The Art Student's War (50 page)

“Well then I’ll have the smallest possible drop of Tennessee bourbon.”

“It’s homemade. My uncle makes it.” She offered this shyly, but proudly, too.

“Moonshine!” Bianca said.

Rita grinned, her braces agleam. Neither she nor Stevie was anything of a drinker—both had trouble downing even a glass of Papa’s wine at family dinners—but Rita clearly relished this
moment:
she was about to sip some moonshine with her grown-up sister-in-law, who was an artist, named Bianca, who lived in a big, gorgeous house in the University District.

It had taken Bianca quite a while to warm toward Rita—quite a while to see bashfulness and intimidation and simple, woeful inexperience behind the girl’s remote sullenness. Ironically, Rita’s terrible teeth had helped work the transformation. After repeated, gentle prodding from Uncle Dennis, Rita had finally agreed to see a dentist, whose office was way out in Center Line. Bianca gave her a lift. On the drive over, it was revealed that Rita had never been to a dentist. Never? Surely that wasn’t possible … “A nurse at school, she came and looked in all our mouths. Does that count?”

No, Rita had never been to a dentist. And Bianca had felt much more patient and compassionate after learning that.

The dentist had worked wonders, and his prices—a favor to his friend Dr. Poppleton—were quite reasonable. Rita was so pleased that when Uncle Dennis, on another visit to Detroit, had proposed braces—Rita was badly buck-toothed—she soon agreed, though not without much flustered chatter about being “the oldest girl with braces in all Detroit.”

It was almost magic—the change the braces had effected. All that metal in her mouth predictably altered her voice, but nobody could have predicted that it would soften her Southern accent. And who could have foreseen the funny, touching, proud way Rita would respond to her braces? Clearly, they represented all the right virtues in her eyes: progress, education, even civilization. She was the only person Bianca had ever heard of who
loved
her braces.

Rita was growing up fast, and learning fast—the little girl was no dummy—and earlier remarks that had set everybody shuddering were viewed in retrospect as the spunky replies of a seventeen-year-old girl putting on no airs when deposited among grandeur. Yes, to a girl like Rita that’s how the house on Inquiry must have appeared—with Mamma’s china on the sideboard and Papa’s elaborate wooden toys on the bookcase. And Bianca’s slate-roofed house on Middleway must have seemed a veritable palace …

The bourbon turned out to be ghastly—which Bianca found reassuring. Given her state of mind, the last thing she needed to discover was a taste for bourbon.

But she was still feeling so peculiar—so torn up and strange! What in the world had she been thinking—asking Rita for wine? She knew she ought to be heading home. Instead she said, sipping from her glass, “This stuff is really something.”

“It’s the hills of home,” Rita said, with plucky bravado, though she couldn’t like it any better than Bianca did.

“Stevie just needs to work less,” Bianca said.

“That’s exactly what I tell him.”

“But do you ever
tell
him? Ever say, Stevie, I mean it, you’ve got to cut back?”

Rita’s eyes widened. “I don’t dare …”

The look on Rita’s face? It was a look of fear. Rita could cajole with Stevie. She could suggest, and she could wheedle … Yet she couldn’t
stand up to that tense and powerful man in the black T-shirt and say, This won’t do.

Bianca sipped thoughtfully from her nasty drink. Was there any comparable reluctance in her own marriage? Nothing, surely—no sentiment she longed to express but didn’t
dare
. Rita was scared, and Grant simply didn’t scare Bianca in that way. Those troubling remarks of Maggie’s came back: “You have him wrapped round your little finger.” And—worse—the image of a bug under her thumb. Did Stevie have Rita under his thumb and was that what her look of fear evinced? In any marriage, was it inevitable, or just likely, that one spouse was under the other’s thumb? But Grant
wasn’t
under her thumb, was he, just because he commonly deferred in various matters of little importance to him?

From out of nowhere, from out of a remote past that glittered like pearls in candlelight, a remark came back: “My boy is no milquetoast.” That was Mrs. Olsson. Speaking to Bianca at lunch, at Pierre’s. An almost frighteningly obliging and accommodating Mrs. Olsson. A Mrs. Olsson who had all but proposed to her, on her son’s behalf.

