The Art Student's War Read online

  The cobbler’s children have no shoes—so the old adage affirmed, which suggested that her own house ought to be dilapidated. In fact, it was the best-kept-up house on Inquiry. Papa was a contractor, though he rarely uttered the word; he tended to keep his English simple. He spoke with an accent, despite having lived in America since he was thirteen. Bea was relieved that the family’s ’38 Hudson wasn’t parked in front. Her father wasn’t home yet. He didn’t like it when she arrived after he did.

  Bea stepped into the front hall and smelled hamburger and onions. She proceeded warily toward the kitchen, where she found her mother—Mamma—stationed at the table, not doing much of anything. This was a bad sign. Mamma was subject to “moods,” sitting immobile over coffee for hours, staring at the kitchen wall calendar, which each month offered a different house built by O’Reilly and Fein, the company Papa worked for.

  “I’m home,” Bea said.

  “Isaac Lustig is dead,” her mother replied.

  “Isaac Lustig?” Bea could not place the name.

  “You know the Lustigs. Up near Charlevoix. Their son.”

  The Lustigs lived way up the street. They had moved in only a month or two ago. Bea hadn’t actually laid eyes on any of them yet, but she knew they were Jewish.

  “He was a soldier?”

  “A student. At Kenyon College in Ohio. Exactly your age, too,” Mamma pointed out. “He drove his car into a tree. He planned to be a doctor.”

  “How terrible. The accident was around here?”

  “In Ohio.”

  “Had you met him?”

  Bea’s mother took a moment to answer. “N-no.” Then she added, on a note of funereal triumph, “And now, I never will.”

  There was something unseemly and exasperating about this—Mamma’s adopting someone else’s tragedy. Evidently, in her grief over poor Isaac, Mamma had forgotten her earlier displeasure at seeing another Jewish family on Inquiry. She harbored a dim resentment toward the Jews, who back in Bavaria, where her father’s family originated, once swindled an ancestor off his farm. It didn’t help matters that one of Papa’s bosses, Mr. Fein, was Jewish. The other boss, Mr. O’Reilly, was Irish—another group Mamma disparaged. (Scottish on her mother’s side, Mamma saw in Ireland a people whose native ingenuity, as history kept demonstrating, was principally devoted to whining.)

  Mamma’s appropriation of the Lustigs’ tragedy somehow barred Bea from telling her own story—her small but genuine loss today, when the wounded soldier exited the streetcar without being properly thanked.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Shipwreck.”

  It was a recipe drawn from the only cookbook Mamma ever consulted, The Modern Housewife’s Book of Creative Cookery. Mamma went in for odd dishes with odd names—though almost never Italian food. As she was quick to point out, she was nobody’s Italian wife. She drove Papa’s car, for one thing. As a rule, Italian wives didn’t drive.

  Mamma’s hair was dark, even darker than Bea’s. In the last few years, a few white hairs had crept in—very few, given that she was forty. But the darkness of her hair made each of the white ones—which were of a different, frizzier texture—cry out as interlopers, at least to Bea’s painterly eye. “I have a stomachache,” Bea said, which though not currently true was often the case. It was a chronic affliction. “I’m going to lie down a few minutes.”

  Feeling a twinge of guilt, Bea called backward from the living room, “I’m very sorry about Isaac Lustig.”

  Upstairs, Bea found her little sister knitting a dark blue turtleneck sweater. Edith was twelve. She was working in a room that was and wasn’t her bedroom. The house had four bedrooms, one downstairs for the parents and three upstairs for the three children. But since neither Bea nor Edith cared to sleep alone, the usual arrangement was for Edith to spend the night in Bea’s upper bunk. Edith was a noisy roommate who often talked in her sleep—sometimes with quite eerie distinctness—but Bea preferred her sister’s company to solitude.

