style, in those days, was sort of Ben Shahn meets Peter Max meets The Yellow Submarine, only in muted tones.

  I told Millie this.

  “Millie,” I said, “I think the painting you have was probably done by my cousin Jerry who was born in Texas, like me, and who is still very much alive.”

  “Well, you never know,” she said.

  “No, you never do,” I said.

  “There’s always a chance.”

  “Yes, that’s right, Millie, there’s always a chance.”

  “I don’t know, Joseph. I still feel like I’ve stumbled upon something remarkable.”

  We agreed that she’d send me photos of the painting along with carbon copies of the correspondence she amassed discussing the piece over the years with various Jewish arts organizations and museums.

  A FEW OF Jerry’s paintings hung in Aunt Norma’s living room. They were enormous, or they seemed enormous to me as a kid. One was a huge canvas with five grim world-weary faces staring out of it, a quintet of dour-faced men. They were a little scary, to tell you the truth. And there was a smaller painting of a single face, a similar face, bearded, Israeli-looking, hanging nearby. This smaller picture must have been a lithograph, because copies of it hung in a number of our relatives’ homes.

  I remember staring at these paintings whenever we’d go to my great-aunt and -uncle’s house. We had a lot of family gatherings there when I was a kid. My grandfather was one of Chaim Skibelski’s ten children. Three of his sons—my grandfather included—lived in Lubbock, and we’d all get together for Thanksgiving dinners and Passover seders, my grandfather and his brothers, these dark, debonair European men with their accents and their cuff links and their manicures. Their wives and their sons and daughters and their daughters-in-law and their grandchildren would all be at these gatherings. I remember the great social roar of the family, with the women cooking and the men talking business and stocks, my grandfather smoking his big cigars, my father telling jokes, my mother whispering her dry witticisms into my ear, the kids all running in and out of the house.

  When you’re a child, because you’ve basically just been dropped into it, you imagine that the world you know is permanent. The adults are like mountains and rivers: part of the landscape. You can’t imagine they were ever different from how you first encountered them, you can’t imagine they were ever young once or trim or unmarried.

  And it never occurred to me that our family, which seemed so large to me, was for my grandfather only half a family. Though there were five Skibelski brothers in America, the sixth brother, Lepke, and their four sisters, along with their husbands and children, never made it out of Europe.

  How could Millie be so naive? That’s the question, isn’t it? I mean, how likely is it that an historic painting, whose true worth is unknown, winds up at a synagogue art sale where it’s purchased by a woman who, knowing nothing of its value, hangs it in her sewing shop in, of all places, Lockhart, Texas, where—ah, but the hand of fate is mysterious!—it’s spotted by the one art historian in the entire world who knows the true story of its provenance?

  Even if it weren’t for Jerry’s painting, hanging in the gallery of my memory, I’d have been skeptical. It wasn’t hard to be skeptical, and yet, at the same time, I knew from experience that impossible-seeming coincidences happen all the time.

  A few days after my conversation with Millie, in fact, something equally implausible, if not even more implausible, occurred.

  IT WAS THE end of the day, and I was picking Samantha up at her day care. When I arrived, I noticed that the children were drawing and painting on the back of a discarded book galley from the University of Texas Press. I turned my daughter’s painting over and I saw, on the reverse side, that the text concerned Jackson Pollack, Native American art, and Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, all of which I knew were the subjects of my friend Jack’s dissertation.

  As it turned out, one of the day care teachers worked part-time for the University of Texas Press, and the press had recently published Jack’s book.

  “We didn’t have any need of the galley anymore,” she told me, “so I brought it in for the kids to draw on. I mean, it’s always good to recycle, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  I thought it would be a nice gesture, and so I sent Jack the picture Sami had drawn on the back of his galley. He called to thank me. He was teaching at the University of Houston at the time, I think, but he grew up in Austin, and he went to the university there, and as we’re talking, I said to him, “Hey, let me tell you this weird story.”

  He’s an art historian, after all. He might have some insight into this whole thing. I tell him the story about Millie and Skǝbell and Mac McCluskey and Carl Barho, and Jack says: “I know a Carl Barho who was an art dealer in Austin.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Strictly bluebonnets,” Jack says, meaning paintings of fields with Texas bluebonnets in them, meaning Barho sells nothing challenging or serious art-wise. “And,” Jack goes on, “I went to high school with a guy named Mac McCluskey, and let me tell you, he was one wild guy, this guy, and his father—also named Mac McCluskey—was a maniac. I mean, it’s possible he was the kind of guy who would play a dirty trick on a gullible woman somewhere out there in the middle of nowhere.”

