The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues

by Ellen Raskin

  Steeling herself against the possibility of Isaac answering the door, Dickory rang the bell at Number 12 Cobble Lane. But neither Isaac nor Garson appeared. A fat man filled the doorway, a very fat man with bulging eyes and greasy skin that took on a purplish cast next to his white suit. His shirt, his tie, even his shoes were white. “White on White,” Dickory thought.

  “Come on up,” Garson called from the landing.

  Still blocking the entrance, the fat man scowled. “You the kid that’s supposed to answer the door? Next time you’re late, I’m kicking you out on your can.”

  Ignoring his greeting, Dickory squeezed past and slowly, haughtily climbed the stairs. The fat man muttered some indistinct curses and slammed the door to the downstairs apartment. His apartment, now.

  “I see you’ve met Manny Mallomar,” Garson said. leading her into his studio.

  Her distaste for the repulsive new tenant was immediately washed away in a flood of light. Head raised to the enormous skylight that slanted two stories above her, Dickory turned in a circle between two large oak easels and blinked into the bright daylight. It was brighter than daylight, free of the glare and the shadows of the sun.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a skylight before?” Garson asked.

  “Not like this. There’s a tiny skylight in our bathroom that leaks when it rains, but the landlord won’t fix it. ‘Why fix it?’ he says. ‘What’s a little water, more or less, in a bathroom?’” Dickory stopped, remembering that she was supposed to be quiet.

  Garson was neither disapproving nor sympathetic. “That makes sense,” he said, and beckoned her to the open staircase that hugged one of the studio walls.

  Reminding herself to be observant, Dickory glanced about the spacious floor. There were no partitions dividing the front part of the house, now a library, from the glass-roofed studio, only a kitchen area against the opposite wall.

  “Come,” Garson urged. “The cartons are up here.”

  At the top of the stairs Dickory once again stood on a balcony. This one was much higher and looked into the skylight and down upon the easels. She thought she saw a man in colorful clothes sitting in a chair, but Garson quickly led her away from the railing and down a narrow hall.

  “That’s my bedroom, the bathroom is over there, and this is the spare room. I’ll store the costumes in here for the while.”

  The four unopened cartons were piled in the center of the small room. Garson pointed to the bare closets and empty chest of drawers. Dickory noticed a slight but unmistakable tremor in his right hand.

  “I’m sure you’ve learned to be better organized after your walk home.” He had known about her missing purse and jacket all along. Avoiding his stare, Dickory opened the top box and removed a huntsman’s coat. Garson moved toward the door. “I’m going down to work. I’ve got to finish my lawyer’s portrait so I can begin painting Cookie Panzpresser. I’ll be back later to find out how observant you are.”

  Trying to memorize the inventory as she unpacked, Dickory separated the men’s costumes from the women’s and arranged them in a vague historical sequence. In the middle of the third carton, between a lumberjack shirt and a red feather boa, she found her jacket and shoulder bag.

  “How’s it going?”

  Dickory jumped. “Fine,” she replied, stooping to pick up the ruffled parasol that had fallen to the floor. “I’m nearly finished.”

  Garson inspected the closets and drawers, then leaned against the wall. Ice cubes clinked against the glass in his hand. “Now let’s see how observant you are. I’ll give you three questions, and if you answer them correctly, the job is yours. No, don’t turn around, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  She was kneeling on the closet floor, lining up high-buttoned shoes, beaded slippers, and fur-trimmed boots.

  “Do you know the difference between a primitive painter and a creative artist?” Garson asked.

  Surprised, Dickory spun around. She had expected to be questioned about the costumes or the house or the Panzpresser Collection or Fragonard.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean that to be a question; I’m just explaining the rules of the game.” Dickory returned to the shoes. “The difference is this,” Garson explained, “the primitive painter meticulously draws in every brick on a building because he knows the bricks are there. But the creative artist can suggest bricks with a few strokes of his brush. The creative artist is concerned, not with facades, but with the inner structure, with the truth of what he sees.”

  Dickory polished the toe of a cowboy boot with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She had meticulously drawn every brick in her Magic Marker street scenes.

