My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

  “All right, because you seem like a nice fellow, forget the twenty. I’ll throw in the twenty. There’s no need to thank me. Just take the boot off, and we’re good.”

  It was becoming clear to me that Eugene was not going to budge.

  “All right, Eugene,” I said. “I can see that you’re adamant about this. But the thing is”—I shrugged—“I don’t have any cash on me.”

  He pointed with his forehead. “There’s an ATM right across the street.”

  “An ATM across the street?”

  “Yeah, across the street, man,” he said.

  I looked across the street. It was dusk now. The street was a blur of red-and-white car lights.

  “At the Noodle House,” he added, helpfully.

  “There’s an ATM across the street at the Noodle House?” I said.

  I looked at Eugene. I looked at my car, immobilized by the Denver boot. I looked across the street at the Noodle House. I thought of my uncle Bernard. I thought of my grandfather. I thought of Sean Penn. Sean Penn wouldn’t be arguing with Eugene now. His lawyers or his agents or his managers would be arguing with Eugene on his behalf. But of course, no one would be arguing with Eugene on Sean Penn’s behalf, because Sean Penn would never have parked here. His driver would have dropped him off and parked down the road, waiting in a sleekly purring black Escalade for his call.

  Some, although not all, of the beer I’d ingested was beginning to wear off, enough, anyway, that Eugene, with his insistence that I pay him, was starting to piss me off. My happy sudsy mood of a half hour before was evaporating. As I crossed the street towards the Noodle House, cutting through the evening traffic, I was aware of two things: first, I was too drunk to be weaving through four lanes of traffic in the near dark, and second, somehow I had made it safely across.

  I took sixty dollars out of my account and rewove my way back to the lot.

  “There,” I said, handing Eugene the cash.

  He took some equipment out of the back of his truck, parked nearby. To unlock the boot, he lay down on his stomach on the ground right near my feet. His head was under the car, but I could see his back, his buttocks, and his legs.

  “Eugene,” I said, standing over him, “I’ve really enjoyed our talk today. I really have. You seem like an intelligent, charming fellow. Do you mind if I ask you a question? How is it that an intelligent and charming man like you can’t find a better job?”

  I seemed to have hit a nerve.

  Eugene stood up. No longer so pleasant and good-natured- seeming, he glowered at me, banging the boot and the equipment into the back of his truck. It seemed as though he wished to say something, but instead he climbed into the cab and slammed the door and drove off.

  I stood for a moment by my car, feeling terrible. What was wrong with me? How could I have said such a thing to another human being?

  I drove by the next day, and the day after that, looking for him, hoping to apologize, but I never saw him again: after all, it was his job to hide.

  TEN FACES

  In the spring of 1995, I published my first short story. We’d gone out to celebrate, and when we returned home the light on our answer machine was blinking.

  “S’probably one of my readers calling about the story, don’t you think?” I said to Barbara. I was joking, of course. I mention this because many times people don’t realize when I’m joking. Many years ago, for instance, my friend Mark McClain and I performed, as a guitar duo, in our junior high school talent show. We had special T-shirts made up for the occasion. Mine said SKIBELL & MCCLAIN, his said MCCLAIN & SKIBELL. We wanted to give the impression that we were fighting over top billing. It was just a joke, but not long after our performance my eighth-grade English teacher Mrs. Clary cited my shirt as proof that I was, in her opinion, a narcissist.

  Why Mrs. Clary thought I was a narcissist and, even more, why she felt it was her duty as my eighth-grade English teacher to tell me she thought I was a narcissist, I no longer recall.

  It was probably because she was a narcissist and I was insufficiently interested in her.

  In any case, the T-shirts were just a joke, and it was just a joke when I said to Barbara that the message was probably a reader calling about my story. The story was in Story magazine, which was pretty impressive in those days, but I didn’t honestly expect anyone to call.

  As we listened to the message, though, that seemed to be the case.

  Mispronouncing my name, as almost everyone does, shortening the long i into a schwa e, a woman said she was calling for a Joseph Skǝbell and that she wished to speak to him about a matter relating to his family’s history and the Holocaust.

