The Art Student's War (65 page)

Edith saw the difficulties straight on, and her response was to proceed as she’d always proceeded: piling up little unspoken kindnesses, much as she’d piled up sweaters and socks and mittens for the soldiers during the War. It seemed Edith didn’t need to draw on one cigarette after another as Bianca did. And Edith didn’t drive up and down Woodward Avenue talking to herself.

Who could have foreseen that what would break Edith’s spirit was the thought of moving from Inquiry? Surely it was time to go. Wasn’t it obvious? In the
Free Press
not so long ago, Bianca had seen all those blocks of the old neighborhood—south of Mack and just west of the Boulevard—described as a slum. A slum!

Moving had never seemed possible because Mamma wouldn’t think of it—but even Mamma was mumbling about
a fresh start
. And Edith the good team player? Suddenly she was digging in her heels. She wasn’t going to move to Reston Street. She just wasn’t.

The two sisters took a walk, though it was cold—a cold and gray December day—and Bianca was wearing an olive-green poncho rather than her black wool coat; she hadn’t planned on a walk. They headed
down Inquiry to Jefferson, Jefferson over to the Boulevard, across Jefferson to the Belle Isle Bridge, which during the War had been renamed the Douglas MacArthur Bridge, though nobody ever seemed to call it that. Bianca let her little sister guide her. Of course it was even colder out by the river, and colder still on the gusty bridge, the wind throwing up little whitecaps beneath them. It seemed almost self-punishing to walk the bridge today, but Edith kept striding in that defiantly purposeful way of hers. Beyond Belle Isle, across the river, cold Canada lay shivering.

Bianca, pregnant and weak, and desperately craving a cigarette, marched along beside her baby sister. The gray waters were flowing with iron determination beneath them, and by the time they were halfway across the long bridge, Edith was crying.

Edith
was crying—all at once. The girl who never wept was weeping. She did not remove her tortoiseshell glasses. Tears flowed down her cheeks, unwiped, and fell to the sidewalk.

“I don’t
want
to move,” she announced. For all her tears, her words moved purposefully forward—just the way she walked. “Does anyone consult me? Does anyone say, What does Edith want? Do they care about
my
feelings?”

“Oh
sweetie,”
Bianca sighed. Her sympathy ran deep. But fear ran deeper still. The sight of her unflappable sister coming undone was more than she could bear. “Of course they do. We all do.”

“Is it the
house’s
fault? Is the
house
to blame because Mamma’s a thief? Because Papa’s a drunk?”

“Papa’s not a drunk.”

“You know what their logic is? It’s the opposite of logic. They don’t see that. What’s the one thing we have when everything’s falling apart? When Mamma’s become someone else, and Papa’s become someone else—what’s the one thing to remain the same? Isn’t it the
house
, which no one has a loyal word for except me? Oh it’s fine for
you
if we move, you’ve got your mansion up there on Middleway.”

“It’s no mansion—”

“You’ve got your husband and your kids, and it’s fine for Stevie, he’s moved on, he never liked the house anyway—”

“That’s not true.”

“Remember when he left us all for a year and a half? It’s all Stevie ever talked about when he was a boy: someday he would grow up and leave us.”

“I don’t remember that …”

“But what about me?” And now Edith’s crying had altered. The words were not moving purposefully forward. She was choking with emotion. “When does anyone say, What about Edith’s welfare?”

“Oh darling, darling,
darling.”
Shivering worse than ever, Bianca drew an arm around her little sister. “Of course we do. We think about your welfare all the time.”

Edith didn’t exactly shrug off the embracing arm, but she began walking resolutely forward once more. Bianca kept her arm around her sister.

Actually, it didn’t matter if Mamma and Papa moved—Edith explained—because she herself was about to embark on her own life. One of her professors, Miss Dinney, was a graduate of Barnard College. Edith would enroll in graduate school, she would study biology, she planned to settle in New York City. Or she was moving to Sarasota, Florida. A friend of hers who also wrote for the Wayne
Collegian
, her name was Joanna Mufflin, her family owned a newspaper in Sarasota, and Edith would move down there.

