The Art Student's War (6 page)

Bea loved these family outings to Lady Lake, where all her observational powers felt heightened—
nothing
escaped her. The folks a couple of picnic tables away must be Polish: they had wide Slavic faces and were eating sausages. The paterfamilias, judging from the way he slumped into himself, was getting drunk. Two picnic tables beyond them sat a white-haired woman who, so the quizzical cant of her head suggested, was half deaf. A boy at the Polish table was eyeing a girl at an adjoining table, and quite a number of boys had noticed
her
, Bea.

This was another of the lake’s appeals: she felt especially pretty here. She might be too thin, like Mamma, and she certainly didn’t have Aunt Grace’s bosom, but rambling about in her new green swimsuit—a happy bargain, purchased for $3.95 at Montgomery Ward’s—the felt what Papa must feel in
his
green suit: poised and comfortable.

Papa had a distinctive way of entering the water. He marched forward steadily, arms aswing, like a gunslinger in a Western. Although these days he had a number of men working under him, he continued to throw himself into manual labor and he had maintained his impressive physique: broad shoulders, narrow waist, slender legs, and knotty arms. (He prided himself on his prowess as an arm-wrestler.)

Uncle Dennis, perhaps in unconscious simulation, likewise strode determinedly, arms aswing—though in his case his body betrayed him with little flinches. Uncle Dennis’s body was paler and pudgier than you might suppose on seeing him fully dressed. Shockingly white, his skin howled a protest at the sun. Papa’s legs were glossed with reddish-brown hair that turned golden in the sunshine. It was hard to believe the two men were roughly the same age.

The sand on the beach was full of little stones. Bea stepped gingerly. The water turned out to be thrillingly cold, as the lake’s raspy sand filled the arches of her feet. The breeze riding over her bare shoulders was delicious. She waded in up to her knees and, with that slight nervousness she always felt as water mounted toward her private parts, proceeded more slowly. The icy water embraced her thighs. Her hair was pinned up. She wore no bathing cap, since she planned to keep her head above water. There were boys on this beach who were watching her, and for just a moment, in her mind’s eye, she saw herself as they might—a tall girl in a green floral bathing suit, standing in water just high enough to reach her dangling fingertips—then closed her eyes and threw herself forward, outward, letting herself float belly down, while keeping her head above the surface.

The cold water took her breath away, then gave it back in huffing puffs and pants. She swam a jerky breaststroke, head still above the surface. At day’s end, traveling home was always more comfortable if she’d kept her hair dry—but it turned out she couldn’t resist. After a few more strokes, Bea plunged under, into the turbid lake, and did a few frog kicks below the surface, then came up gasping and flopped upon her back. She loved to float like this, staring straight up into the heavens. The airplane that had wandered into Uncle Dennis’s photograph, or another airplane, was humming across the sky …

There was a timelessness to such pleasures—floating on her back in cloudy water while contemplating the clouds—though perhaps the real lesson of this excursion to Lady Lake was that, however beautiful the day, some sort of bomb might constantly be ticking and no pleasures were timeless. It was an afternoon to ponder for the rest of her life; she’d never know another quite like it. Today was to be, indeed, the finale of all such beautiful days—for as it turned out, the Poppletons and the Paradisos never again would journey together to Lady Lake.

Stevie had discovered a new game. Immersed in the water, plump Edith was actually light enough for him to pick up in his arms and hurl a
little distance. This brought on high squeals of laughter, for Edith, too, delighted in the new game.

“Look,”
Bea said. She had emerged from the lake and was sitting on a blanket beside her mother. A towel hung over her shoulders. Everybody else was in the water. “Look at Stevie and Edith.”

Though so close in age, the two siblings—the quiet plump homebody girl, the noisy militaristic older brother—generally found few pursuits in common. It was marvelous to see them playing together. Mamma laughed aloud …

The truth was, Mamma had a wonderful girlish laugh—a bright string of giggles as evenly spaced as beads on a wire. It was hers alone, that round yellowy sound, which sometimes had the power to catapult Bea backward into a sunny room she couldn’t place (it wasn’t to be found on Inquiry Street), where cooing, volleying voices echoed each other; this was a laugh Bea sometimes registered when floating at the edge of sleep. It was the oldest laugh she knew, and the youngest.

