The Art Student's War (9 page)

Facts may distort reality, but the next day Ronny offered a particular factual disclosure so startling, it all but took her breath away; it reordered everything. The two of them were walking up Woodward, just south of the Boulevard. The General Motors Building loomed on the left. Bea pointed to the familiar red-and-yellow sign of the drugstore across the street and said, “Funny, it’s the same spelling. As your name.”

Olsson’s Drugs. They were all over the city.

Although the two of them were not touching, she could feel Ronny’s body stiffen. He halted. Even in relaxed moments, his green-gold gaze radiated intensity, but this was more than mere intensity. His eyes were aflame.

He said, “You say it almost like—as if it’s a coincidence.”

“A coincidence?” Honestly, his eyes had such a feverish look! “What are you trying to—”

“Bianca, I thought you knew,” Ronny interrupted. “You didn’t know?” He paused. “Really? Truly? I mean, it’s my father’s. You do know, it’s my father’s store.”

At first Bea couldn’t take it all in. Illogically, she thought Ronny must be referring to this particular store, on Woodward just south of the Boulevard. “You mean he—your father runs this place?”

“I mean”—and facts may be tedious, but Ronny Olsson’s eyes were
burning more brightly than when he rattled on about any Poussin or Fragonard canvas—“he runs them all. He owns them all.”

“All?
All?”

Weeks before she’d ever spoken to the newcomer in class, the wildly good-looking Ronald Olsson, Bea had fantasized, just for fun, that he might be a prince in exile. But to be informed, in the bright no-nonsense light of a Monday afternoon on Woodward Avenue, that her walking companion was the son of the man who owned the leading drugstore chain in Detroit—this was a story more fabulous still. Why, there was even an Olsson’s at the end of Inquiry Street; Bea had been living beside Olsson’s her whole life!

“Forty-seven stores over three states. I don’t know why, but I just thought you knew. Most people just seem to know.”

“But I didn’t,” Bea said. “He’s—your father—well, he’s
Mr. Olsson.”
Over the years, she’d seen a number of newspaper photographs of Ronny’s father and mother. Mr. Olsson led various important organizations for the war effort. The Olssons were among the city’s most prominent people.

“I didn’t know,” Bea repeated, feeling oddly apologetic. But how was she to have known?

Alongside them, automobiles were gliding up and down Woodward. Across the street, people were walking in and out of Olsson’s.
There when you need us there
. It was the store’s slogan. Bea stared at Ronny Olsson. Unmistakably, everything between the two of them must now stand on a different footing.

Yes, everything had changed and Ronny led her to a new luncheonette, called Big Ben’s, and over mugs of watery coffee he regaled her with Olsson family anecdotes. His parents had come together in what was clearly a great love match (though Ronny, in his qualifying way, shrugged off Bea’s term). Ronny’s grandfather, Grandpa Olsson, founder of Olsson’s Drugs, had disapproved of his son’s romance and flatly prohibited marriage. Yet Ronny’s parents went ahead and married anyway. Ronny’s mother was extraordinarily beautiful. (But Bea already knew this, having seen the newspaper photographs.) Mrs. Olsson had grown up in the tiny town of Scarp, North Dakota, but she had found her way to Detroit, and to a party attended by Ronny’s father, Charles Olsson, who, the first time he clapped eyes on her, declared her the most gorgeous girl he’d ever seen and vowed to marry her. “Mother is always after me to do her portrait, though she knows I don’t do people. I suppose I don’t have your gift for it, Bianca.”

It was the first genuine compliment Ronny had paid her art, and his words had all the luster—the darting expansive promise—of paint emerged fresh from the tube. Bea immediately blushed. Ronny retracted his approval a little, however, with his next remark: “I’m a stilllife artist. Now, does that mean I’m limited and narrow? Is Chardin limited and narrow? Isn’t an overreliance on the human element ultimately sentimental?”

Bea responded cleverly: “But still lifes are a comparatively recent phenomenon! If you said to Giotto or Duccio—”

“But there you go again! Always accusing me of being a hidebound reactionary”—of course Bea had never said any such thing; the phrase wasn’t even in her vocabulary—“yet I’m now revealed as a progressive! A novelty-lover! Enchanted by that newfangled creation, the still life!”