But crazy as these ideas sounded (Edith in New York? Edith in
Florida?)
, what she proposed next was crazier still: she would remain on Inquiry. Mamma and Papa would move—that was fine, she wished them all the best, but she needed a place of her own. She would stay put, and pay them rent, and eventually she would buy it outright: the others could do as they wished, but she wasn’t about to abandon her home.

Bianca started to say, “You know Papa would never permit that.” Which was true. Papa move and leave his daughter behind? What was Edith thinking?

Catching herself in time, Bianca said instead, “I think you should talk to Uncle Dennis. He’s coming up this weekend. Tell him what you’re telling me. He may have an idea.” Bianca was shivering so much in her poncho, it was impossible to tell whether, in holding on to her sister, she was offering or seeking warmth. “I’m sure he’ll have an idea.”

She was smoking again, which in itself maybe wasn’t so disturbing. What
was
disturbing was the violence of her hunger for her vile packs of Tareytons—and her lack of hunger for all the foods her baby required. What lesson was she supposed to draw from this? Why was her body
telling her, so commandingly it made her limbs tremble, that she needed what she knew she shouldn’t have, and didn’t need what she knew was essential?

She had been here before, and perhaps most unsettling of all was to see that her recognition of the process in no way prevented its steady devolution. “Everything’s falling apart,” she declared, any number of times, driving down Woodward Avenue, but the unflinching words were absolutely no protection.
Please, God
, she prayed.
Please, God
. And sometimes her prayer took another form, which would have sounded crazy if anyone had heard her, but no one did, she was talking to herself:
Please, Baby
. And this was a prayer for forgiveness—a prayer to the not-yet born.

There was something almost comforting, actually, when things started coming undone on Middleway. The boys didn’t know the full details, of course. They didn’t know that their grandma Paradiso was a thief. But they knew Grandma wasn’t well. They knew their mother was often away, and wasn’t fully present when present. The boys began to squabble and to cry and to ask uncharacteristically jittery questions: “Will Grandma be all right?” And: “Why are you always gone?” And from Chip, with naked puzzlement: “When will it be like before?”

The boys had always seemed so mutually self-reliant … And when you linked them up with their father, when they became the Ives triplets, it was hardly surprising if Bianca often felt superfluous, almost like an outsider. So there was some small comfort in discovering that when she was torn away from home, the normally smooth-running household disintegrated.

Some small comfort, yes. But mostly it brought guilt. She’d entered another period of real crisis, and she was mishandling this one, too. She wanted so much to be strong—helpful and good—but it was as though her body wasn’t built for such crises. Her nerves were shot, she had diarrhea most days, she couldn’t make herself eat enough. She felt so
bad
for the boys, who didn’t know what had hit them. They only knew that almost as soon as Mom announced she was pregnant, the world began to crumble. Wasn’t she setting them up to resent their little sister bitterly?

She could foresee, with a vision that seemed to open across decades, a new vast network of family problems, a whole new generation of problems, intersecting with other, deeper, ancestral networks of problems … It was as though the family wounds, the hurts were independent. Like some cancer, they weren’t out to harm their host; they merely wanted to
replicate. (Distant words from Uncle Dennis came back to her.) But were fiendishly clever when you sought to halt their replication.

What she couldn’t foresee was where this was all heading in Chip’s head. Something was happening to the boy. He’d suddenly turned far more nervous than Matt—asking an endless round of trembling-lipped questions. Can blind people see in Heaven? Do dogs go there? What about rats—if you were a
good
rat, could you go there?

And Chip’s nervousness only made Matt nervous, and resentful. And it made Grant nervous and resentful too—for he was no more successful than Matt at calming the scared little boy. A rift was opening among the triplets.

Only Bianca could offer some small mercy of reassurance, though the boy’s jittery questions never stopped. Why did Grandpa have a stroke? How does God choose who will be sick? Why does God let lizards grow back missing limbs, but not people?

