Ronny introduced Bea as Bianca Paradiso.
Mrs. Olsson did not rise from her chair. “I’ve heard a good deal about you, Miss Paradiso.” Her tone expressed less greeting than observation. Bea’s would-be-winsome reply—combining the hope that Mrs. Olsson had heard nothing too alarming and the wish that she might be called Bea—was thoroughly unintelligible, but fortunately mostly inaudible. Ronny helped her into a seat. He himself had scarcely sat down, however, before Mrs. Olsson said, “Ronny, maybe it’s time for a glass of pop.”
So there the two of them were and just as quick as that: Bea and Ronny’s mother. The smallest pearl on Mrs. Olsson’s neck was larger than any pearl in Mamma’s jewelry box. The glance Bea had fallen under was open, appraising, amused. “You’re quite a pretty girl, Bianca Paradiso,” Mrs. Olsson noted.
This was the type of scene Bea had half expected, similar to glimpses of the formidably rich in old English novels or in Hollywood movies. And her own stammering but verbose reply fit a role too—that of the giddy, gawky ingénue. She tried a second time to clarify her name: “You can call me Bea. Or Bianca. Either. Ronny seems to prefer Bianca. I guess I go by either. Either name. My father calls me Bia. It’s a nickname.”
The encounter soon wandered into unfamiliar terrain, however. Ronny returned with a bottle of pop and two glasses, and, showing uncharacteristic ungainliness, spilled a sizable puddle on the leather-topped table. He, too, seemed quite nervous. “Oh you are a hopeless one,” Mrs. Olsson said—and, turning to Bea, asked, with unexpected and almost sisterly warmth, “What can be done with this boy?”
Mrs. Olsson drew from her purse a lacy handkerchief and mopped the fizzing pool. She placed the sodden hanky atop a seashell ashtray and declared, “You must tell me about your artwork, Miss Paradiso, Ronny informs me you’re quite the talented artist.”
Though the request was intimidating, the soft light in Mrs. Olsson’s enormous dark eyes appeared genuinely welcoming. And as one question succeeded another (Who were Bea’s favorite painters? Had she been born in Detroit? Brothers and sisters? What did her father do?), Mrs. Olsson’s tone sounded clement and sustaining.
So Bea sat nervously sipping her drink—Faygo orange, exactly what Mamma had every day at lunchtime—and Mrs. Olsson sipped her glass, and Ronny sat in the chair between them, his quick eyes darting from one to another. Bea talked about her father’s job with O’Reilly and Fein. She mentioned Aunt Grace, and mentioned, as a modest claim to social standing, her uncle the doctor. At one point, a man stood in the doorway who could only be a servant, and Mrs. Olsson tapped twice with a forefinger on the rim of her glass. He took it away and moments later returned with a replacement. All without a word spoken.
Bea was talking about Edith’s mountains of socks when another man appeared in the doorway. He was not a servant.
Many times in her life Bea had seen business tycoons—weren’t they in half the movies she went to? They were stolidly built men usually hunkered behind stolid desks, barking orders for stock shares into a telephone. None bore the slightest resemblance to Mr. Olsson. He was thin and rangy and blond—or what was left of his clipped hair was blond, for he was mostly bald. His skin was darker than his hair.
With his high, rounded cheekbones and tawny coloring, he reminded Bea of the lynx in her favorite book from childhood, The World’s Most Wonderful Animals.
Although he stepped forward to shake Bea’s hand, he immediately retreated to the doorway, where he asked a number of the same questions Bea had just answered. Mr. Olsson had heard of O’Reilly and Fein. “They turn out good work,” he said—a comment Bea happily filed away, to tell Papa later. In answering questions already answered, Bea tried to vary her responses—so as not to bore Mrs. Olsson—and wound up feeling increasingly nonplussed. Mr. Olsson’s blue almost-too-close-set eyes were both direct and evasive: they had a way of hitting you and sliding off you.
None of Bea’s answers enticed him from his doorway post. He seemed en route elsewhere, so it was something of a surprise when, Mrs. Olsson having suggested that Ronny give Bea “a little tour of the downstairs,” Mr. Olsson decided to tag along.
