Joe Gould's Secret (16 page)

The following day, Miss Feist telephoned Mrs. Marquié at her gallery and explained the situation. Mrs. Marquié said that she herself had been worried about Gould and that she would be glad to handle the money and make it go as far as possible. Mrs. Marquié's maiden name was Ward, and she was a native of Lawrence, Long Island. Her husband, Elie-Paul Marquié, was a Frenchman. He was an engraver and etcher, and he was also a gourmet and an amateur chef. Through him she had become acquainted with a good many French people in the restaurant business. One of these was a man named Henri Gerard, who operated three rooming houses on West Thirty-third Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues, just across the street from the General Post Office, that were known collectively as the Maison Gerard. They were old brownstones, and their numbers were 311, 313, and 317. In the basement of No. 311, he ran an unusually inexpensive restaurant that was also known as the Maison Gerard. Mrs. Marquié had a talk with Gerard about Gould. Gerard was used to the problems of people who had to get by on very little; most of his tenants were in that category. He said that for sixty dollars a month he could give Gould room and board and also see to it that he had a little left over for such things as cigarettes and carfare. His room would cost him three dollars a week, and he could get breakfasts for twenty-five cents, lunches for fifty cents, and dinners for fifty cents. Mrs. Marquié agreed to send Gerard a check at the end of each week covering Gould's approximate expenses, and Gerard agreed to deduct what Gould owed from the check, and give him whatever was left over in cash. If he skipped a meal, he wouldn't be charged for it. If he skipped what seemed to be an undue number of meals, Gerard would let Mrs. Marquié know, in case he might be going without them in order to have some money to spend on liquor, Before the week was out, Gould was installed in a room on the fifth floor, which was the attic floor, of No. 313. In the days when the brownstone houses of this kind were private houses, all the rooms on this floor has been maids' rooms, and Gould's room had obviously been the one that was customarily occupied by the newest, greenest maid. It was around behind the banisters at the top of the stairwell, it had a skylight instead of a window, and it was just big enough for a bed, a chair, a table, and a dresser.

