Free Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut

when I became an apprentice to Dan Gregory, I was going into the ring with the world’s champion of commercial art. His illustrations must have made any number of gifted young artists give up on art, thinking, “My God, I could never do anything
that
wonderful.”
    I was a really cocky kid, I now realize. From thevery first, when I began copying Gregory, I was saying to myself, in effect, “If I work hard enough, by golly, I can do that, too!”

    So there I was in Grand Central Station, with everybody but me being hugged and kissed by everybody, seemingly. I had doubted that Dan Gregory would come to greet me, but where was Marilee?
    Did she know what I looked like? Of course. I had sent her many self-portraits, and snapshots taken by my mother, too.
    Father, by the way, refused to touch a camera, saying that all it caught was dead skin and toenails and hair which people long gone had left behind. I guess he thought photographs were a poor substitute for all the people killed in the massacre.
    Even if Marilee hadn’t seen those pictures of me, I would have been easy to spot, since I was the darkest passenger by far on any of the Pullman cars. Any passenger much darker than me in those days would have been excluded by custom from Pullman cars—and almost all hotels and theaters and restaurants.

    Was I sure I could spot Marilee at the station? Funnily enough: no. She had sent me nine photographs over the years, which are now bound together with her letters. They were made with the finest equipment by Dan Gregory himself, who could easily have become a successfulphotographer. But Gregory had also costumed and posed her each time as a character in some story he was illustrating—the Empress Josephine, an F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper, a cave woman, a pioneer wife, a mermaid, tail and all, and so on. It was and remains hard to believe that these weren’t pictures of nine different women.
    There were many beauties on the platform, since the Twentieth Century Limited was the most glamorous train of its time. So I locked eyes with woman after woman, hoping to fire the flashbulb of recognition inside her skull. But all I succeeded in doing, I am afraid, was to confirm for each woman that the darker races were indeed leeringly lecherous, being closer than the whiter ones to the gorillas, the chimpanzees.

    Polly Madison, a.k.a. Circe Berman, has just come and gone, having read what is in my typewriter without asking if I minded. I mind a lot!
    “I’m in the middle of a sentence,” I said.
    “Who isn’t?” she said. “I just wondered if it wasn’t making you feel creepy, writing about people so long ago.
    “Not that I’ve noticed,” I said. “I’ve gotten upset by a lot of things I hadn’t thought about for years, but that’s about the size of it. Creepy? No.”
    “Just think about it,” she said. “You know about all sorts of terrible things that are going to happen to these people, yourself included. Wouldn’t you like to hop intoa time machine and go back and warn them, if you could?” She described an eerie scene in the Los Angeles railroad station back in 1933. “An Armenian boy with a cardboard suitcase and a portfolio is saying good-bye to his immigrant father. He is about to seek his fortune in a great city twenty-five hundred miles away. An old man wearing an eye patch, who has just arrived in a time machine from 1987, sidles up. What does the old man say to him?”
    “I’d have to think about it,” I said. I shook my head. “Nothing. Cancel the time machine.”
    “Nothing?” she said.
    I told her this: “I want him to believe for as long as possible that he is going to become a great painter and a good father.”

    Only half an hour later: she has popped in and out again. “I just thought of something maybe you could use somewhere,” she said. “What made me think of it was what you wrote earlier about how, after your father started making beautiful cowboy boots, you looked into his eyes