The Art Student's War (66 page)

“Oh
honey,”
she said. “That’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous.”

“I keep thinking you’re going to leave me again.”

“Grant, darling, listen to me: that’s the most preposterous … No one’s going to leave you.”

“You did before.”

“Grant, I did not. I went off to Cleveland, for heaven’s sake. And you came and got me. Just the way I knew you would. You must have driven a hundred miles an hour. Just the way I knew you would. I hadn’t been at Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace’s twenty minutes before you showed up.”

“I made a bargain with you then. And part of the bargain was, I wouldn’t have more than a drink a day. And I keep telling myself, if I just keep up my end of the bargain, she won’t leave me.”

“Leave you? For heaven’s sake, Grant, I’m going to have your baby. And no one minds if you have an extra—”

“You already had two sons of mine, two little two-year-old boys, and did it stop you from getting on that train? You got right on that train. Bang. Straight out of town. You do what’s right. It’s like Bootmaker.”

The milkman? “Grant, what are you talking about?”

“I tell you you have to fire him and do you? Hell no. You do what’s right. And when I make an ass and a fool of myself, chasing after fat little Maggie, when I have
you
for a wife, is it going to stop you that you have two-year-old twins? There isn’t any stopping you, Bianca. You made your point.”

“Honey, listen to me: I didn’t even know what point I was making, only that I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. Now hush, darling, enough. Enough, enough—you’re getting worked up over nothing. I’m not going
anywhere
. I’m going to stay right here. Carrying your baby. And in May I’m going to present you with a daughter, our Maria, to hold in your hands.”

She wanted to cry. It was all too much—Grant’s confessions, his dwindled, slurred voice in the car’s darkness. She went on driving. The big white castle of Sears was coming up on the left. They were nearly home.

“In any case, I want to say I’m sorry,” he mumbled in a different tone of voice. Now he sounded a little lawyerly.

“For what?”

“For getting so emotional just now.”

“I like it when you do. It makes me feel less lonely.
Bia is overemotional
. Papa’s only said that a million—”

“You’re not angry?”

“I’m not angry.”

Grant did seem calmer, and dozed off, or nearly did. But once they were home and Bianca had paid the babysitter, and the two of them had climbed into bed, Grant started right up again. He was still slurring his words.

“I keep thinking you’re going to leave me.”

“Honey, don’t. You’re working yourself up over nothing.”

Bianca put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him toward her. Grant’s body seemed bigger and heavier than usual. He was a big man—six feet one, and probably closer at the moment to 210 than to 200 pounds—but his athlete’s agility usually made him appear lighter than he was. Because it had been so long since she’d seen him really drunk, she’d forgotten the way alcohol bulked him up. She’d all but forgotten that big man who often drank too much and whose lurching presence seemed to imperil every perishable thing in the house: the china, the crystal glasses, the framed paintings on the walls.

Clumsily, bulkily, his hunching body crawled and slipped down her
pregnant body, until his voice emerged below her collarbone: “I had to learn my lesson. But I learned it.”

“Honey, you must stop. Please stop. I love you and I’m carrying your baby and now you’ve got to stop.”

“I learned I’m not my father. I don’t have to be my father. Chasing anything in a skirt. There I am in a goddamn bathroom, necking with Maggie-the-tramp, and the next thing I know my wife has left me.”

It pained Bianca to realize how satisfying it was to hear her best friend in the world described as a tramp, but it didn’t pain her too much. She said, “I do think Maggie deserves
some
of the blame. It’s the thing that drives me craziest about her: she never has to take the blame.” Bianca laughed. “Even Papa couldn’t get angry when he discovered that she’d been hiding a pair of shoes under our front—”

Grant interrupted: “The next thing I know? My wife has left me. Gone. An empty house. And I’m standing in the kitchen reading a note in this artful handwriting—even your handwriting is artful, Bianca—and I know suddenly I’m the biggest goddamn fool who ever lived. And yes, I drive all the way to Cleveland at a hundred miles an hour, picking up a speeding ticket on the way. Did you know I got a speeding ticket?”

