The Art Student's War Read online

  “You have an injury,” she said.

  “Not really.” And that was that.

  “How’s Mr. O’Reilly?”

  O’Reilly and Fein built and renovated houses all over the city. The company was widely referred to as Really Fine, a little pun that had represented, in Bea’s childhood, a summit of human cleverness. One famous day back when Papa was still new at the firm, big bluff O’Reilly showed up right here on Inquiry Street carrying gifts for each of the children. This was three days after Papa had quit the firm in a huff—or been fired—after refusing to oversee the installation of a cheap brand of copper pipe in a house whose construction he was supervising. Mamma had not stopped crying for three days. Because of Papa’s mule-headedness, they were going to lose everything: their home, their automobile, their radio… But white-faced, tight-lipped Papa had won that particular battle, in which every material thing the family possessed was jeopardized for an intangible principle. For in the end, red-faced, garrulous O’Reilly had stumbled up the walk, arms laden with gifts.

  “The same. Always the same. Drinks too much.”

  “And Mr. Fein?”

  Poor worried-looking Mr. Fein—his only child, a boy, had been born deaf.

  “The same. Always the same. Gambles too much.”

  Mr. Fein liked to play the horses.

  Talking with Papa wasn’t the easiest thing. He sat there expectantly, as if making conversation were none of his responsibility, and Bea chatted about Professor Manhardt and her art class, until Papa interrupted with the cheering news he’d come to deliver: “Tomorrow, Bia? Maybe we go to the lake.”

  “The lake!” It would be their first trip this year. They used to go all the time, before the War brought its shortages and restrictions. “And will we swim?”

  “Pretty cold.”

  “Stevie will. He’ll swim.”

  Papa chuckled in that way he had—a sort of clucking. “Stevie will go in.”

  “And you’ll go in too.”

  “Probably so.” Papa rose from his chair. “Don’t let your brother stay in too long,” he said. Papa often departed on a note of solemn advice.

  Later that evening, when Edith had climbed into the upper bunk and the lights were extinguished, Bea did at last yield to tears. This time, the lump in her throat wouldn’t be swallowed down, for it grew bitterly apparent, in the bedroom darkness, that Bea had encountered and lost her one true love. Never again would she catch sight of him—a burden, itself almost insupportable, rendered all the heavier by the knowledge of not having thanked him properly.

  Bea lay on her stomach and leaked tears into her pillow, as mutedly as she could, but Edith heard anyway. Edith, who never cried, whispered beseechingly, “Bea, please, don’t.”

  And the shame of once more being the crybaby, of being an eighteen-year-old art student at the Institute Midwest whose twelve-year-old kid sister requested, not reproachfully so much as pleadingly, “Bea, please, don’t”—this only made Bea sob the harder. She would be all right, she knew, if only she could again summon that soldier’s face, with its promise of soulful, wordless exchanges.

  But the face materializing in her mind’s eye, and refusing to exit from her mind’s eye, wasn’t the soldier’s. No, it was Stevie’s—that weird, unsettling glimpse of him from her bedroom window. Stevie was a soldier too, out in the alley, with the other neighborhood boys, transformed into Japs and Krauts. He had lost his glasses. “Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!” he hollered in explosive defiance. Firing at an enemy he could not see.

  CHAPTER II

  Bea woke to a sensation of being summoned: outside her bedroom window, the sky’s beauty was so keen it all but called her by name. What a perfect day for a lakeside picnic! Everything was so luminous and lovely, so replete with bounty and promise, it wasn’t until she was brushing her teeth—the white sink pulsing with morning light—that she recalled her current state of heartbreak. How could she have failed to thank the wounded soldier properly? Why had her brain been so slow to glimpse what her soul instantly ascertained—that in sitting there like such a dope, with meek downcast eyes, she’d probably lost forever the one person on earth truly meant for her?

  Everybody in the family loved going to the lake except Mamma, who complained it was “much too much work.” No matter how you helped her, a picnic at the lake was still much too much work. Last year, when the shortages were so severe and Papa fretted about making his tires last for the duration, they’d rarely made the drive. This summer, maybe things would be better.