  Her accent, musical and twangy, was familiar to me from a childhood spent on the West Texas plains. As kids, we use to leave pennies on the railroad tracks, and when we’d come back for them after the train had run through town, they’d look like pocket watches in a Dalí painting. That’s what this woman’s vowels were like: elongated, misshapen, still recognizable but taking up more space than necessary.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said to Barbara.

  Or perhaps she said it to me.

  Because the story I’d published in Story magazine was, in fact, a kind of Holocaust-themed fairy tale, chronicling the invented afterlife experiences of my real-life great-grandfather Chaim Skibelski, who had been murdered as a Jew by the Germans during the war.

  It seemed impossible to me that I might hear this quickly from a reader, but I was new to the world of small literary magazines, and perhaps I’d underestimated their reach.

  I CALLED THE woman back. She sounded relieved to hear from me.

  “Oh, thank heavens you’ve called!” she said. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to talk to someone from your family! Every time I go anywheres, I look through the telephone book for a Skǝbell. They’s usually none ov’em. But I saw your name, and oh, I just got so excited!”

  From the sound of her voice, I imagined her as a simple, countrified woman, over sixty, a bit on the heavy side. In my mind’s eye, I saw a cotton print dress, sensible shoes, support hose, wattles beneath her chin, graying hair pulled back into a tight bun, and those cat-eye glasses women used to wear when I was a kid—black rims on the top, translucent rims on the bottom, the design made more feminine, I suppose, by its feline shape. I pictured her standing on a porch out in the countryside somewhere near Palo Duro Canyon, talking on an old black rotary phone, a yellow sunset in a big cloud-filled sky, and no neighbors around for miles.

  She introduced herself to me as Mildred Breiner. “But you can call me Millie,” she said, and she launched into her story, something about “eleven foster children, who oh my goodness I just loved to pieces.” She was so lonesome after her husband, Leonard Sadowsky Sr. died, “an’ we never had any chi’dren ov’er own, but they was just all so precious, ever’ single one of them. Do you have chi’dren yerself, Mr. Skǝbell?”

  As she spoke, I began to realize that the call had nothing to do with my story, nothing to do with my life as a writer, it had nothing to do with me at all. Mildred hadn’t read my story. Instead, she told me, “I was searching through the Austin phone book, when I chanced upon your name, and—oh, good Lord Almighty! I been searching for a relative of the artist Skǝbell for, oh, years and years now. Ever since a man named Mac McCluskey walked into my shop in Lockhart.

  “Do you have a minute, Mr. Skǝbell? Can I tell you about this?”

  IT’S AN OCCUPATIONAL hazard, I suppose, or maybe it’s just a bad habit I’ve gotten into, but I tend to listen politely to stranger’s stories. I’ve spoken to a man in a Toronto synagogue who introduced himself to me as the prophet Elijah. I had a long conversation with an elderly woman in a food co-op in Santa Monica about the dangers of miscegenation. (“The blood mixes, you understand, the black and the white blood mix inside the baby, and they fight. The different bloods fight inside the baby and there can be no peace.”) I met a woman who told me the electric company was subtly in
creasing the amount of voltage in her apartment, and when she complained about it, the repairman they sent stole her Bible.

  You never know when you might hear something you can use in your work, although to be honest, I’ve never used any of it so far.

  Nevertheless, I told Millie I’d be happy to hear her story.

  “Oh, thank heavens!” she said. “You’ll never regret it, Mr. Skǝbell. I promise you that.”

  I’M RETIRED NOW, Millie told me, but for years, I owned a sewing and notions shop in Lockhart, Texas. This was after Mr. Sadowsky, God bless him, passed. And one night, after closing time, it was already dark outside, and I noticed this feller walking back and forth, and back and forth outside my store, peerin’ in through the windas, like he couldn’t tear himself away. Then he’d tear himself away, but then he’d come back again and start in all over again with his pacin’ and his lookin’, until I guess he couldn’t take it no more and finally he raps on the glass door, askin’ to be let in.

