The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  Something awful was approaching.

  “He called me by someone else’s name,” Mamma said. “By mistake. He called me Grace. There we were in bed, and we were … we were, well, in each other’s arms”—her whole body shuddered—“and he called me by the wrong name.”

  “It must have been a mistake.”

  “A mistake. Yes. I said that already. But you see, mistakes can expose the truth. That was his mistake.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  “You’re old enough to know the truth, Bea. It’s so. The truth. Your father’s in love with her. We were in each other’s arms—close—and he called me by my sister’s name.”

  “Oh, Mamma—Mamma! Papa’s not in love with Grace! The whole thing is ridiculous.”

  “He called me by her name,” Mamma repeated.

  “He was thinking about her! We’ve all been thinking about her! Good heavens, this is terrible, what’s happened between you two. You’re sisters.”

  “He called me by her name,” Mamma insisted, in the same restrained but immovable tone. “While we were—close. Your father’s in love with her. Actually, it’s something I’ve always known, though I pretended to myself I didn’t.”

  It was clear—queerly clear—that Mamma was implying that at the very moment when Papa made his fatal utterance the two of them had been … but Bea had no words for such an activity, not where her parents were concerned. Maggie used to talk about hearing her parents, hearing all sorts of things, but never in her life had Bea had any evidence, other than the physical existence of herself and her siblings, that her parents shared physical relations, and it wasn’t a possibility she cared to contemplate. But that was Mamma’s implication …

  And Mamma was suggesting something further, wasn’t she?—the final cessation of such relations? For what she next declared was: “Now, how could I ever again lie close in the arms of a man who wishes I was my own sister?”

  Of course nothing of this could be revealed to Ronny, who for all his overflowing curiosity sounded understandably puzzled. “Your mother, is she mentally ill, then?”

  “Oh I wouldn’t say that.” The term was deeply offensive.

  Yet the nonjudgmental way Ronny spoke the term—as if it were a purely scientific designation—abruptly rendered the idea hideously plausible: was that the accurate phrase? Was Mamma mentally ill?

  “Well, she has her peculiarities,” Bea said, and added a little laugh, not altogether successfully.

  “Most mentally ill people do.”

  “And I don’t suppose you could call her happy.”

  “Most mentally ill people aren’t.”

  “Mamma is just Mamma. You’d have to see for yourself,” Bea volunteered, but in truth she was in no hurry for Ronny to meet her. Discomfort at the prospect propelled Bea into another profession of concern:

  “Well, we’ve got to get together with Aunt Grace and Uncle Dennis this Saturday. It’s Aunt Grace’s fortieth birthday. Oh, I do hope everything goes all right …”

  CHAPTER V

  Among the many changes at home, perhaps the most puzzling involved the telephone.

  The telephone had always played a peculiar role in the house. Papa disliked or distrusted it, often deputizing Mamma or Bea to make his calls. Those calls he did make, he kept short and businesslike. Generally soft-spoken, he tended to yell into the mouthpiece—like some old codger, unaccustomed to this upstart device. Still, as a man who built houses for a living, he could scarcely resist outfitting his own home with “every convenience,” and he’d rigged up an easy way to move the phone from the kitchen into his bedroom.

  Now Papa found a bedroom phone useful. He spoke behind the closed door, and not in his usual barking telephone voice. Who was he talking to? Of course Bea couldn’t ask. It took a couple days to verify who it was—Uncle Dennis—and what they were discussing: Aunt Grace’s upcoming birthday.

  Tradition held that each sister play hostess for the other’s birthday. So Aunt Grace’s fortieth should have been celebrated on Inquiry Street. This year, though, the celebration would take place at a restaurant, Chuck’s Chop House, up on McNichols.

  Who ever heard of a birthday at a restaurant?

  Still, given the tight-lipped way Papa broke the news, the matter wasn’t open to discussion. Only Edith, as the youngest child, felt it proper to ask, “But why a restaurant?”

  “It’s—Uncle Dennis. He—we wanted a change.” Papa followed this with a firm shake of the head.

  “Will there be a cake?”

  Papa stared blankly. The question of a birthday cake plainly hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Yes,” he said. “There will be cake.”

