The Art Student's War (17 page)

Gradually, Papa came around. And then, bit by bit, everyone at the table succumbed to the romance—surely the most romantic task anyone
in the family had ever undertaken. Bea was asked many questions, for most of which she lacked firm answers. (It grew increasingly apparent she didn’t fully understand her new duties.) Still, she answered as she could, plausibly filling in the gaps. “Yes,” she found herself telling Stevie. “I will be drawing officers, too.”

“Officers, too,” Mamma marveled.

It had been a long while since this family had shared any promising news, and the conversation buzzed through dessert, which was prune whip with molasses cookies. Edith didn’t understand, quite, how the mere drawing of soldiers could serve the war effort. “Oh honestly, it isn’t just knitting socks, or recycling tin. It’s good to do those things, of course,” Bea told her sister. “But it’s also building morale.” And poor Stevie was almost more excited than he could bear; he couldn’t conceive of a place more glamorous than a hospital full of wounded soldiers.

After dinner, Bea telephoned Maggie, who took the news badly. Ever since moving in with the Hamms, Maggie had been much less fun to talk to. Still, the two of them arranged to get together Saturday, if the Jailer would grant Maggie a brief pass.

Bea went to her room and, by way of practice, drew some soldiers inspired by photographs from the Rotogravure Section of the
News
. She was feeling peeved with Maggie, though the longer Bea drew, the more forgiving she became. According to Uncle Dennis, George was in no real danger, out there in Hawaii. But if your husband was stationed anywhere in the Pacific, the image of a hospital full of wounded soldiers might well be unnerving …

Bea went to the kitchen for a glass of milk and found her mother seated at the table, a glass of milk before her. Bea said, “Thank you, Mamma.”

“Mm?”

“For helping to convince him. About drawing portraits at the hospital.”

“You know I wanted to be a nurse.”

“I know,” Bea said.

“Did I ever tell you what Miss Patterson said? Who taught me biology in high school?”

Instead of saying, “Only a hundred times,” Bea said, “I’m not
exactly
sure,” which seemed the best compromise between politeness and honesty.

“She said I could be a doctor if I wanted. She said I had the brains
for it.” And Mamma lifted her chin in that touching way she had, as if both daring and dreading an objection.

“Imagine that,” Bea said, and added, as she carried her milk from the room, “Good night, Mamma.”

Needing to think everything over, Bea went to bed early, when Edith did, at 9:30. Staring up for the millionth time at the slats in the bunk where her sister lay, Bea calmed down enough to ponder a few misgivings. What had the Professor meant in suggesting her talent might not lie in still lifes? Was she merely in need of more classroom time—or was she really hopeless? And when he’d called her “a very attractive girl” (admittedly, in irreproachable fashion), was he actually telling her she’d been chosen for her looks? Why hadn’t Donald Doobly been selected? He also had a flair for portraiture. Was it because he was a boy? Because he was a Negro?

Yet the Professor had recollected the afternoon before class when she had so quickly begun sketching Donald … Professor Manhardt had observed, and remembered, the way Donald’s bashful, mindful eyes had emerged. He’d seen she could draw.

She
liked
being an attractive girl, particularly in the exalted precincts of the Professor’s
reality of pure beauty
, and yet Bea also wanted (was this asking too much?) reassurance that what her heart informed her was true was true: she had a genuine gift for portraiture.

And out of the darkness below her, unbidden but waited for, she began to sense them and to see them, floating up like air bubbles, like white balloons: the faces come to vindicate her. These were the soldiers—the wounded boys—risen pale from their pale hospital beds. They were looking to her, attentively waiting for her … At the very border of sleep, Bianca Paradiso catches a collective glance needing no language to convey its importunate privations; yes, she’s on the streetcar again, that enclosed and timeless environment where everything that happens happens in present tense, face to the glass, vowing to this city that has become the Arsenal of Democracy that she will not fail them, even as she feels something—her portfolio?—slipping from her lap.

She stoops to retrieve it and her descent enlarges into a cavernous plummeting free fall. The paper faces have scattered upon the filthy floor and she reaches out in every direction, as, one by one, or maybe all at once, the faces dissolve.

