It had begun some months before in Manhattan at the junction of three streams-a job, a girl, and a most noble lost cause. The job involved preparation of a thesis that would win Brian Cudahy a master’s degree in history from Columbia University. The girl was Kitty Bazerian, who rolls her belly in Chelsea nightclubs as Alexandra the Great. The noble lost cause, one of the noblest, one of the most utterly lost, was the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia.
I first saw Brian Cudahy on a Saturday morning. My mail had just arrived, and I was sitting in my living room sorting it. I receive a tremendous amount of mail. I’m on hundreds of mailing lists and I subscribe to a great many periodicals, and my mail carrier detests me. I live on 107th Street a few doors west of Broadway. My neighbors are transients and addicts and students and Orientals and actors and harlots, six classes of people who get little in the way of mail. Bills from Con Ed and the telephone company, slingers from the supermarkets, quarterly messages from their congressman, little else. I, on the other hand, burden my mailman with a sack of paper garbage every day.
My bell rang. I pressed a buzzer to admit my caller into the building. He climbed four flights of stairs and hesitated in the hallway. I waited, and he knocked, and I opened the door.
“Tanner?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Brian Cudahy. I called you last night-”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Come in.” He seated himself in the rocking chair. “Coffee?”
“If it’s no trouble.”
I made instant coffee in the kitchen and brought back two cups. He was looking all over the apartment. I suppose it’s a little unusual. People have said that it looks more like a library than an apartment. There are four rooms besides the kitchen and the bath, and in each room the walls are done in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, almost all of which are full. Beyond that, there’s rather little in the way of furniture. I’ve a large bed in one room, a very large writing desk in another, a few chairs scattered here and there, and a small dresser in still another room, and that’s about all. I don’t find the place unusual at all, myself. When one is a compulsive reader and researcher and when one has a full twenty-four hours a day at his disposal, not having to allot eight for sleep and eight for work, one certainly ought to have plenty of books on hand.
“Is the coffee all right?”
“Oh!” He looked up, startled. “Yes, of course. I…uh…I’m going to need your help. Mr. Tanner.”
He was about twenty-four, I guessed. Clean-cut, bright-faced, short-haired, with an air of incipient success about him. He looked like a student but not at all like a scholar. An increasing number of such persons pursue graduate degrees these days. Industry considers a bachelor’s degree indispensable and, by a curious extension, regards master’s degrees and doctorates as a way of separating the men from the boys. I don’t understand this. Why should a Ph.D. awarded for an extended essay on color symbolism in the poetry of Pushkin have anything to do with a man’s competence to develop a sales promotion campaign for a manufacturer of ladies’ underwear?
“My thesis is due the middle of next month,” Cudahy was saying. “I can’t seem to get anywhere on it. And I heard that you…you were recommended as-”
“As one who writes theses?”
He nodded.
“What’s your field?” I asked.
“History.”
“You’ve a topic already assigned, of course.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
He swallowed. “Sort of offbeat, I’m afraid.”
“Good.”
“Excuse me?”
“Offbeat topics are the best. What’s yours?”
“The Turkish persecutions of Armenians during the late nineteenth century and immediately before and after the First World War.” He grinned. “Don’t ask me how I got saddled with that one. I can’t figure it out, myself. Do you know anything about the subject, Mr. Tanner?”
“Yes.”
“You do?” He was incredulous. “Honestly?”
“I know a great deal about it,” I said.
“Then can you…uh…write the thesis?”
“Probably. Have you done anything on it to date?”
“I have notes here-”
“Notes that you’ve shown an instructor or just your own work?”
“No one’s seen anything yet. I’ve had some oral conferences with my instructor but nothing very important.”
I waved his briefcase aside. “Then I’d rather not see your notes,” I told him. “I find it easier to start fresh if you don’t mind.”
“You’ll do it?”
“For seven hundred fifty dollars.”
His face clouded. “That seems high. I don’t-”
“A master’s degree is worth an extra fifteen hundred to industry the first year. That’s minimal. I’m charging you half your first year’s differential. If you try to haggle, the price goes up, not down.”
“It’s a deal.”
“This is for Columbia, you said?”
“Yes.”
“And your grades have been-”
“B average.”
“All right. About a hundred-page thesis? And you want it the middle of next month?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have it. Call me in three weeks, and I’ll let you know how it’s coming along.”
“Three weeks.”