  “Seeing the structure behind the facade, seeing the truth behind the disguise, that’s what I mean by being observant,” Garson said. “Remember that in answering my questions. Understand?”

  “Yes.” That sounded simple enough.

  “All right, then. In one word, only one word, describe Isaac Bickerstaffe.”

  “Who?” Dickory stalled for time.

  “Isaac, the man who lives under the front stoop.”

  “Oh.” Dickory sat back on her heels and closed her eyes. She shuddered at the remembered features of the misshapen giant.

  “Take your time,” Garson said between sips of his drink. “But remember—one word, the most important word.”

  Isaac Bickerstaffe seemed too big to squeeze into one word. “Scarface” didn’t indicate his size, neither did “one-eyed.” On the other hand, “huge” or “giant” didn’t indicate his scars. Or his scariness. “Monster,” that was it.

  “Monster,” Dickory said.

  Garson shook his head. “You disappoint me. Poor, gentle Isaac a monster? That is not only inaccurate, it’s uncharitable. The word for Isaac is ‘deaf-mute.’ ”

  Now Dickory remembered the flying fingers, the vacant stare. Shamed by her stupidity, she stood up as her hopes for the job crashed down around her. She decided to fight for another chance. “Deaf mute is two words,” she challenged.

  “One word,” Garson replied. “Deaf-hyphen-mute.”

  “But Isaac Bickerstaffe is more than just a deaf-hyphen-mute.” This was her last try.

  Garson stared into his empty glass. “Yes, Isaac is also brain-damaged.” There was compassion in his voice, but when he looked up his face wore the same blank mask. “Ready for the next question?” He pointed a shaky finger at the shoes.

  Again kneeling on the closet floor, Dickory paired a Greek sandal with an Indian moccasin.

  “In one word, and only one word, describe the new tenant, Manny Mallomar.”

  She had to do better this time, but “gross” fought with “greasy,” “foul-mouthed” with “white-suited.” Only one word described both the man and his character.

  “Ugly,” she said.

  “I, myself, would have said ‘fat,’ ” Garson replied. “Mallomar could never hide his obesity, no matter what his disguise. But I’ll accept ‘ugly’; only the brush of a portrait painter could disguise that.”

  Why was he always talking about disguises?

  “Now, take Manny Mallomar again, and step by step describe what cannot be disguised. Forget about ‘ugly’ this time.”

  “Fat,” she began. That word had already been approved. “Bulging eyes.”

  “He could hide his pop-eyes behind dark glasses,” Garson said.

  “About five-feet eight-inches tall.”

  “Mallomar wears stacked-heel shoes and is only five-five.”

  “White stacked-heel shoes,” Dickory continued, “white shirt, white suit, white tie.”

  “He could change his clothes.”

  “Greasy skin, dark-complected.”

  “The word is complexioned, not complected. And he could change his skin color with makeup.”

  Defeated at every turn, Dickory blurted: “Manny Mallomar looks like the ghost of a greasy hamburger.”

  “Not bad, Dickory. Imaginative, even creative; but you still have a lot to learn ab
out being observant. Think of it this way: if Manny Mallomar walked through that door in bare feet, wearing a dark blue suit, sunglasses, and makeup, how would you recognize him?”

  “Fat.”

  “Are you sure he’s fat? He could be padded.”

  Dickory was tiring of the game. “I would recognize Manny Mallomar by the thick roll of fat at the back of his neck, by his fat fingers, and by his fat thighs that make him stand with his feet wide apart.”

  “You are an apt pupil.” With that, Garson left the room. He told her to come down to the studio for the third question when she had finished unpacking the costumes.

  Costumes? Why would a painter of distinguished men and wealthy women keep such a gaudy wardrobe, Dickory wondered. Were they really costumes, or were they disguises?

  Arranging painted fans and junk jewelry in the last drawer, Dickory thought about the third question. She knew what it would be, and she knew that she was being given time to think about it.

  What was the one word that described Garson?