  When the Paradiso family arrived at Chuck’s Chop House on Saturday, a few minutes before five, Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace were already there. What Bea had previously suspected now became unmistakable: everything about this unprecedented party had been coordinated by Uncle Dennis. He had chosen well. Although they did not have a private room, the seven of them were settled in an alcove off the main dining room that they could make their own.

  Uncle Dennis had determined the seating. Aunt Grace at one end. He himself at the other. Papa and Bea flanking Grace. Stevie beside Papa, Edith beside Bea. Mamma next to Edith, beside Uncle Dennis. Mamma and Aunt Grace sat at opposite ends of the table, then, without actually facing each other.

  The tablecloth was red-and-white checkerboard and the glass ashtrays, jumbo-sized, said “Chuck’s Chop House—Dine Distinctively” on the bottom. The matchbooks in the ashtrays said the same thing, only with an exclamation point: “Dine Distinctively!”

  Chuck’s Chop House turned out to be owned by a patient of Uncle Dennis’s, who came over and introduced himself, very informally: “Hello, hello, I’m Chuck!” he boomed jubilantly. He slung his arm over Uncle Dennis’s shoulder and declared, “Here’s the medico keeping me alive!”—which only made a person wish Chuck looked healthier. He was very fat and very red-faced, and Bea suspected he might be a lush. He shook hands with everyone, even Stevie and Edith, and said, “So it’s a birthday, huh?” and told a story, actually quite humorous, about picking up the wrong bag at Hudson’s and bringing home a Pretty Miss Perfect doll for his son’s tenth birthday. Then he said to Aunt Grace, “The birthday girl—you don’t watch out, you’ll turn thirty!” His laughter rang so boisterously, it echoed in the alcove after he’d gone.

  But if there was something clownish about Chuck (buffoonish, Papa would have said, the Italian buffone obviously behind it—there were many such oddities in his English), his departure introduced a sense of letdown. The evening needed a clown, a distraction.

  … Not that Aunt Grace could have looked more settled and sedate. She was wearing a new cream-colored dress with a pin Bea herself had made, many years ago. And her earrings? Did Mamma notice her earrings? They were the pearl earrings Mamma had given her on her birthday five years before, when Grace turned thirty-five.

  Without comment or explanation, Mamma had refused to get dressed up. She was wearing—conspicuous plainness—a brown dress that was really a housedress. Her hair needed brushing. She hadn’t said a single word on the drive over.

  Uncle Dennis had arranged everything, even what they would eat. No need for menus. They were all brought bowls of ham and split-pea soup. Mamma tasted exactly two spoonfuls—Bea watched closely—before pushing her bowl aside. The others made a point of exclaiming over the soup, which truly was tasty; why shouldn’t a birthday dinner be held at a restaurant? A bread basket circulated. There was pop for the children—today Bea was included among them—and white wine for the grown-ups.

  After the last of the soup had been mopped up with the bread, Uncle Dennis announced that the next course would be baked whitefish. It was slow to arrive. Papa eventually asked Uncle Dennis about the War. Uncle Dennis prided himself on seeing through what he called “the propaganda.” It was true of our government as well—you shouldn
’t believe everything they told you. That was just the nature of war.

  Now let’s see … Germany was facing four possible alternatives in Russia. A retreat, which probably made the most sense strategically but would be disastrous psychologically. Two, just dig in, but this, too, might be ruinous for them: nothing’s harder than to be an occupying army in only partially occupied territory. Three, they could swing south, toward better weather—but away from the targets they most needed to hit. Four, they could prepare an all-out further attack—though if this push failed, they would be helpless on their eastern front. Meanwhile, the generals in Washington were preparing—count on it, and before the year was out—to open a western front, almost certainly in Belgium. Wherever it was, many American boys would be lost—far greater casualties than anything heretofore.

  Far greater casualties … far greater casualties … The table fell silent. And still the whitefish failed to arrive.

  Uncle Dennis continued. We can expect big sacrifices in the Pacific, too. The Japs aren’t going down easily. All along, we’ve underestimated them. There will be no knockout blow. It was a matter of seizing islands one by one. The Japs were prepared to fight to the death.

