The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  The pause on credulous asked whether she was familiar with the word. He was an entertainer, sounding out his audience.

  Bea felt very willing to match vocabularies with any boy her age. “So I look gullible?” she said. “A pushover? Maybe I’m too ingenuous? Should I be wary of you, for instance?”

  “Hey, pretty girl like you? Oughta beware everybody. How old are you?”

  The veering speed of Private Donnelly’s conversation, as well as its presumption of close familiarity, left Bea feeling more comfortable than uncomfortable. She had always enjoyed this sort of boy-girl banter. Oh, she was quick, and she could hold her own with any fast-talking Michael Donnelly.

  “Old enough to know you certainly ask a lot of questions, Soldier.”

  “So whatcha gonna do? Draw half my face?”

  “I—Well, I—” But what was she going to do? What would a real artist do?

  “Or you could draw me in profile.” Private Donnelly swung his face to the right, his bandage all but hidden from sight, swung back and winked at her—if a one-eyed man may be said to wink. He was a shameless flirt. “I do think that’s my better side. Even better than this.” He rotated the other way, showing off a face that was nothing but one mammoth bandage, then turned to eye her once more. “Which you think’s better?”

  “Both have their good points.”

  This amused him. “Call it a toss-up?”

  “I guess.”

  Then his expression abruptly shifted and he broached a grave topic. “Lately they’ve been taking pieces of metal out of my face.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “They’ve been doing it so careful, you know what kind of metal it must be?”

  His expression again altered—became mock-conspiratorial. For someone with so many concealed features, he had a remarkably mobile, expressive face. “Gold,” he whispered solemnly. “Got me a face fulla gold, sister. I just want to make sure they give me my cut. Cut’s the word, I guess.” And again he winked.

  “So what am I going to do? Do you want me to draw you in profile?” She needed to stay focused. She had come with a job to do.

  “Beats me.”

  “I thought I’d start in pencil, just to get the lines flowing. Then charcoal.”

  The truth was, she wasn’t at all comfortable with charcoal, though she hadn’t mentioned this to Professor Manhardt. “I’ll do a pencil sketch for me, then a charcoal sketch for you.”

  “You’re the artist, Bobcat. Did you say your name was Bobcat?”

  “Bea. I said Bea.”

  “The other first name.”

  “Bianca.”

  “Bianca, Bobcat—what’s the difference? If you’re the artist,” he went on, “does that make me your subject? I thought only queens had subjects. Hey,” he cried, “you’re the queen Bea!” His conversation moved so fast—he showed all the hectic energy of a young man bedridden for days on end.

  “You can be a model, then.”

  “Me in a nutshell. Michael Donnelly: model soldier.” He smiled more broadly still. He looked very pleased with himself.

  “Let’s see if you can be a good model soldier, Soldier, and hold still while I’m drawing you.”

  Abruptly, he ventured a new, softer tone: “Nobody has ever drawn my picture before, Bea.” And he added: “Maybe you could draw me the way I really look?”

  “I’m not sure I follow …”

  “I mean—before I got my face fulla gold?”

  “But—well, good heavens. I can’t draw what I can’t see. It wouldn’t be—” Bea halted just before honest. But was honesty what she was here to demonstrate?

  Or was it her job, first and foremost, to please the soldiers—to provide something cheerful? She hadn’t expected to confront such complicated moral questions, all by herself, on this her first day …

  Inspiration came to her: “Do you have a picture of yourself? A picture—before you went into the service? That might be helpful.”

  “Actually I do. In my wallet.” But Private Donnelly made no move. “Seem strange to you? Carrying my own picture? My mother sent me a dozen. Told me to give ’em to the girls. Exchange pictures, you see.”

  “Sounds as if she understands you very well,” Bianca said. “Your mother.”

  “Hey now, Mom’s all right. I’ll say one thing for the old girl: she knows how to make a person laugh.”

  “Mama’s boy,” Bianca said, and laughed herself. “Like mother, like son,” she added, and after a moment’s thought, Private Donnelly joined her laughter. Then one of his quick hands fished under the pillow he’d propped himself upon and came up with a black leather wallet. He opened it, stared reflectively, then held it out.