  Dickory pictured his regular, expressionless features: blue eyes; blond hair, longish and styled; thin lips that never smiled; fair skin, unwrinkled, slightly blotched. Voice: flat, almost bored, except when he spoke of art or Isaac. Size: tall, but not unusually so; lean. Clothes: starched shirt tapered to cling to his slim waist; sleeves rolled high on taut, tanned arms; tailored blue jeans, tight-fitting. He probably worked out in a gym to keep in such fine trim.

  “Trim,” that was a good word. At least it was better than “phony.”

  “Come on down,” Garson called. He had a fresh drink in one hand, a paintbrush in the other.

  “Dissipated,” Dickory thought, descending the open staircase. Then she remembered what he had said about the Mallomar descriptions. There was only one thing about Garson that could not be disguised: the tremor in his right hand.

  Once again Dickory stood under the immense skylight. Garson was painting at one easel, the other easel was covered with a red velvet drape. What she had thought was a man sitting in the chair was not a man at all, but a life-sized artist’s manikin dressed in jockey silks.

  Dickory watched Garson lay a rosy glaze on the cheek of the distinguished, gray-suited lawyer. His brush was sure and steady; his hand no longer shook. Rejecting the word “hand-tremor,” she was now confronted with another hyphenated word: “third-rate.” Garson was a third-rate painter. Although competent, the portrait he was painting said nothing about the lawyer, nothing about the artist. It was a slick and shallow illustration. Perhaps “slick” was more charitable than “third-rate,” or should she return to “trim”?

  “Ready for the last question?” Garson stepped back to squint at his canvas. “Now, in one word and only one word, describe. . . .”

  A bell rang. “Excuse me,” Dickory said. She hastened out of the studio and down the hall stairs, thankful that one of her duties was to open the front door to strangers.

  A little man in black scampered through the front door and into Mallomar’s apartment. His overcoat, over-long and overlarge, surrounded him like a carapace. Beady eyes darted suspiciously between his wide-brimmed hat and upturned collar. He seemed to move sideways, like a crab. No, “crab” sounded too threatening for that inconspicuous little shrimp.

  “Who was at the door?” Garson asked.

  “Shrimp,” Dickory replied.

  Garson nodded, intent on his canvas. “That’s the other new tenant.” Suddenly he spun around. “Did he tell you his name?”

  “No, not unless his name is Out-of-My-Way-Punk.”

  Garson threw back his head and crowed a cheer that sounded like “yee-ick-hooo,” then raced around his studio looking for something called a mahlstick. Thinking he had lost his senses, Dickory pretended to search.

  “Ah, here it is.” He walked toward her, holding the long aluminum rod with a balled end that easel painters use as a handrest when brushing in fine details. Raising the mahlstick high into the air, he brought it down with a light tap on Dickory’s shoulder. “Dickory Dock,” he announced solemnly, “I dub you Apprentice to Garson.”

  Dickory looked puzzled.

  “You’re hired, Dickory. The name of the little man you so accurately described is Shrimps Marinara.”

  3

  Apprenticed and awarded the keys to the house, Dickory was set to the task of cleaning the taboret that stood next to the velvet-draped easel.

  “Roy G. Biv,” Garson said when he opened the taboret drawers to show her where the pigments were stored. That’s all he said: Roy G. Biv. He said nothing more about the artist who painted at that easel nor why the canvas was covered, and Dickory did not ask. That Roy G. Biv was an artist with messy working habits was obvious from the scruffy brushes stiff with paint and the haphazardly squeezed tubes that lay in disarray, uncapped and oozing, on the dirty cabinet top.

  Dickory found the matching cap for a tube of cadmium orange and screwed it on tightly, then Naples yellow, while Garson applied glaze upon glaze to the lawyer’s handsome face. Unlike Roy G. Biv, Garson was extremely neat; his working area, clean and well-organized.

  For the next several days Garson neither spoke nor acknowledged Dickory’s presence as he painted the uninspired portrait. Dickory capped and recapped the same tubes of cadmium orange and Naples yellow. Every evening she left the second taboret clean, only to return the following afternoon to a sticky, smeary mess.

