The Art Student's War (8 page)

In the interim, she and Ronny had seen each other alone a handful of times, mostly at Herk’s Snack Shack. They’d also had club sandwiches at a luncheonette near the Institute, and a somewhat fancier meal, with a tablecloth, at a place called Luigi’s, where Ronny ordered a beer. (Bea was grateful he didn’t ask whether she’d like an alcoholic drink. Having earlier determined that he must be twenty-one, she shied at confessing to being only eighteen. Nor, for that matter, was she in any hurry to divulge that she drank wine regularly, that her father
made
wine, in the cellar. She was indeed in no hurry to expose her family background—her mother contemplating the kitchen calendar, her emphysemic grandfather, who hardly spoke English … All the more so as Ronny had mentioned, with a glancing assurance, that his father was “a businessman.”)

Fortunately, Ronny made it easy to sidestep topics. Bea had never known anyone so easy to talk to about nothing—although none of this felt like nothing, their rapid-fire chatter: oh, it felt like
something
, it felt like life itself. Their first few conversations, Ronny had done most of the talking. But Bea soon learned to leap in—phrase tumbling over phrase—and Ronny had welcomed her arrival in that place where words crowded like exuberant guests at some New Year’s fête. Had she ever,
ever
so much enjoyed talking with anyone? She played his words over and over at night, as she lay in bed, and could it be she was falling in love? It could be.

Or was she so eager for Ronny’s bright talk because life had turned so dark? Not just at home, though home was the worst of it. There hadn’t been another argument, true—and yet Mamma did little but brood over her coffee and candy.

Meanwhile, as if in response to the madness on Inquiry Street, the entire city had gone mad. There had come a night, June the twentieth, when the radio reported that Detroit had broken out into a riot: a race riot. Papa had declared that nobody was leaving home the next day—except of course for him, for he had a job to do.

Yes, it seemed that for some thirty hours the city had gone mad, with terrifying rumors flying everywhere, and President Roosevelt himself ordering soldiers down Woodward Avenue, and some of the rumors turned out to be true: whites had beaten blacks and blacks had beaten whites, including a white doctor named De Horatiis, an Italian, clubbed to death while paying a house call on a little colored girl. Before order was restored, some thirty-four people, nine whites and twenty-five Negroes, lay dead. Mayor Jeffries was quick to explain that full order had been restored, but what in the world was happening to the world? If she hadn’t seen the newspaper photographs, Bea wouldn’t have believed it. Rioters turning over cars right on Woodward Avenue! It was a true battle—a battle inside a city already at war. The War had been going on forever, but thousands of miles away. Now?
Now?
Dozens of corpses on the streets of Detroit …

She needed to talk to Uncle Dennis or Aunt Grace, of course, but they weren’t much around. Uncle Dennis had dropped in a couple times, Aunt Grace a couple times—but the Paradisos and the Poppletons hadn’t gotten together for one of their Saturdays in five weeks. When would things return to normal? When would that calendar over Mamma’s head, with its dozen new homes constructed by O’Reilly and Fein, brighten at last?

Even away from home, Bea felt the oppressiveness. She’d gone to visit Maggie, who had a reliable knack for cheering her up, but on the long streetcar ride home Bea had felt bluer than ever. Poor Maggie, living way up Grand River with a woman she’d nicknamed the Jailer. Mrs. Hamm made no effort to conceal her distrust of her new daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, George—depending on Maggie’s mood—was either doomed soon to die in treacherous Pearl Harbor or living the life of Riley.

No, Bea’s mood lifted only in Ronny’s company. These days, he alone had the gift of making her laugh. Quickly—remarkably quickly—they’d developed a string of little jokes, as if they’d known each other not for weeks but for years. They often addressed each other by surname. “You know, Paradiso,” he might say, “drawing birch bark turns out to be harder than it looks.” “I tell you, Olsson,” she might reply, “I’d rather draw birch bark than a sponge.” And they would exchange looks, and laugh.

She had a taste for irreverence—why else make Maggie your best friend?—but she didn’t approve when boys were coarse. Ronny was never coarse, but he
could
be a trifle risqué; he had the sort of sophistication that lifts prurience into repartee. One day at Herk’s Snack Shack they were discussing their classmates and Bea mentioned Tatiana, the Russian girl with the yellow hair. “But tell me the truth, Bianca,” Ronny interrupted. “Aren’t you just
so tired
of Miss Bogoljubov’s breasts?” And Bea gaped in amazement, then exploded in grateful giggles, for indeed she was, yes, just
so tired
of those big pale breasts—the cleavage as much a part of Tatiana’s daily wardrobe as shoes or a purse.

