Bluebeard

Presented as the fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, the novel follows a 71-year-old, one-eyed Armenian American painter as he writes the story of his life from his waterfront estate in East Hampton, Long Island. Rabo was born in 1916 in San Ignacio, California, to Armenian immigrants who survived the Turkish genocide of approximately 1 million Armenians. His mother escaped by pretending to be dead among the corpses, gathering jewels from a dead woman's mouth that financed the family's journey to the United States. His father, an educated poet, hid in a privy during the massacre and spent the rest of his life as a self-punishing cobbler.

Rabo's second wife, Edith, a grandniece of President William Howard Taft, died two years earlier, leaving him the estate and a valuable collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings, nonrepresentational works by postwar painters he later befriended. His first wife, Dorothy, left decades ago with their two sons, Terry and Henri, who no longer speak to him. On the property sits a potato barn locked with six padlocks, and Rabo refuses to reveal what is inside, comparing himself to Bluebeard, the fairy-tale husband who murdered his wives and locked their bodies in a forbidden room.

Into this isolation arrives Circe Berman, a forceful 43-year-old widow whose brain-surgeon husband recently died. She wanders onto Rabo's private beach with the demand, "Tell me how your parents died" (14), moves in uninvited, and orders him to write his autobiography. Rabo discovers she is secretly the bestselling young-adult novelist "Polly Madison." He keeps this secret to protect his only friend, the novelist Paul Slazinger, a fellow World War II veteran who has been patronizing Circe as an amateur.

Rabo's autobiography moves between past and present. He recounts how his mother had him write flattering letters to Dan Gregory, a wealthy Armenian American illustrator. The letters were answered not by Gregory but by his mistress, Marilee Kemp, a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl from West Virginia. Over six years, Marilee wrote 78 letters that grew from childish scrawls into accomplished prose and secretly sent Rabo expensive art materials from Gregory's supply room.

In 1933, Gregory offers Rabo an apprenticeship. The 17-year-old travels to New York during the Great Depression and receives a hostile welcome from Fred Jones, Gregory's assistant and a World War I aviator. Gregory recounts his own harsh upbringing, including an apprenticeship to an Imperial Russian engraver whom he surpassed by producing a perfect counterfeit ruble. He assigns Rabo an equally impossible task: to paint a photorealistic picture of his vast studio. An ardent admirer of the Italian dictator Mussolini, Gregory instructs Rabo to despise modern art.

During nearly three years as Gregory's apprentice, Rabo grows close to Marilee. They secretly visit the Museum of Modern Art, which Gregory has forbidden. Rabo does not know that Gregory pushed Marilee down the stairs, breaking her bones, when he discovered she had sent his art materials to California. On Saint Patrick's Day, 1936, Gregory catches them leaving the museum and orders them both out. They return home and make love for the only time. Afterward, Marilee coldly tells Rabo to leave, insisting the encounter meant nothing and that she needs Gregory, a man who can provide for her.

Rabo struggles through the Depression, eventually finding work at an advertising agency. He attempts serious painting but is rejected by a teacher who tells him his technically flawless work lacks soul. He joins the peacetime Army, flatters a general into establishing a camouflage unit of artists, and serves as Master Sergeant. He reads that Gregory and Fred Jones have been killed in 1940 at the Battle of Sidi Barrani in Egypt while wearing Italian uniforms. After losing his eye in combat near the war's end and being captured, Rabo is liberated in May 1945. He finds himself on the rim of a green valley filled with thousands of displaced people: concentration camp survivors, slave laborers, prisoners of war, patients from asylums, and remnants of German armies.

After the war, Rabo marries his Army nurse Dorothy and falls in with the painters who will become the Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen. Through unpaid bar tabs and loans, he builds one of the world's great art collections. In 1950, he travels to Florence and reunites with Marilee, now the Contessa Portomaggiore. She has married Count Bruno Portomaggiore, Mussolini's minister of culture and a closeted gay man who was secretly running British Intelligence in Italy. Over tea, she commissions 10 Abstract Expressionist paintings and declares the movement a farewell to a world ruined by men. They part warmly but never meet again.

Back in America, Rabo's career collapses. His paintings, made with a postwar acrylic called Sateen Dura-Luxe, destroy themselves through chemical reactions, leaving collectors with blank canvases. Pollock dies in a drunk-driving crash in 1956, and three weeks later, Kitchen kills himself with a pistol. Dorothy takes the boys and leaves. Rabo becomes a hermit in the potato barn for eight years until Edith tames him with food and nature poems left outside his door, and they marry.

In the present, Circe redecorates the foyer while Rabo is away, replacing his Abstract Expressionist paintings with Victorian chromos, cheap sentimental color prints of little girls on swings. The cook, Allison White, confronts Rabo for never learning her name, telling him she refuses to be "a nobody and a nothing" (140) under his roof. Slazinger is humiliated to learn Circe's true identity as a more successful writer. The household threatens to dissolve, but Circe calms everyone and forms an unspoken contract with Rabo: She will keep him alive, and he will stop obsessing over the barn.

As summer ends, Slazinger has a mental health crisis and voluntarily commits himself to a veterans' hospital. Rabo reveals that after Edith's sudden death from a heart attack, the eight blank canvas panels of his destroyed masterpiece were returned to him. He set them up in the barn. Instead of attending Edith's wake, he drove to a hardware store, bought every art supply he could find, and told the clerk a single word: "Renaissance." He painted in secret for six months, then locked the barn.

On Circe's last night, she calls him a coward for hiding his work until after death. He relents and leads her to the barn. He turns on floodlights and reveals an enormous realistic panorama, 8 feet high and 64 feet long, depicting the valley he witnessed at the end of World War II. It contains 5,219 rendered figures: concentration camp survivors, prisoners of war, displaced civilians, women hiding in cellars, and a dead Romani queen with rubies and diamonds spilling from her mouth, echoing his mother's story from the Armenian massacre. Pollock and Kitchen appear in the painting as Polish slave laborers, and Rabo himself, the largest figure, stands with his back to the viewer. The title is Now It's the Women's Turn.

Back in the house, Circe tells Rabo the painting will make his estranged sons multimillionaires. Rabo reveals that his will requires his sons and grandchildren to change their names back to "Karabekian" before inheriting, fulfilling a promise to his mother. Circe urges him to thank his hands for creating something his mind could never have conceived. He holds them before his eye and says aloud, "Thank you, Meat" (318). Rabo later reports that the painting has become the most popular piece in his collection, now open to the public. Visitors stream through the barn while he stays in the house and points the way.