  But when Bea extended her hand, he recoiled. He was reluctant to let it go. Then, possessively, hesitantly—much the way a shy soldier might tender a portrait of his girl—Private Michael Donnelly at last handed over the precious record of his former face.

  For a second, Bea almost didn’t recognize him.

  To judge from his grave, resolute, would-be-rugged expression, this had to be a high school graduation photo. The Irish face staring up at her was both leaner and solider than she would have imagined. And far handsomer. His hair was unfashionably long—reflecting, no doubt, some well-placed pride in his buoyant curls. He looked a little like an Irish Pan. Notwithstanding its aspirations of solemnity, this was a quick, mischievous, beautiful face.

  The photograph lay on the left side of the open wallet. On the right, a driver’s license listed his birth date: May 16, 1924. This came as a shock. She’d thought this wounded soldier must be a number of years older than she was. In truth, they might have gone to school together. Inside her chest, she felt a heavy wet flop—her heart, going out to him.

  Bea kept the wallet open beside her. Private Donnelly unearthed a pack of cigarettes, also hidden under his pillows. “Now Auntie O’Donnell says I mustn’t smoke,” he confided. “On account of the terrible possibility I may incinerate myself. Or even worse, get ashes on the sheets. This is a woman does hate ashes on the sheets. I tell her, I’m not smoking, the cigarette is. I’m just lighting one match. The cigarette does all the rest.”

  His hands trembled as he lit up. Yes, it rattled him to have his old, intact features scrutinized. Made him far more vulnerable and jumpy, in fact, than to have her looking into a one-eyed face discolored and swollen and decorated with a big stained bandage that needed replacing.

  But what tugged most at Bea’s emotions was, for all his swelling, how haggard Private Donnelly looked as he pulled on his cigarette. Fretful lines radiated from the corner of his eye, and his mouth seemed to take its shape—as an old man’s mouth will, as Grandpa Paradiso’s mouth did—from the cigarette inserted into it. To her young artist’s eye, the oncoming years melted away and she espied the hard-bitten, hapless middle-aged man Private Donnelly was destined to become. No, it was hard to imagine Time treating any too kindly this Irish class clown, who all so touchingly carried a picture of his old self in his wallet.

  “Let’s start with a profile,” she proposed, and he agreed (“I follow orders”), and for twenty minutes or so she sketched the left side of his face in pencil.

  Of course Private Donnelly didn’t follow orders. She continually asked him to sit still—please!—and keep his glance trained on the wall, but he talked and gestured and was constantly turning to gauge her responses. Bea sketched steadily, but soon had to concede that it wasn’t going well, and when at last, in response to his endless beseeching, she allowed him a glance at the work in progress, he, too, showed disappointment. Perhaps this was unavoidable. Private Donnelly wasn’t seen to best advantage from the side. His nose came off as beaky, his chin a little weak. More important, the powerful animation in his Irish features was absent.

  He said, “Maybe you wouldn’t mind drawing my face straight on?” “But you can’t remove—”

  “No, but you could work from the photograph.” Wasn’t that what she herself had
been proposing, when she’d asked him to open his wallet? “It might help you to …” He didn’t have a word.

  “Project?”

  “Exactly.”

  The request again placed Bea in a dilemma. Was this the sort of thing she was invited here to do—to draw a face that no longer existed, and perhaps would never again exist? Wouldn’t they be angry? (This they was a vague they, but she didn’t have time to puzzle it out. Bea knew only that she didn’t want to offend them.)

  “I don’t know,” Bea confessed.

  “You could try.”

  “I think maybe my job is to draw what I see.” She recalled Professor Manhardt’s habitual injunction (“Look closer, look closer”), as well as the often-quoted words of Goya (“Yo lo vi”); could her job conceivably include projecting the half of a face she’d never laid eyes upon?

  “You could try,” Private Donnelly insisted, mildly, and managed to catch and hold her glance with his one shining, eager, conspiratorial eye. It was like the eye of the Ancient Mariner in the poem. She could not look away. So many emotions in his glance! Including a prostrate look of pure pleading …

  You could try. Well, she would try.