More surprising still, he took on the role of co—tour guide. Ronny’s approach might be termed aesthetic—he set out to show Bea the little architectural details and objets d’art that most appealed to him. Mr. Olsson’s approach might be called anecdotal—he interrupted Ronny with colorful, lengthy stories. He showed Bea the mantel on which, last Thanksgiving, Mrs. Olsson’s sister, Betty Marie, had cracked open her head after slipping on the edge of a rug. He pointed out the grandfather clock he’d won in a poker game. (“Unfortunately, I didn’t also win the price of shipping. My mistake.”) He showed Bea where a huge wind-torn branch had blasted through the ceiling, missing Mrs. Olsson by a few feet. (“We almost lost her to a piece of lumber.”) Ronny gradually fell silent. This development scarcely fazed Mr. Olsson, who cheerfully took over as full tour guide. He was—it was already clear—quite a storyteller.
And—apparently—still quite an athlete. As Ronny had mentioned repeatedly, Mr. Olsson had been the track-team captain at the University of Michigan. He ambled through his huge house with a rolling sportsman’s gait. To be guided by him was exciting—he radiated pleasure and energy—even as Bea was aware, beside her, of Ronny’s stiffening resentment.
Mr. Olsson led them into the basement, which held something Bea had never seen in a house before: a small gymnasium. There were mats on the wood floor, dumbbells and barbells, medicine balls and a punching bag. “I built the place bigger than I needed to,” Mr. Olsson said. “I didn’t know I’d be the only one using it.” And a quick glance between father and son.
Mr. Olsson surely did not need to add anything, but he did: “You see, I was thinking Ronny might want to spend time down here with me.”
Bea understood this tension—she felt oddly at home in it, despite the distance from this cavernous palace in Arden Park to her crowded home on crowded Inquiry Street. Notwithstanding Mr. Olsson’s ease and geniality, the tensions between Ronny and his father were evidently as labyrinthine and as rich and as difficult to voice as anything between Bea and her mother.
CHAPTER VII
“Miss Paradiso, may I see you after class?”
So unprecedented was this request, Bea’s concentration came utterly undone. Edges of the objects arrayed before her—a halved lemon, a cracked teacup, a rabbit’s foot—softened and blurred. What could Professor Manhardt want? Was she going to be, as had happened in classrooms before, promoted? (Had he recognized her full bounding potential?) Or maybe demoted—asked to leave class? (Had he discerned her fundamental lack of talent and originality?) There was no saying, really: Professor Manhardt was an impenetrable man.
So at 4:06, six minutes after the official end of class, Bea found herself in the professor’s overheated office. The tilted pane of the window was open a crack—enough to admit traffic sounds from Woodward Avenue—but not enough to bring relief. Apparently, the temperature didn’t discomfit Professor Manhardt, who wore his usual vest under his tweed sports coat.
Previously so formidable, Professor Manhardt had become, under Ronny’s frequent sniping, an almost fatuous figure. Ronny had got the man’s number immediately. Though Professor Manhardt was German (a Kraut, Ronny called him, as everybody these days called them—a word to make Bea wince with the knowledge of being a quarter Kraut from her mother’s side, and a half Wop from her father’s), he’d been educated in London and wanted desperately to be taken for English. It wasn’t his slight German accent that betrayed him; it was his entire manner. Even Bea, who’d never traveled more than a hundred miles outside Detroit, ascertained in a moment that this was one bogus Englishman.
Sometimes, she did wish Ronny weren’t quite so scornful. She’d felt vaguely undermined when he pointed out that the name of their school was “laughably pretentious.” The Institute Midwest? “Dear God”—Ronny rolled his eyes—“they even inverted the word order …”
Bea had simply accepted its name as a given.
Yet to have stepped into this overheated office, to be alone with the man, was to feel thoroughly intimidated—suddenly the Professor was his old self. He said, factually, “You may remain standing, or you may take a seat.” Anybody else would have turned this into an offer.
