The Art Student's War Page 4

  But roles were completely reversed once the rental had been arranged. “Vico, I need a look at that hand,” Uncle Dennis declared, and Papa, meek as any altar boy, sat himself down at a picnic table and unwrapped his bandage. Everybody crowded around. Papa no longer had the authority to shoo them away. He had no authority at all.

  “This one’s nasty,” Uncle Dennis said. Papa had gashed the inside of his palm. “You shoulda come to me yesterday and let me drop a few stitches.” Papa mustered an apologetic grin. “Nasty, nasty, nasty,” Uncle Dennis chanted as he slathered salve on the wound and redressed the bandage.

  “Listen to me, Vico,” he began, “you’ve got a team of men working for you now. You hear me? Let them do the heavy work. Tell them what to do. Right?”

  Papa nodded eagerly, grateful for such good counsel. It was the same nod he always gave when Uncle Dennis offered this advice.

  “Grazie, dottore, sto bene, sono guarito,” Papa said when Uncle Dennis had finished rebandaging the wound. He sometimes employed Italian like this—partly as ceremony, partly as solemn joke. Bea only sometimes understood what he said; her Italian was spotty. “I have the best doctor in the world,” Papa went on, proudly. “The only one who doesn’t like hospitals.”

  “Now Vico, that isn’t quite so,” Uncle Dennis corrected, patiently. But it was a matter of steady, unalterable satisfaction for Papa and no clarifications could modify this point: Dennis disliked hospitals. Uncle Dennis went on: “I just don’t believe in going unnecessarily—they breed infection. And I certainly don’t believe in staying bedridden any longer than you have to.”

  Uncle Dennis advocated early ambulation. It was something of a crusade. To everyone in the Paradiso home, the phrase early ambulation was one of those elaborate mouthfuls—like War Production Board or Office of Price Administration—worn smooth by familiarity.

  At last the two men had their boat in the lake, which was a milky tan-green color, cloudy with stirred-up sediment. Papa rowed, of course, despite his injured hand. Uncle Dennis wouldn’t catch anything. Papa would probably catch something and throw it back. Papa would smoke cigarettes and Uncle Dennis his pipe. They had six bottles of Stroh’s between them. They wouldn’t return for lunch until the bottles were empty.

  Stevie rushed off to swim. There was always something at once comical and depressing in this, because of course he had to remove his glasses. It seemed—poor kid—he could hardly make out the murky water he charged at so excitedly.

  Remaining on shore were the “four girls”—Mamma, Aunt Grace, Bea, and Edith. They sat on two blankets. Carefully shielding her fair skin, Aunt Grace had placed her blanket in the shade, with Bea beside her. Having placed hers in the sun, Mamma squinted into the light.

  Once Bea had come fully to appreciate the extent of Mamma’s jealousy, it was remarkable how many family dealings were freshly illuminated. What was Mamma doing now? She wasn’t merely sitting in the sun… No, she was registering her disdain for the pampering solicitude Grace showed herself—her disdain, even, for the pretty new sun hat with the lime-green ribbon.

  Edith sat beside Mamma in the sun. She had been given a jelly-and-cream-cheese sandwich to “hold her” until lunch. In a patient and exacting process, Edith had set about consuming as much grape jelly as possible without actually biting into the sandwich. Gradually, gently, she squeezed and kneaded the bread, coaxing out little purple seams, which she licked up. Only when satisfied that no more jelly was to be extracted would she bite into the sandwich.

  Edith was utterly absorbed in her task, and Mamma was lost to some dangerous foul mood. So it fell upon Bea and Aunt Grace to keep the conversation alive.

  Aunt Grace asked about her still-life class and Bea told her about Professor Manhardt, who even on the hottest days wore a vest, which he called a “waistcoat.” Aunt Grace’s sincere interest facilitated Bea’s talk—about her classmates, and even about her bright ambitions for her art. Bea had sold one artwork in her life: a watercolor done on Belle Isle, called International Waters, with Detroit lying on the right side and Windsor on the left and the distant Ambassador Bridge, uniting the two countries, in the central background. Aunt Grace had bought it last year, for ten dollars, for Uncle Dennis’s forty-fifth birthday. The painting hung in Uncle Dennis’s office, behind his desk. International Waters wasn’t a very good watercolor—Bea could see that now—and she’d offered a free replacement. But Uncle Dennis wouldn’t hear of it.

