The Art Student's War (70 page)

Was there an attic?

Yes, with a separate little room, but the cats had been up there, too. The whole place reeked so bad, it was difficult to
breathe
.

What kind of heat? Ira didn’t know, but there were radiators. What kind of roof? Ira wasn’t sure but—oh yes, it was slate. A garage? Yes, a two-car garage, and it was probably more habitable than the house. And a fireplace? Yes, there was a fireplace—actually two.

“Edith, you go fetch the guest a glass of wine.”

This meant two glasses, of course, for Papa obviously would join the visitor.

While Edith was off in the kitchen, a silence dropped over the living room. Papa was ruminating. This was obvious to everyone; it would have been indecorous to speak.

When Edith handed him a glass of wine, Ira said, “Did you make this yourself, Mr. Paradiso? I remember Edith writing me that you made excellent wine in your basement.”

Usually this was a topic upon which Papa expatiated eagerly, but he merely nodded. He wasn’t about to be sidetracked. He was thinking. He sipped from his glass and said, “Mr. Styne, you are still a young man and the question for you is: do you want to be a fool, or not?”

Ira did not appear to regard this as a rhetorical question. He, too, sipped his wine, deliberating a moment, then said, “I think I’d rather not.” And laughed nervously and much too loudly.

“Then you don’t sell.”

“Don’t sell?” Ira said.

“You put four thousand into that house, you sell it for thirty-five thousand. Maybe more. I know the street.”

“Thirty-five thousand,” Ira said. “But you don’t know how filthy and disgusting it is.”

“You see the filth, I see the house.”

“Well, Mr. Paradiso, I know you do renovations. If you’re thinking you could—”

Papa interrupted him not with his voice but with an imperial lifting of his hand. It was a gesture like a traffic cop’s, halting oncoming traffic, but for Bianca it always evoked something else: a Roman emperor, as glimpsed in a movie. Ira’s voice trailed off.

“You think I’m looking for work?” Papa said. Papa tucked in his chin and lowered his eyebrows. The expression he trained on poor Ira, who was squirming, combined pity and scorn. “I have far more work than time. Far more work than time. No, I give you names of reliable people, good workmen, if that’s what you decide. I’m not looking for business from you, a guest in my house. That’s not why I give you advice over a glass of my wine. No. You’re young and I’m trying to save you from being a fool. A buffoon.”

Another hard silence fell. Ira sipped deeply, uneasily from his wine. “But would you be willing to go look? At the house? Give me some more advice? You see, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Ira confessed. “I don’t know the city. It’s as if I’ve arrived in a foreign land. Would you go over there tomorrow with me? Just tell me what you think?”

Papa deliberated once more. He was enjoying himself, but poor Ira didn’t seem to recognize there was mischief in this magisterial sternness.

“I’ll go over Saturday morning.”

“But I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Saturday morning,” Papa repeated. Saturday was three days off.

Ira paused, drained his wineglass, laughed in a way that sounded like a hiccup, and said, “You’ve got a deal.” He added, “Now I do intend to pay you for your time.”

“Of course you will,” Papa replied.

Ira soon found a motel in Highland Park that rented not by the day but by the week, which was a good thing because, as he pointed out, he might be in town “a couple of weeks.”

Clearly, he would be much longer if left to his own devices. It was apparent at once to everyone in the family that Ira Styne was hopelessly incompetent. How had he ever worked successfully in the furniture business?

Somehow, each of them was drafted into serving as helper on one of Ira’s ever-growing list of tasks. First, a moving van was needed and of course Stevie—the last family member drawn in—was conscripted:
Turk’s Trucks was just the company to haul away the junk inside the Palmer Woods house. According to Papa, this was a heartbreaking business, because Ira’s aunt had been a woman of not only expensive but exquisite taste: the house was full of once-gorgeous couches, chairs, rugs, curtains, that the cats had ravaged. Papa identified a few items that might be repaired and sold, perhaps to whoever eventually bought the place, but most were assigned to the junk heap.

Papa found someone to rip up the carpeting. It turned out many floorboards were water damaged and he arranged for someone to fix the plumbing as well as the floors. He’d vowed to stay out of the process, but it was just the sort of project that called him irresistibly: the restoration of a dilapidated but at bottom truly splendid house.