The questions were all so bewildering, and unnerving, it took her a little while to see what so obviously linked them: nothing less than Death itself. Chip wasn’t too small to find himself abruptly confronting the largest puzzle of human existence. When posing his fearful questions, he sometimes shook his head in a strange new tilted way—it looked like a sort of tic. It was as though he’d gotten a rank whiff of mortal decay up his nostrils and couldn’t get rid of the smell. He was suddenly far more burdened than Matt, or even Grant, and how could she, susceptible flesh and blood herself, relieve his distress?

And then Grant tottered and gave way, which in retrospect was inevitable. Why should Grant be immune? She knew how painfully vulnerable he was underneath. She’d known this ever since the day she left him a note on the kitchen table, and he showed up glassy-eyed at the Poppletons’, on whose front walk he’d issued that inhuman howl.

From that first evening when Papa had telephoned—“I need you to come”—Grant had been nothing less than wonderful. She could imagine marriages where a wife couldn’t confess to her husband that her mother was a thief, where the shame and awfulness would be too great, but never for a moment had she considered not telling Grant. She’d returned home that night and cried and cried and cried, and he’d done nothing but comfort her. Never—there was never a hint of accusation in his tone, no hint of superiority. Bianca must do everything she could for her mother and father now. And he would take care of the boys.

Then came the night when Bianca took Mamma to the movies (more of Uncle Dennis’s advice—getting Mamma out of the house) and Grant
stayed home with Papa, listening to the radio. When Mamma and Bianca returned, only Edith was home, who reported that Papa and Grant had gone out for a walk.

Out for a walk? Grant and limping Papa?

What on earth for?

Bianca sat with her mother in the kitchen, waiting for the men. Bianca was feeling anxious—the whole business was so odd—and wishing with all her heart for a cigarette. She’d gotten up twice during the movie for a smoke in the ladies’, but there was no way to smoke in this house, other than to lock herself in the bathroom, which she did consider …

It was after eleven when the men showed up. They were red-faced and disheveled. Papa had been drinking heavily. Grant was flat-out, stumble-down drunk.

Bianca drove Grant’s convertible on the way home. Grant sat in the passenger seat and apologized and apologized and apologized. He was slurring his words. “It’s not the end of the world,” Bianca kept saying.

Grant had tried to keep things within limits—he wanted her to know how hard he’d tried—but Papa was so adamant. Drink up, drink up, he kept saying. “What was I supposed to do? It’s so seldom he gets that way, so damn insistent. But when he does … Well, you know how he is.”

“’course I do. Look, Grant, it’s not the end of the world.”

“He just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“It’s all right.” It was. “It’s Papa’s way of trying to talk to you—to get close to you. He’s been going through hell.” Her voice caught in her throat. “Actually, you did the right thing. It’s what he wanted. Maybe it’s what he needed. You did the right thing, honey.”

But there was no convincing Grant. He went on apologizing and repeating over and over that he’d tried to keep things within limits. He didn’t understand how things had exceeded the limits. He’d tried to keep to the limits with things, but he’d exceeded them. The limits.

“It’s all right,” Bianca murmured, but there was no calming him down.

His getting so drunk didn’t disturb her so much. But the frantic, unappeasable, abject man revealed by the drink—he made her very nervous.

“You remember when I got into such hot water at the firm?”

“’course I remember. Those lakeshore properties. It’s nothing you need to—”

“And you remember what lake it was.”

“It was Lady Lake,” Bianca said.

“I knew just what that lake meant to you. You’d told me so many times. About always going out there. As a kid. How much you loved it. I knew what it meant to you. And how it’s the last place where your parents and the Poppletons ever really got along.”

“That’s right …”

“I wanted to make things right again,” Grant said. “Wasn’t that clever? Me and my big ideas, I was going to put things right again.”

“I didn’t know, quite. Until now,” Bianca said. “That that’s what you were thinking, Grant. It’s very sweet. But darling, I don’t think anybody can make things right again.”

“Clever, huh? We could buy a cottage and invite everyone to the lake. Start over. And this time people would get along again. Smart, huh?” The bitterness in his voice frightened her.

“You were just trying to help …”

“And I only made things worse,” Grant said. “That’s me: I only made things worse.” There was a silence, and then Grant said something that made her want to cry. In the darkness of the car, a small voice from the passenger seat said, “I keep thinking you’re going to leave me.”