  And Private Donnelly behaved better, now that he wasn’t being asked to look aside. He talked less—a little less—and gestured less, although he did smoke two more cigarettes. Bea was able, for the first time since walking through Ferry Hospital’s imposing entrance, to settle down, to connect what was arranged in front of her to the blank page outspread before her—to use her arm as the conduit it was ideally intended to be.

  Not that what she set on paper was good in any meaningful way—such as Ronny or Professor Manhardt would appreciate. The gap was too great between the big, bandaged, hurt-looking, lively face before her and the neat, pretty Pan in the little photograph. After some initial floundering, she wound up essentially drawing an enlarged version of the photograph—only, a little older-looking, a fuller and more experienced face.

  She had arrived at the hospital punctually at ten. Her plan had been to do two portraits on this her first day, but when Nurse O’Donnell came to fetch her at noon, Bea hadn’t even moved to charcoal. She was experimenting with pencils of different hardness, still sketching purely for herself. But wasn’t the point to do something for our boys? “Who’s that?” Nurse O’Donnell asked, looking over Bea’s shoulder.

  It was a cruel remark. Who else in God’s name could it be? “It’s Private Donnelly,” Bea starchily replied.

  “Don’t look like him.”

  “I’ve been working partly from a photograph. And I’m not finished. I’m still finding my way. I’ll do it in charcoal after it comes out in pencil.”

  “Not a very efficient method,” Nurse O’Donnell pointed out.

  “You can come back tomorrow. Finish then,” Private Donnelly suggested.

  “I won’t be back until next week.”

  “Next week? I’ll have to check my calendar,” Private Donnelly went on, in a grand, musing sort of way, “but I don’t believe I’ve got any big travel plans.”

  “Plenty soldiers in this ward,” Nurse O’Donnell informed Bea. “You’re not the only face in here,” she pointed out to Private Donnelly.

  “No, but I sure am the prettiest, Auntie.”

  Then arrived—no mistaking it—something unforeseen, and wholly welcome: an itch of a smile rumpled the firm horizontal line of Nurse O’Donnell’s thin lips.

  Private Donnelly, the class clown, had finally accomplished it: he had softened his stern aunt, his forbidding nurse, the old schoolmarm.

  No softness crept into her voice, however. “You been smoking again.”

  “It’s the cigarettes. They been smoking. No smoke coming outta me. Actually, I’m the one puts them out.” Private Donnelly shifted tacks. “Don’t you think Miss Paradiso oughta come back next week? Pretty up my picture?”

  Nurse O’Donnell shook her head wearily. “None of my concern,” she said. “I got no time for such foolishness. Last thing I heard, this was still a hospital, not a art gallery.”

  “Shh.”

  Private Donnelly made a big show of placing an index finger to his lips and whispering, “I’m aware of that, Auntie, but you mustn’t be disappointing the other boys.”

  Bea put in a few goodbyes—one or two half-promises were made—then departed from the “wounded ward” with Nurse O’Donnell at her side, or almost at her side. However much Bea slowed, Nurse O’Donnell appeared determined to walk a step behind. Although the nurse said nothing, it was clear that Michael Donnelly’s banter had lifted her spirits: the oppressive air of disapprobation had thinned. “I’ve never met anyone quite like him,” Bea said, turning slightly, back to where Nurse O’Donnell padded along.

  Nurse O’Donnell looked up at Bianca—the six-foot-tall “artist” who lied about her height—and said, “His injuries are extensive.”

  “It’s a very big bandage.”

  “Serious wounds.”

  “Are there many wounded?”

  Nurse O’Donnell did not answer, but the upthrust of her jaw signaled assent. “And that’s not counting the ones turned a little funny.”

  “Funny?” Bea said.

  Again, Nurse O’Donnell said nothing, merely resetting her jaw.

  “Next week, I must be more efficient,” Bea said at last, which was surely something even Nurse O’Donnell could not fault.

