The man’s tongue is a simple, U. S. Treasury hundred dollar bill, and the dentist is saying, sadly, in French, «I think we can save the molar, but I’m afraid that tongue will have to come out.» It was an enormous favorite of mine.
As roommates, Bobby and I were neither more nor less compatible than would be, say, an exceptionally live‑and‑let‑live Harvard senior, and an exceptionally unpleasant Cambridge newsboy. And when, as the weeks went by, we gradually discovered that we were both in love with the same deceased woman, it was no help at all. In fact, a ghastly little after‑you‑Alphonse relationship grew out of the discovery. We began to exchange vivacious smiles when we bumped into each other on the threshold of the bathroom.
One week in May of 1939, about ten months after Bobby and I checked into the Ritz, I saw in a Quebec newspaper (one of sixteen French‑language newspapers and periodicals I had blown myself a subscription to) a quarter‑column advertisement that had been placed by the direction of a Montreal correspondence art school. It advised all qualified instructors—it as much as said, in fact, that it couldn’t advise them fortenwnt enough—to apply immediately for employment at the newest, most progressive, correspondence art school in Canada. Candidate instructors, it stipulated, were to have a fluent knowledge of both the French and English languages, and only those of temperate habits and unquestionable character need apply. The summer session at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres was officially to open on 10 June. Samples of work, it said, should represent both the academic and commercial fields of art, and were to be submitted to Monsieur I. Yoshoto, directeur, formerly of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo.
Instantly, feeling almost insupportably qualified, I got out Bobby’s Hermes‑Baby typewriter from under his bed and wrote, in French, a long, intemperate letter to M.
Yoshoto—cutting all my morning classes at the art school on Lexington Avenue to do it.
My opening paragraph ran some three pages, and very nearly smoked. I said I was twenty‑nine and a great‑nephew of Honore Daumier. I said I had just left my small estate in the South of France, following the death of my wife, to come to America to stay—temporarily, I made it clear—with an invalid relative. I had been painting, I said, since early childhood, but that, following the advice of Pablo Picasso, who was one of the oldest and dearest friends of my parents, I had never exhibited. However, a number of my oil paintings and water colors were now hanging in some of the finest, and by no means nouveau riche, homes in Paris, where they had gagne considerable attention from some of the most formidable critics of our day. Following, I said, my wife’s untimely and tragic death, of an ulceration cancgreuse, I had earnestly thought I would never again set brush to canvas. But recent financial losses had led me to alter my earnest resolution. I said I would be most honored to submit samples of my work to Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres, just as soon as they were sent to me by my agent in Paris, to whom I would write, of course, tres presse. I remained, most respectfully, Jean de Daumier‑Smith.
It took me almost as long to select a pseudonym as it had taken me to write the whole letter.
I wrote the letter on overlay tissue paper. However, I sealed it in a Ritz envelope. Then, after applying a special‑delivery stamp I’d found in Bobby’s top drawer, I took the letter down to the main mail drop in the lobby. I stopped on the way to put the mail clerk (who unmistakably loathed me) on the alert for de Daumier‑Smith’s future incoming mail. Then, around two‑thirty, I slipped into my one‑forty‑five anatomy class at the art school on Forty‑eighth Street. My classmates seemed, for the first time, like a fairly decent bunch.
During the next four days, using all my spare time, plus some time that didn’t quite belong to me, I drew a dozen or more samples of what I thought were typical examples of American commercial art. Working mostly in washes, but occasionally, to show off, in line, I drew people in evening clothes stepping out of limousines on opening nights—lean, erect, super‑chic couples who had obviously never in their lives inflicted suffering as a result of underarm carelessness—couples, in fact, who perhaps didn’t have any underarms. I drew suntanned young giants in white dinner jackets, seated at white tables alongside turquoise swimming pools, toasting each other, rather excitedly, with highballs made from a cheap but ostensibly ultrafashionable brand of rye whisky. I drew ruddy, billboard‑genic children, beside themselves with delight and good health, holding up their empty bowls of breakfast food and pleading, good‑naturedly, for more. I drew laughing, high‑breasted girls aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply protected against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial blemishes, unsightly hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance. I drew housewives who, until they reached for the right soap flakes, laid themselves wide open to straggly hair, poor posture, unruly children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender) hands, untidy (but enormous) kitchens.
