The Art Student's War (38 page)

… A sense of direction arrived from an unexpected quarter: another telephone call from Mrs. Vanden Akker. The voice was as cold and stiff as ever, and just as unwilling to accept the tiniest offering of condolences, yet it carried an invitation—or maybe a directive. She and Mr. Vanden Akker wished to see Bea again, provided it was convenient. Would there possibly be a convenient time?

Well, what Bea couldn’t convey to this terrifying woman, but wished with all her heart to convey, was that nothing significant remained in her life, really, except memories of Henry. In other words, there wasn’t a single day when she
couldn’t
come. She was basically free every moment for the rest of her life, now that she’d lost the most important thing in it.

Bea arranged to meet in three days’ time.

And this appointment, though so deeply dreaded, had a steadying effect—it allowed Bea to get on with her life. She returned to her landscape class, comforted to be a student again, even if unable to focus. And soon she would return—not yet, but soon—to drawing soldiers’ portraits. She would get on with her life.

For they had scared her—those days when it seemed she might never return to the Institute, to Ferry Hospital. She had spent a stretch of days peering into an ongoing emptiness. She’d seen a metal landscape, a grease-fire sun. Yes, Mrs. Vanden Akker’s request was almost comforting. Bea was grateful for something to dread.

CHAPTER XXI

The woman who opened the door could only be Mrs. Vanden Akker, though for an instant this seemed impossible. How could anyone alter so quickly?

If she hadn’t been fat exactly, Mrs. Vanden Akker had been a solid woman—an imposing solidity was her very essence—and yet the woman at the front door was far from solid. It wasn’t merely all the weight she’d lost, though she’d dropped a substantial amount of weight. Mrs. Vanden Akker moved differently now. She had turned tentative, and tremulous. This woman who had always served as a domestic drill sergeant, instructing everyone where to sit and when to rise, ushered in her guest with a jerking wave of uncertainty.

Only her voice remained constant—that cool impregnable voice which had convinced Bea, over the telephone, that here was a mother unmoved by her only child’s death. Nothing could be further from the truth. No, Mrs. Vanden Akker was being eaten alive by grief.

Mr. Vanden Akker’s transformation was less dramatic but no less complete. His silver hair was longer and uncombed; in fact, it stood up in wild patches from his skull, because as he spoke he kept scratching at his scalp—digging at it—with both hands. He had always seemed brilliant but eccentric, with his domed forehead and those jumpy eyes behind constantly drooping spectacles; now, for the first time, hair upthrust as if in flame, he looked, just possibly, mad.

“Would you have—coffee?” asked Mrs. Vanden Akker. Heretofore, a guest had been simply presented with whatever she—Mrs. Vanden Akker—deemed suitable.

Bea adopted the peculiar locution. “I would have coffee—please.”

So she was left alone with Mr. Vanden Akker.

Bea swallowed hard and said, “I’m very, very sorry about Henry.”

Mr. Vanden Akker flinched, nodded, gouged at his scalp, and said something Mrs. Vanden Akker had already quoted over the telephone: “There is no sorrow in the ways of the Lord.”

The three of them sipped coffee in the living room and Mrs. Vanden
Akker passed around some spitefully hard biscuits. Mr. and Mrs. Vanden Akker—those two formerly august presences—seemed so hapless and so routed that Bea felt emboldened to lead the conversation.

“I don’t exactly know how it happened …”

Mr. and Mrs. Vanden Akker exchanged looks. There was a pause, and a second exchange, during which they evidently agreed that this particular story was Mr. Vanden Akker’s.

“Henry’s plane went down. Trying to land on an island called Majuro in the Pacific. There was a tropical rainstorm.”

“I’m so sorry …”

“I telephoned a friend in Washington who is with the government. He belongs to our church. He was able to give me some additional details. I hadn’t actually heard of Majuro before.”

“No,” Bea murmured.

“The plane crashed and burned. It would have been very quick. I could show you where Majuro is,” Mr. Vanden Akker suggested. “I have a fine atlas.”

“Yes,” Bea said, but Mr. Vanden Akker did not rise. She did not expect him to. He simply sat, and tore at his scalp, and went on staring in his matter-of-fact madman’s way.

“I hope at least there wasn’t much pain in the end,” Bea said.

Of course it was the strangest thing in the world to be talking in this fashion—to be sitting in the Vanden Akkers’ living room discussing Henry as though Henry could really be dead. Could Henry really be dead? Surely not—yet there was a sense, at the edge of Bea’s thinking, that it was only because Henry was dead that the three of them dared attribute to him anything so monstrous as death.