  Bea threw a robe around herself and hurried downstairs, where she found her mother at the kitchen table, sipping coffee. No preparations begun—a bad sign. The gloom Bea had sensed on arriving home yesterday apparently hadn’t lifted. This was something everyone in the house silently did: monitored Mamma’s state of mind.

  Bea got herself a glass of milk. Taped to the side of the refrigerator was a newspaper article entitled THE TEN FOOD COMMANDMENTS. It began, We shall not use condiments extravagantly. It ended, We shall save all food containers made of materials that can be used in war production. The posting of the article was Edith’s doing, who had scattered similar injunctions throughout the house. Zap the Jap with Scrap! and Hit Hitler on HIS Homefront from OUR Homefront! and Put War Bonds in your Wallet, not Axis Bonds on your Wrist! (Edith was fond of puns.) Papa approvingly referred to her as his Salvage Officer, and in fact everyone in the house was a little afraid of Edith’s reprimands. Exactitude was another of her passions. When she read in the newspaper that newspapers shouldn’t be sent to salvage until reaching a stack five feet high, she went down to the basement with a tape measure and marked the desired height on the wall.

  The seventh of the Food Commandments was, We shall drink only one cup of coffee a day, but even Edith knew not to challenge her mother in this regard.

  Mamma rose from the table and the two of them worked side by side, not saying much. Experience had taught Bea that her mother truly didn’t wish to be coaxed out of her moods—she preferred silence. Mamma was prone to melancholy by nature, but what was currently looming was something else again. It happened maybe every three or four months: the arrival of one of “Mamma’s moods.” And this could well subside into a gloom deeper than gloom, infiltrating every corner of the house.

  Bea chopped the celery and peeled the potatoes for the potato salad. Mamma diced onions for the tuna salad. The onions’ biting smell and the redness of Mamma’s eyes might have served as symbols—symbols of life’s prevailing injustice. It was one of her great themes: the world’s injustice. She combed the News for poignant accounts of crashing unfairness—the young bride drowned on a Florida honeymoon, the boy crippled in an accident while driving to his high school graduation. As Bea worked beside her mother in the incandescent morning sunshine, she was enveloped by something fundamental to her existence and yet ineffable: whenever one of her mother’s dark moods impended, she had no suitable vocabulary for her own complicated mixture of feelings, a blending of hot pity and resentment and inseparable guilt, of impatience and weariness and fear. More than anything else, perhaps, fear. At such times, her mother drifted off, and all the calling in the world couldn’t fetch her home again.

  Stevie clattered downstairs and Mamma set before him a bowl of Cheerioats and an unopened bottle of milk. There was already an open bottle in the Frigidaire—from which Bea had poured her own glass—but Stevie loved the cream at the top, which Mamma saved for her “growing boy.” (Papa urged her to reserve the cream for her coffee—she was so bony and thin—but this was advice seldom followed.)

  When Bea had all the potatoes peeled and palely resting in a pan of water on the stove, she assembled six grape-jelly-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and sliced them diagonally. Unfortunately, her mother could not or would not break the habit of cutting sandwiches into rectangles rather than triangles. Mamma grumbled sometimes that Aunt Grace’s picnic basket always looked more appetizing than her own, as if this were another injustice: Uncle Dennis
and Aunt Grace had money for luxuries. What Bea was tempted to point out—but did not point out—was that it cost nothing to cut a sandwich diagonally, to fold a napkin tastefully. Little things … So often, it was not a matter of expense but merely of caring how things looked, and Aunt Grace, Mamma’s beautiful younger sister, attended tirelessly to the look of things.

  When Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace arrived, the Paradisos were ready to go. Aunt Grace was wearing a straw sun hat, with a lime-green ribbon wound around the crown. Grace, as always, looked wonderful.

  “You have a new hat,” Mamma said.

  Aunt Grace naturally awaited some further observation or appraisal. When nothing followed, she said, “Thank you,” and smiled, and called to Edith, standing by the fireplace, “And you have a new dress, darling. How lovely you are!”

  Lovely had never been the word for Edith, not even as a newborn who arrived on Inquiry Street looking furrowed and highly discriminating. Still, the compliment found its blushing mark: for the first time this morning, Edith glowed.

