Rabo Karabekian and Dan Gregory

Rabo Karabekian and Dan Gregory’s relationship is at once an apprenticeship in exacting realism and a struggle over who has the authority to define artistic life. Gregory gives Rabo a place in his household and studio, but his standards turn instruction into judgment: when Rabo completes a meticulously accurate painting, Gregory burns it and declares that it has no soul. Their later rupture, triggered by Rabo and Marilee’s visit to the Museum of Modern Art, converts Gregory’s unspoken hierarchy of artistic loyalty into an explicit demand—and leaves Rabo to begin life outside his protection.

Apprenticeship and the Realist Ideal

As Gregory’s apprentice, Rabo develops both practical skill and a painstaking command of observed detail. He learns the quickest routes across Manhattan while running errands for Gregory, and expands his vocabulary by learning the names and functions of parts of organisms and artifacts. The most ambitious proof of his progress is a carefully accurate painting of Gregory’s studio, completed in six months. In it, materials retain their specific identities: bone, fur, hair, dust, soot, wool, cotton, walnut, oak, horsehide, cowhide, iron, and steel are each rendered as what they are. Even droplets of water falling from the skylight contain, in miniature, the whole studio.

The painting’s precision seems to confirm Rabo’s belief that discipline can be converted into achievement. Gregory’s first response, “Not bad, not bad,” briefly sounds like recognition. Rabo imagines that his success has changed their relationship: like Robinson Crusoe discovering another person on his island, Gregory must now reckon with the apprentice as an independent presence. But Gregory immediately turns praise into a verdict. “Not bad,” he says, can also mean disappointing or worse.

Judgment, Destruction, and Artistic Difference

Before Rabo can answer, Gregory puts the painting on the glowing coals in the fireplace. Six months of work disappear at once. Asked what is wrong with it, Gregory replies, “No soul.” The destruction exposes the limit of the apprenticeship: accurate imitation, however laborious, cannot satisfy Gregory’s conception of art if it does not carry the artist’s own inner life.

Rabo understands why the criticism is not simply arbitrary. Gregory’s own pictures, for all the possibility that their artistic spectrum may later seem dated, are animated by his particular loves, hates, and neutralities. Rabo imagines them as a three-dimensional likeness of Gregory, a kind of portrait that would persist even if a viewer could pass a hand through it. The standard Gregory invokes is therefore also a self-portrait: he expects painting to disclose the personality of its maker. Yet he does not nurture Rabo toward that independence. He enforces the standard by destroying the apprentice’s work, leaving Rabo to absorb both the lesson and the wound of its delivery.

The Forbidden Museum and the Break

In 1936, Gregory catches Rabo and Marilee leaving the Museum of Modern Art. A Saint Patrick’s Day parade has stopped Gregory’s convertible Cord outside the museum; Fred Jones is driving, and Gregory is with him. The chance encounter makes a private breach public. Rabo and Marilee have entered a place Gregory had forbidden, and they emerge together, apparently still holding hands and happy.

Gregory frames the prohibition as a test of allegiance rather than a practical restriction. He calls Rabo and Marilee ungrateful and says that his request had been simple: “Never go into the Museum of Modern Art.” The museum’s contents are not, he insists, the point. His rule was symbolic proof that they belonged to his side and were proud of their membership in his group. He is especially hurt not merely that they went in, but that they seemed happy as they came out. Their pleasure becomes, in his account, a mockery of him and of everyone who has tried to control a paintbrush.

The scene joins their personal disobedience to their artistic difference. Rabo notes that many works in the museum had been painted before the First World War, before he and Marilee were born; what counts as modern art is itself subject to changing standards of reception. Gregory’s fury is thus not resolved by the museum’s age or by a debate over the quality of its pictures. He treats attendance as a declaration of loyalty, making the act of looking elsewhere a challenge to his authority.

Expulsion and the Limits of the Paternal Bond

Gregory describes himself as having treated Rabo like a son and Marilee like a daughter. That familial language reveals the terms of his attachment: he has offered care and belonging, but expects gratitude and obedience in return. Rabo and Marilee’s bond with each other and their independent visit become intolerable not simply as private choices but as evidence that they may no longer accept Gregory’s definition of their place in his household and artistic circle.

Gregory announces that Fred will drive him to City Island, where his yacht, the Ararat, is in dry dock. He says he will live aboard until Fred can assure him that Rabo and Marilee have left the house on Forty-eighth Street and that every trace of their presence has been removed. His response turns rejection into a staged withdrawal: rather than remain in the home with the two younger people, he chooses the yacht and requires their complete departure. The master of meticulous realism is willing to take up residence aboard a vessel in dry dock, reaching it by ladder and relying on a boatyard’s facilities.

Marilee understands the practical imbalance in their situation. She tells Rabo that she has some money saved, enough to support him for a week or two, but that she herself must stay while he leaves. Her imagined opera casts them as a great painter’s worldly mistress and apprentice, discovered and expelled into the world; she predicts that her love and advice will make the boy a great painter, but that they will freeze to death. Rabo later judges that this is close to what would have happened. Her warning gives the separation its immediate human consequence: Gregory’s household has provided Rabo with shelter, and independence begins not as a triumph but as an uncertain departure.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship’s central contradiction is that Gregory recognizes artistic personality as essential while denying Rabo room to establish one on his own terms. His verdict on the studio painting distinguishes technical accuracy from artistic soul, and his destruction of the work makes that distinction an exercise of power. The later museum confrontation repeats the pattern in personal form: Gregory’s demand is presented as a measure of loyalty, but its deeper force is to keep Rabo’s choices within the master’s authority.

The apprentice’s break therefore joins two departures: from Gregory’s household and from the security of being judged by Gregory alone. The novel’s account does not reduce Gregory’s criticism to an empty insult; Rabo acknowledges the force of Gregory’s own art. Instead, it shows how a potentially serious artistic standard becomes entangled with possession, paternal authority, and exclusion. Rabo must leave before the question of what his own art can contain is settled.