Joe Gould's Secret Read online

  “Are you going to give me the contribution?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  I gave him the money he wanted. He didn’t thank me but said what he usually said when someone gave him a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund—“This will come in handy.” Then he went over and sat in the swivel chair and put his portfolio on the floor at his feet. “You said you had some questions you wanted to ask me,” he said.

  “I did have,” I said, “but I don’t now. There were some things I thought I wanted to know, but I guess I really don’t. Let’s just forget it.”

  A look of relief appeared on Gould’s face. Then, to my surprise, seeming to sense that I didn’t intend to go one bit further into the matter, he looked disappointed. I could see from his expression that he wanted very much to confide in me—it was that half-noble, half-fatuous expression that people put on when they have decided to bare their souls—and once again my attitude toward him changed. I became disgusted with him. I was doing my best to keep from unmasking him, and here he was doing his best to unmask himself. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I felt like saying to him. “Don’t lose your nerve now and start confessing and confiding. If you’ve pretended this long, the only decent thing you can do is to keep right on pretending as long as you live, no matter what happens.” Instead, I said, “Please forgive me, but you really must excuse me now. It’s getting late and I have some things I have to do.”

  This gave him the right to be huffy. “Oh,” he said, “I’m ready to go. I’ve been ready to go for what seems like hours, but you held me up. After all, I’ve got things to do myself.”

  He picked up his portfolio and walked out without saying goodbye.

  Fob quite a while after that, Gould distrusted me. He continued to come to see me, but nowhere near as often and never just to talk. He came only when he wanted a contribution to the Joe Gould Fund, and only, I suspect, when he was stony broke and couldn’t run down any of his old reliables. He walked in and asked for what he wanted in as few words as possible and got it or some part of it and then stood around awkwardly for a few minutes and then hurried off. Although he continued to use The New Yorker as his mail address, he stopped asking for his letters the moment he came in, and, to preserve his dignity, waited for me to give them to him. Hoping to make things easier for him, I began forwarding letters to him at the Minetta. However, as an excuse to see how he was getting along, I would occasionally let a few accumulate and then go by the Minetta and give them to him. The first few times I did this, I behaved as if nothing had happened, and sat down at his table as I always had, no matter whether he was alone or others were there, but I soon found that if others were there my presence made him ill at ease. If someone asked him something about the Oral History, or even brought it into the conversation, he would glance at me uneasily and try to change the subject. I think he was afraid that at any moment I might stand up and announce that there was no such thing as the Oral History, that it was all imagination and lies. I made him self-conscious; I got in his way; I cramped his style. From then on, I never sat down with him unless he was alone. If others sat down, I would look at my watch, and pretend to be surprised at how late it was, and leave. Then, one evening, Gould suddenly became his old self again. I was sitting at his table when a couple of tourists, a man and his wife, came over from the bar and asked him a question about the Oral History. Without glancing at me and without any hesitation, he started describing the Oral History for them, and in no time at all was comparing himself to Gibbon—speaking of what he called “the fortunate immediacy” of his position in relation to New York City as contrasted with what he called “the unfortunate remoteness” of Gibbon’s position in relation to the Roman Empire. I was greatly relieved to hear him talking like this, not only because I could see that he had got over his distrust of me but also because I could see that he had got his mask firmly back in place. Furthermore, I couldn’t help admiring his spirit. He was like some down-on-his-luck but still buoyant old confidence man. He put his heart into his act. Right before my eyes, he changed from a bummy-looking little red-eyed wreck of a barfly into an illustrious historian. And the most he could hope to get out of the tourists was a few drinks and a dollar or two.