  Edith’s yellow jumper, trimmed in forest green, was indeed new. This was another of the girl’s singularities: her pudginess. She had needed the new dress, having outgrown so much of her wardrobe.

  Saturday expeditions followed their own protocol. On the way out, wherever their destination, Bea rode in Uncle Dennis’s car—a 1942 royal-blue Packard. On the way home, Stevie and Edith had the privilege. Uncle Dennis had a passion for riddles, and he enjoyed pointing out that his car was perpetually new, always the latest model—one of the few ’42s assembled before the automobile companies had briefly closed down to reemerge as airplane and tank and munitions factories. Cartown no longer made cars. There were no 1943 Packards. There would be no ’44 Packards either.

  Predictably, the children’s eagerness to ride with their uncle and aunt irked Mamma. In the old days, there used to be arguments, and lingering bitterness, until Uncle Dennis hit on the system: Bea would ride with the Poppletons going out, Stevie and Edith would ride with them coming back. Over the years, Mamma had indirectly inspired a number of such little systems.

  When Bea rode anywhere with her uncle and aunt, Grace usually sat in back. “You with those long legs, you need the room,” she would sometimes say. Other times she might say, “The two of you so rarely get a chance to talk.”

  As a little girl, Bea sometimes had fantasized that her uncle and aunt would adopt her. Perhaps she might be tragically orphaned, forcing the Poppletons to take her in. (Stevie and Edith would be settled elsewhere.) Bea had always felt more comfortable with the Poppletons than with any other couple. For years now, long before she possessed the words to form the thought, Bea had intuited that Mamma was jealous of gorgeous Grace, but only in the last year—after graduating from high school and enrolling in art school and mostly becoming an adult—had Bea come to see just how deep this jealousy ran.

  It was a realization that inevitably raised a larger issue: did Grace herself see it? There were moments when Bea felt quite certain that Aunt Grace understood everything and made it her policy to answer her elder sister’s coolness with warmth, her suspicion with trust. But there were other occasions when Bea felt certain nothing calculated informed Grace’s high-mindedness. It was just her particular nature—the nature of the kindest woman Bea had ever known—to view her surroundings trustingly.

  That business with the hat just now—it was typical. “You have a new hat,” Mamma had noted—unmistakably an accusation and a lament, one sister saying to another You get more than I do. And how had Aunt Grace replied? With a “Thank you.” And it may well be that Grace, contentedly settled in the backseat as they drove up Woodward Avenue, now sincerely believed that her sister had praised her hat.

  Uncle Dennis lit his pipe. Even when he wasn’t smoking, his car smelled of tobacco—a lovely, primordial aroma that tendriled around, as pipe smoke will, so many of Bea’s childhood memories.

  It was one of the rituals of their drives that Bea ask her uncle about his reading. Uncle Dennis loved science fiction. He subscribed to magazines with names like Amazing Stories and Astounding Science-Fiction. He was always reading about spaceships and distant planets, about scary trips into the future and futile trips to rewrite the past. They were “silly stories” according to Uncle Dennis. They were “mere relaxation” or “just a way of chasing sleep.” They were even “dumb stuff.” Nonetheless, his face flushed like a boy’s when, in his slow and measured way, he regaled Bea with one more convoluted journey through the coils of time, or one more intricate tale of earth-menacing perils hurtling toward us from the other end of the galaxy.

  Years and years ago, Bea’s new best friend, who was still her best friend, Maggie Szot (now Maggie Hamm), posed a question that made Bea laugh. Having heard so many stories about Bea’s beloved uncle Dennis, Maggie had asked, “And is he handsome?” The question was funny because Uncle Dennis was unmistakably meant not to be handsome. Being not handsome was so much who he was. Uncle Dennis was plump and round-faced, with thick lips and big, square ears. (He was the only square-eared person Bea had ever met.) Like Stevie, he wore enormously thick glasses, and solely on this basis the two were sometimes taken for father and son. Whereas Bea felt honored whenever mistaken for a Poppleton, Stevie bristled. Stevie was the only son of a man who built houses with his scarred, powerful hands. He idolized his dad.

