The Art Student's War

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The Art Student's War Page 9

by Brad Leithauser


  “None of us? Grace and I are a quarter Catholic by blood. And aren’t you forgetting Vico? I married a Catholic, Dennis. And in the eyes of that church, he is pledged to me forever.”

  All eyes swung around to Papa, who was leaning forward and squeezing the edge of the table. At times like this, when seriously challenged, he exuded an air of physical forcefulness.

  Papa cleared his throat. “The Church,” he said. He was visibly searching for something to say.

  Papa a Catholic? He did have a soft spot for nuns, particularly the ones collecting for charity. But as for the Church’s views on marriage, and its prohibition on divorce, he would certainly dismiss such things with that favorite phrase, a “load of mumbo jumbo.” If he believed wholeheartedly in anything, he believed in this marriage between his sister-in-law and his best friend. “Sylvia, we were not married in the Church,” he said, slowly. “It was your own wish—”

  Uncle Dennis interceded. Behind his thick glasses, his magnified eyes caromed round the table and landed on Edith. Clearly, he scarcely knew what he was saying:

  “You were asking about the planet, and where the babies came from, and that’s just what our spaceman eventually figured out: they had to come from—seeds, from the male seeds. The women were made pregnant, scientifically impregnated, in laboratories, using the—the seeds stored in the laboratories. And the Amazons want to get rid of the spaceman, but first they needed to get, they were going to collect—” Uncle Dennis halted, thoroughly discombobulated, and his jumpy gaze alighted on Bea. “You see,” he said. “You see.”

  Just then, providentially, the enormous waitress appeared—large as any Amazon—and Uncle Dennis announced, in an amplified voice not his own, “I think we’re all done, very nice, yes, all done, you can bring on the cake. My yes. You can bring on the cake.” His face swung round the table and he explained, superfluously, “There is going to be a birthday cake for Grace …”

  “I wanted cake,” Edith said.

  “And cake you shall have, my dear. Cake you shall have, little Edith,” Uncle Dennis all but sang.

  But not yet. For when the table had been cleared, as they all sat awaiting the birthday cake, Mamma assumed the floor again: “Have I spoken inappropriately?” she said. “Are we going to ignore certain truths and conditions staring us right in the face?” she said.

  “Sylvia,” Papa called.

  “You know what? I’m going to have my say.” And once again, though her unrestrained words were scary, more frightening still was the inhuman detachment in her voice—she seemed as unstoppable as some machine.

  “Sylvia, you shut up.”

  “I’m going to have my say, Vico. Old Sylvia has thought long enough and hard enough and she’s going to have her say. There are certain truths and conditions that can be ignored no longer, certain truths and conditions, and one is that Grace had a good-looking husband and couldn’t hold on to him. Should we all pretend this isn’t true? Do you remember what you used to say about him, Grace? About Michael Cullers? You said he looked like a Greek god. Remember? Am I the only one who remembers? A Greek … god. And you couldn’t hold on to your god.” Mamma peered with dark horrible intensity at Aunt Grace, who, with frightened upturned eyes, cowered under her older sister’s gaze.

  “And that’s why you married Dennis, wasn’t it? Because you couldn’t hold on to a good-looking man? And do you remember how you described Dennis the first time? After your first date? Remember? Come on, Grace, you do remember. Yes, Grace, you said he looked like a frog. Beautiful Grace, the most beautiful girl at Eastern High School, the perfect princess, she married a frog because she couldn’t hold on to a good-looking man.”

  The cries and protests were universal: everyone was begging her, begging her to stop. But she would not stop. Mamma could not stop. You might as well seek to arrest some allegorical figure in a painting—some streaming-haired Fury, some flying Angel of Death in a plain brown housedress, sowing mayhem and flattened devastation. What could anyone do but sit stunned and motionless, watching the dismembering of a family?

  “So what did you do next? You stole Vico’s heart. You stole the heart of a good-looking man, that’s what you did. Oh I’m not accusing you of any impropriety—because that would be wrong, and our beautiful, perfect Grace never does anything wrong. No, you stole Vico’s heart. That’s all you did. No more than that. You stole my husband’s heart, that’s all you did. You ruined my marriage, and my life, that’s all you did …”

  Aunt Grace had begun to cry. “How could you—” she began, looking down at her plate. She could hardly find a voice through her sobbing. “How could you think—” She lifted her eyes, beseechingly, toward her older sister.

