The Art Student's War (2 page)

She permits herself a few darting glances at her fellow passengers. People are still peering at her. The soldier sits on the other side of the car. He has struck up a conversation with the colored woman beside him. Although Bea can’t hear what he’s saying, she appreciates the unself-conscious way he conducts the conversation. Bea can’t hear what the woman is saying either, although the phrase “My boy Hector” lifts into audibility. A moment later it surfaces again, “My boy Hector,” and a moment later. The handsome soldier nods attentively and cordially.

Because he seems so engrossed, Bea dares a full appraisal of his face. His eyelashes are long and luxuriant—evident even from here. His nose, prominent but fine-boned, with sharply contoured nostrils, calls out to be painted. (She worries, frequently, that her own nose is too long.) Suddenly, as if having sensed her gaze, the soldier throws her a glance … Bea drops her eyes.

This time, she keeps them on the floor for only one stop, and when she peeks upward her demure show of modesty proves sadly superfluous: a fat woman in a preposterous orange coat has posted herself directly between Bea and the soldier. Making the best of her obstructed view, Bea studies the soldier’s legs—the good one folded beneath him, the bad bandaged one, which he cannot bend, thrust out into the aisle. He has big feet, to match that big Adam’s apple.

The woman in the orange coat shuffles toward the back of the car and across the suddenly cleared vista the black-haired blue-eyed soldier stares straight into Bea’s eyes and grins.

So inviting is that smile—so seemingly innocent of the anguish he has inflicted—it seems a pity not to hold his glance. But Bea, flustered, again drops her eyes. She tries to think about the contents of her portfolio, today’s sketch of a hairbrush and a glass of soda water, but she cannot bring its reality to mind. And then—

Then something unfolds that she’s wholly unprepared for: the soldier stands. He is about to exit the car.

Before he does so, however, he has some unfinished business. Although Bea’s eyes are downcast, she feels his approach. And when he speaks—lightly, a little breathlessly—it’s as though she has heard that voice before: “Nice ridin’ with ya, miss,” he says.

Bea peers upward with a guilty frantic quickness, and this time, for a moment that opens into something far more amplitudinous than a mere moment, her eyes hold and negotiate his gaze. And this time,
this
time she uncovers more than genial innocence in his look. She finds hunger, and a wordless understanding. Bea experiences something never felt before—a new chapter in her life. It’s almost as though, until this afternoon, she’d never learned the trick of gazing into anybody’s eyes. It’s vertiginous, truly: her sensation of an instantaneous, fused, fated linkage. It’s as though she’s melting, but melting in one direction—his direction.

How long do they lock gazes? Once the connection is broken, there’s no saying, there’s only a belated recognition of his having moved on, and her tardy acknowledgment of gratitude, called out much too faintly: “Thank you, Soldier.”

She says nothing further, and once all the clocks on earth recommence, time grinds forward relentlessly: in just a few seconds, the soldier has maneuvered himself off the streetcar. Craning forward, Bea is able to see, as he makes his laborious way down the sidewalk, the crown of his bobbing dark-haired head and his profiled nose. And that’s all.
Gone forever: the unreckonable glance that dropped so deeply into her own.

The streetcar clatters forward on its route, the soldier disappears into the bricks and asphalt of the city. The story cannot be finished before it has begun—can it?

“He didn’t even hear me thank him,” Bea says to herself. Though she’s whispering, she can hardly get the words out, for her throat’s a knot of aching emotions.

“He didn’t even hear me thank him,” she sighs once more, and this time, along with her remorse, she locates in the words a bittersweet beauty. Wasn’t the encounter perfect in its way? It’s one more poignant war story—one among millions of wartime poignancies—and Bea savors this sensation of having been enlisted in a sweeping modern military enterprise: she has shared something beautiful and touching with a handsome, unnamed, wounded soldier. She has plumbed the vulnerable eyes of somebody who just as easily might never have come back.

Everything changes—as it so often does—the moment she climbs down from the enclosure of the streetcar; time itself shifts, shifted. When, in the open air, she spoke the words once more, Bea felt a renewed sense of wistful impoverishment: “He didn’t even hear me thank him.” This time the phrase sounded dry and matter-of-tact, as though the soldier really did belong to the past tense and their story were over.