  Now you have to understand: the door to my back office was open. Which it normally wasn’t. Not during store hours leastways. It was my private office, but good Lord! without a word of greeting, this man, a Mr. Mac McCluskey—although at the time I had no idea who he was—well, he just walks in as big as life straight through that store and into that office, right past the sign on the door that says PRIVATE, right up to this black-and-white painting I got hanging on the back wall in there, which he could’ve seen from the street, but which he couldn’t’ve normally seen since normally that door to my office is shut.

  “May I?” he says, and without so much as a word from me, he takes the painting down, and he turns it over and looks at the back of it. “I thought so,” he says, and then he says, “Madam, do you have any idea what this painting is?”

  Now, good Lord, Joseph, I have no idea what he’s talkin’ about. It’s a powerful painting—that’s undeniable—but it’s just something I bought at a synagogue art sale in Wichita Falls I don’t know how many years ago. I myself am not Jewish, but my husband, Mr. Sadowsky, may he rest in peace, was.

  “Ah, my dear lady,” this fella says, “allow me to introduce myself to you. I am McCluskey, Mac McCluskey, an art historian and critic from Austin, and let me tell you something else, my dear, this painting, which you have hung on the wall of your back office here is . . . a Skǝbell.”

  “A Skǝbell?” I say.

  “Yes, madam, a Skǝbell. That is correct. May I tell you a little something else about this Skǝbell, Mrs. Breiner? Mildred? May I call you Mildred, Mrs. Breiner?”

  “Everybody calls me Millie,” I told him.

  “Millie? Oh, well, all right, then. Fair enough.”

  ACCORDING TO MILLIE, Mac asked her if she’d ever heard of the artist Skǝbell.

  “I didn’t think so. Not many people have,” Mac said. “He wasn’t well known, despite his enormous talents, even in his native Europe. Oh, but Millie, this Skǝbell, this young man had a palette and a sense of color that rivaled Chagall’s. His blues were an unheard of blue, his reds a miracle of red! You’ve never seen such greens and oranges, to say nothing of his gelbs and his fuchsias. No one, still to this day, quite knows how he did it.

  “He was a young man when the war broke out,” Mac told her, “and like other young men of the Jewish persuasion, he joined the resistance. Now, this organization, the underground organization Skǝbell joined, was very secretive, as it had to be. Each cell was made up of only ten men. Only ten men, Millie, and the nine other men in your cell were the only other members of the underground you knew, and you knew these men only by their faces, not by their names. No one knew anyone else’s name. The work was that dangerous. Every precaution had to be taken.”

  And what was the work these men had undertaken?

  “They were working with the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg—you’ve heard of him, no doubt. No? Well, Wallenberg was helping to smuggle Jews out of Hungary, and the cell Skǝbell was in, their mission was to ferry Jewish children out of Europe on boats Wallenberg provided for that express purpose.

  “You have to understand, Millie, these ten men had sworn an oath of undying fealty to one another, and their operations, a matter of historical record”—this is true: Wallenberg is known to have saved perhaps as many as a hundred thousand lives—“were extraordinarily successful. That is, until the night their unit was betrayed.”

  “What happened?” Millie wanted to know.

  “What happened, Millie? Exactly. That’s exactly the question. What happened? Well, on what proved to be the final night of their work together, Skǝbell and his comrades were given ten counterfeit sets of travel documents, schutzpasses these were called, enough to carry ten children to safety, but at the last moment, or rather, very nearly at the last moment, Skǝbell looked around and saw that they’d collected only nine children. Only nine children, Millie.

  “ ‘Where is the tenth child?’ he asks his comrades.

  “ ‘You are the tenth child,’ they tell him.

  “ ‘Me?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ they say.

  “He protests. Of course, he protests, but they tell him, ‘Listen. Now you listen to us. Someone has betrayed us. The Germans know we’re here, and soon we’ll all be rounded up. There aren’t enough identity papers and letters of transit to carry us all to safety.’

  “ ‘But we agreed to perish as a group!’ he says.

