The Art Student's War (19 page)

With dating, too, he was full of surprises. Bea had thought she understood dating—she’d been going out with boys since she was fourteen—but Ronny Olsson reordered many of her notions. The big and obvious difference was that he had a car—his own car and a beautiful car, the cream-colored Cabriolet. She had sometimes dated boys who could borrow their father’s car, but usually she and her date would set out from Inquiry on foot.

The usual date was a movie—maybe the Sheridan on Kercheval, or the Whittier on Jefferson—and a milk shake afterward. Not that money was ever discussed, but on a typical evening Bea knew to a nickel—to a penny, really—what her date had spent. It was twenty cents each at the Whittier, and a nickel for popcorn, and seventeen cents each for milk shakes at Olsson’s. Add a total of twenty-four cents for the four streetcar fares if you were wandering farther afield.

But in Ronny’s company you had an unnerving feeling of indeterminate sums disbursed—all the more unnerving because he himself didn’t appear to notice. Dates with him had a veering, unexpected quality.
(Despite rationing, his car always seemed full of gas.) She and Ronny were heading off to the movies one night when he discovered she didn’t know what a taco was—and the next moment they were driving in the opposite direction, toward Mexicantown.

When he learned that she’d always coveted a Winsor & Newton oil paint set—precisely what he himself owned—he showed up at the next date with one under his arm. And when she explained that she couldn’t possibly accept anything so extravagant, Ronny grew not only insistent but indignant: “We’re both students at the Institute. It isn’t
fair
if my equipment’s better than yours.” Well, Bea surprised herself by accepting the gift. And surprised herself still further by not feeling guilty.

When Ronny took her somewhere really nice—the Fox Theatre, lunch at Hudson’s, a piano recital at the Masonic Temple—it was remarkable how often he ran into people he knew. Most were girls—or most who called out greetings were girls. Their dates often looked sheepish and withdrawn. “Ronny!” a happy voice would cry.

Most were college girls. They were home from Ann Arbor or East Lansing for the weekend, or home for longer vacations from those places with really remote names like Bryn Mawr, which Bea knew chiefly through avid reading of the
Detroit News
society pages. These were the sorts of girls whose engagements were “announced on Sunday at a tea given by her aunt.” And after their wedding ceremonies, they were the sorts of girls who “for traveling changed to a navy blue suit, white straw hat, and navy accessories.” (Imagine having your clothes mentioned in the newspaper!) Some of these girls were cold toward Bea; some were warm, in a distant and at bottom chilly way; and some seemed genuinely, almost alarmingly warm, as if reunited with some distant but beloved cousin. In this range of responses the one constant factor was an intense, open curiosity. Bea was peered at.

Ronny would introduce her as Bianca Paradiso. “Bianca is a talented artist,” he would say, and in an instant most of Bea’s unease vanished, replaced by a gushing gratitude: in her entire life, nobody else had thought to introduce her in this fashion.

The girls’ dates often looked not only sheepish but resentful. The tense, unignorable truth was that the city was populated by pretty college girls who would like nothing better than a phone call from Ronny Olsson.

It would have been troubling had Ronny wished to frequent only places where such girls gathered. And more troubling still had Ronny
shied from such places while in Bea’s company. But one of the fascinating things about Ronny Olsson was the poised, urbane way he circulated from one world to another. Dating Ronny meant going to hear a tiny, powerful Russian pianist at the Masonic Temple and it meant finding yourself eating a brittle, splintery something called a taco in a room where a man with a colossal silver moustache, dining alone, had dozed off with his head against the wall.

Herk’s was another place where you were unlikely to meet a Bryn Mawr girl, and it was at Herk’s where Bea finally described for Ronny her visit to Ferry Hospital three days before. (She’d hardly been able to think of anything since.) She felt frustratingly unable, though, to convey the morning’s pathos and magic and whirring power. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she couldn’t overcome Ronny’s resistance to her explanation. Before she could finish a thought, he already had it pigeonholed.

“So you’re saying the place was depressing …”

“Of course, yes, Ronny, it was
depressing
. Good heavens, it’s full of these wounded soldiers, and you keep hearing moans and groans off in the distance. You know I’ve been feeling so fortunate that I don’t know anybody yet who’s actually died in the War—”

“Yes, you mentioned—”

“Though there was this boy at Eastern, Bradley Hake, who’s still missing in action, but I didn’t really know him. Though he
did
use to smile at me.”

“Let’s hope your luck holds.”

