"Kurt Vonnegut - Deadeye Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Louisville and Cleveland and so on, ostensibly to visit galleries and
painters' studios. The two of them also managed to get drunk, and to become darlings of the fanciest
whorehouses in the Middle West.

Was either one of them about to acknowledge that Father couldn't paint or draw for sour apples?

***



Who else was there to detect the fraud? Nobody. There wasn't anybody else in Midland City who cared
enough about art to notice if Father was gifted or not. He might as well have been a scholar of Sanskrit, as
far as the rest of the town was concerned.

Midland City wasn't a Vienna or a Paris. It wasn't even a St Louis or a Detroit. It was a Bucyrus. It was a
Kokomo.

Gunther's treachery was discovered, but too late. He and Father were arrested in Chicago after doing
considerable property damage in a whorehouse there, and Father was found to have gonorrhoea, and so
on. But Father was by then a fully committed, eighteen-year-old good-time Charley.

Gunther was denounced and fired and blacklisted. Grandfather and Grandmother Waltz were
tremendously influential citizens, thanks to Saint Elmo's Remedy. They spread the word that nobody of
quality in Midland City was ever to hire Gunther for cabinetwork or any other sort of work — ever again.


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Father was sent to relatives in Vienna, to have his gonorrhoea treated and to enrol in the world-famous
Academy of Fine Arts. While he was on the high seas, in a first-class cabin aboard the Lusitania, his
parents' mansion burned down. It was widely suspected that the showplace was torched by August
Gunther, but no proof was found.

Father's parents, rather than rebuild, took up residence in their thousand-acre farm out near
Shepherdstown —leaving behind the carriage house and a cellar hole.

This was in 1910 — four years before the outbreak of the First World War.

***



So Father presented himself at the Academy of Fine Arts with a portfolio of pictures he had created in
Midland City. I myself have examined some of the artwork of his youth, which Mother used to moon
over after he died. He was good at cross-hatching and shading a drapery, and August Gunther must have
been capable in those areas, too. But with few exceptions, everything Father depicted wound up looking
as though it were made of cement — a cement woman in a cement dress, walking a cement dog, a herd of
cement cattle, a cement bowl of cement fruit, set before a window with cement curtains, and so on.