I NEVER HEARD from Millie again. All these years later, there are still so many questions. Principally, I wonder: Who was fooling whom? Who was the con man, and what was behind it all? Was McCluskey simply a trickster with a mean streak who sent a gullible woman on a ten-year tizzy? Or was he perhaps mistaken about the painting? Perhaps he’d confused it with another painting he’d been shown. Did he ever really come to Lockhart? Or did Millie simply evoke his name as a way to make her claims about the painting more convincing? Her goals were clear enough: she wanted to sell that painting, either to Lazlo Tauber or to a Jewish museum for a million dollars, or to me. But would she have really invented the whole McCluskey story just to further her aims?
Carl Barho confirmed for me that McCluskey existed, that he was an art critic of sorts and Barho’s friend. Still, Millie could easily have found McCluskey’s name in the phone book, as she had mine, and invented their conversation. I had to wonder, did she really not read my story in Story magazine? Perhaps she’d read my story, noticed that my name was the same name on the painting she owned, and invented a Holocaust fairy tale of her own, this story of Skǝbell and the nine others, as a way to jack up the price and sell the painting to me as a precious family heirloom, a bargain at any price. That makes sense, but then she’d have to have forged all those letters from all those curators at all those museums with all their distinctive letterheads almost overnight. Or maybe, having failed years before to entice a museum or Dr. Tauber into buying the painting, she already had everything prepared when she’d read my story.
But that’s just too much of a coincidence to believe!
Jerry, as I recall, doubted her sincerity much more than I did; to me, Millie seemed too simple a woman, too sincere a person to have spun such an elaborate con around a painting she’d apparently owned for years. On the other hand, part of being a con artist, I suppose, is knowing how to appear simple and sincere.
ONCE, FOR EXAMPLE, I was driving home from work—I was a copy editor for a little weekly newspaper in Marina del Rey called the Argonaut—and I had to slam on my brakes at a crosswalk in order to let a pedestrian pass. At that time in car-clogged Los Angeles, pedestrians had the absolute right of way, and as I backed up I smiled apologetically at the man, a tall, thin black fellow.
In an instant, he was at my passenger window, knocking on the glass, motioning for me to roll the window down.
“I’m wondering if you can jump-start my car,” he said very quickly.
“Jump-start your car?”
“Open the door, go ahead, open the door, and let me in so I can take you to where my car is.”
Now, I won’t say that I opened that door without thinking, because I was thinking, but what I was thinking was that I didn’t want this fellow to think I was the sort of person who wouldn’t let a stranger into my car simply because he was black. So I was thinking, but I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I let him into the car.
“Turn right down there,” he said, pointing around the corner. “My car’s right down there.” Then he said, “Is this a four-volt or a six-volt battery you got here?”
He was asking the wrong person. I had no idea.
“Naw, naw, naw, man, this little Tercel never gonna jump my big ol’ American heap. Naw, drive me instead to a gas station, will ya? Service station people’ll be able to fix up my car, although,” he said, once we arrived at the station, “maybe not in time for me to get to my son in the hospital before visiting hours are through. He’s all the way over in Encino.”
“Your son’s in the hospital?” I said.
“Appendicitis, un-hunh. Come on real suddenlike. He been holt up there for about two weeks now, yes, sir, fighting for his life, poor kid. Say, you don’t think you could drive me to the bus station and loan me forty dollars for a ticket?”
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any money in my wallet. I always forget to carry money, so I drove across Lincoln Boulevard to the nearest ATM machine, and I left the man sitting in my car. He wasn’t going to get out of that car. Being in that car was his entire negotiating strategy.
I took twenty dollars out of my account and I stood behind my car, away from the passenger door, but where he could see me. He looked at me. He sized me up. I showed him the twenty-dollar bill. He saw the twenty-dollar bill. He had wanted forty dollars, but this was all I was going to give him.
“Get out of the car,” I said, loud enough for him to hear me, “and I’ll give you the money.”
He looked at the bill again, he looked at me again, he looked at the car again, he looked at me.