“But it
isn’t
holding for everyone. That’s what you see at Ferry. It brought it all home: the scale of the suffering. And there was this strange little nurse, Nurse Mildred O’Donnell—why would anyone name a child Mildred?—who basically accused me of lying when …” and Bea felt herself securely under way again. She told him about Nurse O’Donnell’s refusal to believe she wasn’t six feet tall, and how she’d simply vaporized at day’s end, and about the one occasion when she cracked the hint of a smile. And Ronny interrupted again: “So you’re saying the soldiers don’t receive adequate care?”

“No, that’s not it at all. I’m just telling you how strange a place it is, especially knowing I was actually born there, and the feeling of all these bedridden bodies, and all the boys looking hopefully at me …” Bea felt some compunction about embroidering events slightly—or at least giving the impression that she’d seen many more soldiers than she actually
had when Nurse O’Donnell had rushed her through the ward. But the words were flowing now, with a life of their own and requirements of their own, and their correspondence to the facts was hardly to be questioned. “They honestly seemed to think I could do something for them.”

“So you’re saying it made you feel appreciated?”

“No—I mean of course, yes, I suppose so, but I just felt their terrible
needs
. They all looked so pitiful.” She could feel their intent gazes again—especially the one who’d called,
Good afternoon, bright eyes
. “It’s just I guess I never really thought about how it is for the wounded. How
slow
their days are …” and she was off and running again, or trying to run.

But it was talk of Michael Donnelly that seemed most to goad Ronny—could it be he was jealous? It was a difficult and delicate notion. It made
her
sound so arrogant, while it made
him
sound so immature to propose that the tall, devilishly handsome son of the owner of the Olsson’s drugstore chain was jealous of an Irish boy from Battle Creek with a bandage over his face. But what else could have possessed Ronny to say, “You should see how flushed you’ve become! Honestly, Bianca, you look
sweet
on him …”

“Sweet on him? Ronny, he’s got a bandage the size of—of a dinner plate.
On his face
. What you
can
see of his face is bruised and swollen and discolored, and what you can’t see is full of metal. I should see
my
face? You should see
his
face.”

“Perhaps the lady doth protest too much?”

Bea knew the phrase, of course, but couldn’t place the reference, and this sense of her own disadvantaged ignorance—Ronny was so wide-ranging and articulate!—in combination with that superior, skeptical way he had of cocking one eyebrow, sparked a new emotion, not very pretty and yet not wholly regrettable: a slight chafed impatience with that sophisticated, elaboration-loving intellectual’s world represented by Ronny Olsson. Why couldn’t he be more like other boys?

And yet in ways she couldn’t begin to fathom (and, later, in bed that night, could hardly bear to contemplate) it wasn’t an hour after their talk, as they took a walk through Palmer Park, that she felt more tightly bound than ever. They were on a little wooded path. No one was about. She was trying again to explain the power of that looming image of Ferry Hospital. Straddling like a mountain range across her mind, it was too large to be envisioned: its borders exceeded her imagination’s borders … It was an object she couldn’t
think
about painting (how could
you even start?), and yet every other object in her head—rabbit’s feet and pocket watches and nutcrackers and lemons—stood idly in its shadow. In the only canvas that might do it justice, you’d intuit all the soldiers within. Yes, you would look at that gray castle and feel them inside.

She
felt the War—it was the largest thing she’d ever felt. She felt it, that is, with a sweep and a complexity burgeoning steadily over time. She absorbed it from every angle—from the newspapers, and the news-reels, and the chatter at the bakery and the butcher’s, and in Uncle Dennis’s careful, well-researched accounts … and yet, for all she absorbed, for all the widening of her vision, Bea occasionally discerned how its true dimensions escaped her. Even the hospital escaped her! It was all so unimaginable: to be sitting before the bed of Private Donnelly, who in the ordinary course of life probably wouldn’t have ventured a hundred miles from Battle Creek in ten years, but who had been shipped off to the South Seas, where strange yellow-skinned Japanese soldiers had exploded screaming white-hot metal fragments into his face…

Of course she couldn’t begin to express her thoughts coherently, which were not really thoughts but images linked to sounds and voices, Roosevelt on the radio and the newsboys calling
Extra
and a whirring projector behind you as an aircraft carrier proudly stretched across the screen of the United Artists, and impossibly remote place names like Singapore and Corregidor and Medjez-el-Bab, and was it any wonder she couldn’t express to Ronny everything she longed to express? To make her task all the more formidable, he had halted, and turned and faced her, seizing her hands, and he’d begun to stroke her palms, sending what already felt like a soothingly familiar warmth up her arms.