“I never said—”

“Of course Mother’s portrait’s been done a number of times, but she doesn’t believe they do her justice, and honestly she’s right, and I do wish I could oblige, but I don’t do people. So you think that’s wrong, Bianca? Isn’t it enough to aspire to be a stilllife artist?”

This was generally the way conversations with Ronny proceeded: a shuttling from personal matters to philosophical questions about the nature of art, back to personal matters, back to art—while he playfully defended himself from accusations Bea had never made, and formulated refutations to objections Bea had never posed. What was so striking, beneath all his banter, was how integrated into Ronny’s daily life were these questions about art. Chardin and Ter Borch and Mr. Olsson and Mrs. Olsson—it seemed they all sat at the same table. Meanwhile, her own life on Inquiry Street, with Stevie and his BB guns and Edith and her knitting, with Papa and his scarred builder’s hands and Mamma and her cups of sludge—what did such things have to do with Chardin and Ter Borch?

And yet, and yet … Here was Ronny Olsson, on another trip to Big Ben’s, implying that her own family stories were just as inspiring as any story could be. She happened to mention that Grandpa Paradiso, born two months premature, had been kept alive in the family oven, and instantly Ronny’s gaze sharpened. More details,
signorina
—he must have more details … And, under his prompting, the tale grew steadily richer.

Nonno had been born on the coast of Liguria, to a very poor teenage girl whose husband had died in a shipyard accident just a week before. The premature baby also appeared destined to die, as did the young
widow, who, having delivered her doomed infant, had collapsed into prostrate grief. It was Nonno’s grandmother—mother-in-law to the ailing young mother—who fixed on the idea of converting the family stove into an incubator.

This wasn’t an electric oven, of course, for nobody on that stretch of coast had electricity yet. No, it was an actual woodstove, whose temperature had to be monitored—day and night, every blessed minute—if the baby wasn’t to be cooked alive.

“Paradiso, don’t you see? That old woman saved
your
life, too!” Ronny cried, so enthusiastically that a few customers turned and stared. The remark sounded like more of Ronny’s far-flung hyperbole—but then Bea got the point, belatedly grasping what she’d somehow never appreciated: yes, that old woman had
saved her life
. And what
could
be odder? Right here in Big Ben’s, her own existence broke over her existence; a wash of novel chemicals rippled through her veins. She—Bea—Bianca Paradiso—would not be sitting here, sipping from a chipped white coffee mug, if it weren’t for a blood relative who was a stranger, an old Italian peasant woman who had hardly slept for days, who could not sleep, for she was sole nurse to the baby in the family oven.

It was typical of Ronny to wish to hear about her great-great-grandmother; Ronny specialized in peculiar inquiries. What would she choose for her last dinner on earth, and with whom would she eat? (“I’d eat with my family,” Bea answered instantly. She added, “Aunt Grace would do the cooking.”) And what was her earliest memory? No other boy had ever asked for her earliest memory.

“Well, I was visiting Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, who used to live in Corktown—you know, near the Ambassador Bridge. The bridge was just being built. This must have been 1928 or so.”

“You would have been—?”

Bea had slipped and almost revealed how young she was. She raced on: “I remember this big muscular man working on the bridge. Silhouetted against the sky. That’s my first memory: a man silhouetted against the sky.”

“Have you ever tried to paint that?”

“N-no.” But why had she never tried to paint that?

She could see him now: the man on the bridge. She would see him forever. High in the metal framework, a muscled silhouette against the sky. Why had she never tried to paint that? (Though, come to think of
it—and wasn’t this fascinating?—she
had
painted the bridge. It anchored the horizon of her one sold painting,
International Waters
, which she was less pleased with each time she visited Uncle Dennis’s office.)

Yes, Ronny was forcing Bea to rethink everything.
Was
it wrong to be nothing but a stilllife artist? This was an “ancient debate”—so Professor Manhardt had described it—and yet arguments formulated in ancient times suddenly felt fresh. Bea loved these discussions, the two promising young art students (the boy twenty-one, the girl eighteen) contending back and forth, not always sure what they thought but weighing each thought passionately. (In truth, Ronny was far firmer in his views; she had trouble making up her mind.) There were days when Ronny seemed absolutely correct: it was enough merely to paint a cruet, a daisy, a dead rabbit, a lemon rind. Indeed, more than enough: it was noble, these attempts to place disparate objects in an artful conjunction and capture with near-microscopic exactitude all the intricacies of their interplay. And yet … there were times when you had to do something more, or something more direct, about it all.