“I didn’t know that …”

“Of course you didn’t,” Grant said, with an unexpected touch of vanity. “I never told you. I’m surprised I didn’t get two of them. And my hands are shaking on the steering wheel the whole time.”

“But that’s what’s been happening to me! These last couple of weeks, I’m driving to and from Mamma’s and my hands—”

But it was as though Grant couldn’t hear her now. He was in the grip of his own story, which perhaps was the central story in his life—the one from which so many other stories constituted an amplification, an afterthought, a consequence, a parenthesis. “And ever since then, I keep thinking you’re going to leave me again. I don’t mean every minute, but it’ll be some day I’m just driving home, and suddenly it hits me: I could arrive home and find a note on the table.”

The words hit
her
with such an extraordinary cringing rawness that she felt it all completely: you could be a man named Grant Ives, you could come home and find nothing but a note on the table … And in that imagined kitchen a door swung open, and she stepped through it, into an emptied, echoing room wherein it was evident how little she understood this man she was married to—this easygoing, lovable man with all his needless, gnawing fears.

“It’s one of the reasons I like taking the boys out,” Grant went on. “Because I know you’d never leave without them.” All over—his big body—he was trembling just like a little boy. “I know you’d never leave
them.”

“Oh darling,
please,”
she said. “Oh darling.”

CHAPTER XXXIV

Back and forth, back and forth went Uncle Dennis’s gray Lincoln, pulling into town out of blizzards and sleet, wind and rain—on top of everything else, it was a messy winter. He would stay with Bianca’s parents, briefly, usually just a night, and yet it seemed with each trip something moved forward, something came unstuck or unlocked. A shiny red-and-yellow “For Sale” sign went up on Inquiry. The house Uncle Dennis was so keen on, over on Reston Street near Indian Village, was actually purchased, with a fixed move-in date of February first—less than two months away!

It was shortly after one of his visits that Edith, sitting with Bianca at the old kitchen table, made a peculiar announcement: she was to be “in charge of the move.” Edith being Edith, it didn’t occur to her that
nobody
need be in charge. “Uncle Dennis asked me to be in charge of the move,” she announced, her voice proud but tentative, as though expecting to be challenged. But Bianca saw instantly what a brilliant idea this was—one of Uncle Dennis’s finest.

Of course Edith pursued her job with clipped efficiency. Summer clothes? Nobody needed them before the move—into boxes they must go. The silver? The china? Into boxes. The garden tools? The muffin tins? The pewter candleholders? All neatly boxed, all neatly labeled.

Bianca had to stop Edith from packing up the Christmas decorations. “We don’t really have time for Christmas this year,” Edith actually declared. And Bianca pleaded with her sister: “But you know how Mamma loves Christmas. You know how Mamma loves gifts.”

Unfortunately, Edith’s decision to undertake the job did not mean she’d accepted the move for herself. Although she no longer talked of remaining on Inquiry—living in the house alone—she was adamantly refusing any transplantation to Reston Street. One of her counterproposals seemed worrisomely plausible: she would find a room in student housing at Wayne. Since she lived by day in the school library, maybe it made sense to live by night on campus … But how heartbreaking if Mamma and Papa were to purchase their new house and begin their
“fresh start” with none of their children beside them. Somehow, Edith must be made to come around.

Up and down Woodward Avenue went Bianca’s Studebaker. She visited her mother every day. They often went to afternoon movies. Or they did their grocery shopping together. Or they even went out to lunch at a soda fountain. This new routine established its own protocol. It soon grew evident that Mamma didn’t want a lot of suggestions; too many choices bewildered her. Bianca simply presented her mother with the day’s plan—and Mamma, with a touching and sweet and painful docility, went along.

Bianca was especially on the lookout for comedies and the two of them saw pretty much every movie in town that might provide a laugh or two. It was balm for the soul: to hear Mamma chuckling beside her in the blue darkness. She’d always had such a wonderful, girlish laugh—an airborne string of giggles, perfectly spaced.

For all Edith’s notions about sacrificing Christmas for efficiency’s sake—a return to the spirit of wartime rationing—the coming holidays offered multiple benefits. Gaiety was in the air, particularly downtown, where Hudson’s shop windows were even more spectacular than usual, but what else would you expect from the world’s tallest department store? And there was the welcome chore of gifts to buy, each requiring much earnest consultation. Christmas shopping took Mamma out of herself.