“In the end?” Mrs. Vanden Akker replied, with some of her old forcefulness. “But this isn’t the end. Explain it. Explain it to the girl, Horace.”

Mr. Vanden Akker took a deep breath. He righted his glasses on his nose and leaned forward. “I would begin this way, Bea,” he said. It was perhaps the first time he’d addressed her by name. “My initial premise would be this: heresy is born not through ignorance but through pride.”

The pause that followed begged for some response, so Bea replied “Right,” and added, “I see,” even though she hadn’t an inkling, of course, what Mr. Vanden Akker meant. She was struck, again, by a sensation of how remote was this man—how remote this man and woman—from any world she recognized. This was how they talked about their dead son, whose torn-open plane had exploded in flames …

“Now, it is a premise of our faith that each of us cannot identify whether we are among the elect—whether we are truly saved. And you can discern the hand of divine wisdom in this arrangement, for what better way to protect us all from the twin vices of pride and complacency?”

“That’s true,” Bea said.

Mr. Vanden Akker went on: “But just because it is impossible to tell for certain whether you yourself are among the saved, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s impossible to make the determination about some other person. It is much like life in the workaday world: we can see others but we can hardly see ourselves.”

“That’s true.”

“The truth is, the workaday world offers us many clues. Things are the way they are for a reason.”

“There are signs,” Mrs. Vanden Akker eagerly interjected.

Mr. Vanden Akker turned toward his wife. “I’m coming to that,” he said and though his voice was mildness itself, this was the first time Bea had ever seen him stand up to her. Mr. Vanden Akker again leaned forward. “And I don’t think that’s heresy. It’s a conclusion I come to quite humbly. You see, Bea, I am a mathematician by trade. Oh I’m nothing like the mathematician our boy was—”

“He was so brilliant.”

“Yes, indeed he was. Quite brilliant. You could see it from the very start—”

“Before he spoke his first word,” Mrs. Vanden Akker pointed out.

Mr. Vanden Akker weighed his wife’s words, then nodded sagely. “Yes, before Henry spoke his first word. You could see he’d been granted a special gift—”

“There were signs,” Mrs. Vanden Akker inserted.

“Yes, signs of a gift,” Mr. Vanden Akker agreed. “Now, I am no mathematician of that sort, but I have taught myself to observe things closely, to search for clues, and in the case of Henry’s death, too, there are signs—”

Mrs. Vanden Akker evidently could not help herself. She interrupted again: “There are signs.”

“There are clear signs that Henry is among the elect.”

“Henry is in Heaven now,” Mrs. Vanden Akker said.

“At the right hand of God,” Mr. Vanden Akker said.

“At the right hand of God,” Mrs. Vanden Akker intoned.

“I have no doubt,” Bea told them.

Of all the many surprises in this household, none was more arresting than husband and wife’s reversal of roles. Previously, Mrs. Vanden Akker had made no effort to conceal her impatience with her husband’s cloudy theological speculations. And Mr. Vanden Akker would stop midsentence—a flush-faced culprit—whenever she cut him off. But now all conversational authority lay with him alone. Mr. Vanden Akker had become an oracle. For he alone could construe the signs: he alone had the subtlety of mind and the expertise needed to calculate that string of mystical terms by which one arrived at the glittering certainty that Henry was among the eternally elect.

Mrs. Vanden Akker asked after each member of Bea’s family—people previously of seemingly little interest. Bea wouldn’t have thought Mrs. Vanden Akker actually knew the names of her brother and sister, but she did. “How is Steven?” she asked. “He is thirteen now, correct?” And, more surprising still, “How is little Edith, who has her own mathematical gift?’

Bea talked awhile about her family. It was Mr. Vanden Akker who brought the conversation around again. “You have something you wanted to give the girl,” he told his wife.

“Yes,”
Mrs. Vanden Akker said, and sprang up quickly, almost guiltily. “Excuse me, excuse me. I’ll be just a moment.”

But what could this “something” possibly be? Bea felt very disconcerted, suddenly. She launched a smile at Mr. Vanden Akker, who scratched at his scalp in reply …

And when Mrs. Vanden Akker returned, the “something” turned out to be much, much more unearthly than anything Bea could have imagined.

Holding it carefully before her with both hands, as though it were some platter on which little party snacks were balanced, Mrs. Vanden Akker brought forth the portrait Bea had drawn of Henry so long ago, in Ferry Hospital. It was framed. Henry must have framed it for his parents. Mrs. Vanden Akker stepped toward Bea and, with a lurch, thrust the portrait at her. “We thought you might want your picture back.”