Standing in front of Brueghel’s amazing
Wedding Dance
, with its earthy peasants and their unignorably engorged codpieces, Ronny was capable of dissecting, with perfect equanimity, the distributions of color: “Isn’t it something? The reds, the greens—even the colors are dancing.” But, in closing, he was also one to remark, of the most flagrantly lusty of the men, “I wonder what’s on
his
mind …”

Later, seated together in the Kresge Court, Bea had her own observation about distributions of color: “Do you know you have unpaintable eyes?”

“Unpaintable?”

“What color are they?”

“They’re green.”

“But there’s gold in them, too, isn’t there?”

And Ronny looked just delighted. “You know what? You’re right! Though maybe only a real painter would notice …”

Just the sort of talk she’d always imagined having with a dashing young artist! It was as though their remarks were gifts to each other—conversation as an exercise in gift giving. She loved listening to Ronny formulate those all-inclusive, magnificent pronouncements he adored: assertions that initially might sound facetious, or just plain silly, but which subsequently struck her as thought-provoking, and often astute, and sometimes profound. He was frightfully bright. “Facts are tedious,” Ronny declared one day. She’d been asking about his high school years, which fascinated her because he was the only young man she’d ever met, outside of a book, who had “gone East” for boarding school. He’d attended Groton, in Massachusetts, the very school that—impossible as it was to imagine—President Roosevelt himself once attended. (“It was my father’s idea,” Ronny said. “My mother didn’t want me to go. I hated it, every minute. I didn’t even finish the year.”)

How many months, exactly, had he spent there?

“You do know, don’t you, Paradiso, that facts distort reality,” Ronny replied, and while this particular pronouncement initially sounded grand and impractical, hadn’t Ronny crystallized for her a notion long coalescing? Hadn’t she always suspected that, beyond life’s cluttered aggregations of facts, what counted ultimately were beauty, ingenuity, nobility, iridescence?

When facts about his life did arrive, even significant facts, they often emerged backhandedly, as when Bea happened to mention having had Rocky Mountain spotted fever as a child, and Ronny informed her that
he’d
had scarlet fever. “It left me with what in the movies they always call a
bum ticker
. But I prefer
heart murmur
, it sounds so much more romantic …” And here was an answer to the question Bea had so fiercely pondered: Ronny’s seeming immunity to the draft.

If facts were tedious, what wasn’t tedious? Well, the “mastery of light” in a painting by Gerard Ter Borch in the Detroit Institute of Arts. “What a sense of touch!” Ronny cried in a peculiar squeezed voice that spoke of the ethereality of true artistic aspiration—and yet with these very words about
touch
for the first time he touched her, reached across with his painter’s fingers to stroke the back of her hand, her surprised, tremulous thumb, the uncertain open shell of her palm.

Bea recognized immediately that this might be a bolder variety of touch—a more meaningful touch—than anything she had previously experienced … Was it perhaps (so she speculated that night, lying in bed, listening to Edith soughing in the upper bunk) her first
adult
touch? Of all the boys she’d ever met, who but Ronny truly appreciated just how beautiful a beautiful painting could be? Who else saw how all of life’s fussed-over dailiness (Nonna’s precise recipe for risotto marinaro, the price of hair ribbons at Kresge’s, the most suitable screws for a banister) paled to nothing before the glittering canvas of some Old Dutch Master whom most people had never heard of, painted when Indian settlements dotted the Detroit River?

But that initial, unlooked-for touch had not been the most remarkable thing about their very remarkable day. No,
that
had occurred before a canvas by Chardin,
Still Life with Dead Hare
. Ronny had gallantly offered his arm as he guided her around the museum. “Now isn’t this one lovely?” he asked her, and right through the fabric of his shirt his skin came alive. The goosebumps on his arm were solid as little pellets. She couldn’t restrain herself. Lightly, discreetly, Bianca slid her fingertips up his arm: one after another, bump after bump after bump. It was remarkable. No painting had ever stirred
her
quite so dramatically, so physically. Ronny had such eloquence—you could almost say glibness—that a person might suppose he didn’t respond freshly to art, but he did. With his whole body, he did.