“Don’t call before then. And I’ll want half the money now, if it’s all the same to you.”
“I don’t have it on me. Can I bring it this afternoon?”
“You do that,” I said.
He was back at two that afternoon with $375 in cash. He was just a little reluctant to part with it-I don’t think because he would miss the money so much but because this made the deal firm, committed him to a plan that he knew very well was morally reprehensible. He was purchasing his master’s degree. It would be a big status thing for him, that master’s, and he’d have gotten it unfairly, and it would always bother him a little, and he knew as much already. But he handed me the money, and I took it, and we both sealed our pact with the devil.
“I suppose you’ve done lots of theses,” he said.
“Quite a number.”
“Many in history?”
“Yes. And a good number in English, and a few in sociology and economics. And some other things.”
“What did you do your own on?”
“My own?”
“Your master’s and doctorate.”
“I don’t even have a bachelor’s,” I told him truthfully. “I joined the Army the day I left high school. Korea. I never did go to college.”
He found this extraordinary. He talked about how easy it would be for me to go through college and walk off with highest honors. “It would be a snap for you. Why, you could write your thesis with no sweat. The exams, the whole routine. It would be nothing for you.”
“Exactly,” I said.
Cudahy’s thesis was a very simple matter. I already knew quite a good deal about the Terrible Turk and the Starving Armenians. My library contained all the basic texts on the subject and more than a few lesser-known works, including several in Armenian. I speak Armenian, but reading it is a chore. The alphabet is unfamiliar and the construction tedious. I also had an almost complete file of the publications in English of the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia. Biased though they were, the League’s pamphlets could not fail to impress in a bibliography.
It was pleasant work. Research is a joy, especially when one is not burdened with an excessive reverence for the truth. By inventing an occasional source and injecting an occasional spurious footnote, one softens the harsh curves in the royal road of scholarship. I studied, I ate, I worked out at the 110th Street Gym, I read, I kept up my correspondence, and I developed Cudahy’s thesis with little difficulty.
I narrowed his topic somewhat, focusing on the Armenian Nationalist movements that had in large part provoked the Turkish massacres. Hunchak and Daschnak, organized in 1885 and 1890 respectively, had worked to develop a national consciousness and pressed for liberation from the Ottoman Empire. The minor Kurdish massacre of 1894 led to an absorbing parade of Big Power manipulations and was followed a year later by Abdu-l-Hamid’s mammoth slaughter of eighty thousand Armenians.
But it was during World War I, when Turkey fought on the Axis side and feared her Armenian subjects as a potential fifth column, that the Armenian massacres reached their height and the phrase “Starving Armenians” found its way into our language. In mid-1915 the Turks went berserk. In one community after another the Armenian population was uprooted, men and women and children were massacred indiscriminately, and those who were not put to the sword either fled the country or quietly starved.
After the war the Soviets took Armenia proper, establishing an Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The areas that remained Turkish had largely lost their Armenian population. The last large concentration of Armenians to suffer en masse were those in the city of Smyrna, now Izmir. The Greeks seized the town in the Greco-Turkish War that followed close upon the signing of the armistice. When Ataturk recaptured Smyrna, the city was burned, and the Greeks and Armenians were systematically destroyed. An earthquake further reduced the city in 1928, but by that time there were few Armenians left in it.
Smyrna, then, was an afterthought, a sort of footnote to the whole business. My main focus was on the Nationalist movements, their organization, their development, their aims, and their ultimate effects. I expected to finish the thesis well ahead of schedule and I expected to go no further with the study of the destruction of Smyrna. But I had not then met Kitty or her grandmother.
Kitty and I met at a wedding in the Village. My friend Owen Morgan was being married to a Jewish girl from White Plains. Owen is a Welsh poet with no discernible talent who had discovered that one could make a fair living by drinking an impressive amount, spouting occasional poetry, seducing every comely female within reach, and generally behaving like the shade of Dylan Thomas. He startled me by asking me to be his best man, an office I had never before performed. So I stood up for him in a drab loft on Sullivan Street at the ceremony performed by a priest friendly to the Catholic Workers. Neither of them was Catholic, but Owen had lived at the CW settlement on Christie Street for a few months before he discovered the potential of the Dylan Thomas bit. (I’m a member of the Catholic Workers myself, although I don’t give them as much of my time as I probably should. They’re a wonderful organization.) I stood up for Owen and passed him the ring at the appropriate time, and afterward Kitty Bazerian danced at his wedding.