I didn’t know what he was thinking. I didn’t know what he was planning, but I had him at check and there was nothing he could do to get that money except get out of the car. As soon as he stepped out, I threw the bill as far away from the car as I could, and when he went for it, as I knew he would, I ran around to the driver’s seat, put my key in the ignition, and drove off.
Now, what strikes me as remarkable about this encounter is the fact that this man was apparently prepared, at a moment’s notice, to use whatever circumstances came his way as an occasion for a con. He could never have planned to have been at the crosswalk at the same moment I was. He couldn’t have counted on me to treat him as anything more than an abstract blur in my own thirty-five-mile-an-hour landscape. Even less certain were the chances that, acting out of white guilt, I wouldn’t have simply driven off or refused to open the door when he approached the car. But somehow in my apologetic nod, in my benevolent we’re-all-one-rainbow-nation smile, in the eye contact we made, he saw the perfect alignment of an unanticipated constellation of events, and he was ready, at the drop of that hat, to carry out a con.
Where was he going? Where was he coming from? When he gets up each day, is it simply his job to walk around from nine to five until he finds someone to bilk?
Or does he just wait for the right set of circumstances to occur?
Did Mac McCluskey do the same thing? Thinking on his feet, seeing that painting on the wall of Millie’s shop, perhaps—who knows?—having recently viewed a documentary about Raoul Wallenberg, perhaps he walked into her store with nothing more at stake than the pleasure of fooling a gullible woman. Think about it: he so inflated the value of the painting—if Millie’s story is true—there’s no chance he could have bought it for himself, which, if he really believed it was that valuable, he could have done for a song, so what other motive could he have had?
On the other hand, maybe Millie read my story, looked at the painting she’d bought at a synagogue art sale years before, and knew there was money to be made here.
YEARS LATER, I’M still wondering. Not too long ago, I called a few McCluskeys in Texas and was told by a Patrick McCluskey that Mac, his uncle, had died at least ten or fifteen years before. “And Aunt Mary, too. It was just too hard for her to live without old Mac, I suppose,” he said. “No, sir, un-uhn, I never heard anything about a Holocaust painting.”
No one answered at Mildred’s old number, although it was still connected. I ran it by an operator at Information who told me it belonged to someone by another name. There is a Mildred Breiner in Houston, but when I spoke to her she said she’d never heard of such a painting.
I left a message at a number for a Carl Barho in Georgetown, Texas, but never heard back.
Most mysteriously, when I asked my friend Jack what he remembered about Mac McCluskey, he claimed to have no memory about any of this at all. When, in an email, I reiterated everything I could remember about Millie and the painting, he wrote me back, saying:
I *love* these stories of yours, and I promise never to tell your editor that this whole McCluskey thing is (as far as I can tell) a Chagallian hallucination. No, seriously, I think I might remember maybe some parts of this story, but not this MacGuffin or MacLusky part.
The next day, he sent me an additional post:
Are you sure you’ve got the name correct? There’s an artist who collects art whose name is Milliken. In tryin
g to recall our conversation, his name came into my head. Not so long ago, he gave a collection of African masks to a museum here.
When, under the heading Documentary Evidence, I sent Jack excerpts from a letter I’d written to Jerry in 1995, quoting him as having said that not only had he known Carl Barho, but that he had gone to school with “a Mac McCluskey and a bunch of his siblings” and that it was “possible that this schoolmate might have had a father” who was a bit of a trickster, Jack steadfastly maintained that he never knew Carl Barho personally:
We used to have some neighbors and his name might in fact have been Carl Barho, but I don’t think he was one and the same with the art dealer. I knew a Mac McGarrigle, who appeared to be certifiably insane; I also knew the McCluskey kids, but they weren’t weird. I mean, their dad seemed pretty normal, whereas the McGarrigles were really out there.
MacGuffin? Milliken? McGarrigle?
What was going on here?
AS I REREAD Jack’s email, I found myself wondering where the painting was and whose wall it was hanging on now. I knew it wasn’t in a Holocaust museum somewhere, but I wondered if the person who has it, who perhaps inherited it from Millie, knows anything at all about its false history.
Or do even our false histories disappear into smoke?