Everything was so much clearer to Bianca now—back then, her brain had been in such a permanent, passionate muddle. The lunch at Pierre’s had taken place not so very long after Henry Vanden Akker’s death launched her on that downward spiral which eventually landed her in the hospital, and from the hospital into a long, floating, tranquil convalescence with Aunt Grace and Uncle Dennis in Cleveland. She’d stayed weeks and weeks with the Poppletons before returning home, only to return to them after a couple of months for further weeks and weeks. She’d devoted much of her time to gardening with Aunt Grace, first in the greenhouse and then, as the weather warmed, in the backyard. Very early one morning she’d been cutting peonies when Aunt Grace came out to report the latest off the radio: the Allies had attacked the Germans in Normandy, France. The invasion that Uncle Dennis had so long predicted was beginning. And all over the city, as if the separate neighborhoods had located their common voice at last, church bells began ringing. Standing with rusty scissors in one hand, some big pink peonies in the other, Bianca felt she’d never heard such sweet music—those big resounding bells ringing out broad across the city, across Lake Erie, across the weary and indomitably hopeful United States.

Yes, everything was so much clearer now, when she could easily grasp the undermining panic in the Olssons’ mansion. They couldn’t agree on anything, Mr. and Mrs. Olsson, but they must have been
equally, secretly horrified at the prospect that their handsome only son, who insisted on studying still-life painting, could possibly be “cur.” Ronny’s girlfriend might be a Wop from within the Boulevard, a girl who wore silly “artistic” clothes and whose father worked with his hands, but the girl was pretty and bright and under the circumstances she looked mighty good …

“Oh golly it’s so
late,”
Bianca said and showily took another, last sip meant to suggest that she’d love to finish her bourbon but simply didn’t have time, and then she was up and out the door.

Bianca reached home two or three minutes before Grant and the boys—just time enough to begin warming up the mashed potatoes. She apologized that dinner wasn’t quite ready and Grant told her, as she’d known he would, not to fret. They were “stuffed.” And then—just as she’d known they would—he and the boys bolted down the meat loaf and mashed potatoes and corn. Mashed potatoes were probably Grant’s favorite food in the whole world: mashed potatoes with butter, or with sour cream, or with bacon bits and cheddar cheese melted on top, or with pork and beans, or with sloppy joes, or simply mashed potatoes plain. Although Grant always had his drink of the day when he came home—usually a stiff Scotch-and-soda—he perhaps loved even better a glass of milk, accompanying a big plate of milky mashed potatoes.

Later, the boys finally in bed, Bianca lay down beside her husband. He was nearly asleep. He’d had quite a day, including a pickup basketball game in the morning. Bianca was still troubled by the visit from Maggie, whose face glowed so distinctly in her mind’s eye, that look of canny ingenuousness while declaring, “You’ve got him under your thumb,” and adding, “I envy you.” Needing reassurance, Bianca reached out and stroked Grant’s neck, who in his half sleep received this as a welcome signal of desire. He swung toward her and his tongue swiped the rim of her ear. When he realized, still half asleep, that, tonight anyway, she had other intentions, he rolled onto his back and within moments he was exhaling the heavy, contented breaths of the virtuously exhausted.

The sound wasn’t a snore exactly—merely a very heavy breathing—and Bianca typically found it comforting. She usually had no difficulty fitting her own breathing inside it and falling asleep; it was like slipping your hand into a warm and bulky glove. But occasionally the sound kept her awake, as she felt certain it would tonight. Did she have Grant under her thumb? The remark still needled.

Down the hall, the boys were asleep in their bunk bed—the magical bunk bed Papa had built for her so long ago. It surprised people to learn that the boys didn’t have a set sleeping arrangement. One night Matt might sleep above and Chip below; the next night, the reverse. Grant had established the policy: whoever went first to bed got first choice of bunks. It was one of many of Grant’s ideas which sounded totally unworkable—a recipe for endless squabbling—but it actually worked quite well, getting them into bed sooner than later. He knew his boys …

Sometimes, when nobody else was home, Bianca would nap in the lower bunk. She still found it comforting. It occurred to her, lying awake beside Grant, that she could probably fall fast asleep right now, if only she could curl up there, in the world’s coziest zoological park.

