Being Refined

Being refined is a very nice thing, and I have had some happy times noticing refinement in the members of my family, most of whom, especially those who were born in the old country, in Bitlis, finally learned that vocal modulation, for instance, constituted one of the many signs of being refined. Shouting was all right in the family, but out among Americans and people like that it was always a good idea to modulate the voice, at least until you found out that the Americans themselves weren't very refined, which my Uncle Shag seemed to be finding out all the time.

Another good sign of being refined was to look at a painting and not have your mouth hanging open in wonder because the fruit on the plate seemed so real you wanted to reach out and take some, which was pretty much the way paintings were appreciated by the immigrants who had only recently arrived in America.

Still another good idea was not to ask priests difficult questions about God, or biology, or about a stick becoming a snake, or a body of water dividing itself so that there would be a dry road running through it, or a dead man coming to life. Asking such questions really didn't demonstrate that you were an intelligent man, or that you had safely emerged from the Dark Ages, or that you knew how to think for yourself; all it seemed to do was make refined people look at you sideways, cockeyed-like, by which they meant that you must be some sort of unrefined person, all of your success as a lawyer, for instance, and all of your wealth notwithstanding. In the presence of music you hated, something classical by Ethelbert Nevin, being played on the piano by somebody's wife, accompanied by somebody else's daughter on the cello, it was not a sign of refinement to blurt out, "Can't you play something lively, like Dari Lolo?"" Or if somebody you had just met looked ill, worn-out from worry of some sort, sunk in spirit, it was not courteous to say, "What's the matter with you? Why don't you stand up straight?"

Shag, or as he had it in full on his card and on the door of his office, Arshag Bashmanian, by the time he was 55 and all the rest of us were in our early 20s, had picked up a wide variety of pointers, as he put it, on how to be refined; and whenever it was in order to demonstrate his refinement, he hardly ever failed to do so.

The year his first daughter, named by her mother Genevieve because the name was refined, became engaged to an American boy named Edmund Armbruster who was a premed student in San Francisco, Arshag was obliged to drive there from Fresno, so that Mr. and Mrs. Armbruster, the boy's father and mother, could meet Arshag and his wife Shushanik, who had a wide circle of friends disciplined to calling her Susan because Shushanik just wouldn't do. And of course the Armbrusters were dying to have a look at the girl their boy had fallen in love with.

Taking his wife and daughter in the Cadillac to San Francisco didn't appeal to Shag, so he asked me to sit up front with him, while they sat in the back, where they belonged, and somehow I wasn't able to get out of it.

"Be in front of your house at five minutes to six," he said. "I'll pick you up, and we'll go right on."

"Isn't that a little early? It's only a five-hour drive, with one stop for gasoline, comfort, and maybe a cup of coffee."

"The earlier we start the better," Shag said. "I've always believed that."

"Are they expecting you at ten in the morning?"

"Well, don't argue," Shag said. "Don't argue about everything. Just be in front of your house in your best suit at five minutes to six, and I'll pick you up."

"How long will we be gone?"

"Well, we don't know yet. These people want to see if I pass the inspection. If I do, that will be that, and we'll come right back. If I don't, we'll come back the next day. If you ask me, I think they're going to have a very pleasant little surprise for themselves. I suppose they think we're country people. I don't suppose they expect to see somebody like me, in the kind of clothes I wear, driving a Cadillac."

"OK, I'll be standing there."

"A white shirt, a tie, and shine your shoes. And when we get up there and go into their house, don't all of a sudden say, 'I'm so hungry I could eat a horse,' or hint around that you want them to give us lunch. I think they'll give us lunch anyway."

"OK."

"And if any of their women—besides the boy, I think they've got two daughters—are beautiful, just compliment them in a nice way, and if they like it and start flirting, flirt back, but politely."

"OK."

"I don't like the idea of driving two hundred miles to have some people I don't know inspect me, but what are you going to do (continued on page 187)Being Refined (continued from page 113) when you've got a daughter who's in love and a wife who wants her daughter to marry into the best possible family? You've got to go, that's all. What kind of a father would I be if I wouldn't do my daughter and my wife a little favor like that? I've met the boy, Bobby, and he's got class, there's no question about that, and if his people are anything like him, they've got class, too."

"Isn't his name Edmund?"

"Is that what it is? Well, anyway, he's a nice boy, a slow boy, slow in the head, but nice. Every time he said Bashmanian, I almost didn't know what he was saying. He took toolong. It's not a complicated name, all you've got to do is say Bashmanian, not Bash Man Ian. But Jenny thinks she loves him, so maybe she does, so maybe you better go get a haircut, too, and be sure to shave real neat. Here's fifty cents for the haircut, give the barber a dime tip, keep the rest."

"OK."

I didn't get a haircut, but I did all the other things he said, and I was in front of my house at five minutes to six. Less than two minutes later the big sky-blue Cadillac drew up and I got in and sat beside him. His wife and daughter looked very nice in their new dresses and coats, and Shag himself looked all right, too. He was wearing everything. Diamond stickpin in his tie. Silk handkerchief in his jacket. Gold watch chain across the vest, gold watch attached to the chain. Red rose in the lapel buttonhole. Haircut, shampoo, manicure, shoeshine, Sen-Sen in his mouth—the damned smell nearly knocked me over.

We stopped for gas, comfort and coffee in Modesto, and we were in San Francisco at a quarter to eleven. At four minutes to eleven the Cadillac drew up in front of the house, which was in a neighborhood called Seacliff, where only rich people could afford to live, or as Shag put it, "They've got money all right, but let me tell you something. I can buyand sell them any day in the week, and don't ever forget it."

"Poppa," his daughter said. "Please don't talk that way. Just, please, forget that they've got money and that we've got money."