  Edith’s bedroom had become mostly a storage room and workroom. Work was something Edith excelled at. She was an extraordinary child—indeed, she had a testimonial to that effect signed by Madeleine J. Wilton, executive secretary of Needles for Defense, the organization that provided the patterns for the socks and mittens and sweaters Edith so rapidly produced. Most of the knitters for Needles for Defense were grown-up women, and initially Edith had done her knitting under Mamma’s name—until Mamma, justifiably proud of her remarkable daughter, had confessed the truth to the women at Needles for Defense. The result, which was headed A Testimonial, had been the letter from Mrs. Wilton acknowledging Edith’s “extraordinary patriotic contribution, especially for a child.”

  It was one indication of just how extraordinary Edith was that at the age of twelve she knew the word testimonial. It was another that she’d assembled a confidently large scrapbook called “My Testimonials.” So far, it contained three letters, beginning with Mrs. Wilton’s. The second was from a leader of the Detroit Girl Scouts, thanking her for her “skillful salvage.” (Edith regularly went around the neighborhood collecting the bacon fat, beef drippings, suet, etc., which all the housewives saved for her—she was a great favorite among them—and which she sold as salvage to the butcher for four cents a pound. She then bought war stamps with her savings.) The third was a letter from her school principal, commending her performance in a school-wide Math-o-Meet. Edith could do complicated multiplications and divisions in her head.

  Again Bea hung in the doorway. “I’m home,” she said.

  “We’re having Shipwreck.” It was one of Edith’s favorite dishes. Edith was plump—the only plump member of the Paradiso family.

  “I know.”

  Edith’s hands continued their work as she regarded her sister. Bea, too, knitted for Needles for Defense, but she couldn’t match her little sister’s output. Bea’s hands regularly forgot what they were doing. Edith’s didn’t, while moving far more rapidly than Bea’s daydreamy hands. Though she didn’t intend to, Edith continually sharpened Bea’s various misgivings about not contributing enough to the war effort. Wasn’t there something she alone could provide?

  Bea was forever reading in the News about young women not much older than herself who were running gas stations—their husbands having gone off to war—or driving tractors, or unloading trains. She read such articles with fascination, as well as disbelief, and a little dismay. Was she somehow living the wrong sort of life? Letting down her country? But when she saw the News photograph of three California coeds who had learned to ride unicycles in order to reduce wear on their bicycle tires, all she could do was laugh and say to Mamma, “Look at this—it’s Edith’s next accomplishment.” Mamma, too, had laughed nervously. As Bea had recently come to recognize, one peculiarity in the family she’d been born into—one of many—was that its youngest member was often its most intimidating.

  What will become of her? Bea sometimes asked herself. Papa joked that Edith’s future husband would never discover a sock that needed darning, a shirt missing a button. But it wasn’t easy picturing Edith married to anyone. If a girl could be spinsterly at the age of twelve, Edith managed it. Nothing about her seemed twelve. She was stoical beyond her years. It was a rare day when tears marred her clear blue eyes. Brown-eyed Bea, six years her senior, was, mortifyingly, far more susceptible to weeping.

  “I have a stomachache,” Bea said. “I’m going to lie down.”

  “And apple crisp,” Edith called after her.

  Bea’s bunk bed was a special bed: her father had constructed it for her. You might have supposed she would prefer the airy upper bunk, assigning the lower to Edith, but the sensation of lying within an elaborate wooden nest comforted her. Ever since she was a little girl, nights had been her difficult time and the abashing fact was that she had trouble sleeping at a girlfriend’s or a relative’s—anywhere but here in this bed of her father’s making. Into each of the posts upholding the upper bunk he had carved, to
tem pole—style, a creature. Whenever Bea lay here, she was surrounded by a lamb, a fish, a stork, and a rabbit.

  This was clearly the best place in the world to revive today’s valuable gift: the image—unforgettable—of the handsomest soldier in the world, a bandaged boy on crutches, yielding up his seat for her. A boy who had said—casually, but painfully mindful of the moment’s poignancy—“Nice ridin’ with ya, miss.”

  Yet Bea had hardly settled down when a great ruckus erupted in the alley.

  She knew its source even before clambering out of bed. If in many ways Bea’s most treasured place on earth was this bedroom and the bed her father had built for her, the alley was the richest locale for her brother, Stevie. You found him out there in all seasons, sometimes morning till night. Long ago, his games had involved cars and circuses and athletic contests. These days, it was all the War.