  “What did I ever do to you?” Grace went on. “What did I do? Where was the offense? You say I ruined your life, but it’s been this way forever, long before you ever met Vico. You’re always attacking me, belittling me, attacking me, attacking me, and I try to ignore it—I do my level best to ignore it—”

  And on this night of catastrophic accusations and revelations, one durable mystery was illuminated: Grace had understood the truth all along. Yes, she had sensed the hostility, and she’d tried to overlook it, or to defuse it, only to discover that it must ultimately declare itself.

  Sobbing, pleading, struggling to get the words out, Grace demanded of Mamma, “What did I ever do that you treat me this way? On my—my fortieth birthday?”

  And Aunt Grace was such a miserable, pitiable, wronged creature that Bea must reach over and place one hand upon the woman’s quaking shoulder, the other hand atop Grace’s hand, which was wet with tears. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Bea whispered.

  But it was not all right and Mamma had some final bitterness to fling at the world. Nothing could be left intact. Tonight, at this birthday celebration, everything must be irretrievably broken:

  “Oh go ahead, Bea. Side with her. Side with her,” Mamma hissed. “Sure you do. You’ve always been an unnatural girl. You never loved your own mother, did you?”

  There: the terminating and seemingly inevitable words had been pronounced, which weirdly seemed to free them all, and Papa and Uncle Dennis hurried everybody up from their seats. Bea strode blindly through the restaurant and stepped out into the chill darkness of a drizzling rain, a summer night that felt like autumn. The children ranged on the sidewalk in assorted stunned postures, loosely huddled under the restaurant’s awning, but saying nothing. Papa and Uncle Dennis were still inside, evidently settling the bill. Mamma stood apart, having edged out from under the awning into the pattering rain.

  Keeping to the awning’s protection, Bea wandered on her own alongside the restaurant. She peered through the rain-struck window. What she beheld looked remotely familiar, but it took a moment to focus. This was in the alcove. A quivering nest of bright jewelry, like a mobile chandelier, floated into it, borne by the enormous waitress, who apparently had not yet heard the party was over. The quivering jewels? The candles of Aunt Grace’s fortieth-birthday cake.

  CHAPTER VI

  The woman had set her blazing mark on that kitchen calendar she continually contemplated. She had created a day to go down in Paradiso history.

  The rest of the world might not notice, but Mamma had issued a declaration of war. July 10, 1943, would henceforth serve, for the family living at 2753 Inquiry, as the domestic equivalent of December 7, 1941. A day which would live in infamy? A day, anyway, to banish any hope that a truce could be arrived at and wholesale destruction averted …

  Perhaps the oddest aspect to it all was Mamma’s transformation. In the days immediately following the party, she sprang from her kitchen chair and set to work, indefatigably. She emptied the kitchen cabinets and wiped them down, inside and out; she scrubbed the linoleum; she polished the silver; she even took a dust rag to the furnace room. One of the household’s long-standing tensions was that Papa always kept up the exterior—paint, shutters, shingles, drainpipes—more meticulously than Mamma
kept up the interior. No longer! Everything indoors shone.

  No, she seemed fine; it was everybody else who stumbled around like numbed survivors of some aerial bombardment. Stevie’s toy guns fell silent; Edith retreated upstairs behind her mountains of knitting; Papa was even earlier off to work and later coming home, where he barricaded himself interminably behind the News, while the radio played. He smelled of beer and wine. He scarcely spoke, except in stifled telephone conversations, mumbled behind his bedroom door. He looked like somebody suffering the first queasy touches of seasickness. He even walked differently—with the plodding deliberation of a passenger on a pitching ship.

  As much as she could, Bea stayed away from home. Merely to step inside the front hall was to feel her throat tighten and burn. Dinners were a horror and bedtimes were worse. Once the lights were out, she felt far more jittery than usual, and soon a truly ridiculous task formulated itself, requiring her to reconstruct childhood classrooms, ages ago, back at Field Elementary. Which pupil had sat where? And what were their names?