"All right, honey, for your sake I'll let it go this time, but I don't want these people putting on a lot of airs with me. I'm Arshag Bashmanian, who the hell do they think they are? Three-car garage. Why three? Why not make the whole house a garage?"

"Poppa, please."

"All right, all right, don't worry about your father."

The door was opened by a rather handsome woman in her late 40s, and from the expression of surprise on Shag's face I was sure he imagined that this was the mother of the boy his daughter had fallen in love with. He had never before visited anybody who had had a servant.

"Yes?" she said.

"Are you sure this is the right address?" Shag said to his daughter, who instead of answering him said to the woman, "I'm Genevieve Bashmanian, and this is my father, and my mother, and my cousin."

"Oh, yes, of course," the woman said. "Won't you please come in and sit down."

Well, the place was really swank. It was certainly the swankest place I had ever walked into, but it gave Shag an awful pain, because by comparison his mansion on Van Ness Avenue in Fresno was a remodeled barn full of Grand Rapids furniture and an original oil painting for which he had paid $1000 by somebody named Gaston Voillard, 1874—a meaningless landscape in dull colors. Three years before when Shag had asked me over to the house to see how a successful man was entitled to live, so that it would be a lesson to me, he showed me the picture, told me how much he had paid for it, and then said, "This Gaston Voillard, 1874, he's one of the greatest painters, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is," I said.

Encouraged by my lie, Shag then said, "For God's sake, look at that picture, will you? Look at those leaves on those trees. The man's a genius. I wouldn't take five thousand dollars for that picture, if you want to know the truth."

But of course I didn't want to know the truth, so the conversation collapsed and we went to the little bar just off the kitchen, where he poured each of us a drink of raki.

Well, on the walls of the room in which we were now sitting there was an original Cézanne, an original Matisse and an original Picasso. Shag looked from one to the other, and then at me. He leaned his head over slowly to the right, and at the same time lifted his eyebrows, by which he meant, "What kind of cockeyed paintings do you call those?"

Soon the father, the mother, the son and a daughter of 11 came into the room. They were nice people, very gracious, very warm, and yet somehow in spite of everything, even in spite of the fine paintings they owned, they seemed to lack something. I really didn't know what it was, but it was a rather large thing. I suppose it might have been wit of some kind, or maybe health of some kind, or maybe humor. At any rate, it was impossible to be really at ease with them.

The boy's mother said lunch would be at one, and she would be terribly let down if we had made other plans. As a matter of fact, she would insist that we change our plans. In the meantime, perhaps we'd like to see the rest of the house, and then the garden, and after that we might enjoy taking a short drive up to the Legion of Honor Palace to see the new show.

"What kind of a show is it?" Shag said, as if it just might unaccountably be burlesqueor something, in which case he would let these people know he didn't take his women to places like that.

"Well, it's the Second Winter Invitational, and I think even better than the first, which was an enormous success."

Shag looked at me, so I said, "California painters?"

"Well, actually, Northern California painters."

"Oh, paintings," Shag said. "Sure, let's go see 'em."

And so first we saw the house, and then the garden, and every bit of each burned hell out of Shag, and then we were all asked to get in the chauffeur-driven Rolls, but Shag said, "No, let's not all of us try to get into one car. I'll drive up with my nephew."

"Just follow us, then," the father of the boy said, "unless you know the way."

Following the Rolls, Shag said, "What do you think?"

"They're nice people all right."

"No, I don't mean them. What do you think of the impression I've made so far?"

"So far it's been pretty good, I must say."

"Voice modulated, smiles, politeness?"

"Yes, you showed them all those things all right."

"I'll show them plenty more, too."

At the museum the Second Winter Invitational wasn't bad, although not much good, either, mainly a lot of stuff without any style of any kind, most of it experimental and messy. Not one picture like the one painted by Gaston Voillard, 1874.

"Shall we look at the permanent collection as well?" the mother asked.

Shag said, "Why not?"

Well, it was the older stuff, an El Greco, a Rembrandt, a Rubens, but none of it especially exciting, certainly not to Shag; but then in the first of the five small rooms just off the main hall, to the left, there was a painting that really impressed him. Years later I made a point of going back and getting the name of the thing, and of the painter. His name was Jean Marc Nattier, French, 1685—1766, and the name of the picture was The Duchess of Chateauroux as Thalia, Muse of Comedy. It was a rather big picture of this pretty girl whose right breast was delightfully exposed. It was as big as life, very white, with a nipple the size and color of a pink rosebud. The girl's face had a twinkle to it, as of mischief. All around her were foldings of dark velvet, and in the background was a small stage with actors upon it.

We all stopped in front of the picture, and after a moment Shag said, "My goodness, that girl's chest is so real you could reach out and touch it."

Lunch was soup, fish, meat, raspberries with ice cream and coffee.

Somewhere near the end of lunch there was a moment of silence, whereupon Shag said, "I don't think I've ever seen anything more real than that girl's chest."

Less than an hour after lunch we got back into the Cadillac, and Shag began to drive back to Fresno. He had been refined every minute he had been with the elegant people. He had worked very hard at it, saying, for instance, my goodness, and chest, for instance, but what is a man to do about a daughter? A daughter is always a lot of trouble, and now all of a sudden she was crying.

The upshot of the whole thing was that the engagement was slowly broken, or possibly it was simply permitted by time and silence to fade away, and a year later Genevieve married a poor but ambitious boy, by whom she now has four sons and three daughters.

As for Shag, one day he said, "I never did like those Armstrongs."

"Isn't the name Armbruster?"

"That's exactly what I mean. There's such a thing as a name like Armstrong, but whoever heard of a name like Armbruster? Those people were phonies. They weren't really refined. They were performing, like those little trained dogs at vaudeville shows, and one thing I can't stand is a lousy performance."