Eventually, Bea made her way down the only street she’d ever lived on, which had the oddest name of any street she knew: Inquiry. In all her novel reading, she’d never come upon its like. All the other neighborhood streets had streetlike names: Kercheval, Canton, Lafayette, Helen, Mount Elliott, Sylvester, Gratiot, Goethe, Mack… Doubtless there was an explanation, but it seemed no one had made an inquiry about Inquiry; nobody in the neighborhood could explain why she was living on a street that—so she liked to declare—might as well be Question Mark Avenue.

She passed the house of the Sgouroses, who once kept a goat in their backyard, and the Dawkinses, the Whites, the McNamees, and the Hig-bees, whose boy, Hugh, was in the Navy. She passed the Szots’, where Bea’s best friend, Maggie Szot, used to live, before getting married at the tender age of seventeen and becoming Maggie Hamm. (As Maggie was the first to point out, she had terrible luck with names.) Maggie lived with her in-laws on the West Side, while her husband, George, was
stationed out in Hawaii. George used to have bad teeth but now poor George had no teeth at all. An Army dentist, foreseeing grave problems if any tooth abscessed while George was in combat, decided to yank them, every one, and give him dentures. (As it turned out, George was assigned a desk job.)

A pair of white gulls wheeled overhead, cawing needfully to each other. Inquiry Street lay close enough to the river—the Detroit River—that you often saw seagulls over its rooftops.

Bea passed the home of the “Dutch ladies,” two spinster sisters, Miss Slopsema and Miss Slopsema, who maintained the cleanest sidewalk on the East Side of Detroit. They were constantly out front, faces ruddy and resolute over buckets of steaming water. They ignored most everybody, though Bea had been accorded minute nods of recognition ever since the freezing night last winter when her father had restarted their broken furnace and refused all payment. Bea’s father—Papa—could fix most anything.

The cobbler’s children have no shoes—so the old adage affirmed, which suggested that her own house ought to be dilapidated. In fact, it was the best-kept-up house on Inquiry. Papa was a contractor, though he rarely uttered the word; he tended to keep his English simple. He spoke with an accent, despite having lived in America since he was thirteen. Bea was relieved that the family’s ’38 Hudson wasn’t parked in front. Her father wasn’t home yet. He didn’t like it when she arrived after he did.

Bea stepped into the front hall and smelled hamburger and onions. She proceeded warily toward the kitchen, where she found her mother—Mamma—stationed at the table, not doing much of anything. This was a bad sign. Mamma was subject to “moods,” sitting immobile over coffee for hours, staring at the kitchen wall calendar, which each month offered a different house built by O’Reilly and Fein, the company Papa worked for.

“I’m home,” Bea said.

“Isaac Lustig is dead,” her mother replied.

“Isaac Lustig?” Bea could not place the name.

“You know the Lustigs. Up near Charlevoix. Their son.”

The Lustigs lived
way
up the street. They had moved in only a month or two ago. Bea hadn’t actually laid eyes on any of them yet, but she knew they were Jewish.

“He was a soldier?”

“A student. At Kenyon College in Ohio. Exactly your age, too,” Mamma pointed out. “He drove his car into a tree. He planned to be a doctor.”

“How terrible. The accident was around here?”

“In Ohio.”

“Had you met him?”

Bea’s mother took a moment to answer. “N-no.” Then she added, on a note of funereal triumph, “And now, I never will.”

There was something unseemly and exasperating about this—Mamma’s adopting someone else’s tragedy. Evidently, in her grief over poor Isaac, Mamma had forgotten her earlier displeasure at seeing another Jewish family on Inquiry. She harbored a dim resentment toward the Jews, who back in Bavaria, where her father’s family originated, once swindled an ancestor off his farm. It didn’t help matters that one of Papa’s bosses, Mr. Fein, was Jewish. The other boss, Mr. O’Reilly, was Irish—another group Mamma disparaged. (Scottish on her mother’s side, Mamma saw in Ireland a people whose native ingenuity, as history kept demonstrating, was principally devoted to whining.)

Mamma’s appropriation of the Lustigs’ tragedy somehow barred Bea from telling her own story—her small but genuine loss today, when the wounded soldier exited the streetcar without being properly thanked.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Shipwreck.”

