It all happened with such suddenness, Bea could make sense of it only later. In their immediate unfolding, the events seemed unreal.
Stevie grabbed his aunt by the waist. There was a struggle. She went down. He brought her up again and hurled her toward the deeper water.
When Aunt Grace rose to her feet, the sight was so very strange that, for just a fraction of a second, Bea couldn’t isolate its strangeness. The top of Aunt Grace’s suit had been yanked from her left shoulder. Her ample white breast above her blue suit was bared for anyone in the world to ogle. The big shocking nipple was dark as a plum.
Aunt Grace didn’t realize her shame. As she stood in the waist-deep water, having been assaulted and upended, seized and dunked, shoved and pushed, she didn’t know enough to cover herself. She blinked and shook her befuddled, tilted head.
As chance would have it, Papa was wading only a few feet away, holding his bandaged hand above the water. Now both of his hands, the normal, bare hand and the bandaged hand, lunged forward, toward her. Oh, he meant to shelter his poor sister-in-law—shield her from the leering, squalid gazes of a beach full of strangers! But his hands halted. They did not quite touch her.
Only a moment’s duration—this surreal little tableau lasted only a moment. Then Grace, in a panicky fluster, yanked up the top of her suit. It flopped back down, baring the left breast once more. The strap had snapped.
Hunching self-protectively, arms crisscrossed over her chest, she beat a retreat toward shore, where Bea greeted her with a waiting towel plucked from her own shoulders. “Angel,” Aunt Grace cried, “do you have a safety pin?” and she raced toward the changing cabins.
Full order was reinstated in just a couple of minutes. Once more, Aunt Grace was sitting in the shade, fully dressed, straw hat restored to her head. She appeared as tranquil as ever. It was a simple accident, after all …
Yet Mamma’s shadowed face suggested otherwise, and an unnamable shame descended over the group. For Bea, there was no erasing the image: Papa waist-deep in water, his good hand and his bandaged hand reaching out toward Aunt Grace’s naked breast. And little Edith, eyes bugging out of her head—obviously, she’d witnessed the whole thing. As had Uncle Dennis, who, with a blush on his round cheeks, rattled on about a patient who once got a fishhook lodged in his eye.
Poor half-blind Stevie didn’t quite grasp what he’d done, and nobody wanted to inform him. Still, he sensed the unease—how could he not? The air was so dense with it.
Mamma cast a look of fury and revulsion at the lake, at the sun-bathers, at the gathering clouds to the south, where the embattled city lay …
Aunt Grace’s aplomb really was admirable. Pie—would anyone care for more pie? Or cookies? She was particularly solicitous toward Stevie, who no doubt sensed (something purblind Stevie seemed destined to sense throughout his life) that he’d inexplicably misstepped. Hey, Ste-vie, how’s about an oatmeal cookie? Or what about coffee anyone? “Vico, I have a whole nother thermos. I bet it’s still hot …”
But nobody wanted anything. Clearly the day at the beach was over.
According to protocol, Stevie and Edith ought to ride home with Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, and Bea accompany her parents. But Stevie, uneasy and still perplexed, decided to go in his parents’ car. Alone in the Packard’s big backseat, Edith rode with her uncle and aunt.
On the long drive back, Bea repeatedly tried to initiate a conversation. As did jittery Stevie. Even Papa, who could be so taciturn, worked to get some words flowing. He spoke of the fine house he was renovating in Sherwood Forest. And the promise of rain. And the visit tomorrow from Nonno and Nonna.
But Mamma, hunched darkly in the front seat, lean face tilted toward the window, would have none of it. She wasn’t about to be cajoled into conversation. Nothing. Not a word.
CHAPTER III
“You haven’t got it right—but it’s almost right.”
This appraisal of her work—a pencil drawing of a wizened little apple and some long-stemmed onions—ought to have been unwelcome on a number of fronts. Chief among the unwritten rules at the Institute Midwest was a ban on gratuitous criticism: students were to proceed unobstructed by each other’s evaluations, unless expressly solicited. In addition, Bea’s onions and apple clearly were unfinished—all the more reason to exempt them from judgment. Furthermore, and finally, this particular critic and fellow student was somebody Bea hadn’t met yet (though of course she knew who he was). You might think he’d have the common courtesy to forgo criticism until they’d been properly introduced.