  “The Italians are different,” Papa said.

  Yes, Uncle Dennis agreed, the Italians were different. Mussolini didn’t really command their loyalty (Papa nodded urgently at this), and Italy would be liberated by year’s end. There was a sigh of relief around the table. But still no whitefish.

  Uncle Dennis’s summary was lengthier than usual, and when he finished, an extended and increasingly awkward silence entrenched itself.

  Normally, Aunt Grace could have been counted on to stitch any tear in the conversation, with words so apt and sincere they never seemed a mere stopgap. But tonight Grace, though beaming fixedly, seemed in no mood for such talk. The task fell squarely upon Bea, who sought to amuse the table with some eccentricities found at the Institute Midwest—Professor Manhardt in his wool vests on summer’s hottest days, and Mr. Cooper, the Polish refugee, declaring, “Art is my only home”—but unfortunately her story seemed to have no point. She turned to the reliable subject of Maggie—everybody delighted in Maggie, whose departure for the wastelands of the far West Side had left a big vacancy. “She calls her mother-in-law the Jailer,” Bea began. “Mrs. Hamm is this crazy lady who scarcely lets Maggie out of her sight.”

  But, as the following silence made clear, this was no occasion for an account of a strange, suspicious woman who was a homebody to boot.

  Then the subject of race came up—what Mamma called “the colored problem”—which was unfortunate because nobody wanted to discuss this at a birthday celebration. Still, it was hard to ignore a civil uprising which had left dozens of people dead and which, for all the mayor’s reassurances that it represented only a few hours of madness, had transformed the city’s atmosphere. “Vico, these people have nowhere to live,” Uncle Dennis pointed out. “You understand better than anyone. Back in April, it’s decided none of these federal projects would be integrated, which really meant the Negroes wouldn’t get their share, didn’t it? They’re packed into the few rooms in the few neighborhoods—”

  Papa interrupted: “Nobody has places to live.”

  “That’s exactly my point! Who in all Detroit understands this better than you? Heck, Vico, you’re working fingers to the bone building places where all these new workers—”

  “I’ve never seen the city like this,” Grace interrupted. It seemed she, too, felt jittery. The topic made Bea very nervous—especially as debated by these two men. It wasn’t so many years ago that Papa had used the word nigger in front of Uncle Dennis. This was on an outing to Chandler Park, a picnic, where Papa had been drinking wine. A couple niggers was the phrase. And what happened next was extraordinary—Bea had never forgotten it. She would never forget it. Uncle Dennis had walked right up to Papa and said, “Vico, you don’t talk that way,” rebuking him as sharply and dismissively as though he were some schoolboy. And Bea, standing beside her father, this man who prided himself on his arm wrestling, had seen Papa’s body tremble all over with fury. He’d gathered his fists together, and Bea had honestly feared Papa would strike Uncle Dennis.

  “It’s less of a problem Outer Drive way,” Mamma observed, which sounded offhand but was actually aggressive. The implication was that the Poppletons, living on Outer Drive near the Grosse Pointe border, were insulated from the Paradisos’ legitimate fears. Only a few short blocks separated Inquiry Street from Belle Isle, and when the radio had reported (falsely, it turned out) that Negroes were assembling on Belle Isle and were planning to march on the city, Bea had felt something odd: a social—racial—terror. It was quite unlike anything she’d ever known, this invasive fear of another race.

  Uncle Dennis took the topic firmly in hand. “Oh, but it isn’t a problem in one neighborhood, it’s the whole city’s problem. And it has to be a citywide solution. We need more of those Sojourner Truth housing developments. Good heavens, this is America, how can you say to people, Your kind has nowhere to live in the fourth-largest city in the country?” Given Mamma and Papa’s attitudes, this wasn’t perhaps a wholly rhetorical question. Still, Uncle Dennis proceeded confidently. He was of course a great liberal, as was Aunt Grace, whose heroine was Eleanor Roosevelt. “That’s the thing all of us are learning,” he declared, and carried on in this vein, his all of us shepherding the dinner party safely into a territory where fairness and decency and progress flourished. Uncle Dennis pushed on, delving into some of the specific programs the city needed to adopt, and would adopt, because we remain a very decent city, and it soon became evident that at this celebration a potential disaster had been averted.