It was a recipe drawn from the only cookbook Mamma ever consulted,
The Modern Housewife’s Book of Creative Cookery
. Mamma went in for odd dishes with odd names—though almost never Italian food. As she was quick to point out, she was nobody’s Italian wife. She drove Papa’s car, for one thing. As a rule, Italian wives didn’t drive.

Mamma’s hair was dark, even darker than Bea’s. In the last few years, a few white hairs had crept in—very few, given that she was forty. But the darkness of her hair made each of the white ones—which were of a different, frizzier texture—cry out as interlopers, at least to Bea’s painterly eye. “I have a stomachache,” Bea said, which though not currently true was often the case. It was a chronic affliction. “I’m going to lie down a few minutes.”

Feeling a twinge of guilt, Bea called backward from the living room, “I’m very sorry about Isaac Lustig.”

Upstairs, Bea found her little sister knitting a dark blue turtleneck sweater. Edith was twelve. She was working in a room that was and
wasn’t her bedroom. The house had four bedrooms, one downstairs for the parents and three upstairs for the three children. But since neither Bea nor Edith cared to sleep alone, the usual arrangement was for Edith to spend the night in Bea’s upper bunk. Edith was a noisy roommate who often talked in her sleep—sometimes with quite eerie distinctness—but Bea preferred her sister’s company to solitude.

Edith’s bedroom had become mostly a storage room and workroom. Work was something Edith excelled at. She was an extraordinary child—indeed, she had a testimonial to that effect signed by Madeleine J. Wilton, executive secretary of Needles for Defense, the organization that provided the patterns for the socks and mittens and sweaters Edith so rapidly produced. Most of the knitters for Needles for Defense were grown-up women, and initially Edith had done her knitting under Mamma’s name—until Mamma, justifiably proud of her remarkable daughter, had confessed the truth to the women at Needles for Defense. The result, which was headed
A Testimonial
, had been the letter from Mrs. Wilton acknowledging Edith’s “extraordinary patriotic contribution, especially for a child.”

It was one indication of just
how
extraordinary Edith was that at the age of twelve she knew the word
testimonial
. It was another that she’d assembled a confidently large scrapbook called “My Testimonials.” So far, it contained three letters, beginning with Mrs. Wilton’s. The second was from a leader of the Detroit Girl Scouts, thanking her for her “skillful salvage.” (Edith regularly went around the neighborhood collecting the bacon fat, beef drippings, suet, etc., which all the housewives saved for her—she was a great favorite among them—and which she sold as salvage to the butcher for four cents a pound. She then bought war stamps with her savings.) The third was a letter from her school principal, commending her performance in a school-wide Math-o-Meet. Edith could do complicated multiplications and divisions in her head.

Again Bea hung in the doorway. “I’m home,” she said.

“We’re having Shipwreck.” It was one of Edith’s favorite dishes. Edith was plump—the only plump member of the Paradiso family.

“I know.”

Edith’s hands continued their work as she regarded her sister. Bea, too, knitted for Needles for Defense, but she couldn’t match her little sister’s output. Bea’s hands regularly forgot what they were doing. Edith’s didn’t, while moving far more rapidly than Bea’s daydreamy hands. Though she didn’t intend to, Edith continually sharpened Bea’s
various misgivings about not contributing enough to the war effort. Wasn’t there
something
she alone could provide?

Bea was forever reading in the
News
about young women not much older than herself who were running gas stations—their husbands having gone off to war—or driving tractors, or unloading trains. She read such articles with fascination, as well as disbelief, and a little dismay. Was she somehow living the wrong sort of life? Letting down her country? But when she saw the
News
photograph of three California coeds who had learned to ride unicycles in order to reduce wear on their bicycle tires, all she could do was laugh and say to Mamma, “Look at this—it’s Edith’s next accomplishment.” Mamma, too, had laughed nervously. As Bea had recently come to recognize, one peculiarity in the family she’d been born into—one of many—was that its youngest member was often its most intimidating.

What will become of her?
Bea sometimes asked herself. Papa joked that Edith’s future husband would never discover a sock that needed darning, a shirt missing a button. But it wasn’t easy picturing Edith married to anyone. If a girl could be spinsterly at the age of twelve, Edith managed it. Nothing about her seemed twelve. She was stoical beyond her years. It was a rare day when tears marred her clear blue eyes. Brown-eyed Bea, six years her senior, was, mortifyingly,
far
more susceptible to weeping.