The Art Student's War (44 page)

Dennis did indeed. It was something he’d understood from the very outset, when he first laid eyes upon her. Back then, she was just a slip of a thing, Grace’s little niece. But he’d felt it from the start: a spirit to reckon with.
Who is this man?
her wondering gaze demanded, as if she were naturally the judge and he were present only on approval.

“Oh I know,” he said.

“The others are different. They will listen.”

“I know.”

“You told it to me,” Vico said, quoting once more, for what now must be the thousandth time, an idle observation Dennis had made a dozen or so years ago: “Bia is overemotional.”

It was the solemn respectfulness of Vico’s tone, as if citing some diagnosable medical condition, that somehow unexpectedly propelled Dennis over a spiritual threshold. His heart kicked inside his chest and he lunged forward, as though falling, and clutched at his brother-in-law.

Dennis held Vico fiercely, needfully, seeking to conceal what would not be concealed: he had abruptly begun weeping. But Vico could hardly have failed to notice the half-choked sobbing, the violent trembling…

In Dennis’s entire adulthood this was the first occasion when anyone—anyone other than Grace—had seen him in tears. The only lenitive aspect was that Vico had come along with him: Vico, too, was sobbing, trembling.

Upstairs, the bathroom door clicked shut. Somebody—one of the younger children—had begun to stir. The enfevered city itself was stirring, prodded awake by the peremptory lights of a new day. No repose, no cessation. Coughing, wheezing, the ailing night shift punches out, the ailing day shift punches in. And the War goes on, and will go on, for this is a war to be fought every single day for the duration …

Block after block, the city of Detroit was beginning to brighten, while on Inquiry Street the art student’s pallid head revolved within the dim and bright derangements of its fever, and the two reunited friends, the two brothers-in-law—the two true brothers—clung to each other, weeping.

PART TWO
Off in the Islands

CHAPTER XXV

In the Land of Colors without Objects, learning to read can take a while. There, the pages are less like pages than like teeming microscopic slides, explosive as pondwater. The medium is liquid. And light is everywhere and everything.

In the Land of Colors without Objects, you will find no anchor or hitching post. No compass and no polestar. There is only the outspread where-we-are, and the ever dimming and receding where-we-were, and the projected (the obscure and half erroneous) where-we’re-headed in the Land of Colors without Objects.

Entry is often by way of the slimed board on the duckwalk, the missed footing and the backward-sprawling sudden plunging slipping into sleep. But it can be won as well by the steep escarpments of high fever, from whose unchallenged summits the cosmos lies below you as an interlocked, slow-churning, and forever-unblendable spill of waters and oils, pools unspooling within pools, loops overlapping loops.

She’s not asleep although it often feels like sleep: she’s under a spell, wrapped and rewrapped within a fever like no other fever. It has transported her to this artist’s land of colors without objects, where swirls nudge swirls and swing into looser swirls, and lines hunch over into loops; where loops pinch in the middle to become eights and eights divorce themselves into paddles, and paddles thin into spokes, into lines—and lines, inspired, spiral into loops, spools.

Of all colors, blue is the color she most spiritedly loves, since it reaches furthermost, even into the locked heart of the ice cavern, into the whistling heart of the sky-blue gas flame—though when a great sprawling Valentine’s Day splotch of red oscillates into view, insolent and irrepressibly amorphous, she recognizes it as the most full-hearted pigment in creation, though naturally this must be just the right bright shocking shade of red: redder than roses, redder than blood, redder than the blood’s howl at a forbidden kiss. Red truly has always been her favorite color, or so she’d swear until, there on the other, gentler, purer side of gold—gold into which concentrated gold has been injected—she
locates the blazing sum, that high and perfect outpost whose outpourings animate, far so far below, one green extension ladder after another, all the climbing rustling surfs of jungle leaves, the soft mad frothing of flowers, competing blooms budding heads, the garden whereinwhich each primary pigment shatters open like some brashly exotic tropical nut and we are witnesses to lemon blossoms, lilac blossoms, apple-green flowers, apple-red flowers, mauves and peridots, rusts and russets, tourmalines and aquamarines, beryl and blueberry, all of them detonating widely within her head, her poor head.

Her true sleeper’s name is White, it is not Bea but Bianca, it is the sun and sanctuary of all colors, which may indeed be the greatest miracle the cosmos encompasses—certainly, it’s the greatest of all examples of hiding something in plain sight. Who could ever have divined that Ochre and Olive and Magenta, Chartreuse and Fuchsia and Umber could all lie concealed inside a White that seems, in its illuminated openness, to conceal nothing? This is—no less—the Light of Creation, the trompe l’oeil at the heart of every blessedly extravagant dawn.

She has gone farther than ever into the Highlands of Fever, once the homeland of her own private Vincent, her singular extinct Henry, who found all those crowding leaves so frightening, what with their dark and intratwined whisperings, and yet they scarcely frighten
her
. Why should they, when she knows that no painter ever born, not Turner, not even Vincent himself, beheld pigments purer or brighter than those she now beholds? She has arrived at the land where colors uncouple not only from objects but even from light sources and—allowed to be solely themselves—float atop that sea where the stars are nothing but a windtossed scarf of sunlight knotted round an icy ocean wave. Eternity is not commodious enough to exhaust the elated geometry of that sea. When you add a garnet-colored rhombus to an emerald ellipse, what do you get? You get a wan colossal melting pearl the color of tallow with, by way of remainder, a couple of chevrons, robin’s-egg blue, arrowing away in cool pursuit of each other.