Apologetic, as ever, about her height, particularly since Professor Manhardt (a diminutive man anyway) was seated behind his desk, Bea hastened to take the office’s one free chair, balancing on its edge by way of compromise, as if prepared to vacate promptly if so requested. The Professor’s pale eyes—a soapy blue—contemplated her. His gray hair was so wiry, you could probably have scoured a pan with it.
He said, “You have a family I presume.”
It was such an unexpected conversational sortie, and so singular in its phrasing, Bea had no immediate answer. In a near whisper she replied, “Yes. A family, yes I do.”
“You have brothers?”
“A brother. Steven.”
“He is older, perhaps?”
“He’s younger. Thirteen.” She added: “Much younger.”
“So you have no immediate family in”—the Professor’s faint pause suggested distaste—“the military service.”
“The military? No.”
“Cousins, perhaps?”
“In the military? No.” And Bea felt apologetic anew. She quelled a reckless impulse to begin cataloguing some of the Paradisos’ war efforts, starting with her father’s erecting homes for defense workers.
On the wall behind the Professor hung a pastoral landscape—cows in the foreground, steeple in the background. Unmistakably an English countryside.
“I have a rather personal request to make,” the Professor informed her. His eyes tightened their hold. Under the pressure of his steady gaze, Bea felt herself nod unstoppably, while various misgivings bubbled inside her.
“This is all such a damned peculiar business, isn’t it?” the Professor went on. “They don’t know why we’re here. They don’t see our raison d’être. They do not understand us, do they?”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
But who was this they? And who the us?
“The Industrial Arts people—they understand them. But you and I? We are Fine Arts people. Obviously, we are a race apart.”
Something extremely odd was unfolding, and this word race suggested—unbelievable though it might seem—that Professor Manhardt was about to commit an impropriety. Oh my. Oh no. On a handful of other occasions in Bea’s life, equally out of nowhere, a preposterous and unthinkable proposition had come her way, often prefaced, like this, by talk of a we or an us, some unlikely alliance she hardly recognized …
“We’re a different breed, aren’t we?” the Professor said and Bea certainly didn’t like the sound of breed. Yes: something like this had happened a few times before—wild, misguided words issuing from somebody you’d never in a million years expect to utter them. And each time it happened, it happened afresh; her panic was always the same raw quivery panic.
“We must rise above, don’t you suppose?”
And each time it happened, the utter, patent impossibility and wrongness of the proposition in no way impeded its delivery. That’s how it was, and it did force you to wonder: what was the matter with the male mind? Why did they go on thinking unthinkable things?
“I’m not sure I—”
“Yes, a damned peculiar business.”
“What business?”
“The War,” the professor replied, brusquely.
“Oh.” Pause. “Oh.”
“It has left us in a very delicate position, hasn’t it?”
“A—delicate?”
“It surely will not surprise you to hear that there are administrators at our institution who see no need for classes in still-life painting, or life-drawing, or landscape, at a time like this. Enrollments are down, so I’m told. Needless to say, the Industrial Arts faculty are under no similar disparagement.”
The dawning blush on Bea’s cheeks assumed a new warmth—a private, guilty warmth. Yes, she’d imputed wholly false motivations to the very proper, very English Professor Manhardt! Wherever this conversation was going, it wasn’t headed toward anything like an impropriety. She was always letting her imagination run away, and not always in healthy directions …
“Yes,” she said again. “That’s a question we’ve—I’ve—” Her impulse to point out that she and Ronny had often discussed this very issue suddenly looked unwise. Bea let it drop. The Professor, in his slow and oblique way, marched on:
“What are we who are ‘Fine Arts people’ contributing? What is our contribution? In this institution, those questions keep arising. Why are we painting still lifes? As if you and I, Miss Paradiso, should be assembling grenades. Or armored cars.”
If Professor Manhardt hadn’t looked so somber, Bea would have allowed herself a smile. Really it was funny to envision the Professor on some factory floor, still wearing tweed jacket and waistcoat. Funny to think of him, with his manicured hands, picking up something so utilitarian, and oily, as a monkey wrench …
“But now a peculiar request arrives, and I thought you were perhaps the student best suited to undertake it.”