  What were their names? This was something she generally prided herself on—a better memory for childhood than most people had. (Maggie called her my memory. Maggie said, “I don’t bother remembering anything—Bea is my memory.”) But it was slipping away, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s what happened when you got older, when you approached twenty: your earliest years silently dissolved away. Until now, this process hadn’t seemed so catastrophic; now, it seemed as wrenching as a death in the family.

  Bea would clamber out of bed in the middle of the night and tiptoe down to the kitchen in order to assemble lists of old classmates. Sometimes—often—she could recall the face, but the name eluded her. Her failure seemed far, far worse when a boy was involved. The boys might well be shipped overseas by now, and any failure to recall their names invited bad luck, didn’t it? Such callous indifference betokened disaster … It didn’t make any sense, but as she sat in the dim kitchen (she didn’t turn on the overhead, preferring the gentler light over the sink), a car might slip down Inquiry, pursuing some cryptic nocturnal errand, and the ghostly probe of its headlights, rifling through the living room, triggered an anxiety she had no words for, and a need—such a need—to make things right.

  It was peculiar, but it seemed Bea had commandeered Mamma’s chair at the kitchen table. The wall calendar, with its twelve proud O’Reilly and Fein houses, peered down at Bea just as exactingly as it had always peered down at Mamma. Bea recognized her task as a kind of prayer—the setting of names into a litany—and wouldn’t merciless calamity follow if she neglected her prayers?

  It turned out that the process of pencil sketching some remembered boyish face could sometimes unlock the secret of a missing name. She was sketching just such a face when her mother stepped into the kitchen. Mamma entered so quietly, it was as though Bea had been snuck up on. “Bea, what are you doing?”

  Bea’s pencil jumped. Her mother was peering over her shoulder. There it was, visible proof of a deep current of lunacy running through another generation of the Paradiso/Schleiermacher family. “Mrs. Nelson, Grade 4B, Field Elementary School” it was titled, followed by a list of student names. “Glenn Havira, Mark Deane, Titus Gardner, Willy Jakiebielski …” A few sketched heads floated in the margin.

  “I’m—I’m—sketching for class.”

  And Mamma nodded serenely, as though sketching in the kitchen at two-thirty in the morning were the most sensible thing in the world. She poured herself a glass of milk. (A glass of milk! When was the last time Mamma was seen drinking a glass of milk?) Then she said, “Good night, dear,” and retreated from the kitchen.

  The next morning, feeling exhausted, to say nothing of desperate and bewildered, Bea went shopping with her mother. They walked down to Kercheval. They stopped in Marcellino’s for bread, and in Abajay’s for pork chops, and Pukszta’s for pork and beans, applesauce, potatoes. On the walk home, Bea proposed a detour to Buttery Creek Park and Mamma, a little surprisingly, agreed. When was the last time they’d gone to a park together? It seemed as if Mamma, too, understood it was time for a heart-to-heart, and that she, too, preferred that it take place anywhere but home.

  Though tiny, Buttery Creek Park was laden with memories. Mamma used to bring Bea here to play when she was a little child. Later, she brought Bea and baby Stevie. Later still, Bea and Stevie and baby Edith. Now, Mamma let Bea lead the way. They settled on a park bench near the swings. “Feels good,” Mamma said, stretching her legs out. A white seagull had settled on the adjoining bench. He eyed them cheerfully, as if it felt good to him, too, to rest a moment.

  A number of little boys were scampering around, aiming fingers and shooting at each other. Had boys always been so combative? Or was this, too, a result of the War? At the other end of the little park, keeping to themselves, a couple of families of Negroes were sitting at two picnic tables, their children playing in the tight space between the tables. In the old days, you didn’t see Negroes in Buttery Creek Park.

  Closer at hand, a little red-haired girl, who must have been six or seven, was binding up one of the boy soldiers with strips of rag. Playing nurse. She was lanky. Her appearance was heartening; Bea could see herself in that small but lanky creature.

  “I am aware, Bea, how much I’ve upset you,” Mamma began. “I’ve upset everyone, and I’m sorry, but I don’t regret it. You see the difference, don’t you?”