Even so, this was somebody she’d been longing to meet: Ronald—Ronny—Olsson, who was not merely extremely handsome but handsome in a fashion guaranteed to fire up Bea’s imagination. He looked intensely literary—meaning not so much that he read books as that he belonged in one. She’d come across him before, somewhere in her constant novel reading. But which one was he—this pale, tall, dark-haired young man who wore a beautiful camel’s hair sports coat and a tawny suede hat? (Not many young men could have gotten away with that hat.) Some disguised prince in exile? Some nineteenth-century consumptive poet on a final pilgrimage?
He always wore cuffed trousers. Cuffs on new trousers had been one of the first casualties of the War—by order of the War Production Board—and Ronny’s pants suggested a very deep closet. He dressed beautifully, in pale pastel shirts and bold but subtle neckties.
After letting him stand unanswered for a moment, “What do you mean, almost?” Bea replied.
Ronald had done something else odd and theoretically forbidden—he had entered the Institute in the middle of a term. He was a newcomer to Professor Manhardt’s class. Yet in just two weeks he’d established himself as its best draftsman—a superiority acknowledged by all eight of the other students, as well as the Professor himself. It was quite remarkable, the speed whereby that pale hand of his could translate an apple or a lemon or a cattail on a tabletop into an apple or a lemon or a cattail on a sheet of paper—in the process losing far less of the thing’s tactility than any other student would likely lose. Bea had repeatedly allowed herself to stare, surreptitiously, at those long, quick, shapely, blunt-nailed fingers of Ronny Olsson. They moved more confidently than any fingers Bea had ever watched before. “What do you mean?” she repeated.
As if superior on a social level as well, Ronny chose not to mingle. All the rest of the class went to Nick’s Nook for sandwiches; you never saw Ronald Olsson at Nick’s. The rest went sometimes to the Run Way for coffee after class; Ronny was never glimpsed at the Run Way. In truth, Bea had already imagined a couple of little quarrels with Ronny Olsson, in which she’d flummoxed him with accusations of snobbery. Still, he was perhaps the most interesting “type” in a class rich in types.
The Institute Midwest was divided into two disciplines, Industrial Arts and Fine Arts. The exclusively male Industrial Arts crowd favored a straitlaced look. Most of them hoped, when the War ended, to go into things like automotive design. The Industrial Arts crowd had few exchanges with Bea’s own Fine Arts crowd, where most of the “types” were found.
There was huge Hal Holm, with his big fanning red beard and overalls, who was gaped at wherever he went. And Tatiana Bogoljubov—also gaped at, but in a different way. Tatiana dressed just like a whore (not a word Bea would have voiced to anyone except, perhaps, her best friend, Maggie). Tatiana had dyed her long hair yellow—not blonde, yellow. She wore lengthy gaudy scarves over exceedingly tight blouses. She was a buxom girl who had pierced her ears. And there was Mr. Cooper—David Cooper—far older than the rest of them and perhaps Jewish. He’d come from Poland. He had a long doleful nose and a dark gaze of uncomfortable intensity. The vertical furrows connecting his nose and mouth might have been drawn with a knife. “Art is my only home,” Mr. Cooper continually declared, with lugubrious pride. And there was Donald Doobly, Jr., who was a Negro and who studied both Fine Arts and Industrial Arts. Donald always looked neat and dapper but a little comical, since his clo
thes were mostly a couple of sizes too large. You might have called Donald slight, but one day Bea had watched him marching down Woodward against a strong wind that whipped his baggy trousers tight to his thighs, and she’d realized he was slighter than slight: his legs weren’t much thicker around than broom handles. Donald drew beautifully, and if glamorous Ronald Olsson hadn’t materialized midsemester, Donald might now reign as Professor Manhardt’s star pupil.
Ronny, too, took his time in answering. “Might I perhaps?”
And now he moved quickly. Whether or not he might, he did: before Bea had had time to agree, quite, Ronny Olsson began applying his pencil to her paper. He was a lefty, like her, which somehow cheered her.