Time and again Edith waded off on her own. Stevie “snuck up” on her—swimming through the murky water and suddenly seizing her by the leg or waist. Edith thrashed and screamed. And Stevie cast her out toward the lake’s deeper, colder water.

Given how myopic he was without his glasses, it was surprising the game lasted as long as it did without Stevie’s making a mistake.

Once again, he plunged into the water, kicking and racing forward like a human torpedo—but one whose aim was off. This time his grappling hands seized Aunt Grace, who, like Edith, was wearing a powder-blue suit.

It all happened with such suddenness, Bea could make sense of it only later. In their immediate unfolding, the events seemed unreal.

Stevie grabbed his aunt by the waist. There was a struggle. She went down. He brought her up again and hurled her toward the deeper water.

When Aunt Grace rose to her feet, the sight was so
very
strange that, for just a fraction of a second, Bea couldn’t isolate its strangeness. The top of Aunt Grace’s suit had been yanked from her left shoulder. Her ample white breast above her blue suit was bared for anyone in the world to ogle. The big shocking nipple was dark as a plum.

Aunt Grace didn’t realize her shame. As she stood in the waist-deep water, having been assaulted and upended, seized and dunked, shoved and pushed, she didn’t know enough to cover herself. She blinked and shook her befuddled, tilted head.

As chance would have it, Papa was wading only a few feet away, holding his bandaged hand above the water. Now both of his hands, the normal, bare hand and the bandaged hand, lunged forward, toward her. Oh, he meant to shelter his poor sister-in-law—shield her from the leering, squalid gazes of a beach full of strangers! But his hands halted. They did not quite touch her.

Only a moment’s duration—this surreal little tableau lasted only a moment. Then Grace, in a panicky fluster, yanked up the top of her suit. It flopped back down, baring the left breast once more. The strap had snapped.

Hunching self-protectively, arms crisscrossed over her chest, she beat a retreat toward shore, where Bea greeted her with a waiting towel plucked from her own shoulders. “Angel,” Aunt Grace cried, “do you have a safety pin?” and she raced toward the changing cabins.

Full order was reinstated in just a couple of minutes. Once more, Aunt Grace was sitting in the shade, fully dressed, straw hat restored to her head. She appeared as tranquil as ever. It was a simple accident, after all …

Yet Mamma’s shadowed face suggested otherwise, and an unnamable shame descended over the group. For Bea, there was no erasing the image: Papa waist-deep in water, his good hand and his bandaged hand reaching out toward Aunt Grace’s naked breast. And little Edith, eyes bugging out of her head—obviously, she’d witnessed the whole thing. As had Uncle Dennis, who, with a blush on his round cheeks, rattled on about a patient who once got a fishhook lodged in his eye.

Poor half-blind Stevie didn’t quite grasp what he’d done, and nobody wanted to inform him. Still, he sensed the unease—how could he not? The air was so dense with it.

Mamma cast a look of fury and revulsion at the lake, at the sun-bathers, at the gathering clouds to the south, where the embattled city lay …

Aunt Grace’s aplomb really was admirable. Pie—would anyone care for more pie? Or cookies? She was particularly solicitous toward Stevie, who no doubt sensed (something purblind Stevie seemed destined to sense throughout his life) that he’d inexplicably misstepped. Hey, Ste-vie, how’s about an oatmeal cookie? Or what about coffee anyone? “Vico, I have a whole nother thermos. I bet it’s still hot …”

But nobody wanted anything. Clearly the day at the beach was over.

According to protocol, Stevie and Edith ought to ride home with
Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, and Bea accompany her parents. But Stevie, uneasy and still perplexed, decided to go in his parents’ car. Alone in the Packard’s big backseat, Edith rode with her uncle and aunt.

On the long drive back, Bea repeatedly tried to initiate a conversation. As did jittery Stevie. Even Papa, who could be so taciturn, worked to get some words flowing. He spoke of the fine house he was renovating in Sherwood Forest. And the promise of rain. And the visit tomorrow from Nonno and Nonna.

But Mamma, hunched darkly in the front seat, lean face tilted toward the window, would have none of it. She wasn’t about to be cajoled into conversation. Nothing. Not a word.

CHAPTER III

“You haven’t got it right—but it’s almost right.”

