Saint Patrick’s Day, 1936

Saint Patrick’s Day, 1936 marks the abrupt end of Rabo Karabekian’s apprenticeship with Dan Gregory and his first decisive break from Marilee Kemp. Gregory catches the two young people leaving the Museum of Modern Art during the holiday parade; by sundown, Rabo has packed his belongings and left Gregory’s house for good, beginning his first night alone at the Vanderbilt YMCA.

The museum visit and the discovery

The episode belongs to Rabo’s recollection of his youth. He and Marilee had gone to the Museum of Modern Art repeatedly—perhaps fifty times by then. Rabo had worked for Gregory for almost three years and was just short of twenty. He no longer thought of himself as an aspiring artist, but as an artist’s employee fortunate to have a job during the Great Depression. Looking back, he places that precarious period against the still larger interruption of another world war, but the immediate crisis arrives on the city street.

A Saint Patrick’s Day parade moves north along Fifth Avenue, its noise and traffic stopping Gregory’s convertible Cord directly in front of the museum. Fred Jones, Gregory’s former World War I aviator companion, is at the wheel. Gregory sees Rabo and Marilee coming out together. The public holiday, with its green clothing and crowded streets, provides the setting for a private rupture: Rabo’s visit to the museum, repeated many times before, is now the occasion on which Gregory discovers the relationship and acts against him.

Dismissal and departure

After the discovery, Marilee tells Rabo that she has already chosen Gregory, whom she regards as a man able to take care of her, while Rabo is still a boy. Rabo retreats to his room confused and humiliated and packs his belongings. Marilee does not see him out; he does not know which room she has gone to, and nobody else sees him leave. The rejection is thus both explicit and strangely unattended: he is dismissed from the household without a farewell.

At sunset on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1936, Rabo leaves Gregory’s house forever, passing the Gorgon at the front door without looking back. He spends his first night on his own only a block away, at the Vanderbilt YMCA. The move converts Gregory’s decision into a material change in Rabo’s life: he loses his position and home and must begin supporting himself outside the older artist’s authority.

Aftermath and retrospective meaning

Rabo does not see or hear from Marilee again for fourteen years. In the months after leaving, he imagines that she has challenged him to become financially successful and return to take her away from Gregory. The fantasy borrows its shape from the stories Gregory used to illustrate his points, including the Arthurian romance he was then preparing for a new edition: Marilee had posed as Guinevere, and Rabo imagines returning with the Holy Grail. That imagined future cannot soften the immediate humiliation, but it gives the separation a storybook pattern that Rabo later recognizes as something he had learned in Gregory’s household.

The date therefore names more than the day of a discovery. It fixes the moment when Rabo’s protected, dependent life as Gregory’s employee ends and his uncertain independence begins. The later recollection keeps both scales in view: a parade-choked encounter outside a museum, and the lasting consequences of being sent away from the house and from Marilee.