I asked Jerry once if he remembered the original impulse behind the painting.
“I don’t know,” he told me. “You draw and you paint and you just start doing things. You start wanting to do a still life, maybe, and it becomes a group of faces. Maybe it emanated from a Beatles album cover, I don’t know . . . To be honest with you: you finish a piece and it’s there and you might look at it now and then, and it means something different to you now than what it meant back then . . . As for the Holocaust? Well, those faces are sort of ominous-looking, aren’t they? . . . No, I’ll tell you the truth: when I look at that painting today, all I remember is being lifted up by those guys and thrown onto the deck of that ship.”
I NEVER WROTE the novel about Lepke. I took the little story about my great-grandfather Chaim Skibelski, the story that had won Story magazine’s Short Short-Story Contest and which I now think Millie must have read, and I made a novel out of it. Not only did my great-grandfather appear in the novel as its protagonist, but my great-grandmother Ester did as well, along with their daughters and their sons-in-law and their grandchildren, all the people who were killed by the Germans.
Even Lepke has a scene or two.
Though these people were my grandfather’s parents and his siblings, I never knew much about them when I was growing up. Nobody ever spoke about them or mentioned their names, and I felt that by making them characters in this novel, I was somehow remembering them back into the family, remembering them in the normal sense of the word, of course, but also re-membering them: making them members of our family again.
MY GRANDFATHER AND his brothers are all gone now; my grandmother and her sisters-in-law, all my great-aunts are gone. It’s been years since I sat in Aunt Norma’s living room and stared at Jerry’s paintings at one of our family get-togethers.
My mother died nearly thirty years ago, and my father more recently. The family has splintered and fractured over the years. That whole big crowd of people moved out of Lubbock and stopped getting together for Thanksgiving. Sometimes we manage a seder, though less and less often now, and when we do, you can almost hear a faint echo of that once-great familial roar.
At my father’s funeral, we were all again in Lubbock, the entire family or what remained of it, gathered at his graveside, under those big West Texas skies. We hadn’t been together, all of us, like this, in years, but that’s how I’d grown up. That was the world I’d grown up in, surrounded by this clutch of relatives, and it feels as though that world’s gone forever now.
And that’s when it hit me: Maybe I’ve finally found Skǝbell, I thought. Maybe I’m Skǝbell. Sometimes it feels as though you’ve just been flung into this life, flung into life as though it were the deck of a ship that’s sailing for a strange and distant land, while the world you know and all the people in it disappear behind you. You arrive with nothing but a story to tell.
If you don’t tell that story, it disappears, and even if you do tell it, it might just disappear anyway.
Though these stories are true—everything that happens in them happened in actual life—I’ve changed the names of a few of the people who appear in them. I’ve done this sometimes at their request and sometimes in gentlemanly deference to old lovers and friends. Also, as a work of memory, this book is subject to the distortions, incorrections, and elisions of all retrospection.
JOSEPH SKIBELL is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic, and the forthcoming nonfiction work Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has won the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction. A recent Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives in Atlanta and Tesuque, New Mexico. (Author photo by Laura Noel.)
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Published by
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© 2015 by Joseph Skibell. All rights reserved.
“International Type of Guy” was published in Literary Hub, “If You Were Smiths” was published in a slightly different form as “Everyone’s a Critic (Even My Cousin)” in Poets & Writers, “My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things” in The Millions, a section of “Call Morris” as “Eggheads” in The Austin Chronicle, “Don’t Mess with Mister In Between” in Tablet magazine, “Ten Faces” in Commentary, and “Paul McCartney’s Phone Number” in the Alan Cheuse Literary Review. “Ten Faces” was also staged as a reading as part of Theater Emory’s Brave New Works festival.
Illustration copyright by Jerry Skibell. Used by permission.
“The Hometurning,” a screenplay mentioned in “Call Morris,” is based on an unpublished short story by James Dennis.
I’m grateful to the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University for the time and quiet to work on the final drafts of this book.
“Linda Paloma” written by Jackson Browne. Published by Swallow Turn Music (ASCAP).
ISBN 978-1-56512-545-4 (ebook)
My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories Page 14