Even if Papa had been far more hard-hearted, it would have been difficult to resist Ira’s fumbling pleas for assistance. Ira had confessed it the first day—he’d arrived in a foreign land. He knew nobody in Detroit but the Paradisos, and he was forever dropping in. Nor could Papa fail to notice that Mamma was crazy about Ira, or have failed to appreciate what an unforeseen blessing his arrival was at this particular juncture—the final days before the move from Inquiry to Reston—when Mamma might be expected to fall apart. Ira’s gaze was trained forward, and he inspired Mamma to look forward. Because they both faced pressing questions of interior decoration, Ira was happy to escort Mamma to the paint store, the wallpaper store, the hardware store. And given Ira’s curiosity about all those interesting-sounding dishes Edith had mentioned in her letters, it was hardly surprising that he sat down to suppers of Shipwreck, Drowned Tuna Loaf, Slumped Pork, Smothered Liver … And was it possible that Mamma found it regenerating to open a friendship with someone who hadn’t known her on that black day when she’d been revealed as a shoplifter? Wasn’t this, too, a
fresh start?

Because the house in Palmer Woods was so close to Middleway—less than a mile—it was easy for Ira to drop in on Bianca as well. She was the artist of the family, and he wanted her advice about what colors the rooms should be. He drove her to the house one February afternoon while a few irresolute snowflakes dotted the air. In addition to all his other huge expenses—he must have invested a couple of thousand dollars already—Ira had hired teams of people to scrub the house from top to bottom. Even so, the place was musty. “Sorry about the smell,” Ira apologized. “Your father says we won’t get it out completely until spring, when everything’s been repainted and we can open it up completely.”

Still, even in the shape it was in, with scraps of old carpet heaped in the corners, and missing floorboards, Bianca could see what Papa had seen before he’d stepped inside the place: the expansive, solid bones of a home that could be truly beautiful.

It was a little odd—in a good way, a sweet way—to wander through this somewhat ghostly house alone with Ira Styne. Outside, snow was in the air. Inside, two burdened people—a pregnant woman and a man on a cane—circulated from room to room. Ira was not handsome but he’d cleaned himself up a bit (he’d looked pretty ratty that afternoon he first showed up shivering on the front porch) or she’d gotten used to his looks. In any event, he had a wonderful face—an invitation to any portraitist. Rembrandt, peering into the mirror on waking, must have daily thanked the Lord for being given something even more precious than a handsome face: a soulful face. Graying Ira, on his cane, had much to be grateful for—and he seemed grateful.

Perhaps it was the cane, or just something about his expression, but Ira powerfully evoked for Bianca those days when she’d hugged her portfolio while walking up the stone stairs to Ferry Hospital, days when the eighteen-year-old girl artist had ridden streetcar after streetcar, always observing, observing. Perhaps that’s why, this morning, knowing she would be seeing Ira, she’d put on the amethyst locket that Henry Vanden Akker had proudly offered her before shipping out to the Pacific. Ira seemed to bring her closer to Henry, to whom one night she gave herself, knowing he would never return, and Ira brought her closer to the funny sad boy, Private Donnelly, with the bandaged face and amputated foot. On this gray winter afternoon, the promise of snow lent their desultory conversation a richness, a hidden reserve of lusters, as she followed Ira from room to room in this empty house in which, not so long ago, a dozen cats must have roamed, mewling weakly, ravenously, as their mistress lay dead. Bianca felt oddly jittery: the sharp liveliness she always felt in the company of ghosts. The emptied house was all but calling out to her. And the air contained, as well, the peculiar, not unwelcome tension she felt whenever she and Ira were alone. He studied her so closely. It was as though he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Bianca talked about the various colors she might paint the rooms, if this were her own house, and Ira wrote down everything in a little notebook, nodding obligedly.

“Of course what you must think about isn’t what would look best, but what would best sell the house.” Bianca didn’t quite believe this, but she knew what she ought to advise.

And Ira Styne didn’t believe it either. “I figure, first make it look best. Then you get the best price.”

“A man after my own heart, Ira.”

He blushed, as she knew he would. It was hard to resist making Ira blush—he did it so agreeably.

