The Art Student's War (23 page)

And Mrs. Olsson observed, testily, “Charley, I don’t get my cosmetics at Olsson’s.”

“Go ahead, give me a
list.”
Sometimes, in his pell-mell enthusiasms, Mr. Olsson truly could seem boyish—younger than his son, who, with his qualifying, dicing love of nuances, sometimes seemed never to have lived a boyish day.

The pencil hovered in Bea’s hand, stalled. Three Olsson’s trained their eyes on her. This was so intensely awkward! And then a mischievous, fiendish thought arrived … What if she were the sort of girl who would deliberately shock and appall them all? What if she were to name one or two of the most personal things to be bought at Olsson’s?

“Hairbrush.” Bea wrote in a somewhat larger hand than usual, so all might read. She looked up triumphantly.

“Go on, you gotta make a
list.”

“Noxzema,” Bea wrote and added, in a needless parenthesis: “Face Cleanser.”

“Go on.”

Bea racked her brain. All those gaudily bright, crowded aisles of
entrancing merchandise … What did she want? What did she need? She came up with a linked trio of items and wrote eagerly, “Small Scissors, Nail Clippers, Emery Boards.” Before Mr. Olsson could urge her further, she passed him the notepad and the pencil and said, “I’m ever so grateful.”

A bottle of red wine arrived, and in a couple of swallows Mr. Olsson re-created his winning imitation of a heron flipping a fish across its bill. He set the empty glass down perhaps more loudly than intended and ran a hand tightly over his narrow balding skull. Some sense of calm at last descended over the group.

After dinner, at Mrs. Olsson’s suggestion, Ronny asked Bea to dance. The song was “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” He appeared a little morose; he had been shuttered up all evening. “So you’re going to Grand Rapids!” Bea said in a cheery voice that—the recognized—parroted his mother’s. “I’ve never been.”

“Can you imagine anything worse?”

“It’s supposed to be a pretty town …”

“I’m not talking about
Grand Rapids.”
Ronny’s body felt distant. He could be quite a good dancer (though he lacked his father’s broad, audacious sweep), but tonight he seemed listless. “You know what I’m saying, Bianca—so why do you sometimes pretend you don’t? Why would you want people thinking you understand
less
than you do?”

It was one of those questions that made her so nervous, and made her so thankful for Ronny’s company—those powerful, probing questions that jostled her into untested lines of contemplation. He had a marvelously keen eye for veiled hypocrisies. She said, “It isn’t immediately clear—”

“I mean riding with
him
. For hours and hours. Battle Creek. Jackson. Kalamazoo. From one Olsson’s to the next. There where you need us there.”

“It’s a nice slogan.”

“Slogans …” Ronny sighed, and then he said, “Bianca, y’ever think you’d like to get far away from here?”

Far away from here? Whatever did he mean?

Still, at least he was opening his mouth, and Bea said, encouragingly, “I’ve always wanted to go to Chicago. It’s supposed to be ever so wonderful.”

“I don’t mean
Chicago
, and what is it you’re pretending now? I mean
far
. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you and I could draw the
way God meant us to draw, paint the way He meant us to paint, if only we could get away
far?”

You and I?
But what was Ronny saying?

“Just picture it,” he went on, “if we went to the Pacific, like Gauguin.” And then he added, typically, “Not that I admire his paintings so much.” And added, yet more typically, “Though you’d have to say the exotic travel freed whatever talent he had …”

“The Pacific?” Bea said. Ronny sometimes treated her so impatiently when she failed to understand him, but wasn’t it obvious that in numerous ways he didn’t understand himself? “Ronny, Ronny, they’re fighting a war out there in Gauguin’s Pacific. Those beaches have land mines.” And this, too, was one of his fascinations for her: was there another young man in all of Detroit who could, however briefly, overlook the screaming fact of the greatest war in history?

Even so, even if the weight of human civilization endorsed her, Bea had managed to say precisely the wrong thing. She could feel it almost physically: enthusiasm draining from Ronny’s body, his heart withdrawing …

There’s no love song finer,
But how strange the change from major to minor,
Ev’ry time we say goodbye.

When Ronny led her back to the table, Mr. and Mrs. Olsson were having what could only be described as an argument, on the subject, unfortunately, of courage. “Charley, it’s simpler than that. The truth about them? They’re just
afraid.”
This
them
of Mrs. Olsson’s encompassed—so the swing of her hand suggested—all the members of the Coral Club. “Afraid what people think.”