Still, it was a chore weighted with psychological burdens. Whenever the two of them entered a store, Bianca watched her mother like a hawk, while pretending to be doing no such thing. Bianca was certain—she felt nearly certain—that Mamma had learned her catastrophic lesson and could now be trusted, until the end of time, not to shoplift so much as a stick of gum. But still …

Still, after a shopping expedition with Mamma, when Bianca climbed into her car with a groan, she wouldn’t make it halfway down the block before lighting a cigarette. Still, she was talking to herself; still, she was getting the shakes, and having trouble eating anything wholesome, and suffering from diarrhea; still, she was having trouble sleeping …

There was an old comfort to be derived from the drawing up of lists: to-do lists and grocery lists, lists of Christmas presents bought and needing to be bought, Christmas cards sent and needing to be sent. Some nights, sleepless, she would sit at the kitchen table with pen and paper, putting things in order. “I’m turning into my mother,” she
declared aloud, not for the first time, but the more likely danger was that she was turning into herself—reverting into that troubled waif of a girl who had sat up nights in the old kitchen on Inquiry, drawing up lists of who’d sat where in her earliest school classrooms, a slave to the ludicrous notion that if she couldn’t remember a classmate’s name, particularly a boy’s name, he might meet a terrible end: his soldier’s blood would be on her hands.

Those queer nighttime jitters counted for little most of the time. They faded in the morning sun and left her alone during the day. Lamps sometimes kept them at bay. And yet in the darkness they beckoned like a lit keyhole, opening into the all of her. What mattered most of the time were her boys and her husband, the baby due in May, her mother and father and sister and brother, the circle of her friends and relatives … What mattered was her house, and knowing herself pretty, and the paintings at the DIA, and the paintings she herself might paint but hadn’t yet painted, and clothes that showed more than good taste—clothes that showed some inner artistry … And then would arrive this alternative, nighttime conception of things—corruption of things—and what mattered were the lists to be drawn up, the phrases chanted and the cruel internal tasks to be tended to. Bianca would recognize, at the edge of sleep, that all day long one shape inside her head had been crowding upon another, maybe a baby-blue ungainly trapezoid edging up against a dented olive-gold oval, and what mattered was this precarious business of accommodating all the demands of one’s shifting inward geometry. What mattered was getting the colored shapes into some alignment where sleep was possible …

Grant usually slept like a log, but at two-thirty one night he came down and found her at the kitchen table, the lists in front of her: a grocery list and a list of necessary or soon-to-be-necessary home repairs. “Honey,” he said. “Let it go. You’ve got to come back to bed.”

She did, and she was sleepy enough that somehow it made sense, lying in the dark, to attempt to explain the odd reassurance found in compiling lists, and her sense of various objects pushing at her mind—best warded off by itemized rows. Her sense of shapes, worries, voices emerging from her head at night. And their wanting to claim her. And their insisting that every single aspect of her days was unreal. They were wrong, and yet they were irrefutable.

There was no accommodating them—there was only a constant fending off of intrusions. Nor was there any knowing when the voices
might emerge, when the shapes might appear. Or disappear, for when they were gone they were really gone … There had been a time, long ago, when she’d needed to figure out, in precise order, which of her family she’d seen first that day, and second, and third, and then one evening it was as though the task had been completed. It was like shoveling snow: once the job was done, there was nothing else to do.

“The funny thing is,” Bianca said, still speaking into the bedroom dark, “it’s as if I can remember when the whole thing started. Probably my memory’s playing tricks, but it’s as if the whole thing started when I was eleven, in church, at MYF, the Methodist Youth Fellowship. Reverend Kakenmaster, this huge bald frightening man, he was sort of yelling at us. And a light from a stained-glass window throws this blazing dot on his bald forehead, as if God is pointing him out to us all.”

Grant was half asleep—it was three in the morning—and she could feel a slow thickening in the body beside her.

“He says something and all the kids are supposed to answer, ‘I say yes, I abide by that.’ You know, renouncing sin and selfishness and impurity.