  Then Bea recalled someone and something she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten until now: the soldier on the Woodward Avenue streetcar yesterday. “Oh, but listen to this,” she cried. Bea recounted the story at length, and Aunt Grace’s little interpolations—“Really?” “Oh my,” “You poor thing”—made clear she appreciated its every nuance.

  “How mortifying! You must have felt terribly self-conscious,” she said.

  Oddly, this time the story fired Mamma’s imagination. “But what did he say?” she asked.

  “I told you. Just the one remark: Nice ridin’ with ya, miss.”

  “You do know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers on streetcars.”

  “But I didn’t. That’s the whole point. I don’t think he even heard me thank him, for heaven’s sake.”

  Mamma deliberated. “You say he was handsome?”

  “He was very handsome.” Yes, he had been handsome, though in Bea’s imagination he’d now become almost the handsomest boy she’d ever seen.

  “It’s a good way to find trouble. Talking to strangers on streetcars.”

  “But I didn’t, and what trouble was I going to get into? He was a very nice boy, otherwise why would he insist I sit down? Besides, he was on crutches.”

  “As if that matters! Grace, you remember Pearlie Kulick, and the boy who’d been in the accident.”

  Pearlie Kulick was a name Bea had never heard. Still, she didn’t ask about Pearlie, or the boy, or even the accident—since if she were to ask, the story would doubtless prove unsuitable for children’s ears. This was another conversational peculiarity of Mamma’s, especially in Grace’s presence: she was forever alluding darkly to people and anecdotes unfamiliar to Bea and then refusing to elucidate. You might almost suppose, given how many unspeakable stories she knew, that Mamma over the years had encountered nobody who wasn’t a dope fiend, a wife beater, a sexual deviant, a shoplifter, a floozy, a confidence man, a heartless seducer—just as you might spend weeks in Aunt Grace’s company and conclude that she’d never met anyone who wasn’t kindly, generous, sympathetic, well-intentioned. How could the two of them be sisters?

  Yet they were and—perhaps more to the point—each was the only life long family the other had. Bea’s Grandpa and Grandma Schleiermacher had died too long ago for Bea to remember either clearly. There had been no other Schleiermacher children—just the two girls, Sylvia and her eleven-months-younger sister, Grace—and the only Schleiermacher cousins were settled way out in California. Given, also, that Uncle Dennis had no immediate family nearby (only a half brother, in New Jersey), and that Papa was an only child, it was logical that the Poppletons and Paradisos got together as often as they did: most every Saturday, and sometimes weekdays as well. Likewise it made sense that Grace had chosen to ignore the whole issue of her older sister’s jealousy, blithely fending off an endless series of digs, accusations, slights, complaints.

  Yet this was to presuppose that Aunt Grace actually identified them as such. Really, there was no saying how much she understood. Contemplating her now (noting the solemn if sympathetic way Grace shook her head over poor, mysterious Pearlie Kulick), you might swear that here was a woman who embodied the notion that petty sniping cannot exist among those grand enough to surmount it.

  After the men returned, empty-handed, and Stevie emerged blue-lipped from the lake, the seven of them settled around the picnic table. This moment was always eagerly awaited: the unveiling of Aunt Grace’s picnic basket. She wasn’t merely a marvelous cook. Her things always looked so pre
tty.

  When Bea was occasionally asked where her passion for art originated, the obvious answer was from the Paradisos. In addition to being a fine builder, Papa was a master craftsman. The wooden pull-toys he’d constructed for his children when they were little—a lamb for Bea, an owl for Edith, and for Stevie a rooster whose wings waggled when you dragged it behind you—were extraordinary. And Papa’s father, Grandpa Paradiso, had once been (long ago, back in Italy, before his health broke) a genuine sort of artist who specialized in those trompe l’oeil effects so dear to the Italian imagination. (Bea had seen examples in books.) Grandpa Paradiso had adorned simple houses and he had embellished palazzi. He was a kind of muralist. He’d painted windows opening out of nonexistent rooms, doors leading into nonexistent corridors, shrubs bordering nonexistent gardens. Yes, at one time he’d been a celebrated artist, up and down the coast of Liguria, in Italy, cradle of the greatest art the world has ever seen.