  No stranger came to the door; the telephone did not ring. Except for Manny Mallomar swearing at Isaac Bickerstaffe, who was helping him move some heavy filing cabinets into the downstairs apartment, the afternoons were silent. Oppressively silent. At one point Dickory almost started a conversation with the manikin seated in the chair before her, the larger-than-life jockey in orange and yellow silks.

  Cadmium orange. Naples yellow. Roy G. Biv was painting the jockey, but she had yet to see either the artist or his canvas that was hidden under the velvet drape.

  Dickory did meet a familiar figure leaving the studio when she arrived one day—a balding, sour-faced man with blubbery lips. Only after some effort did she recognize him as the lawyer in Garson’s painting, who had come for his last sitting. His ugliness had been well-disguised by the artist’s brush.

  “What time is it, Dickory?”

  Surprised to hear Garson speak, Dickory looked at her bare wrist. “I don’t know. I pawned my watch to help pay the electric bill.”

  “Just as well,” he said, adding a glaze of shadow to firm the lawyer’s lips. “It was an ugly watch anyhow.”

  Garson did not speak again until the middle of Friday afternoon. “Almost finished,” he announced, stepping back from his canvas. “Come take a look.”

  Dickory glanced at the lawyer’s glowing face. “Almost finished,” she agreed, and returned to Roy G. Biv’s messy taboret. It was the kindest opinion she could give of the third-rate, no, fourth-rate painting. Head down, she could hear Garson swishing his brush in solvent; she could feel his critical stare.

  “You’re a strange one, Dickory,” he said evenly. “Unreachable—wait, that’s not the right word.”

  Dickory waited. What was the right word for her? She wished she had been able to wash her hair that morning, but the kitchen sink was full of dishes and her sister-in-law’s uniform was soaking in the tub. Anyhow, “dirty hair” was two words. So was “ragged fingernails,” “roundish face,” “flattish nose.” Nervously she screwed a yellow cap on an orange paint tube.

  “I have it; I have the word for you, Dickory,” Garson said at last. “The word for you is ‘haunted.’ ”

  Haunted? Dickory looked into the tall oval mirror that stood on bracketed feet in a corner of the studio. A haunted face framed by dirty hair looked back at her.

  “Haunted,” Garson repeated. “Haunted by self-doubt. Haunted by some tragedy. A haunted angel from another world. You are a Piero della Francesca angel.”

  That was someone else she had to find out about, Piero della Francesca, along wit
h Roy G. Biv.

  With a tiny brush and a steady hand, Garson painted a carnation in the lawyer’s lapel. He did not use his mahlstick. Perhaps he kept the mahlstick only for tapping apprentices, Dickory thought.

  “Of course, a little self-doubt is a good thing if you want to become an artist, a good artist,” Garson said. “Makes you work harder. Work and study, experimentation, devotion—that’s what you need to develop a style of your own. You can learn techniques, but no one can teach you style.”

  Dickory had no intention of learning Garson’s slick style, but she was learning about paints by watching him and cleaning up after Roy G. Biv. She seemed to be the only one in her class without a working knowledge of art materials.

  “What I can teach you is how to observe,” Garson continued. “How to see through frills and facades; how to see through disguises. How to see with an artist’s eye. And the simplest way to teach that is to play our little game.”

  “Describing?” Dickory asked, hoping it was not her turn to give the one word for Garson.

  “That’s right, describing. From now on I want a description of every person who visits Manny Mallomar. You can use more than one word, if necessary, but always remember to look beyond the disguise. And get their names, too, if you can. Understand?”

  “Yes.” To Dickory it seemed more like spying than a lesson or a game. But spying on whom? And for what purpose?

  The doorbell rang only once that day. Dickory noticed Mallomar peering suspiciously through his half-opened door when she let his nervous visitor into the house.

  “Turkey-necked Mr. Smith,” she reported to Garson.

  “Very good,” he remarked sadly.

  Greenwich Village sleeps until noon on weekends. Alone, Dickory walked through silent streets, past barricaded shops. But someone else was already in Cobble Lane when she turned into its narrow bend. A derelict, unshaven chin on his chest, sat sprawled on the stoop of the house opposite Number 12.