It had occurred to her—a wild inspiration not yet shared with anyone—that perhaps she and Grant might buy this house when the renovations were complete. Grant had wanted to buy her a house in Huntington Woods or Birmingham, but she’d turned him down—“not enough gulls up there.” But a house in Palmer Woods, less than a mile north of their home on Middleway—this was plausible. In a weird way, it was near-inevitable, since Palmer Woods had always been, even when she was a little girl accompanying her father on his weekend housing tours, her favorite neighborhood in the city. And besides, having consulted so closely with Ira, she knew in advance she would approve of the color scheme.

“What year was this house built?” she asked Ira.

“Nineteen thirty-one. An act of optimism in the depths of the Depression. Incidentally, it’s a prime number, according to Edith.”

“You didn’t do the calculations yourself this time?”

Again Ira blushed. The two of them were standing in what had been, and what presumably again would be, the dining room. From here you could look upward out the window and see falling snowflakes: the whitest things imaginable, but seemingly dark when, as silhouettes, they first spun out of a gray sky. It was a visual effect she’d always loved: black snow. The subtle winter light had brightened half his face, flushed pink. “I figured she’d know,” Ira murmured.

“If anybody would,” Bianca said. “Actually, you remind me of a boy I once knew. I met so many soldiers. Did you know I used to draw portraits of soldiers?”

“Yes. Edith wrote me,” Ira said.

“She often wrote about me?”

“All the time. You were her chief subject. You were an artist. You wore extraordinary clothes. You were dating a boy named Ronny, who was very handsome. He owned a fancy convertible.”

Bianca laughed.
“Someone
has been telling tales.”

“From where I was then, it all sounded so far away. Glamorous. A family called Paradiso. Living in this city I’d never seen.”

“Back then, I didn’t know anyone was reading about us.”

“In serial installments. An unknown reader.”

“Maybe those are the best kind?”

“Which one do I remind you of?”

“Mm?”

“You said I remind you of a soldier you knew.”

“That’s what I don’t know. Maybe a boy named Henry? He gave me this locket. Before he went off to the Pacific. He never came back.”

It was an invitation not even timorous Ira could refuse. He inched over to examine the purple stone between her breasts. Physically, this was the closest they had ever stood. She lifted the stone from her chest and Ira for a few seconds held it in his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Bianca moved away, closer to the window and the falling snow. “And there was a boy on a streetcar once,” she said. “We never really spoke, though he said,
Nice ridin’ with ya, miss
, but the face, the eyes, stayed with me. I wished I could have drawn him—kept him, somehow—or that he’d reappear. And maybe you remind me of him? He, too, had an injured leg.”

Ira reminded her of somebody? Yes, he did, the graying man on the cane summoned her back to those most intense days of her life—and yet Ira was also so vivid a presence, with his rapid, apologetic speech and remarkably long chin and big brown imploring puppy-dog gaze, that it was impossible not to be drawn into the immediacy of the moment. The empty house was speaking to the two of them. Outside, a few lost-seeming snowflakes, so lightweight they appeared to drift rather than fall, wandered the air. Inside, also a little lost-seeming, Ira watched her as, mixing paints in her head, she described interiors only she could see: this room’s walls might be painted a subdued terra-cotta, this room’s walls a gold softened by caramel, this room’s a white tinctured with apple green …

If Ira had a gift for ingratiation, or infiltration (he’d inserted himself into the lives of everyone in the family), he was also excessively generous. Not long after the move to Reston Street, Ira showed up not only with champagne but with a handsome and no doubt very expensive set of six champagne glasses from France. Mamma could hardly have been more thrilled! The gift embodied everything the move was intended to effect. She was living in a new neighborhood, in a house with a bay window in the living room and a working fireplace, and why shouldn’t she have fine French champagne glasses?

The gift nonplussed Papa, who wanted to be gracious but who had always viewed champagne as an airy swindle—bubbles were a sign of
something gone wrong in your winemaking—and saw the existence of special champagne glasses as proof of the shameless ends to which the swindlers will pursue the gullible. This notion that Ira was an easy mark pulled Papa, inexorably, ever deeper into Ira’s renovations. A new policy was instituted wherein Ira wrote no checks for the house without first clearing the amount with Papa. How in the world had Ira ever succeeded in the furniture business?