  In the spring of the next year—the spring of 1944—a chance encounter that Gould had with an old acquaintance set some things in motion that made life easier for him for a while. Around eight o’clock one morning early in May, he left the Hotel Defender, at 300 Bowery, where he had spent the night, and started out on his daily round of soliciting contributions to the Joe Gould Fund. He was hungry, and he was suffering from a hangover, a bad case of conjunctivitis, and a bad cold. He intended to go first to the subway station at Sheridan Square and stand for an hour or so near the uptown entrance and waylay friends and acquaintances hurrying to work. On the way over, trying to pull himself together, he sat down on the steps of a tenement in one of the pushcart blocks on Bleecker Street. He threw his head back and started squirting some eye drops in his eyes, and at that moment a woman named Mrs. Sarah Ostrowsky Berman, who had come down to the pushcarts from her apartment on Union Square to buy some of the small, sweet Italian onions called cipollini, caught sight of him and impulsively went over and sat down beside him. Mrs. Berman was the wife of Levi Berman, the Yiddish poet, and she was a painter. She had come here from Russia when she was a girl, and while making a living sewing in sweatshops she had taught herself to paint. Although her paintings were awkward, they were imaginative and they had a hallucinatory quality, and they had been admired and highly praised by a number of people in the art world. She was a gentle, self-effacing woman, and somewhat other-worldly, and she was maternal but childless. She had often run into Gould at parties in the Village in the late twenties and early thirties and had had several long talks with him, but she had not seen him for years, and she was shocked by the changes that had taken place in him. She asked him how he was getting along on the Oral History, and he groaned and shook his head and indicated that he didn’t have the strength right then to talk about the Oral History. She asked him about his health, and he pulled up his pants legs and showed her some sores that had recently appeared on his legs. Mrs. Berman got a cab and took him to her apartment. She made some breakfast for him. She washed his feet and legs and put some medicine on his sores. She gave him some clean socks and a pair of her husband’s old shoes. She gave him some money. Then, after he had gone, she sat down and made a list of all the people she knew who had known Gould in the period in which she had known him, including some who had moved to other parts of the country or to Europe, and she spent the rest of the day writing impassioned letters to them.

  “Joe Gould is in bad shape,” she wrote in one of these letters. “He is using up time and energy he should be devoting to the Oral History running around all over town getting together enough dimes and quarters for the bare necessities, and it is killing him. I have always felt that the city’s unconscious may be trying to speak to us through Joe Gould. And that the people who have gone underground in the city may be trying to speak to us through him. And that the city’s living dead may be trying to speak to us through him. People who never belonged anyplace from the beginning. People sitting in those terrible dark barrooms. Poor old men and women sitting on park benches, hurt and bitter and crazy—the ones who never got their share, the ones who were always left out, the ones who were never asked. Sitting there and dreaming of killing everybody that passes by, even the little children. But there is a great danger that Joe Gould may never finish the Oral History and that those anonymous voices may never speak to us. Something must be done about him at once. If it isn’t, some morning soon he and a part of us will be found dead on the Bowery.…”

  Among the people Mrs. Berman wrote to were two old friends of hers who had once been married to each other and had been divorced—Erika Feist and John Rothschild. Miss Feist was a German-born woman who had come here in the early twenties and had become a painter. Rothschild was a N
ew Englander who had roomed with Malcolm Cowley for a while at Harvard and had got acquainted with Gould at a party in the Village soon after coming to New York City to make a living, and had been contributing to the Joe Gould Fund ever since. He was the director of a travel agency called The Open Road, Inc. One night a week or so later, Mrs. Berman received a long-distance call from Miss Feist, who, after her divorce, had moved from a studio in the Village to a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Miss Feist said that while she was married to Rothschild she had got to know and respect an old friend of his, a very reserved and very busy professional woman who was a member of a rich Middle Western family and had inherited a fortune and who sometimes anonymously helped needy artists and intellectuals, and that she had spoken to this woman about Gould. Independently of her, she said, Rothschild had also spoken to the woman about Gould. Miss Feist said that the woman had agreed to help Gould to the extent of sixty dollars a month. There were two conditions. First, Gould must never be told who the woman was or anything about her that might enable him to find out who she was. Second, some discreet and responsible person in New York City who knew Gould would have to receive the checks from the woman—they would come once a month—and disburse the money, passing it on to Gould in weekly installments and seeing to it that he spent it on room and board and not on liquor. It would have to be someone Gould respected and would heed. When Mrs. Berman heard this, she said, “Someone like Vivian Marquié,” and Miss Feist said, “Yes, exactly.” Mrs. Vivian Marquié was an old friend of Gould’s and the proprietor of an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street called the Marquié Gallery. As a young woman, she had been a social worker and had lived in the Village. She had met Gould at a party in 1925 or 1926 and had been helping him ever since. In recent years, she had been providing him with most of his clothes; she knew several men who were close to him in size, and she kept after them, and every now and then they gave her some of their old suits and shirts to give to him, He went to her gallery a couple of times a week for contributions to the Joe Gould Fund.

  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.”