  But Nurse O’Donnell could not approve of it, either, since at some point down this corridor the silent-footed solid little woman had drifted off. Bea Paradiso, at the entrance to the hospital where she was born, stood alone.

  CHAPTER X

  Ronny was endlessly full of surprises. He took enormous delight in advertisements, and who would have figured this? Given what a purist he was about visual art—visual everything—you’d expect him to regard ads with Professor Manhardt’s revulsion, who spoke of advertisements and who knew of no dismissal more devastating than a comparison to commercial art. But ads appealed to Ronny.

  More perplexing still, he often found in them hidden humor she didn’t see. Oh, she could share his amusement about the little boy holding a dropper to his upraised nostrils while exclaiming, “Gee, Mom, these nose drops are swell!” But what was so funny in the ad for mountain springwater in which a nurse, carrying a glass to her patient, declares, “AND it’s good for the kidneys …”? Wasn’t this what spring-water was supposed to be good for? And why did Ronny laugh so hard at the ad that asked, “Are you a rupture SUFFERER?” Or at the clothier who promised “the lowest profit margin known to man”?

  With dating, too, he was full of surprises. Bea had thought she understood dating—she’d been going out with boys since she was fourteen—but Ronny Olsson reordered many of her notions. The big and obvious difference was that he had a car—his own car and a beautiful car, the cream-colored Cabriolet. She had sometimes dated boys who could borrow their father’s car, but usually she and her date would set out from Inquiry on foot.

  The usual date was a movie—maybe the Sheridan on Kercheval, or the Whittier on Jefferson—and a milk shake afterward. Not that money was ever discussed, but on a typical evening Bea knew to a nickel—to a penny, really—what her date had spent. It was twenty cents each at the Whittier, and a nickel for popcorn, and seventeen cents each for milk shakes at Olsson’s. Add a total of twenty-four cents for the four streetcar fares if you were wandering farther afield.

  But in Ronny’s company you had an unnerving feeling of indeterminate sums disbursed—all the more unnerving because he himself didn’t appear to notice. Dates with him had a veering, unexpected quality. (Despite rationing, his car always seemed full of gas.) She and Ronny were heading off to the movies one night when he discovered she didn’t know what a taco was—and the next moment they were driving in the opposite direction, toward Mexicantown.

  When he learned that she’d always coveted a Winsor & Newton oil paint set—precisely what he himself owned—he showed up at the next date w
ith one under his arm. And when she explained that she couldn’t possibly accept anything so extravagant, Ronny grew not only insistent but indignant: “We’re both students at the Institute. It isn’t fair if my equipment’s better than yours.” Well, Bea surprised herself by accepting the gift. And surprised herself still further by not feeling guilty.

  When Ronny took her somewhere really nice—the Fox Theatre, lunch at Hudson’s, a piano recital at the Masonic Temple—it was remarkable how often he ran into people he knew. Most were girls—or most who called out greetings were girls. Their dates often looked sheepish and withdrawn. “Ronny!” a happy voice would cry.

  Most were college girls. They were home from Ann Arbor or East Lansing for the weekend, or home for longer vacations from those places with really remote names like Bryn Mawr, which Bea knew chiefly through avid reading of the Detroit News society pages. These were the sorts of girls whose engagements were “announced on Sunday at a tea given by her aunt.” And after their wedding ceremonies, they were the sorts of girls who “for traveling changed to a navy blue suit, white straw hat, and navy accessories.” (Imagine having your clothes mentioned in the newspaper!) Some of these girls were cold toward Bea; some were warm, in a distant and at bottom chilly way; and some seemed genuinely, almost alarmingly warm, as if reunited with some distant but beloved cousin. In this range of responses the one constant factor was an intense, open curiosity. Bea was peered at.

  Ronny would introduce her as Bianca Paradiso. “Bianca is a talented artist,” he would say, and in an instant most of Bea’s unease vanished, replaced by a gushing gratitude: in her entire life, nobody else had thought to introduce her in this fashion.

  The girls’ dates often looked not only sheepish but resentful. The tense, unignorable truth was that the city was populated by pretty college girls who would like nothing better than a phone call from Ronny Olsson.