  But there was an art-loving side to the Schleiermacher family, too, as embodied in Aunt Grace, whose visual flair surfaced in unexpected byways. Her house brimmed with curiosities that had enchanted Bea’s childhood: peacock feathers, a pink blown-glass snail whose shell was revealed as midnight-blue and not black only when held up against the sun, a malachite frog, a dark-skinned strangely melancholy Indian doll from Mexico. There were Asian flourishes as well. Some years ago, Grace had befriended a Japanese woman, Mrs. Nakamura, whose husband, Dr. Nakamura, had worked beside Uncle Dennis. The Nakamuras, like the Poppletons, had no children, though Mrs. Nakamura was indeed as small as a child. Though she spoke even less English than her husband, she had delighted in initiating Aunt Grace into a realm of bewitching oriental tricks: how to use chopsticks, how to fold a simple sheet of paper into a crane or a horse, even how to whittle a humble carrot until it metamorphosed into a flower blossom. In the summer of 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor, Dr. Nakamura had completed his studies and he and his wife had returned to Tokyo. It was peculiar to think that the Nakamuras were now the enemy. The bombs from General Doolittle’s raid could have fallen on them.

  Aunt Grace drew from her picnic basket a tray of sticks which she called brochettes, little skewers on which were alternated small cubes of garlicky lamb, pearl onions, pieces of carrot and green pepper: no one cooked like Aunt Grace. And she unearthed from the basket two pies—cherry pies, the fruit so abundant it was popping free of its lattice. “Sylvia’s favorite,” Aunt Grace announced. “The very first cherries from California. Dennis got them from a patient who works for the railroad.”

  “California,” Mamma said, and her face brightened right up. Gifts wielded a peculiar power over her imagination. That these pies had unexpectedly become her pies—it was a notion to cheer Mamma considerably, even while she ate sparingly. She consumed little at mealtimes, despite various urgings—everyone was keen to fatten her up. It wasn’t so much that she was picky; rather, food didn’t deeply interest her, with the dual exceptions of coffee and candy. She preferred her coffee syrupy thick. Partly because of rationing, she hesitated to throw anything away, heaping new scoops onto the old and exhausted grounds. Hers was a bitter, gritty brew. She didn’t understand how people could “mess up” their coffee with milk or sugar, and yet she would snack on sugar all day, in the form of candy. Here, too, her tastes were unusual and off-putting. She didn’t much care for chocolate. She favored bright-colored—primary colored—chewy fruit candies. Unusual, too—worrisomely so—was her habit of hiding candy. You’d be poking under the sink for something, or you’d lift the lid of a shoebox, and out would tumble a bag of jawbreakers, a cache of candy corn. This was a practice born with sugar rationing; sly Mamma wasn’t going to let anyone take her candy away.

  The sight of Mamma’s brightened face inspired Uncle Dennis to proclaim, as he so often proclaimed, “Time for a picture …”

  So the two sisters were posed side by side at the picnic table, with a pair of cherry pies before them. Aunt Grace looked lovely in her straw hat with the lime-green ribbon and Mamma’s face still wore the radiance of the gift of the pies. Grace set a hand lightly on Mamma’s forearm and Mamma, after a moment’s hesitation, laid a hand atop Grace’s hand. It all came together in a vivid diminished click: the comely sisters, the distant sound of children yelling and splashing, the wind purling through the trees, and, above the trees, no louder than a honeybee in your neighbor’s yard, an airplane ascending over a city in wartime.

  The day at the lake progressed quite well—far better, anyway, than anyone might have predicted—until the swimming after lunch. Mamma was the only one who chose not to enter the water. As Bea had come to understand, she was self-conscious about how bony she was, and about the varicose veins in her legs.

  Bea loved these family outings to Lady Lake, where all her observational powers felt heightened—nothing escaped her. The folks a couple of picnic tables away must be Polish: they had wide Slavic faces and were eating sausages. The paterfamilias, judging from the way he slumped into himself, was getting drunk. Two picnic tables beyond them sat a white-haired woman who, so the quizzical cant of her head suggested, was half deaf. A boy at the Polish table was eyeing a girl at an adjoining table, and quite a number of boys had noticed her, Bea.