The
all
was the War, of course—a war bigger than anything else in history. Hitler and Mussolini meeting in the Brenner Pass, Hitler on the Spanish border conferring with Franco, Hitler being cheered as he waved from Prague Castle, Hitler leaning on a balustrade in front of the Eiffel Tower … So long as the Nazis had the run of the Louvre, how could you talk dispassionately about a Chardin still life? No, you had to offer some response—something to encompass the soldiers on the Detroit streetcars, the loss of Bataan and Corregidor, Churchill defending his strategies after Tobruk, old Henry Ford ghostly in the newsreels, and the whole throbbing city gearing up as never before. An amphibious vehicle rolled off a GM assembly line, and worlds away its ramp swung down, khaki legs splashed out into a choppy salt surf… Those assembly lines were churning out tanks and armored cars, antiaircraft guns and rocket launchers, a whole new alphabet of browns and tans and olives: B-24s, B-29s, M4s, M3s, LCVPs, LCTs, DUKWs, F6Fs, TBFs. Sometimes Bea envisioned herself creating vast tumultuous canvases unlike anything she’d attempted before, streetcars sharing the streets with tanks, wounded soldiers staring out at you with inquisitive, hurt, hopeful eyes, and newspapers tallying the death counts, and whole city blocks darkening in their dim-outs, while dark alarms were wailing—but who in the world could paint such a canvas? It was
impossible—and yet to attempt anything less than the impossible seemed tantamount to betrayal …

She kept reading about the amazing things girls had learned to do. The articles leaped out from the
News
. Girls were driving tractors through soybean fields, they were manning radar stations in the Arctic, they were riveting armored cars. But to judge from Papa’s response when she’d suggested, not very seriously, getting a war-factory tob—honestly, he couldn’t have been more dumbstruck if she’d proposed joining the circus, or converting to Hinduism. His mouth had fallen open. What would his Bia say next? Wasn’t
he
working his fingers to the bone erecting housing for defense workers? Now, in addition, he’s asked to send off his daughter, wearing slacks, to work beside a bunch of leering factory rats?

In the face of her anguished perplexities, Ronny Olsson rarely wavered. He was Olympian. It was enough—more than enough—to paint a peony, a pack of playing cards, a guttered candle. “I do my part,” he insisted. “Don’t I give the maximum amount of blood permitted? Didn’t I cart God knows how many tons of salvage from our attic? Don’t I serve as a block captain? But no artist should apologize for being an artist.” And sometimes Bea hungrily envied him his robust certainty, sensing herself constrained and deficient for its lack. Wasn’t Ronny displaying the stylistic confidence of the true artist? And wasn’t she showing the churning muddle of the would-be artist, painting bowls of cherries while dreaming of gritty canvases in which turreted armored cars roamed the streets, gun barrels uplifted like the fingers of accusers?

And sometimes she resented Ronny—his confidently declaring, “I don’t mean to be callous, but you must take the long view. This is only the latest war. There have been plenty of wars, Bianca.” Oh, words easy for him—him with his “romantic” heart murmur! But while Ronny was pondering strategies for committing a tulip to canvas, American boys exactly his age were shipping off to war. The induction notices in the
News
sometimes filled one column and spilled over into a second. Those bare stretches of newsprint terrified and summoned her—the more so, somehow, when appearing opposite the funny pages. On one side, Alley Oop and Rick O’Shay and Superman. On the other, a cold, factual list of hundreds of boys, many of whom would never return. One day she was idly reading “Freckles and His Friends” when her gaze drifted rightward and fell
immediately
upon the name Frederick Rumpelman. This had to be the Fred she knew from Eastern High—how
many Fred Rumpelmans could there be in Detroit?—and the coincidence terrified her. His name leaping out like that—did this mean Fred was destined for a bad end?

Still, it was hard to resent Ronny for long, given how he stretched her preconceptions. Thoughts of him brightened her days, and now more than ever, in this chaotic summer of ’43, when rioters were overturning cars on Woodward and American death tolls were exploding overseas, Bea needed brightening. It seemed things at home couldn’t get any worse—but they kept getting worse. Having initially shied from divulging to Ronny anything about her family, she soon began to take comfort in discussing how things stood on Inquiry, even if she must censor many details …