Those bumps still tingled against her fingertips as she lay in bed—in the elaborate, carved bed where everything she felt was felt with especial keenness. She loved this sensation of pondering life’s mysteries while enclosed by the dark silhouettes of her totem-pole bedposts: lamb, fish, stork, rabbit … Of course she typically felt uneasy as well, for nights were—nights had always been—her difficult time. That’s when the phrases she couldn’t get out of her head arrived, or the dopey but insistent melodies whose sheer repetitiveness threatened to drive her mad. Or that’s when, sometimes, elaborate tasks coalesced. Most of these made no sense at all. Last year, she’d passed through a period (it had tyrannized her for months, before vanishing almost without a trace) when she’d needed to reconstruct her day in a peculiar, fixed fashion, recalling the precise order in which she’d first laid eyes on her family. Mamma and Papa and Stevie and Edith and (if she’d seen them that day) Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace or Grandpa Paradiso and Grandma Paradiso—whom had she first clapped eyes on? And second? Third? Fourth? The entire day had to be reenacted around something as arbitrary and meaningless as that … There were no words for most of this business, and Bea had no way to think it through, although thinking it through was what she attempted along the seam of sleep, pursuing it in
loops and swirls, painterly shapes and also ugly, unimaginative, oppressively repetitive repetitive repetitive shapes, where was the escape and why was sleep so elusive? Defended by its staunch animal quartet, her bed helped keep such forces at bay, and this was the real reason she’d always resisted sleeping over at Maggie’s, or at Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace’s.

Were the night thoughts of everybody else so different from their day thoughts? Bea had pondered this a great deal, mostly at night, and while aware of the omnipresent risk of self-delusion, still it did seem to her, to Bianca Paradiso, that she could date precisely the moment when everything turned. She had been twelve—Edith’s age. She’d been in church, which was somewhat surprising, given that churches had never figured large in her imagination. She had spent little time in St. Charles Borromeo, or any of the other local Catholic churches. (Papa, relishing his scattering of slang, sometimes called Mass “a load of mumbo jumbo.”) And Bea had felt even less affiliated with either the Lutheran or the Presbyterian churches Mamma vacillated between, depending on whether her German or Scottish ancestry called.

For a time, on Sunday afternoons, Bea used to go with Maggie to the MYF, the Methodist Youth Fellowship; it was the church group of the really popular crowd at Barbour Intermediate. Usually it was taught by parents of kids in the group, but on one special occasion Reverend Kakenmaster himself addressed them.

He had a style unlike anything Bea had ever seen in a man of the cloth. He looked right at you and his face burned bright red. He posed a long string of questions, to which the rather puzzling answer always was,
I say yes, I abide by that
. The children chanted the reply. The questions involved choosing good over evil, and God over the Devil, and innocence over depravity.

Through the stained-glass window a beam of golden light from Heaven itself drilled Reverend Kakenmaster’s high domed forehead. “It is up to you, boys and girls,” the glowing-headed man of God declared. The beam of light added a sort of horn to his head. “You must decide which it will be: purity or filthiness. Jesus Christ instructed you to choose purity, and what do you say to that?”

And it was precisely at this sacred but precarious instant that some impulse
not
originating in Heaven alighted inside Bea’s brain.

In her mind’s eye she envisioned herself boldly standing up, in the powder-blue dress with white lace collar and white fagoting on the
sleeves that Aunt Grace had made for her, and declaring right back at Reverend Kakenmaster, “I say no, I say——to that,” in which the blank word was an unspeakable term. What would they say, yes, and
what would they do?
What would they all
do
if she fearlessly stood up in her lacy blue dress and yelled, “I say——to that.”

It was all somewhat laughable now, so many years later, but at the time the image was so vivid and upsetting that Bea afterward had felt sick, her insides bubbling above the beige toilet bowl in the Methodist ladies’ room, and later that evening, in expiation, she had required herself mentally to chant one hundred times,
I say yes, I abide by that
. Only, she could never reach a hundred. No matter how hard she concentrated, a poisoned thought infiltrated (an
I say no to that
, or something far worse), compelling her to start over … Had everything changed that day? Well, Bea couldn’t be sure her memory was trustworthy, but it certainly
seemed
everything changed on that day when she’d said no to God and, in retribution, an era of bizarre tasks had descended. Or so it might appear while, as now, drifting so near to sleep that nothing could be hauled back to the land of full waking …