His speed was intimidating. A few scratches of shading to the apple’s underside, a few smudging strokes of the eraser, and the apple commanded what it had lacked heretofore: the true reserved weight of a terrestrial object. This was fruit, however modest in size, to strike a dozing Isaac Newton on the crown of his head and awaken him to a universe bound by gravity …
Ronny displayed much the same speed and smoothness in spiriting her away after class. They didn’t head to the Run Way. They marched to a little luncheonette a few blocks on, where they were unlikely to encounter classmates. It was called Herk’s Snack Shack. They sat in a booth over mugs of watery coffee. Bea was feeling hungry, but she didn’t order any food because Ronny didn’t. The confident way he’d hustled her here, as though she couldn’t possibly have anything better to do, might have been insulting had it not been so suave.
She’d thought Ronny “stuck up.” But he spoke warmly and directly—and with a rapid precision comparable to his rapid precision with a pencil. Bea’s rushed sentences characteristically went astray. (Maggie was forever teasing her about this, when not mocking her “overflowery vocabulary;” Bea had a weakness for the picturesque and polysyllabic.) Typically, she’d wander off into conversational detours, looping back to establish necessary preconditions, or would leap into parentheses that failed to close. Ronny—impressively—spoke as if dictating to a secretary.
He had mesmerizing eyes. They were mostly green, but mixed with a tempered gold, almost amber. It was a little hard to concentrate when those eyes were upon you.
He called her Bianca, the name she, letter by letter, affixed to her artwork. “Bea,” she corrected him, but when he did it a second time, she let it pass. He talked mostly about art. Some of his observations had the pitch and polish of true epigrams. (You had the feeling he might have said them before.) He talked about the Impressionists, whom he didn’t much admire (“Human vision is muddy enough without deliberate muddying”) and Albert Bierstadt, also unworthy (“I’m afraid I can only deride anyone who would insert a moose into a painting”), and Whistler, whom Ronny applauded somewhat (“He encourages us to examine only parts of his canvas—but usually the right parts”), and Sargent, of whom he mostly approved (“Though you get the feeling, since he really could draw, he’s often too easy on himself; he trivializes his gift”).
No one in Professor Manhardt’s class talked this way; indeed, Bea had never heard anyone of roughly her own age talk this way. Dazzling in themselves, the words were also welcome for reasons Ronald Olsson had no way of knowing: at home, on Inquiry Street, things were far, far worse than Bea could ever remember. Sitting anxiously across from Ronny Olsson, Bea felt her heart lift—lift and lighten—as it hadn’t in weeks.
In retrospect, everything at home had started unraveling nearly three weeks ago, with the trip to Lady Lake and Aunt Grace’s little accident. (Though you might say it began the day before, really—the afternoon of the bandaged soldier on the Woodward streetcar, when Bea came home to find Mamma staring blackly at the kitchen calendar.) The mishap at Lady Lake had shaken everybody, but Mamma most: it seemed to fix the hovering darkness over her head.
And then came the night—a Wednesday night, four days after the lake—when everything altered with such swift violence it seemed the family’s old peace and happiness might never be revived.
Bea had been lying in bed, nearly asleep, when she heard something peculiar. Her father was raising his voice. He was a man who steadfastly refused to argue. When he became angry, which he did rarely but terribly, his practice was to make forcible, irreversible pronouncements and storm from the room. (At work, a couple of times, he’d resorted to fisticuffs, but that was different. He had to maintain discipline on his watch—a favorite phrase of his.) Now, though, he was arguing.
In the darkness Bea crept from bed and noiselessly twisted the doorknob. She stepped out onto the landing. Her parents were downstairs, in the kitchen. Papa’s voice dropped away on a peculiar phrase (“Sylvia, you have to clean your mind”) and then Mamma, voice honed like a razor, spoke the saddest words Bea had ever heard. When a dark mood was upon her, Mamma had a penchant for hopeless pronouncements, but these were words to rip the heart right out of a person’s chest: “But it isn’t in my mind—it’s in yours. It’s in yours, Vico. It’s in yours. It’s true. It’s true, it’s true. Deep in your soul, Vico, it’s Grace you’ve always loved!”