  This was getting weirder and weirder. I mean, talk about your Jungian synchronicities! What were the chances, right? The day-care woman could have chosen any galley to recycle; my daughter didn’t have to be drawing when I picked her up, and if she were drawing, she could have been drawing on anything; had she stopped drawing seconds before I arrived, I might never have seen Jack’s galley; Barbara could have picked her up that day; the galley sheet she was drawing on could easily not have been recognizable to me as Jack’s work; et cetera, et cetera.

  ON A WHIM, not too long ago I looked Carl Barho up in the Austin phone book. He still owned a gallery, and was happy to speak with me.

  “Oh, yes, I knew the late Mac McCluskey,” he told me. “Yes, sir, he and I were good friends.” I could hear him drawing on his cigarette over the phone line. “Now, Mac started out as a hamburger cook, but he taught himself all about art, everything there was to know about it, and eventually he owned a gallery.”

  I brought up Millie and her painting.

  “Hm-hm. Hm-hm,” he said, listening. “All I can say is that if Mac told this woman the painting she owned was done by a Holocaust survivor named Skǝbell, then I’m certain Mac knew what he was talking about, yes, sir, yeah.”

  I HAD TO wait a couple of days for Millie’s package to arrive.

  “It’s going to take me a little while to get the copies of the photos of the painting made,” she told me. I didn’t mind waiting. Skǝbell had begun to intrigue me. I saw him as a doomed, romantic figure, and even if the story weren’t true—especially if the story weren’t true—I thought maybe I could use it as the basis of a novel, a novel about the loopy effects of distorted history and false memory and our all-too-human desire to fiddle with the past. Maybe I could work in a little something about Holocaust revisionism and maybe even the dangers of Holocaust fiction!

  The novel would have two principal characters, Skǝbell and me, each of us searching for the other through a foggy corridor of time, he needing me to tell his story, I needing him in order to have a story to tell. The ghost of Lepke would be a part of it. (Who is Lepke? Where is Lepke? What happened to Lepke? Is Lep
ke Skǝbell?) Some days I thought this search for Skǝbell might change my sense of personal, familial, and even tribal history.

  BUT THEN, OF course, the postman drops Millie’s package off. It’s late spring, and it’s hot in Austin, so hot that perspiration from the postman’s hand smudges the addresses on the letters he’s left. I open the package immediately. Along with articles about Raoul Wallenberg and Dr. Lazlo Tauber, there’s a clutch of photocopied letters from museum curators from all over the world, all dated around early March 1989:

  Dear Mrs. Breiner . . . thank you for submitting 10 Faces to be considered for possible purchase. The Committee has given serious consideration to your offer . . . Thank you for your letter. Yes, we agree with your sentiments that this piece belongs in a public collection . . . Madam, the Museum concentrates almost exclusively on the acquisition of art created in situ during the period from 1933 to 1945. However, may I keep the photograph of 10 Faces for our files?

  There are letters from the US Holocaust Museum, the Jewish Museum in New York, the B’nai B’rith Klutznick Museum, the Skirball Museum, museums in Paris, Jerusalem, London, letters so carefully worded you can’t tell how skeptical the curators are about Millie’s claim that the painting is as valuable as Van Gogh’s Irises; and certainly, none of them wanted to pass on it if the painting turns out to be the real thing.

  Along with all of these letters and articles are photos of the painting, and there they are: those ten faces Millie told me about, painted in a palette of stark blacks and whites, each staring grimly out, confronting the viewer, a deeply beautiful, if unnerving group portrait, reminiscent of Ben Shahn and Peter Max, and clearly the work of my cousin Jerry.

  I’ve kept Jerry updated on the progress of the story, and I forward Millie’s package to him along with the photographs. He sends Millie a letter via certified mail, dated April 19, 1995:

  Dear Mrs. Breiner,

  First I must verify that I painted the picture in question in 1967 while a student at the University of Texas. How the picture ended up in Wichita Falls, where you purchased it, I can only speculate. The story of the lone Holocaust survivor who wished to memorialize his nine comrades is simply not true. I’m flattered by the value you have placed on my work and it would certainly behoove me to see you obtain such a large sum for the picture. However, now that you are aware that Mr. McCluskey’s story is false, I suggest that neither you nor I be party to any such misrepresentation.