The faces dissolve and she’s transported miles away, hours away, and deep into the depths of the dark. It’s late. She has walked alone to the
desolate corner of Day and Midnight, where she takes a left turn and finds herself in bright sidelights marching up the steps of Ferry Hospital, which has a genuine medieval moat encircling its walls. She is here to meet the doctor. Many things happen on her search and yet nothing happens, since these are nothing but tricked-out preliminaries for the moment when she enters the yellow room where the doctor stands with his back turned. The doctor swings round and—it’s Mamma.

So flabbergasted is Bea, she cannot speak, though Mamma’s cool as cool can be. She hands Bea a waxed paper bag whose fateful heaviness (a wet, packed, sliding heaviness) is ghastly beyond all expression. “We saved everything we could,” Mamma says—and the girl wakes, gasping.

In the room’s stray streetlight glare, breathing hard, she found in its appointed place the silhouette of the wooden lamb her father had once carved for her, for his little Bia. And then she caught her breath, and, in just a few minutes, she reentered that best of all sleeps wherein all dreams are forgotten.

CHAPTER IX

Standing on the steps of the vast castellated gray structure of Ferry Hospital, Bea felt as though she had stood here before. There was no way in the world she could remember any such thing, of course, but she did have to wonder: had she initially glimpsed this hospital from her mother’s arms, carried out into the living world for the first time? A less fanciful explanation was that Uncle Dennis had led her here, years later, on one of his hospital errands. The place’s familiarity didn’t translate into a sense of comfort, though, and for all her exalted moral purpose, Bea instinctively shrank from its imposingness.

Nor was she put at ease by the menacingly named Mr. Dearth, from the USO, who met her in the lobby. He spoke, as Professor Manhardt spoke, of the need for “cheerful” portraits—adding, while projecting his chin, “This won’t always be easy.” He was himself an odd study for any portraitist—a tall, bald, stooped, big-chinned man, lipless as a turtle. He added, heavily, “I know what war is like, you see.” Nor was she put at ease by Mr. Kronstein, who apparently ran the hospital. The brown pouches underneath his eyes looked large enough to hide a penny in. “One ward has been requisitioned by the military.”

“Yes.”

“In many ways it’s the most difficult ward.”

“Yes.”

“Some of the boys are downhearted,” he told her, mournfully. “Others will be quite—spry,” he went on, more mournfully still. “You understand what I’m saying, Miss Paradiso? This isn’t a social club.”

“Of course,” Bea said.

“It’s a hospital,” he said.

“Of course,” Bea said.

Winged creatures were circling inside her—her stomach was absolutely aflutter—by the time she was turned over to a nurse.

Nurse Mildred O’Donnell was a tiny woman—barely reaching Bea’s shoulder—with a broad, no-nonsense face. “You’re
very
tall,” she accused Bea, as the two of them strode along a corridor painted a reptilian green.

“Not
so
tall, maybe?” Bea hugged her portfolio to her chest.

“You must be six feet tall.”

“I’m five eight and a half,” Bea replied, truthfully. She often “forgot” the half inch, in the interests of both convenience and vanity. But within the walls of Ferry Hospital it seemed imperative to be scrupulous about physical data.

Though mostly content to be tall, Bea would have given a lot to be only half an inch shorter, in which event she wouldn’t be classified, under the War Production Board, as a “female of unusual height.” Wartime tailoring restrictions did not apply to females of unusual height. Seeing that phrase in the newspaper
—female of unusual height
—Bea had felt cruelly, personally singled out, as if the government itself were calling her a freak. Bea was in the same category with girls who stood six feet tall, seven feet tall, eight feet tall …

“My brother Jerry’s five foot ten, and you’re definitely taller than Jerry,” Nurse O’Donnell told her. The fixed expression on her face made plain that while Bea was at liberty to treat the truth as casually as she wished, she shouldn’t expect to put anything past Nurse Mildred O’Donnell.

Meanwhile, as the two of them marched purposefully down the corridor, Bea heard a variety of leaked sounds—muffled cries or groans—
male
cries or groans—and was beginning to feel thoroughly frightened. A sharp hospital smell overlay another, human smell: the lingering reek of somebody’s having vomited up an assortment of the very worst things inside him. Her own stomach was
very
uneasy and Bea felt as if she were but one touch away—one feather’s stroke—from retching up the two strawberry-jelly-and-cream-cheese sandwiches she’d eaten for lunch. Oh my. Oh please. Bea’s mind tried, and failed, to mount a suitable prayer.