Did
she have Grant under her thumb? If she did, perhaps it had begun with that horrible Christmas party, one of the two big crises in her married life. (The other was the time when Grant nearly got fired over the lakefront properties.) Or it began the day after the Christmas party, when Bianca, after carefully tidying the house, had left Grant a note explaining that she and the twins were going away for a few days. She’d ordered a taxi to the train station.

Knowing how furious she was, Grant left the office early. He must have arrived home only a few hours after her departure. In any event, she’d been at Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace’s only a few minutes, just long enough to cry and dry her tears, when—the arrival itself not wholly unexpected, but far earlier than could have been predicted—Grant pulled up.

She had pictured the argument the two of them would enact, in which she would pose stinging accusations. She had even envisioned herself commanding him to leave her uncle and aunt’s home. But none of this was possible when Grant appeared. He was an altered man. Not even in the transports of bedroom passion had she ever seen him so changed, so different from the Grant she knew …

He was not only white-faced. His face looked caved in—as if he’d been kicked hard in the head. And he was trembling—not a gentle shiver but a big palsied shaking that would have seemed comically overdone if it hadn’t been so terrifying.

Bianca had never doubted—even when, blinking back tears, she’d climbed aboard the train, shepherding the twins with one hand and dragging a suitcase with the other—that Grant loved her. What she hadn’t understood, and what Grant no doubt had never contemplated,
was that he would become completely incapacitated at the possibility of her abandoning him.

Aunt Grace, with her instinctive good breeding, greeted Grant normally, as if finding nothing out-of-the-way in his arriving on their doorstep. Uncle Dennis, with his doctor’s eye, took one look at the miserable, quivering specimen before him and proposed a toast. They wanted to welcome Grant to Cleveland. Four neat glasses were poured. Grant’s went down in a gulp. A second, bigger glass was poured for Grant. It, too, went down in a gulp.

Since Aunt Grace longed to spend a little time with the twins, she wondered whether Grant and Bea might wish to see something of the city? Or perhaps they preferred a walk?

Grant didn’t make it even to the sidewalk. The two of them had scarcely stepped off the front porch when he clutched his arms around her and issued a howling sob that must have echoed halfway down the block.

Bianca led him to the car, where he collapsed on her breast and in a voice squeezed high by breathless sobbing vowed that if she would only agree to take him back he would never, ever, never, ever do anything like that again …

At dinner, after two more hefty shots of whiskey, he’d entered a different phase. He quit trembling. His face wore a politely genial but glazed look. He sat beside Bianca and tightly held her hand under the table. She’d had to unlace his fingers, one by one, to go to the bathroom.

She’d wondered whether this astounding day was meant to end with their making love, which would present a problem, since she obviously hadn’t brought her diaphragm. Did they dare risk it? She’d be willing to risk it. But shortly after dinner, while Grace was showing the twins how she could make a bird simply by folding a sheet of paper, Bianca had gone upstairs and Grant had yanked her to the bed, both of them fully dressed, and, tucking his face deep into the hair of her neck, had instantly fallen asleep.

And stayed asleep. Bianca got up a number of times—to tend to the twins, to put on a nightgown, to go to the bathroom—but Grant stayed down, his breathing steady but higher than usual.

And stayed asleep. Bianca got up at six-thirty, at which point Grant had been sleeping for eleven hours—longer than she’d ever seen him sleep before. After thirteen hours, she asked Uncle Dennis whether it might be dangerous for Grant to sleep so long, and Uncle Dennis had
laughed and told her this was just what the man needed. When Grant had been asleep for fourteen hours, she began to check on his breathing. Could he have had some sort of stroke? By going away and leaving him, had she killed her husband?

Grant slept for sixteen hours. He got up looking a little sheepish but no more than a little. He was his old self again.

… Or so it had seemed, but later it occurred to her that something fundamental in him—in the two of them—forever shifted on the day she boarded that Cleveland train. It was shortly afterward that Grant had adopted his one-drink rule, and though sometimes those drinks were tumbler-sized, he’d stuck by it—stuck by it until it hardly seemed like discipline or deprivation. Wasn’t milk his true drink of choice? It was difficult now to remember a time when she’d worried about Grant’s drinking.

Still, that pair of remarks from Maggie—especially the “bug under your thumb”—continued to rankle. Admittedly, Maggie had her own reasons for expressing herself aggressively. But this didn’t mean she was necessarily wrong.