“Maybe it isn’t fear,” Mr. Olsson countered. “Maybe it’s something we might call simple politeness. Or quiet decency. You follow me? Respect for certain civilities and time-tested codes of behavior which—”

“Honestly, you can’t
smell
it, Charley?” Mrs. Olsson answered her own question: “No-o, course you can’t. Fear’s got a smell, and like any other smell I suppose after while you get used to it. You honestly can’t smell the cowardice in here?”

Mr. Olsson again asked Bea to dance, which seemed an excellent idea. She rose eagerly.

More than ever, she felt sorry for Mr. Olsson, though Bea could
never actually confide this to anyone, it sounded so smug and silly … An eighteen-year-old girl art student pitying one of Detroit’s most successful men? Yet sorry for him was precisely what Bea felt—he was always working so hard, while facing such mutinous opposition at home.

She appreciated the way Mr. Olsson initiated a dance: he sort of drifted you into it, as though dancing required no more thought than walking. They revolved around the floor. Bea very much wished Ronny would try harder to see things from his father’s point of view, and she wondered again: was there some way to draw the two of them closer? She wished she had something to give Mr. Olsson. What would he like? What would make him happy? Some bolstering word? Some earnest confession of respect and sympathy? But of course she had nothing to give Mr. Olsson.

A new song began, “Skylark,” and she was not at all prepared for the quick tightening urgency of Mr. Olsson’s embrace. This might appear—Bea feared—inappropriate. It certainly felt inappropriate: to have their (from a practicing artist’s point of view) different-aged bodies pressed so tightly that she could feel her breasts flatten against his chest. Bea tried to pull back, but Mr. Olsson’s hold on her, however graceful, was unbudging. “Miss Paradiso, you are so tactful,” Mr. Olsson said. Tactful?

“And what an extraordinary name to parade through life with: Miss Bi-an-ca Par-a-di-so.” Mr. Olsson’s voice, too, was a bit of a mystery, dreamy and purry and seemingly at odds with his vivid physical presence. She did find herself wishing the Olsson family were easier to decipher—though perhaps the Paradisos might appear, to the eyes of an outsider, equally unfathomable …

“My father calls me Bia.”

“Be a?”

“The first part of my name.”

“Oh,” Mr. Olsson said. “Right. Your father.” After a pause he said, “Works for O’Reilly and Fein, right? They have a good reputation.”

“I told him you said that. He was very pleased.”

“You told him I said that?” This seemed to quicken Mr. Olsson’s interest. “What else did you tell him about me?”

On the one hand, it was odd having this conversation while dancing so close, with Mr. Olsson’s thin-lipped mouth lodged right beside her ear. On the other hand, it wasn’t odd at all.

“I don’t know. I told him you have a gym in your house. After all, Papa’s a builder.”

“Always looking for a little extra work, I suppose?”

“He has more than he can handle,” Bea replied truthfully, and proudly. “You know how it is—the city’s booming.”

“And will go on booming long after the guns stop,” Mr. Olsson said. “Once they start making cars again, all hell’s gonna break loose in this town.” His voice, especially when uttering the profanity, quivered with excitement; this was a
hell
he was looking forward to. “That’s when the real businessman’s war will begin.”

“I thought the city might slow down,” Bea said.

“Slow down?” Mr. Olsson laughed. “My dear little girl, nothing’s going to slow down. Ever again. It’s a new world. Faster and wilder. Faster and wilder,” he chanted, and Bea’s head went spinning, off toward a
new world
, and then in a softer voice Mr. Olsson said: “I think courage comes in a hundred different forms.”

And what in heaven’s name did he mean by
that?

And when the music stopped, with a final climbing phrase (“Won’t you lead me there?”), Mr. Olsson uttered the strangest words of all. He held her even yet, seizing her upper arms, and stared frankly, full-heartedly into her eyes with that queer, arresting face of his—at times a lynx, at times a heron. “You must understand, Bianca, I am not what I seem,” he told her. His powerful thumbs pressed into the flesh of her arms.

“No?” Bea said. She could say nothing else.

“Me? I’m searching for purity,” Mr. Olsson said.