  This was another of the lake’s appeals: she felt especially pretty here. She might be too thin, like Mamma, and she certainly didn’t have Aunt Grace’s bosom, but rambling about in her new green swimsuit—a happy bargain, purchased for $3.95 at Montgomery Ward’s—the felt what Papa must feel in his green suit: poised and comfortable.

  Papa had a distinctive way of entering the water. He marched forward steadily, arms aswing, like a gunslinger in a Western. Although these days he had a number of men working under him, he continued to throw himself into manual labor and he had maintained his impressive physique: broad shoulders, narrow waist, slender legs, and knotty arms. (He prided himself on his prowess as an arm-wrestler.)

  Uncle Dennis, perhaps in unconscious simulation, likewise strode determinedly, arms aswing—though in his case his body betrayed him with little flinches. Uncle Dennis’s body was paler and pudgier than you might suppose on seeing him fully dressed. Shockingly white, his skin howled a protest at the sun. Papa’s legs were glossed with reddish-brown hair that turned golden in the sunshine. It was hard to believe the two men were roughly the same age.

  The sand on the beach was full of little stones. Bea stepped gingerly. The water turned out to be thrillingly cold, as the lake’s raspy sand filled the arches of her feet. The breeze riding over her bare shoulders was delicious. She waded in up to her knees and, with that slight nervousness she always felt as water mounted toward her private parts, proceeded more slowly. The icy water embraced her thighs. Her hair was pinned up. She wore no bathing cap, since she planned to keep her head above water. There were boys on this beach who were watching her, and for just a moment, in her mind’s eye, she saw herself as they might—a tall girl in a green floral bathing suit, standing in water just high enough to reach her dangling fingertips—then closed her eyes and threw herself forward, outward, letting herself float belly down, while keeping her head above the surface.

  The cold water took her breath away, then gave it back in huffing puffs and pants. She swam a jerky breaststroke, head still above the surface. At day’s end, traveling home was always more comfortable if she’d kept her hair dry—but it turned out she couldn’t resist. After a few more strokes, Bea plunged under, into the turbid lake, and did a few frog kicks below the surface, then came up gasping and flopped upon her back. She loved to float like this, staring straight up into the heavens. The airplane that had wandered into Uncle Dennis’s photograph, or another airplane, was humming across the sky …

  There was a timelessness to such pleasures—floating on her back in cloudy water while contemplating the clouds—though perhaps the real lesson of this excursion to Lady Lake was that, however beautiful the day, some sort of bomb might constantly be ticking and no pleasures were timeless
. It was an afternoon to ponder for the rest of her life; she’d never know another quite like it. Today was to be, indeed, the finale of all such beautiful days—for as it turned out, the Poppletons and the Paradisos never again would journey together to Lady Lake.

  Stevie had discovered a new game. Immersed in the water, plump Edith was actually light enough for him to pick up in his arms and hurl a little distance. This brought on high squeals of laughter, for Edith, too, delighted in the new game.

  “Look,” Bea said. She had emerged from the lake and was sitting on a blanket beside her mother. A towel hung over her shoulders. Everybody else was in the water. “Look at Stevie and Edith.”

  Though so close in age, the two siblings—the quiet plump homebody girl, the noisy militaristic older brother—generally found few pursuits in common. It was marvelous to see them playing together. Mamma laughed aloud …

  The truth was, Mamma had a wonderful girlish laugh—a bright string of giggles as evenly spaced as beads on a wire. It was hers alone, that round yellowy sound, which sometimes had the power to catapult Bea backward into a sunny room she couldn’t place (it wasn’t to be found on Inquiry Street), where cooing, volleying voices echoed each other; this was a laugh Bea sometimes registered when floating at the edge of sleep. It was the oldest laugh she knew, and the youngest.

  Time and again Edith waded off on her own. Stevie “snuck up” on her—swimming through the murky water and suddenly seizing her by the leg or waist. Edith thrashed and screamed. And Stevie cast her out toward the lake’s deeper, colder water.

  Given how myopic he was without his glasses, it was surprising the game lasted as long as it did without Stevie’s making a mistake.

  Once again, he plunged into the water, kicking and racing forward like a human torpedo—but one whose aim was off. This time his grappling hands seized Aunt Grace, who, like Edith, was wearing a powder-blue suit.