From where Bea sat, Henry’s face, upside-down, looked oddly asymmetrical. This was the very portrait at which he’d crowed,
Don’t I look brainy?

Although Mrs. Vanden Akker stood awkwardly waiting, Bea simply couldn’t lift her arms. Henry’s face bobbed up and down—Mrs. Vanden Akker’s hands were trembling. But Bea simply could not bring herself to touch the portrait.

“Oh but it’s yours,” she whispered.

“You drew it,” Mrs. Vanden Akker countered.

“But I want you to have it.”

Poor Henry continued to bob like a struggling swimmer. Bea had forgotten the mock tribute to van Gogh, the scatter of tropical star clusters …

“We thought you should have it,” Mr. Vanden Akker said.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Mrs. Vanden Akker said. “But we prayed and Mr. Vanden Akker received a sign that the picture belonged with you.”

“Yes,” Bea said.

So, to sit and do nothing ran counter to God’s will, then. Bea lifted her arms and accepted the portrait. But before setting it in her lap she swung it around, so that Henry, no longer upside-down, eyed her squarely.

And with this cinching gesture—this final cradling of Henry in her lap—the tears arrived. Bea wiped her eyes, and thanked Mr. and Mrs. Vanden Akker, and half-listened to various reassurances, and wiped her eyes once more, and after five or ten minutes of scarcely hearing what was said, Bea made her way to the door, where she was handed a rectangular object she couldn’t at first identify. (It was the portrait of Henry, which she’d evidently at one point handed over and which now was returned, wrapped in brown paper. But which of the Vanden Akkers had stepped out of the room to secure it like this, with tape and twine?)

… They ride together, Bea and Henry, artist and subject, first on a bus and then on a streetcar. Although his face is covered, Bea knows it is there. Right through the brown paper wrapping, Henry’s gaze blazes. Bea sits in the back of the car and senses his eyes upon her and knows, out at the peripheries of many diffuse sensations, that Henry’s glance is still alive, within the portrait she conceived. The artist captured something vital which remains vital. Maybe she failed to conceive everything she might have; maybe her left hand fell short of its noblest extrapolations. Even so, it fixed on something essential about Henry, and no other object on earth captured
this precise facet
of her lover, which, had she not preserved it, would have been lost for good.

Henry’s dear face, buried under paper, lies in her lap. Yes, Henry must have framed it for his parents. And it’s almost too painful to contemplate—the sort of magnanimity by which Mr. and Mrs. Vanden Akker relinquished the only artist’s portrait of their son. Bea weeps a little
in the back of the car and gets off at Warren, where she immediately catches another streetcar. It’s on the Warren crosstown line that clarity suddenly comes down …

Mr. and Mrs. Vanden Akker dislike the portrait. Mrs. Vanden Akker in particular—she’d disliked the portrait from the first. The young man whom Bea had labored so painstakingly to replicate? That feverish-eyed, fiercely freethinking young man, surrounded by van Gogh stars, isn’t someone the Vanden Akkers wish daily to contemplate. No, it was a convenient relief when Mr. Vanden Akker received his heavenly “sign” that the portrait must be returned.

The truth is, Bea is utterly dry-eyed and thinking very lucidly. Clarity of this sort always ought to be embraced, even when its light is merciless and raw. Bea has lost nearly everything, and yet she has retained this one indispensable virtue: a sharp-eyed appreciation of exactly where she is.

So it’s more painful than it otherwise would be—it all but breaks Bea’s spirit entirely—when evidence arrives that she is, in fact, completely muddleheaded … Clarity? She’s kidding herself—deluding herself. Oh, she can be such a damned little fool! Someone grabs at her sleeve as she’s exiting the car. A Negro woman, who evidently has been calling her, lays a hand upon her arm. “Miss,” she says, “aren’t you forgetting something?”

Yes: she is. Oh my God yes: she’s forgetting Henry.

She apparently means to leave Henry on the streetcar.

How could she do such a thing? How could she possibly,
possibly
do such a heartless and indefensible thing? This public exhibition of her deficiencies—her negligence, her unworthiness, her very unfitness for the life she finds herself in—overwhelms her. What would be the point in making excuses? Mere excuses are what they would be. The intense eyes beneath the paper package—they know otherwise. Henry comprehends her every shortcoming. Henry sees it all. He asked her once: in the whole spectrum, what is the worst, the disgustingest color a human being could be? Turtle green? Plum purple? She hadn’t fully understood back then—that night at Mitchell’s. Now she does. She understands the bottommost degree of self-awfulness Henry was struggling to express. For she’s as awful as
he
could ever be. Worse—because Henry had believed, at least, in her purity. And she believes in nothing.