The Art Student's War (39 page)

Bea Paradiso carried the head of her lover, shrouded in brown paper, down Inquiry Street toward home.

CHAPTER XXII

Under Henry’s steady gaze, her life turned out to be far more manageable. She placed his framed portrait on the right side of her desk, so she could study it from her bed. Henry was the first thing she saw on waking.

His fixed gaze reminded her she must move forward, just as he’d moved forward, toward his recovery, toward his return to the unimaginable Pacific—toward his fiery death on an island called Majuro. Henry understood that the end of everything he held precious might be lying in wait, stranded on some alien shore, but he climbed into the roaring plane nonetheless; it was the only way.

Every day, she wore the amethyst locket he’d given her in those extravagant last days before shipping out. His birthstone. Solemnly, she unfastened it before going to bed; solemnly, she fastened it on rising, while Henry, surrounded by tropical stars, looked on. And so she marched off to the Institute Midwest and sketched meadows and ponds and hillsides for Professor Ravenscroft, who, poor man, wore a toupee. She marched up the steps of Ferry Hospital, whose lizard-green corridors once held the power to sicken her, and pulled out her pencils and her charcoals and drew face after face of young soldiers, some of them fated, like Henry, to die in places nobody had ever heard of.

And people were dying at home. The entire city was besieged by a flu epidemic. Men and women coughed and wheezed on the streetcars on the way to work. The weak, the elderly—they were dying in dreary rooms in a dark city in wartime. Contagion was everywhere. The city was newly under attack. The city would always be under attack. For it was all one war, forever evolving, and the only thing you could do was march forward, past the coughers and the wheezers, to the disabled in their hospital beds: there were wounded soldiers’ faces crying out to be drawn.

No one understood how she did it—no one could locate the wellspring of her fortitude. Or grasped that she was, under the circumstances, handling things remarkably well. At home, more than ever, they
were tiptoeing around her—Bea sensed that. They feared her taking once more to her bed, they worried she’d weep until her heart actually broke. But Henry’s locket would protect her, and Henry’s protection was something nobody could understand.

She did try to explain it to Maggie, riding all the way out to what Maggie was now calling the Pig Pen (short for Hamm Penitentiary). Maggie was given a one-hour pass, and the two of them raced around the corner to a luncheonette, where they promptly fell into their biggest argument since junior high school days. Maggie seemed to demand Bea’s pity because George
might
get killed, at his desk job in Honolulu. But Bea’s true love
had
been killed. But Henry hadn’t been Bea’s
husband
, Maggie reminded her, and Bea asked what sort of
marriage
it was if Maggie was carrying on with Wally Waller, and Maggie couldn’t see how this was
different
from Bea’s going out with Ronny Olsson, and Bea pointed out that the difference was that Maggie was a married
woman
, which was how the whole subject of George arose in the first place. The argument only degenerated from there. Maggie was hopelessly, pitifully self-centered. This was a painful truth Bea had actually known for ten years, though never fully confronting it until now.

But not anymore! Striding along Grand River toward a streetcar stop, Bea felt strangely exhilarated. Henry would have admired the savage honesty of her conclusion: her best friend was no true friend. He’d reached various insights before she had, having once composed a poem Bea had by heart:

The lad I once considered my best friend
Has found another friend …

Likewise it made no sense to continue seeing the medical student Norman Kapp. When Norman had telephoned recently, Bea found herself unable to tell him about Henry—and what was the point in boys with whom she couldn’t talk about Henry? After one more afternoon movie (Bea
still
hadn’t met Norman’s parents), she announced that they must stop seeing each other, and the effect was quite touching, really: Norman gently wept. And she who cried so easily? Dry-eyed, though she almost wished she hadn’t been. “I knew this would happen,” Norman sniffed, and honked into his handkerchief. “I knew this would happen.” And he added, which did give Bea a stab of remorse, “You were so beautiful.” (It didn’t help matters, his speaking in the past tense. Presumably, she’d already become a remote romance.)