  “Now, this was true, Millie. As I said, the members of the cell had bonded themselves to one another with a sacred pledge. With a sacred pledge, they’d joined their fates, their destinies, one for all and all for one, and the idea of abandoning the others in order to save himself alone, even at their request, was hateful to Skǝbell.

  “ ‘You’re the youngest,’ they told him. ‘Don’t you see? You have the best chance of surviving. And more important, you’re an artist, you’re a storyteller, your paintings tell a story, and you must live to tell our story to the world!’

  “The others are in perfect agreement about this, but Skǝbell is enraged.

  “ ‘How could you have decided this without me?’ he roars.

  “ ‘Would you have gone if we’d told you in advance?’

  “ ‘Certainly not! Just as I won’t go now. If we are to die, let us die together, as friends!’

  “He’s insistent, but the others are insistent as well. ‘Someone must tell our story.’ ‘Someone must survive us as a witness.’ ‘The world must know, and we’ve decided that it will be you!’

  “In the distance, Millie, there are sirens. Time is of the essence. If Skǝbell doesn’t get on that boat and if that boat doesn’t sail within the next few minutes, many lives, not merely his own, will be lost. But still he refuses! And so they grab him. They grab him, Millie, two men take him by the arms, two by the legs, and they fling him up, they fling him up onto the ship, on top of those nine children, where he’s restrained by the crew. They have to restrain him. He’s so enraged he might otherwise have jumped into the water and drowned.

  “Now the ship sails, Millie, and as it does, the distance between the ship and the harbor increases, and Skǝbell can see the searchlights, he can hear the sirens of the patrols descending upon his comrades, and—oh!—it’s a terrible sight.”

  “And then what happens?” Millie wants to know.

  And then, eventually, according to Mac, Skǝbell washes up on the more morally coherent shores of Sweden. He makes his way, after the war, to England and finally to America. Like other Skǝbells before him, he arrives in Texas, and he lives in Wichita Falls, a broken man, his health ruined, his mind in tatters, struggling all the while with this sacred mandate he’s been given, but which he simply cannot bring himself to perform. He’s obligated to fulfill the dying wishes of his comrades, true, but how can he paint, how can he make art, how can he create beauty in a world like ours?

  “Oh, it’s terrible, terrible, Millie, terrible, yes. Nearly twenty years pass, and for those twenty years, Skǝbell never picks up
a paintbrush. For nearly twenty years, he never approaches a canvas. But in the last months of his life, Millie, maybe in the last month of his life, Skǝbell begins painting again.”

  Employing a stark palette of blacks and whites—color would have been a concession to sentimentality—he composes a group portrait of himself and his nine comrades, the men with whom he’s pledged his destiny, the nine companions of his youth. It’s a searing group portrait: ten grim faces staring past the viewer in silent testimony, witnesses to utter devastation. In horizontal lines, a thick impasto suggests a kind of barbed-wire fence cordoning the figures off from the rest of humanity.

  “Having fulfilled this single commission,” Mac tells Millie, “having kept the promise that had been forced upon him against his will, Skǝbell breaks down completely and dies. He dies, Millie.”

  But before his death—he’s an artist, after all—he shows the work to one man, to a single art critic, to someone who will understand what he has made.

  “He shows the painting to me, Millie. That’s right. He showed the painting to me. He called me up in Austin, and asked me to drive out to Wichita Falls to have a look at this painting of his. When I arrive at this dingy little apartment, he refused to show it to me for more than a few seconds, and he wouldn’t let me study it at all. But he told me his story, and he showed me how you could see this story in the ten faces of these men: the death, the concern, the chaos, the terror.

  “I never thought I’d see that work again, —Millie, and to find it here in your notions shop . . . Oh, Millie,” McCluskey tells her, “a painting like this doesn’t belong in the back of a shop. It should be in a museum in New York or Jerusalem where everyone in the world can see it!

  “Listen, Millie,” Mac tells her. “I have a friend in Austin, a gallery owner named Carl Barho, and with your permission, I’d like to mention this painting to him, and together, we’ll figure out what should be done with it.”

  MILLIE, OF COURSE, gave him her permission.