It is her sister—whose name is Edith, who talks in her sleep, declaring composedly to all the forces of darkness,
I disagree completely
—it is her sister who has the gift for numbered shapes, inside that philosopher’s head of hers which, Bea sometimes suspects, with a touch of envious alarm, may be the deepest head in the Paradiso family. She’s only a child, Edith, yet she has managed a near-total escape from childhood.
She’s the solid girl who never cries, the one whose knitter’s hands will ultimately topple Berlin and Tokyo, and the occasional provider of observations so much psychologically wiser than her years that, enlightened and unnerved, you recoil. Edith? Whose sister are you, Edith? (Are you Henry’s sister? Are you childless Henry’s child?) Yet even Edith, perhaps, has never free-fallen quite so head-deep into that ancient well from which numbers siphon all their wit and playfulness. Who would have guessed, there at the bottom of the well, that all the numbers sing like birds?

One day in a blinding tropical rain an overweighted little plane failed to find its runway. Maybe it found palm trees instead. Maybe it found jungle. For a few minutes, the bodies burned. The drumming rain found the earth. And when the skies cleared, palms rustled huskily overhead, those dark leaf-leather voices whispering,
What are we going to do with him? What are we going to do with him?
Bianca has heard that rustling herself, the voices sighing,
What are we going to do with her?
sometimes assuming the cadences of Papa’s voice, and sometimes Mamma’s, and sometimes the voice of a streetcar’s scraping progress, and sometimes the voices of those collusive, long-tongued ancestral creatures in green-walled Ferry Hospital, the lizards’ lair where she herself was born and where she returns always with heart in mouth, heart on her sleeve, the crybaby who must learn to control herself, as the others do, boys who have suffered so much and are so much braver than she can steel herself to be. Or it’s the world’s biggest nestful of baby birds, Ferry Hospital, and each oversized little beak poignantly agape, for they are—everyone is, everywhere they are—clamoring to be fed, and in these strapped times Bianca can hardly bear to feed herself, what with these ever-so-many hungry mouths to which she has become, oddly, accountable.

Step carefully. First you turn pale, and then quite a bit paler, and then paler still, and then your head goes up in flames; her head is up in flames. You stand naked at the sink, proposing to wash yourself by sponge bath, one despoiled limb at a time—but there is always the voice catapulting at you from the other side of the door, beseeching forgiveness, and always the whisper of leaves, wondering
What are we going to do with her?
She learned a poet once, or a poem.

The life I used to think of as my life
Was someone else’s life.

He was the poet of the resurrection:

One day it seemed my life had reached its end.
But that was not the end.

She understood this poem because—because it was her modest ambition to bring a few of the wounded fully back to life. And she understood
everything
better now, since you can’t have fevers of this sort without lying at death’s door. Death’s Door. That’s what Henry told her. Henry knocked first, in a pilgrimage memorialized in his eyes. (And later, he walked through that door.) Yes, with more delicacy than you’d need to pick up a single fallen scale from a butterfly’s wing, she had reached out and gripped that pilgrimage of his in her left hand, her artist’s hand, translating it into Vincent’s webby jungle stars, which now stand framed upon her desk, a homemade celestial backdrop for the lamb, fish, stork, rabbit. Sleep carefully.

The young art student, just a girl, not yet twenty, has gone up in flames in a back upper bedroom of a modest house on the East Side of Detroit—a city itself destined to go up in flames. Already the hissing spark races down the evil-minded fuse, like a mouse scurrying along a horizontal pipe, throwing off its occasional sparks just as the streetcars, with their loose and elderly synapses, toss their sparks overhead. The streetcars are doomed. And the city is burning.

Night and day, the factories are burning—burning stones to melt metals, burning souls to feed the foundry flames. There’s a whistle in the smokestacks, summoning more and more workers into this overheated metropolis, though there’s no place to settle them, even as the new houses spring up like toadstools, even as the old houses are gutted and restored: our beloved city is splitting at the seams. They wander up out of the black night of the South from regions not yet hung with electricity, black faces from black tarpaper shacks, hurt and hungry souls materializing at the rumor of a rumor of a job. The others won’t but Mr. Ford will take them in, dark as their faces may be, and he will take in as well the lean white faces, shy and surly, figures gangling out of Appalachian hillsides, who have congregated in this city where the colored folk no longer know their place—where the black people have no place, since most neighborhoods refuse them.

Lodged within its dingy fur, the little mouse racing down the water pipe carries a ruinous plague and in time the entire city will burn with
fever. The dead will lie whichways on the sidewalks and the houses burn, in that choking summer of ’67, when the fever at last erupts. Some fourteen hundred buildings will blaze, including two whose renovation Ludovico Paradiso once supervised. A bungalow on Euclid, into whose attic he fitted a defense worker’s apartment, will roar to the ground, and from a duplex on Twelfth Street, where Vico, with his careful craftsman’s hand, laid in doorjambs and staircases and moldings, outraged choking smoke will stream from the shattered windows. A citywide uprising, forty-three dead, most of them Blacks. They’ve had enough, it seems, of being thought not good enough—one more demonstration of the confounding notion that the oppressed inevitably resent even their most generous oppressors …

The smoke is born long before the fire, though nothing is perceived clearly until the first flame, overheated, sticks out its panting tongue from the crumbling eaves. As the contractor knows in his bones, the houses speak, they tell a tale. And this Detroit journey from pride to rage will sometimes seem to Vico the mystery beyond all others, around which his own fever must be wrapped (were he to have a fever). The man on the ground floor, who envisions doorjambs and staircases, has no notion that a flaming mouse is scurrying along a basement water pipe. In the kitchen on Inquiry Street, Ludovico Paradiso embraces his brother-in-law, Dr. Dennis Poppleton, the two weeping men literally propping each other up—for neither can support alone the prospect looming before them: a world without the girl, a world without their own Bianca.