  But still no whitefish. In desperation, Bea said, “Why don’t you tell us about your reading, Uncle Dennis?”

  “My reading?”

  “Your science fiction. You must be reading a science-fiction story.”

  “Yessss …”

  Although Uncle Dennis avidly discussed his reading with Bea, he’d never felt quite comfortable sharing such things with the world at large. “Oh, this one’s pretty dumb, actually,” he said, and his plump bespectacled face looked a little abashed.

  Still, he carried on. “The book’s called Lost Planet of the Amazons. A spaceman from Earth crash-lands on some distant planet and discovers there aren’t any other men in sight. No boys. No males anywhere. Only females.

  “And at first he’s utterly delighted. Jeepers, it’s like a harem! I don’t mean to suggest the book goes in for hanky-panky. But you can imagine how overjoyed our spaceman is to find himself the only man on a planet overrun by women.” Uncle Dennis halted. “That may not sound like heaven to you, but you’ll have to trust me on this, Stevie,” he said. “Eventually, you’ll get it”—which made Stevie blush and everyone else laugh. The laughter felt good. Uncle Dennis was trying so hard, really, to make the party a success …

  “But then he fell to thinking. Men had to be somewhere. Otherwise, where did all the women come from? And he’d caught a few glimpses of pregnant women, and how could they be pregnant without—without the benefit of men?”

  Uncle Dennis glanced searchingly around the table. His gaze settled on his wineglass and he took a sip.

  Stevie and Edith were staring hard at Uncle Dennis, who only now realized his tale might not be completely appropriate for children.

  “But where did the babies come from?” Edith asked in her level, fact-gathering way.

  Uncle Dennis was saved by the belated arrival of the whitefish.

  Like Chuck, the waitress was very fat and very red-faced. The two of them might almost have been brother and sister, though they didn’t otherwise look much alike; it seemed if you were fat enough and red-faced enough, other resemblances scarcely counted.

  The fish was covered with bread crumbs—wonderfully crunchy bread crumbs—and it came with buttered carrots and mashed potatoes with dark brown gravy. Uncle Dennis had selected well. They
ate in silence. They were going to get through this potentially disastrous celebration. It was merely a matter of everyone’s proceeding cautiously—tonight, tomorrow, next week—and letting time do its healing work. They were all one family, the Paradisos and the Poppletons, and they were, besides, all the family each of them had.

  The waitress refilled the children’s ginger ale, refreshed the grownups’ wine. Uncle Dennis was readying himself to make a toast—he was a great one for toasts.

  A clinking of knife against glass silenced the alcove. “To the woman at the other end of the table,” Uncle Dennis proclaimed, hoisting high his wineglass. “You can’t tell me that woman is forty. My God, she looks as fresh as a new bride.”

  Aunt Grace smiled—beautifully, demurely—and her lips moved in some unspoken message of humility and thanks.

  And it was at this precise, exquisite moment that Mamma chose to speak up—opened her mouth to utter something surpassingly blunt and cruel. It was as though all the last few weeks of dark brooding had solidified in a phrase that fell like a butcher’s cleaver.

  “But she wasn’t,” Mamma pointed out. “A fresh bride. When you married her. Grace was divorced.”

  It was a topic rarely mentioned, and never mentioned in a public setting.

  Mamma, who had pushed her plate aside, now took an interest in her food. She scooped up a large mixed forkful of fish and mashed potatoes and—as everyone at the table, aghast, intently watched—chewed it reflectively.

  Mamma swallowed and resumed talking. Almost more upsetting than her words was her matter-of-fact tone. It was all so eerie—her calmly thoughtful and seemingly nonjudgmental mien, as if she wished merely to set the record straight. “In the eyes of the Catholic Church, she’s still married to Michael Cullers. Grace is married to a man who isn’t even here. I suppose he wasn’t invited.” Her fork sought out the fish again.

  It fell upon Uncle Dennis to speak: “But Sylvia, none of us here is a Catholic.”