At home on Inquiry, they seemed too preoccupied to notice she was doing better. They all took a negative view of life, which was their main problem, and dinner had become a grave nightly trial. Perhaps because she was hurt at the way Bea toyed with her food, Mamma had gone over to Papa’s side: Bea wasn’t eating enough. But no one could see it wasn’t a lack of appetite, exactly—rather, an inability to procure just what she hungered for. And it made no sense, during a time of shortages, when thousands of young men like Henry needed provisions, to eat what you didn’t wish to eat. Later—she could put the weight back on later.

Just how profoundly she had worried her parents became evident when Papa one night made a strange, unprecedented offer. It began with his saying he needed some cigarettes, which had become his usual way of signaling a desire to speak privately.

Whatever was truly on his mind, he gave few hints on the way to Olsson’s. But as they stepped out of the store into the night air, Papa lit a cigarette and said, “Bia, I want to give you some money.”

It was a peculiar thing to say. This wasn’t at all like Papa, usually so circumspect when called upon to open his wallet. He did so now and—right out in the open, in the glare of a street lamp—deposited into her obediently open palm twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred dollars!

“That’s yours to keep. No strings attached.” Papa’s pride in this choice English idiom was patent. “I wanted you to have the money first. Now you put it away.”

“Yes, Papa,” Bea said, and folded the bills into her billfold and settled her billfold in her purse.

“I was thinking you might want to visit your Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace.”

“In—Cleveland?”

“You could take the train.”

“Alone?”

“Yes. Or the ferry, you just be careful on ferries, the kind of people ride ferries. I know ships.” Meaning: I rode in one once, from Italy to America. “But you go visit. Maybe you like to buy things, the things you like with her?” Meaning: maybe you’d like to go clothes shopping with Aunt Grace? “And restaurants. You buy them dinner. You’re not begging charity. You just go do whatever they do in Cleveland. They say it’s a very nice town.”

It was strange how Papa never longed to travel—he who, as a boy, had voyaged alone by ship across the Atlantic to New York, and by train from New York to Detroit. Or perhaps it wasn’t so strange. In any case,
except for rare day trips across the river into Canada, he hadn’t left Michigan in thirty years. And now he was proposing that
she
go to Cleveland—to shop, and dine, and see the sights!

“But what would Mamma say?”

It was one of Mamma’s long-standing complaints: she never went anywhere. There was some strangeness here, too, given Mamma’s reluctance to leave home. She almost never ventured downtown, which was such an easy trip. She preferred to sit in the kitchen, drinking lukewarm coffee and lamenting a life in which she never went anywhere.

“I can square it with her,” Papa said.

“When would I go?”

“Soon, Bia.”

“But I couldn’t go now! Papa, I’ve got way too much to do. My classes! And the hospital …”

“A little break,” Papa said. “And this flu. The city’s sick. Everywhere, everywhere, sick people. You go stay with the doctor.”

All her life, Bea had dreamed of visiting some other big city—Cleveland, Chicago, even New York. So why didn’t she feel giddy and jubilant? Why this wormy fear in the hollow of her stomach? And why this vague resentment toward the man who had just handed her more money than she’d ever held before—a hundred dollars!

“But I couldn’t go now.” Under the street lamp Bea stared beseechingly into her father’s eyes. “Papa, you do see I couldn’t go now?”

Her father stared right back. His uncomprehending eyes were beseeching too. “I want you think about it. The city’s sick, Bia. Now promise me you think about it?”

“I’ll think about it,” Bea promised her father.

But how could she explain to him all she was contemplating—the things currently running through her brain? Actually, the person who best understood was Ronny, sweeter than ever, who continued to treat her almost as an invalid. This was hardly necessary any longer, though it comforted her to subside into that role. Ronny took her to movies and restaurants but mostly—if the weather was at all decent—he took her for walks in various parks: Chandler Park and Balduck Park and Memorial Park and Riverside Park. She hadn’t known the city held so many parks. As though she were tottering a bit, they walked slowly; in Ronny’s company, the whole crazy city blessedly slowed down. His leather-gloved hand held her wool-mittened hand. It was almost as though they were some elderly couple, and one day Bea told him so: “It’s as if we’re
some really old couple, fifty or sixty or something. Sitting on a park bench.” They were holding hands on a bench in Palmer Park.

And Ronny’s reply was very tender. “I’d like to be sitting on a bench with you in Palmer Park when I’m sixty.”