Perhaps as a result of having seen so many movies, Bea had vividly pictured an enormous barracks-type room: beds to left and right, stretching out for yards and yards. But the first room she was led through contained only a dozen or so beds, some of them empty. Male voices leaped up: “Hello.” “Good afternoon, bright eyes.” “Well well, hello hello.” She followed Nurse O’Donnell and did not slow; in truth, she hardly saw the boys on either side.

The next room contained only four beds. Two were empty. In one, a soldier lay motionless, apparently asleep. Only the crown of his blond crew-cut head was visible. He was making a sound between snoring and moaning.

In the other bed lay a ginger-haired young man with a bandaged face, who peered at them groggily.

Nurse O’Donnell said, sharply: “Ya wancher pitcher drawn?”

The soldier’s answer, though slow to form, was quite elaborate when it did assemble itself: “Now what’s that you’re asking, Auntie? Would it be too serious an inconvenience to repeat the question to nephew Michael?”

“None of your nonsense now. It’s all explained before. Yes or no—ya wancher pitcher drawn?”

One of the soldier’s eyes was covered by a huge white bandage. The uncovered eye swam fully into focus, dragging, as it were, the rest of his features with it. “This another your hard bargains, Auntie?”

“Yes or no?”

“Another your trick questions?”

Bea knew that face, or knew its type. She recognized the appetite for mischief, the antic Irish playfulness. Oh, she’d gone to school with plenty of boys like this one. Who was he? The class clown. At once Bea felt better. She knew where she was, suddenly.

“Yes or no?”

“I would be most delighted” was the soldier’s rejoinder. “I’d go so far as to say, enchanted. I will go that far. I am an enchanted youth.”

“Enchanted youth my foot. And I’m not your aunt, thank the Lord.” Apparently wishing to set the record straight, Nurse O’Donnell added, with satisfaction: “I’m nobody’s aunt.”

“Oh now just because little Michael is something of a black sheep among certain of our stern kith and—”

Nurse O’Donnell cut him off. “You can start here,” she said to Bea. “With this one. You’ll be out of the way
here.”

Then the little nurse was gone, and Bea and the red-haired soldier eyed each other across the room. He was sitting up in bed now.

“I’ve adopted her as my aunt,” he said briskly. “Figured I ought to, since we got the same last name. Or almost. Mine’s Donnelly. Michael Donnelly at your service, miss. I just hope you won’t give me any marching orders.”

“Oh no, you stay put.”

“Afraid I’m not quite up for the long march, miss.”

“That’s all right.”

With a solemn look on his one-eyed face, Michael Donnelly held out his hand. Still clutching with both hands her portfolio to her chest, Bea
crossed the room, removed her right hand, and deposited it in his cool hand. It embarrassed her—her own hand was so clammy.

And what to do next? How exactly to proceed? Although Bea hadn’t felt altogether comfortable with Nurse O’Donnell, the woman had disappeared more abruptly than Bea would have wished. Bea needed additional guidance … There was a chair in the corner and she dragged it to the foot of the soldier’s bed, sat down, portfolio still to her chest. “And yours?” the soldier said, expectantly. But what did he mean?

Oh—of course: her name. “Bea. Really Bianca, but call me Bea. Bea Paradiso.”

So bewildering and new was all of this—to be sitting beside the bed of a young man newly met—that only now did Bea discern what must be a stroke of mischief, if not outright malice, on Nurse O’Donnell’s part. Bea was here to draw a soldier’s portrait, but how was she to proceed with a face nearly engulfed by a white bandage? Was this any place to begin?

“You’re an artist,” Michael Donnelly said.

“Oh no. Just an art student.”

“And I’m just a private. Humble beginnings, huh? I guess we’ve all got to start somewhere.” He grinned. The bandage covered his right eye and eyebrow, most of his nose, his right cheekbone, the right base of his jaw. But his mouth was free to smile at her, free to laugh. An extraordinary amount of jollity was compressed into his visible features. “Let me take a wild guess. Paradiso means Paradise.”

“Good guess.”

“Italian girl. I like that. As you probably guessed, Donnelly’s an old Polish name. From a long line of Battle Creek Poles.” Again the flash of a grin, inviting—coaxing—a grin in response. “You know if I may say so, you have a very … credulous look.”