Once, back in grade school, Bea had seen a boy, Glenn Coney, fall spectacularly out of a tree. This was at Chandler Park. He must have dropped thirty feet, straight down. You could actually hear the leg bone splintering when he crashed to earth. Afterward, Bea had replayed that scene over and over. Far stranger even than hearing a boy’s leg—Glenn Coney’s leg—cracking into useless fragments was the moment just before impact, while his body was plummeting. Over and over she witnessed the descent, and though it lasted but a second—the interval between the slip and the sickening, shattering thud—still Bea had had time within it to realize that the coming destruction was ineluctable: once Glenn lost his footing, nothing could be done. The earth was unforgiving. There was no going back …
Now, too, she was confronting something as irreversible as gravity: hearing those low deadly words of Mamma’s while standing tiptoe on the landing, Bea had felt similarly unable to undo what cried to be undone. After such a ravaging declaration, how could their neat little home ever be quite the same? Shivering in her pajamas, Bea had heard other things as well—horrible things—but nothing could ever match that most shocking and sad of accusations: Deep in your soul, Vico, it’s Grace you’ve always loved!
Bea knew she shouldn’t be lingering over coffee in a place called Herk’s Snack Shack with a boy named Ronny Olsson; by now, she ought to have boarded a streetcar. Yet she didn’t wish to. Although a measure of civility had been restored at home, in other ways life had only degenerated. After words like those, how could things get any better? The desperation and fury could only go underground …
So if she heard herself egging Ronny on to deliver still more sweeping and severe judgments, and laughing more recklessly than usual, surely she was to be forgiven. And the truth was, Ronny Olsson hardly needed encouragement. He was something of a performer—actually, an extraordinary performer.
It was a sign of how things stood at home that Papa for the last two Saturdays had put off the Poppletons with excuses. Neither Uncle Dennis nor Aunt Grace had been glimpsed since the outing to Lady Lake. When would normal family life return?
Bea didn’t want to go home—she didn’t want to think any more about the declaration overheard on the landing. She wanted another cup of coffee. She wanted to listen to Ronny Olsson talk and—almost an equal thrill—she wanted to watch him talk. My goodness, he was handsome!
A crazy notion occurred to her—so outlandish, she momentarily lost the drift of his conversation … But if she were somehow to marry this Ronny Olsson (about whom, admittedly, she knew next to nothing), she could move out of her bedroom on Inquiry Street. And begin a new life.
So when Ronny said to her, “You’ll go with me Saturday to the DIA, won’t you?”—meaning the Detroit Institute of Arts—and she replied, “That s-s-sounds just lovely,” it wasn’t hesitation bringing a rare stammer to her lips. It was sheer bounding eagerness.
After dinner, miraculously, the telephone really freed up. Papa retreated into the living room, to listen to the radio. Edith cajoled Stevie upstairs for a game of rummy, though Stevie typically refused to play card games with Edith, who almost invariably won. And Mamma, who hovered endlessly round the kitchen, decided to take a bath. It seemed a perfect time to call Maggie. Bea longed to discuss handsome, dapper Ronny Olsson.
But if it was hard for Bea to find a private phone in the evenings, it was harder still for Maggie, whose mother-in-law, Mrs. Hamm, seldom left the house, or strayed far when Maggie was on the phone. Still, Bea decided to give it a try.
“And he’s muy splendido?” Maggie asked, once the conversation really got rolling. The word was pronounced splen-dee-doe. Maggie’s bright chatter had always been spiced with funny and preposterous slang, often of her own devising. But her talk had grown even more distinctive and peculiar since her move to the Hamms’. These days, she often spoke in a kind of code.
“Very. Très splendido.”
“And a sharp dresser?” Clothes were a passion the two girls shared—though Bea sometimes wished her friend’s taste weren’t quite so flamboyant.
“The tie he wore the other day?” Bea said. “Blue and gold silk? It would have made the most beautiful scarf you can imagine. And there’s a camel’s hair coat …”
“Sounds like money,” Maggie said.
“Looks like money. But I don’t know. I don’t even know where he lives.”
“Maybe he’s a con man,” Maggie suggested.
“I’m thinking a European prince in exile.”
“I say a con man.”
“Or a Hollywood scout?”
“A con man. You’ll be visiting him in jail before you know it.”
Maggie wasn’t playing along, quite.
Ever since Maggie’s wedding, and especially since she’d moved in with her in-laws, conversations about boys had grown complicated—difficult. And it was mostly boys the two girls had always talked about. What else? Certainly not art—a subject Maggie treated with uninterest at best, peevishness at worst. Actually, lots of subjects made her peevish.
The Art Student's War Page 5