“I’ll remember you said that,” she said.

“Do. Please. I want you to remember I said that,” Ronny said.

She never would have guessed Ronny had it in him to be so self-sacrificing. He made little mention of his own problems, though Bea intermittently grasped that he wasn’t doing too well either. Not only had he stopped taking classes, but it seemed he wasn’t pursuing art at all. Or anything else, so far as she could determine.

“You’ll get back to your art,” she told him.

“I don’t know.” A leery pause. “Know what my mother wants? She wants me to go back to school. Real school. As an academic, not an artist. She wants me to be an art professor.”

The notion seemed patently ridiculous. Just imagine Ronny Olsson correcting student papers, running off mimeographs! But only a second later, it made all the sense in the world. Bea could picture it so vividly: the devilishly handsome art professor, in his rakish clothes, striding purposefully across some quadrangle and every girl on campus mesmerized …

“I told you the same thing once,” Bea said. “That you’d make a great teacher.”

“And I told you I don’t want to
talk
art. I want to
do
it.”

“But who talks more brilliantly than you do?”

“She wants to see you, incidentally.”

“Hmm?”

“Mother. You haven’t seen my parents in ages. She wants another tour of the DIA.”

And this, too—like Papa’s proposed trip to Cleveland—instantly roiled Bea’s stomach. Yes, she was doing much better, but how was she supposed to progress when people were forever upsetting her? Why couldn’t they leave her alone? Under the circumstances, she was doing well.

… But these were
such
peculiar circumstances. That very afternoon, after Ronny dropped her home, she went upstairs and sat where she rarely sat, in Edith’s bedroom. Bea didn’t know what led her there. She sat in the chair where her sister often knitted and her eye fell on an unfamiliar object, suddenly sunlit, on the bedside table.

It was—a homemade dart, obviously of Stevie’s construction. Its tip was a sun-glazed knitting needle. It was one more militaristic toy.

Yet when you looked at it closely, it was far more than a mere plaything. This was a little marvel. Stevie had put it together painstakingly, lovingly … He had fitted the knitting needle into a piece of wood carved and sanded into a handsome bell-shaped curve. He had outfitted it with gray feathers rimmed in ebony and silver—but where had he acquired such gorgeous feathers?

Maybe he’d found a dead bird? Maybe they’d been supplied by Mr. Glovinsky, the butcher? The point was, this was Stevie’s handiwork, and Bea recognized, across an expanse vast enough to make anybody’s head spin, that her baby brother, little
Stevie
, knew it too: now and then, Ste-vie, too, felt a true artist’s hunger in his hands. Unmistakably, the boy had stared at this dart as intensely as Bea had ever stared at any of her soldier portraits, and at once Bea grasped how
little
she grasped about her nearest, her most intimate world. You live beside people—strangers. She was so caught up in her life, she couldn’t see her life, circumscribed as it was by that most inscrutable of mysteries—a family—where each of us understands everything and nothing at once. She looked still more closely at Stevie’s handiwork, and the sunlight dancing angelically on the needle’s head was a source of clarification all but blinding.

Mrs. Olsson wasn’t someone to be fended off; another trip to the DIA was scheduled. It amused Bea to recall how she’d crammed at the library when last preparing to serve as Mrs. Olsson’s museum guide. There was no studying this time.

The morning of the scheduled tour, Bea woke up feeling nauseated. If it weren’t for Henry, the sleepless sentinel on her desktop, she wasn’t sure she could have dragged herself from bed.

After a bout of diarrhea, Bea examined her face more intently than usual in the bathroom mirror. She’d been aware of losing color these past few weeks—various people had gently pointed it out—but it came as a shock to see her face so thin and ghostly.

And her clothes were beginning to fall off her.

Hoping to disguise the true state of things, Bea put on a baggy black sweater and a baggy gray skirt, and she was more liberal than usual with the rouge, but of course Mrs. Olsson wasn’t fooled for an instant. She
strolled magnificently across the great lobby of the Detroit Institute of Arts and seized Bea’s hands and declared at once, “Oh my poor dear Bianca. You’ve had such a time.” “Hello.” “Ronny told me about your friend. My poor dear child,” Mrs. Olsson said, “you’ve had such a time.”