“I am?”
“A peculiar request.”
“A—”
“From the USO.” Professor Manhardt accorded each of the letters a substantial stress and pause. “The United—”
“United Service Organizations.” Bea didn’t mean to interrupt the Professor, even if he did talk so laboriously, but she yearned to know where this conversation might be leading. Of all the students in the class, just what sort of task would she be “best suited” to undertake?
“According to the USO, there is a need out there, an apparent need, for portrait artists. Not professional portrait artists,” the Professor hastened to reassure her.
“Portrait artists?”
“Actually, that is perhaps too grand a phrase …”
“Portraitists?”
“Shall we say ‘makers of portrait sketches’?”
“All right.”
“I’ve seen a few of your—your caricatures.”
“Well, those were hardly—”
“I gather that the emphasis here is not on quality so much as facility. Sheer speed.”
What was he saying? And was she being casually insulted? His words were so dizzying, there wasn’t time, really, to take offense, even if offense were intended, and it probably wasn’t—this was just the Professor’s way. He continued: “And it occurred to me, this may be where your particular talent lies. Not perhaps in still lifes,” he appended, which Bea again recorded as a possible slight, which must be weighed later—but not now, given how inquisitive and exhilarated she felt. “You recall that I saw you drawing such a portrait sketch. Before class.”
“Yes. Of Donald.”
“Of Donald Doobly. The Negro.”
“Yes.”
The portrait was still sitting, unfinished, in the portfolio in her lap. She’d been intending to get back to it, though Ronny hadn’t regarded it highly. Bea said, “They’re looking for portrait artists?”
“I should perhaps have selected another term. Shall we say portraitists? Young artists with a facility for capturing a quick likeness?”
“These would be portraits of …?” Bea’s voice trailed off.
“Portraits of soldiers,” Professor Manhardt replied. He did sometimes address his students as though they were half-wits. “What are we contributing?—that’s the infernal question they keep asking. Why do we need classes in still-life painting? Do you see? There is a war on, they tell me, and I say, Indeed there is and it’s being fought right here in this institution. For we in Fine Arts are the besieged. You might think of yourself as a peacemaker.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“I am asking you to volunteer.”
Hazarding another Manhardt rebuke, Bea asked, point-blank, “So are you asking
me to draw portraits of soldiers for the USO?”
“You could regard it as a mission, Miss Paradiso. I gather the subjects would be, in particular, wounded soldiers. It may jolly them up, it may lift their spirits, it may fortify the war effort—so goes the thinking I presume. It’s what they call morale-building, I believe. And frankly a good thing, from our point of view in Fine Arts, to announce that what you learned at this institution is serving the USO. Let us disregard for the moment that you have been studying still-life drawing rather than—”
It was hardly her style to interrupt the Professor intentionally, but Bea felt an overwhelming desire for outright, air-clearing assertions. “Well,” she said. “All right,” she said. “Now if you’re asking me whether I would volunteer to draw portraits of wounded soldiers, I should be honored.” The words felt so stirring and noble, Bea embellished her declaration: “I should consider it a great honor and my patriotic duty.”
Bea’s pulse was pounding. As happened perhaps all too often, she was experiencing an enhanced, almost surreal sense of her own thumping young heart in her chest—as if this were an organ no longer pink and red but a bright burning gold, throbbing with an almost painful ardor. You would need a Picasso or a Chagall—someone liberated from conventional notions of color—to do it justice.
“It’s meant to jolly up the boys and I daresay it will. You’re a very attractive girl, Miss Paradiso. We here in Fine Arts, anyway, we needn’t disparage the concept, the reality of pure beauty. Do you follow me?”
“I suppose so.”
Even now, a few flickerings of wariness revived. Perhaps she should cherish the compliment, yet it unsettled her.
But why should it? Again, again she was being too suspicious—as the look of proud defiant finality on the Professor’s face attested. He had established his point. The Professor of Fine Arts had spoken on behalf of the reality of pure beauty, as was not merely his prerogative but his duty.
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