When the samples were finished, I mailed them immediately to M. Yoshoto, along with a half‑dozen or so non‑commercial paintings of mine that I’d brought with me from France. I also enclosed what I thought was a very casual note that only just began to tell the richly human little story of how, quite alone and variously handicapped, in the purest romantic tradition, I had reached the cold, white, isolating summits of my profession.
The next few days were horribly suspenseful, but before the week was out, a letter came from M. Yoshoto accepting me as an instructor at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres.
The letter was written in English, even though I had written in French. (I later gathered that M. Yoshoto, who knew French but not English, had, for some reason, assigned the writing of the letter to Mme. Yoshoto, who had some working knowledge of English.) M.
Yoshoto said that the summer session would probably be the busiest session of the year, and that it started on 24 June. This gave me almost five weeks, he pointed out, to settle my affairs. He offered me his unlimited sympathy for, in effect, my recent emotional and financial setbacks. He hoped that I would arrange myself to report at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres on Sunday, 23 June, in order to learn of my duties and to become «firm friends» with the other instructors (who, I later learned, were two in number, and consisted of M. Yoshoto and Mme. Yoshoto). He deeply regretted that it was not the school’s policy to advance transportation fare to new instructors. Starting salary was twenty‑eight dollars a week‑which was not, M. Yoshoto said he realized, a very large sum of funds, but since it included bed and nourishing food, and since he sensed in me the true vocationary spirit, he hoped I would not feel cast down with vigor.
He awaited a telegram of formal acceptance from me with eagerness and my arrival with a spirit of pleasantness, and remained, sincerely, my new friend and employer, I.
Yoshoto, formerly of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo.
My telegram of formal acceptance went out within five minutes. Oddly enough, in my excitement, or quite possibly from a feeling of guilt because I was using Bobby’s phone to send the wire, I deliberately sat on my prose and kept the message down to ten words.
That evening when, as usual, I met Bobby for dinner at seven o’clock in the Oval Room, I was annoyed to see that he’d brought a guest along. I hadn’t said or implied a word to him about my recent, extracurricular doings, and I was dying to make this final news‑break—to scoop him thoroughly—when we were alone. The guest was a very attractive young lady, then only a few months divorced, whom Bobby had been seeing a lot of and whom I’d met on several occasions. She was an altogether charming person whose every attempt to be friendly to me, to gently persuade me to take off my armor, or at least my helmet, I chose to interpret as an implied invitation to join her in bed at my earliest convenience—that is, as soon as Bobby, who clearly was too old for her, could be given the slip. I was hostile and laconic throughout dinner. At length, while we were having coffee, I tersely outlined my new plans for the summer. When I’d finished, Bobby put a couple of quite intelligent questions to me. I answered them coolly, overly brie
fly, the unimpeachable crown prince of the situation.
«Oh, it sounds very exciting!» said Bobby’s guest, and waited, wantonly, for me to slip her my Montreal address under the table.
«I thought you were going to Rhode Island with me,” Bobby said.
«Oh, darling, don’t be a horrible wet blanket,” Mrs. X said to him.
«I’m not, but I wouldn’t mind knowing a little more about it,” Bobby said. But I thought I could tell from his manner that he was already mentally exchanging his train reservations for Rhode Island from a compartment to a lower berth.
«I think it’s the sweetest, most complimentary thing I ever heard in my life,” Mrs. X said warmly to me. Her eyes sparkled with depravity.
