The Art Student's War (42 page)

“Morally, they are only half the field,” Mr. Vanden Akker said, and added, with characteristic, crazy exactitude, “or let’s say forty percent.”

“Mr. Vanden Akker determined that you ought to have your own copy of the letter. So he has written out a copy for you.”

In her rapid new little-womanish way, Mrs. Vanden Akker hastened to the mantel to retrieve an envelope, which she handed to Bea, who said, “I’m so touched,” though what she actually experienced was a heavy, body-encompassing dread. She snapped the letter into her purse.

“I’m keeping the original,” Mrs. Vanden Akker said.

“That’s only right.”

“I omitted to mention this letter when you last visited. That was misleading.”

“There’s more,” Mr. Vanden Akker said.

The pause that expanded hinted at a store of resistance—as though Mrs. Vanden Akker were about to contradict her husband. When she spoke, however, they were in complete accord: “There’s more,” she said.

“In one of his letters,” Mr. Vanden Akker went on, “Henry said something highly significant. He said you were the only person, other than his parents, other than us, who truly understood him.”

“I omitted to mention that,” Mrs. Vanden Akker said.

Deep in the warm swirling mists of Bea’s head, deep in a kind of fogged tropical jungle, this last remark from Henry located her. He spoke and she heard. (The sea was whispering in the distance, speaking unimaginable volumes, and she heard that, too.) It was a message even more telling, in its way, than his indirect proposal of marriage. No other girl had understood him—but
she
had. You could see it in the portrait she did. She had known him, soul to soul. She’d known Henry. And here where everything was meant to balance, in this neat, white, mathematically symmetrical house in Pleasant Ridge, Michigan, the three survivors sat—over coffee, over tumultuous revelations: the three people on earth privileged to understand the soul of a brilliant eccentric boy who did not take teasing well and who, back from the War, somberly marched off to the zoo in a laughable hat … “He understood me, too,” Bea whispered plaintively, and wasn’t that all she’d ever asked of life? The living room was overheated—or seemed so because, as she must have been aware for some time now, Bea had a pounding fever coming on.

“There’s more,” Mr. Vanden Akker prompted, and this time his wife did not hesitate: “There’s more,” she parroted.

“More,” Bea said. In her dizziness and achiness, Bea likewise placed herself in Mr. Vanden Akker’s hands. For it was as if, in all his woolly-headedness, the man had achieved true clarity at last: this afternoon, all the sins of conversational omission would be painstakingly, precisely rectified. Together the three of them would say the unsaid.

“My son also reported that he had wronged you greatly. He obviously felt a great deal of remorse and torment over this.”

But what was Mr. Vanden Akker saying? How far had he glimpsed into the naked and slippery truth?

Henry had
wronged
her? The words blazed up in Bea’s fuzzy, fiery head, illuminating an image of a tall thin girl standing palely in Mitchell’s bathroom, without a stitch of clothing on her body, languorously giving herself a sponge bath at the sink while Henry wept on the other side of the door. Elsewhere, on another day, she had walked up to Mack in order to sprinkle paper fragments into two trash containers.

When from the depths of her fever Bea looked Mr. Vanden Akker right in the eye and declared, “Henry did not wrong me,” it would have been impossible to say whether she was defending Henry, or herself. But the utterance bolstered her. Just as firmly (just as misleadingly, perhaps—or just as mercifully, perhaps) she glanced into Henry’s mother’s pale eyes and said, “No, not at all. He was always a complete gentleman. Henry.”

It was time to leave and every movement and moment hummed with novel feelings of power. She wasn’t the least intimidated by these people. Bea had something she had been longing to announce and would now announce: one remark that would not become an omission. Looking fixedly at Mrs. Vanden Akker, Bea said, “Henry wrote and told you that he
loved
me.” The offensive term, startling as any profanity, caused the little old woman to flinch. But Bea was not to be deterred or deflected. “I just want you to know how things stood between us. Because you see, I loved him. I
loved
your son.”

It was time to go. Bea felt vindicated—she had been not so misleading after all. Mrs. Vanden Akker urged more coffee, Mr. Vanden Akker volunteered to drive her home, one of them remarked that she was looking tired, one of them told her she would be
welcome
at their church … Politely, unstoppably, Bea disentangled herself and escorted her packed, feverish head down the street toward Woodward Avenue.

