Rabo Karabekian and Henri and Terry Steel

Rabo Karabekian’s relationship with his sons Henri and Terry is marked by estrangement rather than reconciliation. He acknowledges that they no longer speak to him and have legally adopted the surname of their stepfather, Roy Steel. Yet he leaves them his property and the enormous painting “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” tying inheritance to the restoration of the Karabekian name. The condition turns his final provision into both an act of inheritance and a demand that the family connection he failed to sustain be recognized.

Family Background and Estrangement

Rabo’s distance from Henri and Terry belongs to a wider pattern of failed attachments after the war. Wounded and captured in Luxembourg near the end of World War II, he returned to civilian life without a homecoming that could restore the artistic and military community he had lost. His left eye had been injured in the fighting, though the wound healed quickly; after the war, the United States paid for cosmetic surgery at Fort Benjamin Harrison. He married the nurse who cared for him and became a father to two sons, but he later described his family life as a failure. His remark to Terry Kitchen that marriage was simply “the postwar movie” suggests how readily he accepted a conventional sequence of marriage and children without understanding what his role within it required.

The separation became explicit in 1956, when his first wife, Dorothy, and their sons left him. Rabo says that he gave up on himself as a painter and then sought solitude, living as a hermit for eight years. The break with his family thus coincided with a break in his artistic life, although the account does not reduce one to the other: the sons’ departure, his abandonment of painting, and his chosen isolation are distinct parts of the same period of loss.

Rabo’s Recognition of Failure

In retrospect, Rabo identifies his failure as a husband to Dorothy and the resulting alienation of Henri and Terry as among the matters he is most ashamed of. He imagines a judgment of his life in which his military service receives praise, while his record as husband and father is dismissed. The stark contrast makes clear that the role he could perform in wartime did not translate into care for his own family.

His account also places the sons’ estrangement within an enduring absence: after their departure, they no longer speak to him. When Rabo returns from Florence, Dorothy and the boys are ill, and he is told that he would be in the way until she recovered. He is to spend the next few nights at the studio he shares with Terry Kitchen. Looking back, Rabo wishes he had stayed away much longer, a bitter recognition that even a brief return could not repair the family bond. The scene does not establish that this episode alone caused the separation; rather, it gives a concrete measure of how unwelcome and out of place he had become in the household.

The Sons’ New Name and Father

Henri and Terry legally changed their last name to Steel, the surname of Dorothy’s second husband, Roy. Rabo treats the change as evidence of their rejection of him: they are no longer Karabekians, and Roy is described as the only real father they had ever had. That judgment belongs to Rabo’s retrospective account, but the legal name change itself makes the estrangement visible in public and familial terms. Their names no longer carry his, even as he continues to regard them as his sons and plans for them to inherit from him.

The tension between biological descent and chosen family is sharpened by Rabo’s account of his own parents. His mother was not born a Karabekian, yet she wanted the name to survive. In his will, Rabo makes the sons’ inheritance conditional: they and his grandchildren must legally change their names back to Karabekian. He tells Circe Berman that he is doing this for his mother. The stipulation therefore reaches beyond a personal claim on his sons; it is an attempt to carry forward a family identity his mother valued, even though the people expected to carry it have already chosen another surname.

Inheritance and the Painting

The bequest includes “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” the monumental painting that Circe regards as important. Rabo says his two sons will decide what becomes of it, though he imagines that the work might otherwise end up in a museum in Lubbock, Texas, or behind a very long bar. Circe points out that the painting could make them multimillionaires. Rabo answers that they will be wealthy in any case, then adds the name-change requirement that governs everything he owns.

The painting and the surname condition give the estranged relationship an unresolved ending rather than a restored family life. Rabo does not report that the sons accept the condition, return to him, or reclaim the name. Instead, he offers material inheritance while placing it behind a legal and symbolic threshold. His provision can be read both as an effort to preserve the family name and as a last assertion of authority over sons who have already made their own choice. The inheritance keeps the possibility of connection open, but the condition also records how little direct intimacy remains between father and sons: the future of their bond is entrusted to a change of name and to the fate of a painting.