At first, Gould wasn't able to get much pleasure out of living at the Maison Gerard or out of anything else connected with his new way of life, for the mystery of the identity of his patron tormented him. It was all he could think about. For a while, he turned up at Mrs. Marquié's gallery at least once a day, and sometimes as often as three or four times a day, and asked her seemingly innocent questions in an effort to trick her into giving him some clue. She begged him to stop it, but he couldn't. The speculation that seemed most likely to him was that it was someone who had been in his class at Harvard, and Mrs. Marquié encouraged him to believe this. Then, one day, instead of using the phrase “your patron,” she forgot herself and used the word “she,” and that inflamed Gould's imagination. He spent every afternoon for a couple of weeks going through newspaper files in the Public Library and searching for information about rich women in general and rich women who were patrons of the arts in particular, but he wasn't able to find any clues. His mind was dominated for several days by the idea that the woman might somehow be one or the other of two well-to-do old spinster sisters who were cousins of his and lived together in Boston. He had always been afraid of them, and he hadn't seen or heard of them since a few years after he got out of Harvard, when he had asked them to lend him some money with which to revisit the Indian reservations in North Dakota and they had refused. However, he finally got up his nerve and called them collect. One of them accepted the call and listened to him for about a minute while he tried in a roundabout way to find out what he wanted to know, and then interrupted him and said that she couldn't imagine what he was leading up to but that, whatever it was, she didn't want to hear it and that if he ever called her or her sister again she would put the police on him. Two or three nights later, lying in bed unable to sleep, he recalled an elderly woman, reputed to be very rich, whom he had once met at a party on Washington Square and with whom he had had a pleasant conversation about Edgar Allan Poe, and he decided that
she
might be the woman. In the morning, after a chain of telephone calls, he found out that she was dead. Next, he got it in his head that it might be some woman who had become interested in him through reading the Profile and that I knew who she was, and he came to me and asked me for her name. He demanded her name. Years later, quite by chance, I did find out who the woman was, and went to see her and had a talk with her, but at that time I didn't know who she was, and I told Gould so. He went away unconvinced and returned a few days later with a long letter that he had written to the woman. He wanted me to read it and send it on to her. The letter had a preamble, all in capitals, which read, “
A RESPECTFUL COMMUNICATION FROM JOE GOULD TO HIS UNKNOWN PATRON (WHO WILL BE CHERISHED BY POSTERITY FOR HER GENEROSITY TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ORAL HISTORY WHETHER SHE CHOOSES TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS OR NOT) PROPOSING THAT INSTEAD OF 60 DOLLARS MONTHLY SHE GIVE HIM A LUMP SUM OF 720 DOLLARS YEARLY THE PRINCIPAL ARGUMENT BEING THAT THIS WOULD PERMIT HIM TO GO ABROAD AND LIVE IN FRANCE OR ITALY WHERE BY EXERCISING A LITTLE PRUDENCE WHICH HE IS FULLY PREPARED TO DO THE MONEY WOULD GO TWICE AS FAR
.” It seemed to me that Gould's purpose in writing this letter was to provoke the woman into some kind of communication with him, no matter what, and this alarmed me. I urged him to tear the letter up and forget about lump sums and living abroad, and all the rest of it, or the woman might hear that he was already complaining and get annoyed and cut the money off. If he went ahead and finished the Oral History, or at least got some work done on it, I said, maybe she would come forth and make herself known to him. He told me to stop giving him advice; he could handle his own affairs. Then, a moment later, an agonized look appeared on his face and he exclaimed, “I'd almost rather know who she is than have the money!” He stopped talking until he had got control of himself. “How would you feel,” he went on presently, “if you knew that somewhere out in the world there was a woman who cared enough about you not to want you to starve to death but at the same time for some reason of her own didn't want to have anything to do with you and didn't even want you to know who she was?” He watched me craftily. “A woman who had an illegitimate baby when she was young and hated the father of it and let it be adopted might behave that way,” he said, “if she got to be old and rich and respectable and suddenly found out by reading a Profile in
The New Yorker
that the baby was now a middle-aged man living in poverty on the Bowery.” He paused for a moment. “I know I sound crazy,” he continued, “but when I was a boy I used to daydream that I had been adopted, and lately I've been having those daydreams all over again.” He left the letter on my desk and went away, and a few days later he returned and retrieved it and took it up to Mrs. Marquié and asked her to read it and send it on to the woman. Mrs. Marquié had always been gentle with Gould, but at this point she spoke sharply to him, and something she said must have brought him to his senses, for from that time on he kept his curiosity about his patron to himself.

Not long after this, Gould stopped coming to my office (I had begun forwarding letters to him at the Maison Gerard), and I lost track of him for a while. I saw him around the middle of June. During the next six months, for one reason or another, I spent more time out of New York City than in it, and I didn't see him again until one afternoon in December. On that afternoon, I was walking past the Jefferson Diner when I heard the peremptory sound of metal rapping on glass, and looked up and saw Gould staring out at me from a booth in the diner and rapping on the window with a coin to get my attention. I went in and sat down with him. “Hold on to yourself and don't faint,” he said, “and I'll buy you a cup of coffee.”

It was the same booth we had sat in when I had my first talk with him. His face and hands were as dirty as ever, but his color was good and his eyes were clear and he had put on a little weight. As usual, he had on a suit that was a size or two too big for him. It was somebody's castoff—the ruins of a suit—but it was well cut and it was made of some kind of expensive, Scottish-looking material, and it had been a good suit in its time. He even had on the vest. He wore a hat whose sides were deeply dented and whose brim was turned up on one side and down on the other. It was an extraordinarily rakish hat, and almost any veteran Villager could have identified it at a glance; it was one of E. E. Gummings's old hats. I told Gould that he looked the best I had ever seen him, and I was surprised at the smugness of his response.