… And later, having in a sense arrived home once more (having seated herself in a streetcar), Bea recalls that she is carrying a letter from Henry. Although she had torn up an earlier letter, it’s as if the fragments have miraculously rewoven themselves, all in order to lie within her hands, intact, a second time.

“Dear Mother and Father,” the letter begins. It’s in Henry’s handwriting, which is perplexing.

Actually, it’s only
nearly
Henry’s handwriting, which is more perplexing still … until Bea realizes that son and father—fierce, focused Henry and mild, woolly-headed Mr. Vanden Akker—have nearly identical penmanship:

I hope and trust the two of you are well. I am quite remarkably recovered. I still get occasional twinges in my back, but I can hardly complain, especially when I look around at what some of the others have endured. The easing of pain has been a great mercy, largely because it has allowed me to think more lucidly …

Bea doesn’t want, doesn’t need, to read any further. Enfolded in that last sentence lies the one true note. Henry’s yearning pilgrim spirit resides in that voice: “A great mercy, largely because it has allowed me to think …”

To think … She snaps the letter back in her purse. The streetcar grates in reply. It occurs to Bea just how wonderfully appropriate is her condition as she carries home this unforeseen document in which, so she has been informed, Henry will profess his love: she has a fever, just the way Henry had so many, many fevers. And the fever allows her to think …

Down Inquiry Street she is carrying Henry’s love. The city is drifting away, into its outskirts, or floating away, up in smoke, but that’s all right, since she houses within her the knowledge that she was the only girl ever to commune with Henry’s spirit. As he communed with hers. Yes, she understood him before she understood she understood him. And this was the reason, one beautiful, imperishable evening, in the photograph-jammed living room of a complete stranger, eighteen-year-old Bea had chosen to give herself wholly, body no less than soul, to the late Henry Vanden Akker.

CHAPTER XXIV
Long Drive to the City

The book he was reading just before turning off the bedside light was called
The Man Who Chose His World
. In this one, a sort of religious cult moved to the highest Andes. Their religion was really Science, and in their dizzy, thin-aired isolation they began to make unprecedented strides. They began plausibly to envision an Earth free of hunger, menial toil, childhood disease. They mastered the mysteries of genetics, and foresaw new generations of better, brighter, healthier human beings. But with every new advance, the people they’d left behind—the People Down Below—regarded them with increasing suspicion and, eventually, hatred. Down Below, a plot was hatched to exterminate the cult.

It fell upon the book’s hero, a young man raised by the scientists, to arrange a compromise. He went down from the mountains and negotiated. The cult would build a rocket ship and fly away. They pledged never to return to Earth. They would take to the stars, those infinite spaces where they could pursue in tranquillity the infinite reaches of Science.

And so it was agreed. Only, now a complication developed. For while visiting the People Down Below, the young man had fallen helplessly in love with one of their young women. Now he faced a choice: abandon his people, and all their unbounded aspirations, or abandon the girl? He must choose his world.

The ringing phone was a call from another planet—or what might just as well have been. A call put through from Detroit. The bedside clock said twenty-five after one. It was Vico calling.

“Dennis, it’s Vico.”

It was Vico calling from Detroit at one-thirty in the morning and all at once Dennis felt fully, fearfully awake. During nights at home, alone with Grace, this was always the one call above all others to be dreaded: some cry of distress from the Paradisos. He and Grace might have moved from Detroit, but that snug home on Inquiry remained almost more real and precious to the two of them than their own capacious house in Cleveland.

“Vico, what is it?”

A charged pause, during which Dennis sensed that the news must hit in the most vulnerable spot of all.

“It’s Bia,” Vico said. Of course it was … “She’s all right, she’s all right, but it’s a very high fever. I think it may be the influenza.”

“How high a fever?”

“One hundred four?”

“For how long now?”

“One hundred four point two, actually.”

“Vico, how long has the fever been going on?”

“A day. Maybe a little more than a day. Though not quite so hot before. The influenza can be serious for someone like Bia?”

“Can be.”

Dennis knew all about influenza in Detroit. It had been a true epidemic this winter, the worst since ’18. It was deadlier than the War. In recent months, the city had suffered more casualties at home, from influenza, than boys lost overseas.

Grace was up and out of bed, standing beside him. Dennis scribbled on the notepad by the phone:
Bea—fever—104°
.

“Vico, you have her at home?”

“At home, right. I know you don’t like hospitals.”