The Sunday that I stepped on to the platform at Windsor Station in Montreal, I was wearing a doublebreasted, beige gabardine suit (that I had a damned high opinion of), a navy‑blue flannel shirt, a solid yellow, cotton tie, brown‑and‑white shoes, a Panama hat (that belonged to Bobby and was rather too small for me), and a reddish‑brown moustache, aged three weeks. M. Yoshoto was there to meet me. He was a tiny man, not more than five feet tall, wearing a rather soiled linen suit, black shoes, and a black felt hat with the brim turned up all around. He neither smiled, nor, as I remember, said anything to me as we shook hands. His expression—and my word for it came straight out of a French edition of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books—was inscrutable. For some reason, I was smiling from ear to ear. I couldn’t even turn it down, let alone off.
It was a bus ride of several miles from Windsor Station to the school. I doubt if M.
Yoshoto said five words the whole way. Either in spite, or because, of his silence, I talked incessantly, with my legs crossed, ankle on knee, and constantly using my sock as an absorber for the perspiration on my palm. It seemed urgent to me not only to reiterate my earlier lies—about my kinship with Daumier, about my deceased wife, about my small estate in the South of France—but to elaborate on them. At length, in effect to spare myself from dwelling on these painful reminiscences (and they were beginning to feel a little painful), I swung over to the subject of my parents’ oldest and dearest friend: Pablo Picasso. Le pauvre Picasso, as I referred to him. (I picked Picasso, I might mention, because he seemed to me the French painter who was best‑known in America. I roundly considered Canada part of America.) For M. Yoshoto’s benefit, I recalled, with a showy amount of natural compassion for a fallen giant, how many times I had said to him, «M. Picasso, ofi allez vous?» and how, in response to this allpenetrating question, the master had never failed to walk slowly, leadenly, across his studio to look at a small reproduction of his «Les Saltimbanques» and the glory, long forfeited, that had been his. The trouble with Picasso, I explained to M. Yoshoto as we got out of the bus, was that he never listened to anybody—even his closest friends.
In 1939, Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres occupied the second floor of a small, highly unendowed‑looking, three‑story building—a tenement building, really—in the Verdun, or least attractive, section of Montreal. The school was directly over an orthopedic appliances shop. One large room and a tiny, boltless latrine were all there was to Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres itself. Nonetheless, the moment I was inside, the place seemed wondrously presentable to me. There was a very good reason. The walls of the «instructors’ room» were hung with many framed pictures—all water colors—done by M.
Yoshoto. Occasionally, I still dream of a certain white goose flying through an extremely pale‑blue sky, with—and it was one of the most daring and accomplished feats of craftsmanship I’ve ever seen—the blueness of the sky, or an ethos of the blueness of the sky, reflected in the bird’s feathers. The picture was hung just behind Mme. Yoshoto’s desk. It made the room—it and one or two other pictures close to it in quality.
Mme. Yoshoto, in a beautiful, black and cerise silk kimono, was sweeping the floor with a short‑handled broom when M. Yoshoto and I entered the instructors’ room. She was a gray‑haired woman, surely a head taller than her husband, with features that looked rather more Malayan than Japanese. She left off sweeping and came forward, and M. Yoshoto briefly introduced us. She seemed to me every bit as inscrutable as M.
Yoshoto, if not more so. M. Yoshoto then offered to show me to my room, which, he explained (in French) had recently been vacated by his son, who had gone to British Columbia to work on a farm. (After his long silence in the bus, I was grateful to hear him speak with any continuity, and I listened rather vivaciously.) He started to apologize for the fact that there were no chairs in his son’s room—only floor cushions—but I quickly gave him to believe that for me this was little short of a godsend. (In fact, I think I said I hated chairs. I was so nervous that if he had informed me that his son’s room was flooded, night and day, with a foot of water, I probably would have let out a little cry of pleasure. I probably would have said I had a rare foot disease, one that required my keeping my feet wet eight hours daily.) Then he led me up a creaky wooden staircase to my room. I told him on the way, pointedly enough, that I was a student of Buddhism. I later found out that both he and Mme. Yoshoto were Presbyterians.