The agile dancing, and this impenetrable parting declaration, and the lingering print of his thumbs on her upper arms—they all worked to ensure on her return to the table that Bea scarcely heard Mrs. Olsson, who was still expounding on courage and cowardice. No, it took the sound of impermissible words—harsh as a slap to the face—to summon Bea fully: “Kikes,” Mrs. Olsson said, distinctly. “Niggers. I’m not afraid of them.”

“Gretchen.”

“I’m not afraid of the words, itsy-bitsy words, and why am I not afraid? Let me tell you why. It’s because I’m not afraid of the people behind the words. Gretchen Olsson is not scared of the Jews. I’m one of the few people in this room who would let them into this club. You know that, Charley. God, it’s pathetic. Albert Kahn designs the DAC and they make it clear they don’t want him as a member?”

“Did you know he also designed the lighthouse at Belle Isle?” Bea interposed. “Gretchen. It’s time to go home,” Mr. Olsson said.

“They’re all running scared in here. Running scared of people like
Max Fisher and the Bormans, because they’re looking to build houses nearly as big as Henry Ford’s. The folks in here? They’re all afraid they’ve lost the keys to the bank. D’you honestly not feel the fear in here, Charley? Or is it you’re scared, too, Charley—of little two-bit operations like Saperstein’s Drugs?”

“That’s more than enough. More than enough, Gretchen.”

“Charley thinks I’m letting down the team, buying my clothes from the Jews down on Livernois, rather than out in Grosse Pointe where they may know how to dress a horse but certainly not a woman. I say to him, It’s a question of justice. I don’t want clothes doing me an injustice. I say, Charley, it’s either Livernois or New York.”

Ronny inserted himself into the conversation: “Bianca has never been to New York.”

Mr. Olsson immediately picked it up: “We must all go to New York. Soon’s I get a little time. Gretchen, you’ll take Bianca shopping.”

But Mrs. Olsson was not about to be diverted from her firm enumeration of principles:
“And
the colored. Jesus, everyone in here, scared to
death
. Of that big black river, big as the Mississippi only it’s flowing
north
, from New Orleans to Dee-troit, one godforsaken jalopy after another. The people in here think the lights are going out, the whole damn city turning black as night, but I’m not scared, Charley, and you know why? Because the colored recognize they have a friend in Gretchen Olsson.”

“You want to know something, Gretchen?” Mr. Olsson had stood up in order to lean on the table—toward her, over her. Mrs. Olsson did not look cowed. She glared straight back. It was a frozen moment, a tableau right out of a painting. (Later, in her bed that night, Bea would recognize it for a queer sort of painters’ allegory: a Contest Between Strength and Beauty.) Mr. Olsson was swaying, obviously ransacking his wits for a suitably ample denunciation. Only now did Bea realize just how much he, like his wife, had drunk tonight.

When Mr. Olsson’s utterance arrived, it was unmistakably an anticlimax: “Gretchen, you have, you—you went and really outdid yourself this evening.” He tossed his chin, dismissing her, and glanced contemptuously around the room.

Another silence. Then Mrs. Olsson said, “You’re not scared of the word ‘Wop,’ are you, Bianca?” Her dark eyes looked a little bleary, as though peering through fogged glass.

“Scared?” Bea said.

“Gretchen,”
Mr. Olsson said.

And another voice reentered the fray: “
Mother
.…”

But with something like self-righteousness—a notion that she would be not only absolved but wholly vindicated if only, if only permitted to have her say—Mrs. Olsson carried on: “Because you know what, Bea?
I don’t care
. Dago, Wop, I don’t care if your family’s hairy as monkeys and reeks of garlic. Doesn’t smell as bad as the smell of fear. And I don’t care that you’re Cat-lick, as we used to say in Scarp, North Dakota. You can pray to the Patron Saint of Lost Handbags, or Laddered Stockings, for all I care …”

“Actually, my family’s religion—”

“I
don’t care,”
Mrs. Olsson repeated, which she clearly meant nobly, though it came off brusquely.

Mr. Olsson had come around the table and placed his hand upon his wife’s arm. The imperious way she stared down at that hand was frightening. For just a moment, Bea feared (a horrible fear) that Mrs. Olsson would slap it away. But then the woman rose to her feet, with all her stylistic aplomb, although she had one more remark, or pair of remarks, to bestow. She said to Bea, almost sweetly, “You really are green as grass, aren’t you, Bianca?” And added, solicitously, “Oh Christ, Bea, do yourself a favor and never learn a goddamn thing.”