IF IT MADE any real sense--and it doesn't even begin to--I think I might be inclined to
dedicate this account, for whatever it's worth, especially if it's the least bit ribald in
parts, to the memory of my late, ribald stepfather, Robert Agadganian, Jr. Bobby--as
everyone, even I, called him--died in 1947, surely with a few regrets, but without a
single gripe, of thrombosis. He was an adventurous, extremely magnetic, and generous
man. (After having spent so many years laboriously begrudging him those picaresque
adjectives, I feel it's a matter of life and death to get them in here.)
My mother and father were divorced during the winter of 1928, when I was eight, and
mother married Bobby Agadganian late that spring. A year later, in the Wall Street
Crash, Bobby lost everything he and mother had, with the exception, apparently, of a
magic wand. In any case, practically overnight, Bobby turned himself from a dead
stockbroker and incapacitated bon vivant into a live, if somewhat unqualified, agentappraiser
for a society of independent American art galleries and fine arts museums. A
few weeks later, early in 1930, our rather mixed threesome moved from New York to
Paris, the better for Bobby to ply his new trade. Being a cool, not to say an ice-cold, ten
at the time, I took the big move, so far as I know, untraumatically. It was the move back
to New York, nine years later, three months after my mother died, that threw me, and
threw me terribly.
I remember a significant incident that occurred just a day or two after Bobby and I
arrived in New York. I was standing up in a very crowded Lexington Avenue bus,
holding on to the enamel pole near the driver's seat, buttocks to buttocks with the chap
behind me. For a number of blocks the driver had repeatedly given those of us bunched
up near the front door a curt order to "step to the rear of the vehicle." Some of us had
tried to oblige him. Some of us hadn't. At length, with a red light in his favor, the
harassed man swung around in his seat and looked up at me, just behind him. At
nineteen, I was a hatless type, with a flat, black, not particularly clean, Continentaltype
pompadour over a badly broken-out inch of forehead. He addressed me in a
lowered, an almost prudent tone of voice. "All right, buddy," he said, "let's move that
ass." It was the "buddy," I think, that did it. Without even bothering to bend over a
little--that is, to keep the conversation at least as private, as de bon gout, as he'd kept
it--I informed him, in French, that he was a rude, stupid, overbearing imbecile, and that
he'd never know how much I detested him. Then, rather elated, I stepped to the rear of
the vehicle.
Things got much worse. One afternoon, a week or so later, as I was coming out of the
Ritz Hotel, where Bobby and I were indefinitely stopping, it seemed to me that all the
seats from all the buses in New York had been unscrewed and taken out and set up in
the street, where a monstrous game of Musical Chairs was in full swing. I think I might
have been willing to join the game if I had been granted a special dispensation from the
Church of Manhattan guaranteeing that all the other players would remain respectfully
standing till I was seated. When it became clear that nothing of the kind was
forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for
the gift of being alone--a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost
or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid
loneliness. Mornings and early afternoons, I attended--bodily--an art school on Fortyeighth
and Lexington Avenue, which I loathed. (The week before Bobby and I had left
Paris, I had won three first-prize awards at the National Junior Exhibition, held at the
Freiburg Galleries. Throughout the voyage to America, I used our stateroom mirror to
note my uncanny physical resemblance to El Greco.) Three late afternoons a week I
spent in a dentist's chair, where, within a period of a few months, I had eight teeth
extracted, three of them front ones. The other two afternoons I usually spent wandering
through art galleries, mostly on Fifty-seventh Street, where I did all but hiss at the
American entries. Evenings, I generally read. I bought a complete set of the Harvard
Classics--chiefly because Bobby said we didn't have room for them in our suite--and
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