  Mamma had always relished fine distinctions—extremely minute, almost lawyerly distinctions. Papa called it “hairsplitting”—another of his proud English idioms—and he had no patience with it. These distinctions were a reminder that Mamma, though she read little except the Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s, possessed a fine mind. Like Bea, she’d twice been double-promoted—two semesters—while still in grade school. As she was perhaps a little too quick to announce, she had been the better student of the Schleiermacher sisters. Had Grace even once been double-promoted? No …

  Mamma said, “I can’t regret what had to be done. I did have to say something: I couldn’t have them thinking I didn’t see. And you know what? I feel better.”

  The truth was queer but inarguable: Mamma looked better, too, in addition to being so much more industrious around the house. The whites of her eyes were whiter, there was vigor in the set of her jaw, she even sounded better—a whininess or weariness had dropped from her tone. These days, she spoke so much more forthrightly than she used to.

  “Something had to be said, Bea. The truth is, Grace has always envied me. People think she’s perfect, but she never stops envying me.”

  Grace envying Mamma? Grace envying anyone?

  “She envies me my good-looking husband. Do you know the story about Mike, Michael Cullers, her first husband?”

  Bea knew a bit, and didn’t want to know more. “No, though I’m—” she began, but Mamma pressed on.

  “Well he was good-looking, with pots of money, too—Grace always marries rich—and they weren’t married three years before … You know what he did? He got his secretary pregnant.”

  Pregnant? Mamma rarely talked about physical matters of this sort, except indirectly and disapprovingly, and the unwonted frankness of pregnant was startling. But so was the girlish, gossipy way she leaned forward, eyes wide and voice thrillingly hushed, as though they were high school chums, trading scandalous high school stories, rather than mother and daughter, discussing their own family.

  But it seemed that Mamma, now that she felt so much better, was free to speak with reckless abandon: “As you must know, Grace can’t have children, and can you imagine how she felt? Mike’s secretary has a bun in the oven?”

  Did Mamma just say bun in the oven?

  “Grace has always envied me my husband. And envied me my children. So what does she do? She sets out deliberately to steal my husband from me, to steal my children from me. Stealing the very things she can’t have.”

  And Mamma, who didn’t often touch her children, seized Bea’s hand. “But you
mustn’t let her,” she pleaded. “You mustn’t, Bea.”

  And if, just moments ago, Mamma had seemed almost schoolgirlish, there was now—odder yet—something almost old-womanish in this clutched grasping at her daughter’s hand, and in her trembling-eyed and importunate look. “Bea, don’t let her steal you from your mother.”

  “Mamma, no one’s stealing me,” Bea cried. Stealing: the word was so ugly … She withdrew her hand and shifted her gaze toward the red-haired girl, even as she offered her mother a partial reassurance: “No one will ever steal me from … all of you.”

  “You’re a good girl,” Mamma said. “Yes, a good girl.” Then she was launched again: “Do you see why I had to speak out? She stole my husband’s heart and my husband’s loyalty. She’s very crafty—Grace. You know the way she always gets her way? It’s all done silently, by craftiness. Grace schemes. She never stops scheming. She never rests. But you’re a good girl, Bea. You won’t let her steal you away.”

  This time, Mamma did not clutch Bea’s hand but simply patted the top of it. Normally, it was Bea—overemotional Bia, the art student—who was the family “toucher.” (Italian families were supposed to go in for touching, but the Paradisos didn’t.) Mamma said, “I have good children. Yes I do,” she insisted, and smiled broadly, a look of authentic joy softening her features. She went on smiling, staring out at this park where, in the olden days, she used to bring her good children.

  And she looked pretty. (She had always been pretty—a pretty girl with a beautiful sister.) There were occasionally moments, like this one, when you could imagine eighteen-year-old Sylvia Schleiermacher (just Bea’s age!) looking irresistibly fetching to Vico Paradiso, who stumbled with his words but was handsome and determined and already making a good living. Yes, Mamma had been just eighteen when she became a bride.

  “I am perfectly willing to be civil,” Mamma went on. “She may have stolen my husband’s heart, but she’s my sister after all and I am willing to be perfectly civil. We can proceed on that basis. I only require that she understand she isn’t fooling anyone, that the two of them not go around thinking they pulled the wool over old Sylvia’s eyes.”

 

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