“Oh, I'm doing all right,” he said, smiling complacently. “I'm doing fine. I didn't much care for the Maison Gerard at first, or the Maison G., as the inmates call it—it's too out-of-the-way, the food is too starchy, and the stairs are a damned nuisance—but I've gotten used to it. In fact, I'm quite happy there. I come down to the Village and make the rounds the same as ever and scratch around for contributions to the Joe Gould Fund, but it isn't a life-and-death matter any longer. I've even stopped bothering with some people—the dime ones and the maybe-tomorrow ones. I just hit the ones I'm sure of, and I don't hit them as often as I used to. A peculiar thing has happened. I thought I'd be ruined in the Village if the news got out that I had a patron who was paying for my room and board, and I tried to keep it under my hat, but I couldn't; I told a few of my friends and they told others, and one by one all of them found it out, and what do you know—instead of reducing the amount of their contributions or refusing to give me anything at all anymore, they've become far more generous than they used to be. People who used to give me a quarter and give it grudgingly now give me fifty cents, and sometimes even a dollar, and give it willingly. You know the old fundamental rule: ‘Them as has gits.' Sometimes, these days, I have three, four, five, six, seven dollars in my pocket. I don't bum cigarettes any longer, let alone smoke picked-up butts; I buy my own. Sometimes I even drop in a place and order a drink and pay for it myself. And I'm taking better care of myself. Most mornings, if I don't have a hangover, I get up around eleven and have a big breakfast, and then I walk up to the main branch of the Public Library and read the papers or look up something, or I might go to a few exhibitions in the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street and see if there are any good nudes, or I might take a run up to the Metropolitan or the Frick or the Museum of Natural History or the Museum of the American Indian, or I might just walk around the streets. After a while, I go back to the Maison G. and lie down for an hour or so, and then I have an early dinner, and then I get on the subway and go down to the Village. I knock around the Village until the bars close at 4
A
.
M
. and everybody goes home, and then I head on back to the Maison G. Compared to the way things used to be, I'm living the life of a millionaire.” He hummed the tune of a bitter old Bessie Smith song and then sang a few words. “‘Once I lived the life of a millionaire,'” he sang in his squeaky, old-Yankee voice. “‘Spending my money, I didn't care.…'

“Of course,” he went on, “there's one thing I
do
keep under my hat, and that's the fact that I don't know who my patron is. I don't give a damn anymore who she is, but I have my pride. People keep asking me, and I tell them I'm not allowed to say. It's a famous name, I tell them, and they'd recognize it if I mentioned it—one of the richest women in the world. I call her Madame X, and I hint that I have the inside track with her. You know how bohemians are. They profess to disdain money, but they lose all control of themselves and go absolutely berserk at the slightest indication of the remotest hint of the faintest trace of a smell of it. Ever since the word got out that I have a patron, and not only that, a
woman
patron, and not only that, a
rich
woman patron, the poets and the painters have been getting me aside and buying me drinks and asking me to tell Madame X about their work. I try to be as helpful as I can. ‘Let me have a few of your best poems,' I say if it's a poet, or ‘Let me have a few of your best sketches,' I say if it's a painter, ‘and I'll take them up and show them to Madame X the next time I go up to see her in her huge town house just off Park Avenue.' I take the poems or the sketches up to my room at the Maison G. and put them on the dresser and leave them there for a week or two, and then I take them back to the genius who produced them. ‘Madame X looked at your work,' I tell him, ‘and she asked me to thank you very much for letting her look at it.' ‘But what did she say about it?' the genius asks. ‘She strictly forbade me to tell you,' I say, ‘but we've been friends for a long time, and I know you too well and respect you too much to lie to you, and I'm going to tell you exactly what she said. She said that she couldn't detect the slightest sign of any talent whatsoever in your work, and she said she feels it would be very wrong of her to encourage you in any way.'”

Gould's eyes flashed, and he giggled. “Oh,” he said, “I've put quite a few people in their places that way. I've settled quite a few old scores that way.”

I found myself getting annoyed with Gould, not because of his gloating over the settling of old scores—that was all right with me; I believe in revenge—but because of his general air of self-satisfaction, and I asked him a malicious question. “How are you getting along on the Oral History?” I asked.

“Fine!” he said, not batting an eye. “I'm making a lot of progress on it.” His portfolio was beside him in the booth, and he patted it. “I've added an enormous number of words to it lately,” he said. “It's growing by leaps and bounds.”