“Up to a point, Vico. She gets any hotter, take her right away to Ford. Or Ferry. The emergency room. Keep a cool washcloth on her forehead. If she’ll drink anything, give her cold water but not ice water. It’s one-thirty. I can be there by six-thirty I think.”

“You don’t have to do that. I just thought you ought to know.”

“I’m on my way, Vico.”

“I didn’t call asking you. I’m not asking you to drive all that—”

“Vico, Vico, I know you didn’t. Expect me at six or six-thirty. Sooner, maybe.”

“You don’t have to come,” Vico protested. “There are other doctors in Detroit.”

But Vico himself must have heard his own beseeching diffidence. As far as he was concerned, there was but one trustworthy doctor on earth, who happened to be his brother-in-law and best friend, Dennis Poppleton.

“Yes, there are some very good ones, if you need them. Over there at Ford. Or Ferry. Six or six-thirty, Vico. Have some coffee on. Bye now.”

Grace—the faithful helpmeet—was already busy in the kitchen. She had the coffee brewing and was assembling a couple of ham-and-cheese sandwiches.

“What do you think it is?” she said.

“I’m guessing influenza.”

“How serious?”

“Normally not. I mean statistically. What troubles me is his calling at one-thirty in the morning. You know Vico. He wouldn’t do it if he weren’t scared silly.”

“Oh Dennis …”

“Yes,” Dennis said.

“You know, Vico played his last card, calling here.”

As he often did, Dennis stared at his wife in puzzlement. For a moment, he did not understand. But then he saw that Grace, as was her way—a quicker way than his—had intuited just how things stood in Detroit. Vico never did anything without deliberation. He had weighed the call in his mind, checked on the girl, weighed the call, checked on the girl, weighed the call, checked on the girl … And then he’d played the one remaining, desperate card he held: Vico had telephoned Cleveland.

“I could go with you,” Grace said.

“I need you here, darling. Call the hospital, tell them what’s happened. Reschedule what needs rescheduling. I hope to be back by late afternoon. The girl’ll be all right.”

“Oh I know she’ll be all right.”

“She has a strong constitution. They all do—all three of those kids.”

“That’s right.”

Dennis went out to the toolshed, where he kept a five-gallon container of gasoline, and, grunting under its weight, hoisted it into the trunk of his car. In the past year, the gasoline situation had improved for everyone, and as a doctor he’d been given a “C” sticker anyway, all but exempting him from rationing. But at this hour of night you never knew when you’d find an open service station. Being a doctor meant being prepared.

By the time he returned to the house, Grace had fitted his sandwiches in a lunch box, along with an apple, a molasses cookie, and a wedge of spice cake. The big thermos was full of hot coffee. Having asked her once, he had no reason to remind Grace to call the hospital; she was the most competent person he’d ever met. At the front door, he
embraced her with one arm (his medical bag was in the other) and pushed his body up against her—his jewel, his pillar of strength.

“You’re not too worried, Dennis?”

He confessed the truth. “Normally, I wouldn’t be. But Vico clearly is. Calling at one-thirty in the morning from Detroit. The man must be scared out of his wits. You know what she means to him.”

“And to you,” Grace replied.

“Yep.”

“And to me.”

“Yep.”

Dennis turned and walked toward the dark car, turned once more on his heels, and found Grace where he expected her, surveying him from the lit doorway. “Now don’t you worry,” he said.

“And you,” Grace called, softly. “Don’t you worry.”

“You’re my palm tree,” he called, more softly still—a mere whisper. He heard a tremulous “Thank you” as he closed the car door.

It was a doctor’s house, their house, with little room for nonsense jokes, and yet the line about the palm tree was a treasured exception.

The phrase had sprung to his lips one evening some fifteen years ago, back in those delirious days when he’d set his sights on the most desirable woman he’d ever laid eyes on, who was somehow all the more unapproachable for being a divorcée. Who was he to aspire to such a creature? He was a pop-eyed frog—he knew it well enough. He was the penniless kid from Alton, Illinois, who had somehow managed to scrounge and scrape his way through medical school, where for one three-week period he’d read his textbooks with one eye, his glasses having lost a lens he couldn’t afford to replace. On that vertiginous evening when Grace first allowed him a kiss, Dennis, overwhelmed, so frantic to please her, and to praise her, had proclaimed, “You’re my palm tree.” The words had popped out from some unvisited, exotic sector in his brain. Of course, back then neither of them had ever seen a palm tree.