  Stevie and his friends were forever enacting battles out back of the house. From the rooftops of garages, from the shelters of trash cans and wheelbarrows, they ambushed each other and pitched themselves into headlong advances. Sometimes they took prisoners and tied them up with rope. Bea had even seen the boys, lined up neatly and solemnly, performing a clattering death by firing squad …

  Just thirteen, Stevie no less than his little sister was tireless in his country’s defense. For despite heavy casualties, the finale was always a thoroughgoing rout of the “Krauts” and the “Japs.”

  Bea had intended to throw open the window and yell at her brother. Instead, she watched intently. The scene captivated her. There must have been a dozen boys—crawling, running, whooping, making explosive noises. She had some trouble locating Stevie, half-hidden behind a barricade of packing crates. Picking him out of a crowd was usually easy, because of his thick glasses. He was all but blind without them.

  Those glasses crystallized a family understanding shared by everyone but Stevie. Even Edith, in her mulling clandestine way, had probably guessed that Stevie, who yearned passionately for the day of his future enlistment, never would serve. If—if, unthinkably, the War were to continue until 1947, when he would turn seventeen, no branch of the military would likely have him.

  The logic behind this disqualification was demonstrated as Bea watched a chaotic battle unfold. Stevie’s packing-crate fortress was attacked in a crackling fusillade. One of the crates was toppled and Stevie’s glasses fell to the ground …

  Stevie did not stoop to retrieve them. With a look of crazed determination on his squinting molelike face, an expression of radiant martyrdom, Stevie went on firing his gun at an enemy he could no longer see. It was a haunting face, a haunting moment: “Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!” he cried. “Rat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!”

  Fifteen minutes later, it was a subdued and taciturn Stevie at the dinner table. His glasses were restored to his face.

  Those glasses made him look studious—a misleading impression. Stevie lagged behind his classmates in reading skills. He lagged in mathematics, too, and here Bea could identify with him, somewhat, though she’d always been an almost perfect student. In grade school, she’d twice been double-promoted, a half-grade each time, and had wound up graduating from Eastern High at the age of seventeen, near the top of the class. Still, math had sometimes kept her from a flawless all-A report card. It was as though Edith, who without even blinking could compute towering sums in her head, had somehow garnered math skills that by rights the Paradiso children should have divided equally.

  As was too often the case, tonight’s dinner was a lifeless affair. It usually fell on Bea to spark any real conversation. Papa on returning home had repaired immediately to the bathroom. He’d emerged with a bandaged hand, as was fairly common: he often came home with bruises, lacerations, nasty splinters.

  He’d done a neat job with the bandage, not surprisingly: he did a neat job with everything.

  “You have an injury,” Mamma said, over the steaming Shipwreck.

  “Not really.”

  This was untrue on its face—fresh blood had seeped into the white cotton in Papa’s palm.

  But if Papa declared himself uninjured, this pretty much ended all discussion. He didn’t like “fretting.” Most of the ministrations he required—the cleaning of wounds, the removing of splinters—he accomplished himself. I can do it myself was something of a motto of his.

  Mamma said, somewhat defiantly, “I want Dennis to look at that tomorrow.”

  Papa suspended a forkful of Shipwreck before his mouth. “All right,” he replied.

  This was the great exception to Papa’s motto. Although he would never ordinarily step into a doctor’s office, Papa did allow his brother-in-law, Dr. Poppleton—Uncle Dennis—to peer down his throat, to poke into his ears, to eavesdrop with a little cup on his robust heart. Moreover, Papa would confer with Dennis about what sort of mortgage to apply for, which newspaper to subscribe to, whom to support for mayor. Needless to say, Dennis had had to be consulted before Bea could take the peculiar step of enrolling in art school. His approval had helped carry the day.

  Uncle Dennis had come by his authority gradually, it seemed. He was the husband of Mamma’s sister, Grace—Grace’s second husband. (He had chosen to marry a divorcée.) The Poppletons were childless. Though soft-spoken and seemingly unassertive, Uncle Dennis somehow managed to be the most persuasive person Bea had ever met.