  They were such a unified couple, Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, it was as though he hardly needed good looks, when she possessed them so abundantly. Could anyone imagine a better partnership? Bea could scarcely compass the notion of Aunt Grace’s previous marriage. How could she possibly have wed anybody other than square-eared Uncle Dennis? In her entire life, Bea had never heard them quarrel.

  Grace’s beauty was partly the beauty of Kindness—anybody as nice as she was probably must seem beautiful in time—and partly the beauty of pure Beauty. Had Grace lived in the Renaissance, five hundred years ago, some immortal painter might have asked her to model for the Madonna. She had alabaster skin, vibrant with health, and clever gray eyes, and she had a full and lovely bosom.

  They continued up Woodward, past a jeweler’s, a locksmith’s (“Sleep Tight,” the old sign said, which Bea had once thought extremely clever), an Olsson’s Drugs (“There When You Need Us There”), Honest Abe’s Radio, a music store (“Sheet Music—We’ve Got the Latest”), a tobacconist’s, and, on the other side of the street, another Olsson’s Drugs.

  Uncle Dennis was concluding his story: “So now everything’s in his grasp: the kingdom, the beautiful and mysterious princess, the planet itself. The only thing left is to eliminate the young masked man—his rival for the princess and the rocket ship’s plunder. Well, the young man doesn’t beg. He’s quite dignified. He says, You must do what you must do—or words to that effect. And the older man takes out his death ray and declares, You’d do precisely the same thing in my place—words whose irony you’ll understand in just a moment, Bea—and then he shoots the young man. And when he does? He feels himself fading away.”

  “Fading away?” Bea said.

  “And well you might ask. Becoming unreal. Just as if he never existed. And how could this be? Good question. Good question. He realizes the brutal truth just before vanishing altogether. You see, he’d gone backward, not forward in time. You remember the time machine was upside down when he mounted it? Well, because of that, he reversed the direction, and the young masked man was actually himself, back when he was young. By shooting the young man, he’s actually committing suicide. And his very last thought, before fading away altogether, is, But then there was no enemy and I’ve been fighting myself…”

  “I like that,” Bea said. “There was no enemy.”

  You could watch, by clear stages, as the inner boy receded from Uncle Dennis’s features and the good sober middle-aged doctor assumed his place. “There’s a big problem—a big hole in the plot,” Uncle Dennis pointed out. “If he shot his younger self with the death ray, how did he live long
enough to take the time machine back and shoot himself with the death ray? You see what I’m saying.”

  “Mostly,” Bea said.

  “I recognize there’s a big problem,” she added, struggling to squelch any amusement in her voice. What struck Bea as funny was the notion that for Uncle Dennis something so preposterous as an older man shooting his younger self with a death ray could represent a big problem.

  At the lake—Lady Lake—it was always Papa’s job to arrange for the boat and equipment for the men’s fishing. While a process seemingly closed to negotiation (the rental prices were posted), Papa invariably turned it into an intricate and protracted business. He was tight with a dollar—even if, or perhaps especially if, Uncle Dennis might ultimately foot the bill. (Papa was forever protecting others from getting swindled.) While this transaction unfolded, Uncle Dennis stood outside the rental shed in a posture of hapless idleness—as if he couldn’t begin to assist in any such complex undertaking.

  This was another aspect of family life that Bea had only recently come to analyze and appreciate: just how complicated and complementary the dealings of these two men were. Uncle Dennis was a soft, unathletic doctor who spent his off-hours reading about a dizzy, rocketing future. Papa—who read haltingly, not only in English but in his native Italian—was a lean, athletic builder who in his spare time constructed wooden toys and made wine in the cellar and grew roses in the backyard while the rest of the family tended the victory garden. And yet, he and Dennis were not only brothers-in-law but best friends.

  Uncle Dennis’s show of incompetence was repeated whenever he asked Papa how to fix a leaking faucet, how to pack the crowded trunk of a car, how to trim a shrub. In such moments, if you didn’t know better, you might conclude that this man who served the Paradisos so ably as general doctor, financial advisor, political and military analyst, education specialist, legal-affairs consultant, guide to American history, and interpreter of foreign cultures was a bit of a nincompoop.