“Ferry Hospital is where
the war comes home,”
she said, and
home
felt unexpectedly right, it resounded in her chest, while the looming gray structure shimmered like some Monet cathedral in the sun.

“It’s like this big repair shop,” Bea said, feeling her imagination again taking wing. “For broken soldiers. They bring them back to be repaired, only—” Only? Only, some cannot be repaired, is that what she wanted to say? What in heaven did she want to say? Bea felt all but overmastered, as Ronny stoked the fire in her hands—a fire that climbed, as fire naturally will climb, right up the crackling veins in her arms. “All those broken soldiers,” she sighed—words that only enhanced the wordless realization that Ronny Olsson, by contrast, stood before her unbroken: intense and gifted and dizzyingly handsome. The heart of this young
man with a heart murmur was beating ardently, irrepressibly, and she seemed to glimpse the two of them from slightly above—like a painter who has chosen to expand the view by climbing some knoll. A young woman in a red felt hat and red wool skirt, age eighteen, and a young man, twenty-one, were standing in a Detroit public park one late afternoon in August 1943. Soon the park’s greenery would be giving way to autumn colors. Outside the park, encircling it on all sides, stood the city’s pluming smokestacks, one after another after another, for this was the greatest manufacturing hub in the world. What had once been the world’s automobile capital had become, almost overnight, an outspread and interconnected armamentarium. Everything had been retooled, redesigned, and it was right here, in all of Detroit’s beautiful factories, infernally aglow, that the War would be won. Right here began the endless, outbound exodus: Chrysler’s tanks and Ford’s airplanes and General Motors’ amphibious landing craft, rolling off the lines and being hauled away by ship and train, by river and railroad track. And what was returned to the city was a random poor human scatter of wounded soldiers, including one carrot-topped class clown whose face had been splattered with stray metal.

“All those wounded, needy soldiers,” Bea sighed again, hardly knowing what she was saying, and it was as if this phrase, in all its flammable imagery, ignited the young man before her. Ronny lunged forward and flattened his lips against hers: their first kiss. And Bea thrilled to an equal answering forward lunging: she fully met the kiss. His arms were lashed round her back, his hips pressed tight enough to hers that she could feel the bulge of his belt buckle.

Before long, his lips parted, as sometimes other boys’ lips had parted during a kiss. But this time she did what she resolutely had not done before: she opened her mouth completely to that beckoning male mouth. The stroke of his tongue against her tongue threw a big voluptuous splash of color against the dark of her mind: an orange-gold glow that broke like a wave, tingling like one of those fireworks that die with such high reluctance against the sky’s velvet black. His tongue pushed in the other direction, and in the deepest Lascaux-cavern walls of the mind a whole pack of beast-shapes went loping over the rolling hills. Resemblances formed and broke, living things, dreams, colors, colors without objects, pale milky greens and reds with swollen veins of electric blue, and if he’d not continued holding her fevered body firmly in his hands, Bianca could hardly have remained upright: Ronny Olsson alone was keeping her from tumbling disgracefully to the ground.

• • •

Ronny wasn’t at all keen on the new painters: Picasso and Matisse and Modigliani and Munch and Dufy and Feininger, each represented by a single work at what she still thought of as the Art Institute but what Ronny always called the DIA. (There were other, often still newer painters—Braque and Klimt and Kandinsky and de Chirico and Magritte and Klee and Bonnard and Giacometti—but these were mostly names in catalogues, since she’d never actually seen their work.) He dismissed outright, as “cheap,” the Salvador Dalí show whose recent arrival at the DIA had filled Bea with such powerful mixed feelings. (Though it was like Ronny, too, to offer a subsequent qualification: “Paradiso, you do have to admit the man could paint a marvelous loaf of bread.”) Ronny was quite convincingly articulate about the painters’ various shortcomings, and wickedly humorous, too, and unlike many people who ridiculed modern art, he knew what he was talking about. He had been to New York City any number of times; he had visited the Museum of Modern Art, on Fifty-third Street, in Manhattan. (He saw it as MoMA.) Having so much less firsthand familiarity with the modern painters, Bea was far less confident. And Ronny was so much older. Ronny had seen a number of actual Vermeers—Vermeer was one of his gods. She’d never seen one. He’d seen a number of Brueghels. She’d seen one.