Late that night, as I lay awake in bed, with Mme. Yoshoto’s Japanese‑Malayan dinner still en masse and riding my sternum like an elevator, one or the other of the Yoshotos began to moan in his or her sleep, just the other side of my wall. It was a high, thin, broken moan, and it seemed to come less from an adult than from either a tragic, subnormal infant or a small malformed animal. (It became a regular nightly performance. I never did find out which of the Yoshotos it came from, let alone why.) When it became quite unendurable to listen to from a supine position, I got out of bed, put on my slippers, and went over in the dark and sat down on one of the floor cushions. I sat crosslegged for a couple of hours and smoked cigarettes, squashing them out on the instep of my slipper and putting the stubs in the breast pocket of my pyjamas. (The Yoshotos didn’t smoke, and there were no ashtrays anywhere on the premises.) I got to sleep around five in the morning.
At six‑thirty, M. Yoshoto knocked on my door and advised me that breakfast would be served at six‑forty‑five. He asked me, through the door, if I’d slept well, and I answered, «Oui!» I then dressed—putting on my blue suit, which I thought appropriate for an instructor on the opening day of school, and a red Sulka tie my mother had given me—and, without washing, hurried down the hall to the Yoshotos’ kitchen.
Mme. Yoshoto was at the stove, preparing a fish breakfast. M. Yoshoto, in his B. V.D.‘s and trousers, was seated at the kitchen table, reading a Japanese newspaper. He nodded to me, non‑committally. Neither of them had ever looked more inscrutable.
Presently, some sort of fish was served to me on a plate with a small but noticeable trace of coagulated catsup along the border. Mme. Yoshoto asked me, in English—and her accent was unexpectedly charming—if I would prefer an egg, but I said, «Non, non, madame—merci!» I said I never ate eggs. M. Yoshoto leaned his newspaper against my water glass, and the three of us ate in silence; that is, they ate and I systematically swallowed in silence.
After breakfast, without having to leave the kitchen, M. Yoshoto put on a collarless shirt and Mme. Yoshoto took off her apron, and the three of us filed rather awkwardly downstairs to the instructors’ room. There, in an untidy pile on M. Yoshoto’s broad desk, lay some dozen or more unopened, enormous, bulging, Manilla envelopes. To me, they had an almost freshly brushed‑and‑combed look, like new pupils. M. Yoshoto assigned me to my desk, which was on the far, isolated side of the room, and asked me to be seated. Then, with Mme. Yoshoto at his side, he broke open a few of the envelopes.
He and Mme. Yoshoto seemed to examine the assorted contents with some sort of method, consulting each other, now and then, in Japanese, while I sat across the room, in my blue suit and Sulka tie, trying to look simultaneously alert and patient and, somehow, indispensable to the organization. I took out a handful of soft‑lead drawing pencils, from my inside jacket pocket, that I’d brought from Ne
w York with me, and laid them out, as noiselessly as possible, on the surface of my desk. Once, M. Yoshoto glanced over at me for some reason, and I flashed him an excessively winning smile.
Then, suddenly, without a word or a look in my direction, the two of them sat down at their respective desks and went to work. It was about seven‑thirty.
Around nine, M. Yoshoto took off his glasses, got up and padded over to my desk with a sheaf of papers in his hand. I’d spent an hour and a half doing absolutely nothing but trying to keep my stomach from growling audibly. I quickly stood up as he came into my vicinity, stooping a trifle in order not to look disrespectfully tall. He handed me the sheaf of papers he’d brought over and asked me if I would kindly translate his written corrections from French into English. I said, «Oui, monsieur!» He bowed slightly, and padded back to his own desk. I pushed my handful of soft‑lead drawing pencils to one side of my desk, took out my fountain pen, and fell—very nearly heartbroken—to work.
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