She was small and slender and dark, with fine black hair and huge brown eyes. She stood demurely, garbed in a wisp of diaphanous fluff, and someone said, “Now Kitty Bazerian will dance for us,” and the house band from the New Life Restaurant began to play, and her body sang in the center of the improvised stage, music in motion, silk, velvet, perfection, adding a wholly new dimension to sensuality.
Afterward I found her at the bar, dressed now in skirt and sweater and black tights, which was about right for Owen’s wedding.
“Alexandra the Great,” I said.
“Who told you? They promised not to say.”
“I recognized you myself.”
“Honestly?”
“I’ve watched you dance at the New Life. And at the Port Said before that.”
“And you recognized me right away?”
“Of course. I never knew that Alexandra the Great was an Armenian.”
“A starving Armenian right about now. Aren’t they having anything to eat?”
“It would spoil Owen’s image.”
“I suppose we have to respect his image. But I already had too much to drink and I’m starving.”
“May it never be said that Evan Tanner let an Armenian starve. Why don’t we get out of here?”
We did. I suggested the Sayat Nova at Bleecker and Charles. She asked me why I was so very hipped on Armenians. I told her I was writing a thesis on Armenia.
“You’re a student?”
“No, I’m just writing a thesis.”
“I don’t…wait a minute, you’re Evan Tanner! Sure, Owen told me about you. He says you’re crazier than he is.”
“He may be right.”
“And you’re writing about Armenians now? You ought to meet my grandmother. She could tell you all about how we lost the family fortunes. She makes a good story out of it. According to her, we were the richest Armenians in Turkey. Gold coins, she says; more gold coins than you could count. And now the Turks have it all.” She laughed. “Isn’t that always the way? Owen insists he’s a direct descendant of Owen Glendower and the rightful King of all of Wales. The Sayat Nova sounds fine, Evan. But I warn you, I’m going to be expensive. I’ll eat everything they’ve got.”
“I don’t remember what we had or how it tasted. There was a good red wine with the meal, but we got drunker on each other than on anything else. It does not happen often for me, the special magic, the perfect harmony. It happened this time.
She talked some about her dancing. I was delighted to discover that she had no higher ambitions. She did not want to become a ballerina, or get a guest shot on the Sullivan show, or found a new school of modern dance. She just wanted to go on dancing at the New Life for as long as they wanted her.
I, on the other hand, have many ambitions and I told her of them. “Someday,” I confided, “we’ll restore the House of Stuart to the English throne. The Jacobite movement has never entirely died out, you know. There are men in the Scottish Highlands who would rise at any moment to throw out those Hanoverian interlopers.”
“You’re putting me on-”
“Oh, no,” I said, wagging a finger at her. “The last reigning Stuart was Anne. She died in 1714 and they brought over a Hanoverian, a German. George I. And ever since that day the Germans have sat upon the English throne. If you think about it, it’s an outrage.”
“But the House of Stuart-”
“There have been attempts,” I said. “Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. All of Scotland rose to support him, but the French didn’t do all they were supposed to do, and nothing came of it. The English won the Battle of Culloden Moor and thought that was the end of it.” I paused significantly. “But they were wrong.”
“They were?”
“The House of Stuart has not died out, Kitty. There has always been a Stuart Pretender to the English throne, although some of them have worked harder at it than others. The current Pretender is Rupert. Someday he’ll reign as Rupert I, after Betty Saxe-Coburg and her German court have been routed.”
“Betty Saxe-Coburg…oh, Elizabeth, of course. And who is Rupert?”
“He’s a Bavarian crown prince.”
She looked at me for a long moment and then began to laugh. “Oh, that’s beautiful! That’s priceless, Evan. I love it!”
“Do you?”
“Replacing the…the German usurpers with…oh, it’s great…with the crown prince of Bavaria-”
“The true English claimant.”
“I love it. Oh, sign me up, Evan. It’s better than a Barbara Stanwyck movie. Oh, it’s grand. I love it!”
And outside, a breeze playing with her marvelous black hair, she said, “I live with my mother and my grandmother, so that’s out. Do you have a place we can go to?”
“Yes.”
“But Owen said something about you not sleeping. I mean-”
“I don’t, but I have a bed.”
“How sweet of you,” she said, taking my arm, “to have a bed.”