This appraisal of her work—a pencil drawing of a wizened little apple and some long-stemmed onions—ought to have been unwelcome on a number of fronts. Chief among the unwritten rules at the Institute Midwest was a ban on gratuitous criticism: students were to proceed unobstructed by each other’s evaluations, unless expressly solicited. In addition, Bea’s onions and apple clearly were unfinished—all the more reason to exempt them from judgment. Furthermore, and finally, this particular critic and fellow student was somebody Bea hadn’t met yet (though of course she knew who he was). You might think he’d have the common courtesy to forgo criticism until they’d been properly introduced.

Even so, this was somebody she’d been longing to meet: Ronald—Ronny—Olsson, who was not merely extremely handsome but handsome in a fashion guaranteed to fire up Bea’s imagination. He looked intensely literary—meaning not so much that he read books as that he belonged
in
one. She’d come across him before, somewhere in her constant novel reading. But which one was he—this pale, tall, dark-haired young man who wore a beautiful camel’s hair sports coat and a tawny suede hat? (Not many young men could have gotten away with that hat.) Some disguised prince in exile? Some nineteenth-century consumptive poet on a final pilgrimage?

He always wore cuffed trousers. Cuffs on new trousers had been one of the first casualties of the War—by order of the War Production Board—and Ronny’s pants suggested a very deep closet. He dressed beautifully, in pale pastel shirts and bold but subtle neckties.

After letting him stand unanswered for a moment, “What do you mean,
almost?”
Bea replied.

Ronald had done something else odd and theoretically forbidden—he had entered the Institute in the middle of a term. He was a newcomer to Professor Manhardt’s class. Yet in just two weeks he’d established himself as its best draftsman—a superiority acknowledged
by all eight of the other students, as well as the Professor himself. It was quite remarkable, the speed whereby that pale hand of his could translate an apple or a lemon or a cattail on a tabletop into an apple or a lemon or a cattail on a sheet of paper—in the process losing far less of the thing’s tactility than any other student would likely lose. Bea had repeatedly allowed herself to stare, surreptitiously, at those long, quick, shapely, blunt-nailed fingers of Ronny Olsson. They moved more confidently than any fingers Bea had ever watched before. “What do you mean?” she repeated.

As if superior on a social level as well, Ronny chose not to mingle. All the rest of the class went to Nick’s Nook for sandwiches; you never saw Ronald Olsson at Nick’s. The rest went sometimes to the Run Way for coffee after class; Ronny was never glimpsed at the Run Way. In truth, Bea had already imagined a couple of little quarrels with Ronny Olsson, in which she’d flummoxed him with accusations of snobbery. Still, he was perhaps the most interesting “type” in a class rich in types.

The Institute Midwest was divided into two disciplines, Industrial Arts and Fine Arts. The exclusively male Industrial Arts crowd favored a straitlaced look. Most of them hoped, when the War ended, to go into things like automotive design. The Industrial Arts crowd had few exchanges with Bea’s own Fine Arts crowd, where most of the “types” were found.

There was huge Hal Holm, with his big fanning red beard and overalls, who was gaped at wherever he went. And Tatiana Bogoljubov—also gaped at, but in a different way. Tatiana dressed just like a whore (not a word Bea would have voiced to anyone except, perhaps, her best friend, Maggie). Tatiana had dyed her long hair yellow—not blonde, yellow. She wore lengthy gaudy scarves over exceedingly tight blouses. She was a buxom girl who had pierced her ears. And there was Mr. Cooper—David Cooper—far older than the rest of them and perhaps Jewish. He’d come from Poland. He had a long doleful nose and a dark gaze of uncomfortable intensity. The vertical furrows connecting his nose and mouth might have been drawn with a knife. “Art is my only home,” Mr. Cooper continually declared, with lugubrious pride. And there was Donald Doobly, Jr., who was a Negro and who studied both Fine Arts and Industrial Arts. Donald always looked neat and dapper but a little comical, since his clothes were mostly a couple of sizes too large. You might have called Donald
slight
, but one day Bea had watched him marching down Woodward against a strong wind that whipped his
baggy trousers tight to his thighs, and she’d realized he was slighter than slight: his legs weren’t much thicker around than broom handles. Donald drew beautifully, and if glamorous Ronald Olsson hadn’t materialized midsemester, Donald might now reign as Professor Manhardt’s star pupil.

Ronny, too, took his time in answering. “Might I perhaps?”

And now he moved quickly. Whether or not he
might
, he
did:
before Bea had had time to agree, quite, Ronny Olsson began applying his pencil to her paper. He was a lefty, like her, which somehow cheered her.