  Most Saturdays the seven of them got together—the five Paradisos and the two Poppletons. Years ago, classification-loving Edith had determined that Saturday was American Day and Sunday was Italian Day. The designation, gradually evolving into a little family joke, had stuck. Sundays were reserved for Papa’s father, Grandpa Paradiso, who was often called Nonno, and Papa’s stepmother, who was sometimes called Grandma and sometimes Nonna but often not called anything. There was no real conversing with her, she spoke so little English.

  Bea was waiting for an opportune moment to narrate her affecting story—the Tale of the Handsome Wounded Soldier on the Streetcar. But now the table suddenly turned loquacious. Papa, who rarely said much during supper, began an amusing little story of his own, about Harry, one of his workers, who at the noon lunch break ate a fried-egg sandwich that had been sitting in a lunch box for three days; at the next break, punctually at two-thirty, he vomited it up in the alley. And then the telephone rang—ringing phones at suppertime always irritated Papa—and Mamma chose to answer it, which was a mistake, and she couldn’t get the caller (old Mrs. McNamee down the street) off the line. And then Edith launched into a long anecdote about running into Mrs. Marshland at Olsson’s Drugs. Who? Mrs. Marshland—her fourth-grade teacher at Field Elementary. (Her family’s lapses of memory frequently stirred Edith’s indignation.) And Mrs. Marshland was buying four hair ribbons, isn’t that strange?

  Bea didn’t feel free to begin her story until dessert. It was apple crisp, overcooked. (Mamma had been on a bad streak lately, burning even more dishes than usual.) Papa interrupted Bea’s narration to remove from his mouth a bullet of blackened dough and to say, “I’m going to crack a tooth.” Though he never visited a dentist, he was rightfully proud of his teeth: white, straight, absolutely unblemished by cavities.

  “The oven isn’t working right,” Mamma replied, sullenly.

  Bea resumed her story, rattling along until she reached the punch line, or at least one of the punch lines: “Can you imagine? Can you imagine? He offered me a seat.”

  “Well now,” Mamma volunteered, “if a young man offers you a seat on the streetcar, you must accept. Decent manners have been dying ever since this war began, I can tell you.”

  “Take a seat when he’s on crutches?”

  “Crutches? I didn’t know he was on crutches,” Mamma protested, which only proved she hadn’t been listening at all.

  “That’s the whole point. He was a soldier on crutches. He was a wounded soldier.”

  “Well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish,” Mamma said in the same authoritative tone, wholly undismayed about reversing herself
completely. “For Pete’s sake, Bea, you can’t take a crippled man’s seat!”

  “Don’t I know it!” Bea cried. “After all, that’s the whole point! I was thrust into a quandary”—and she saw her mother and father exchange a quick but significant glance. Although the two of them disagreed about many things, in this particular matter they were in tight accord: their oldest child, their elder daughter, was “overemotional.” The term had been supplied, years ago, by Uncle Dennis, and Papa in particular had seized upon it, in that characteristic way he sometimes seized on a slangy American phrase. “You are overemotional,” he would say, and pause—a long pause. “Overemotional, Bia.” Bia—pronounced be uh—was his special nickname for her. The other children had no special nicknames.

  Bea excused herself as soon as she could and raced upstairs and hurled her body onto her bed. Again a burning lump closed her throat, but she didn’t cry—instead, something consoling happened. In her mind’s eye, with a clarity vainly wished for ever since she’d stepped off the streetcar, she visualized the handsome soldier. He was staring down at her, into her. She was returned to that blazing moment just before he disembarked, when their glances truly fused.

  Bea gazed up into his startlingly blue and yet altogether soothing eyes and found they opened onto unexplored regions—a territory where there was no doubting he understood her essential self. And surely both of them were to be pardoned if they hadn’t known how to proceed, given how unlooked for was this one-in-a-million encounter between two young people just possibly made for each other.

  There was a knock on the door: Papa’s knock. He did this sometimes, when he suspected Bea was feeling sad or overwrought. Usually he made no references to her state, while seeking to supply cheering news.

  Bea sat up in bed. Papa took the seat at the desk, sitting backward on the chair, forearms resting on the top. He had freshly bandaged his hand.