Part 4
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 briefly,
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.
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 briefly,
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.
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