It would have been troubling had Ronny wished to frequent only places where such girls gathered. And more troubling still had Ronny shied from such places while in Bea’s company. But one of the fascinating things about Ronny Olsson was the poised, urbane way he circulated from one world to another. Dating Ronny meant going to hear a tiny, powerful Russian pianist at the Masonic Temple and it meant finding yourself eating a brittle, splintery something called a taco in a room where a man with a colossal silver moustache, dining alone, had dozed off with his head against the wall.
Herk’s was another place where you were unlikely to meet a Bryn Mawr girl, and it was at Herk’s where Bea finally described for Ronny her visit to Ferry Hospital three days before. (She’d hardly been able to think of anything since.) She felt frustratingly unable, though, to convey the morning’s pathos and magic and whirring power. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say she couldn’t overcome Ronny’s resistance to her explanation. Before she could finish a thought, he already had it pigeonholed.
“So you’re saying the place was depressing …”
“Of course, yes, Ronny, it was depressing. Good heavens, it’s full of these wounded soldiers, and you keep hearing moans and groans off in the distance. You know I’ve been feeling so fortunate that I don’t know anybody yet who’s actually died in the War—”
“Yes, you mentioned—”
“Though there was this boy at Eastern, Bradley Hake, who’s still missing in action, but I didn’t really know him. Though he did use to smile at me.”
“Let’s hope your luck holds.”
“But it isn’t holding for everyone. That’s what you see at Ferry. It brought it all home: the scale of the suffering. And there was this strange little nurse, Nurse Mildred O’Donnell—why would anyone name a child Mildred?—who basically accused me of lying when …” and Bea felt herself securely under way again. She told him about Nurse O’Donnell’s refusal to believe she wasn’t six feet tall, and how she’d simply vaporized at day’s end, and about the one occasion when she cracked the hint of a smile. And Ronny interrupted again: “So you’re saying the soldiers don’t receive adequate care?”
“No, that’s not it at all. I’m just telling you how strange a place it is, especially knowing I was actually born there, and the feeling of all these bedridden bodies, and all the boys looking hopefully at me …” Bea felt some compunction about embroidering events slightly—or at least giving the impression that she’d seen many more soldiers than she actually had when Nurse O’Donnell had rushed her through the ward. But the words were flowing now, with a life of their own and requirements of their own, and their correspondence to the facts was hardly to be questioned. “They honestly seemed to think I could do something for them.”
“So you’re saying it made you feel appreciated?”
“No—I mean of course, yes, I suppose so, but I just felt their terrible needs. They all looked so pitiful.” She could feel their intent gazes again—especially the one who’d called, Good afternoon, bright eyes. “It’s just I guess I never really thought about how it is for the wounded. How slow their days are …” and she was off and running again, or trying to run.
But it was talk of Michael Donnelly that seemed most to goad Ronny—could it be he was jealous? It was a difficult and delicate notion. It made her sound so arrogant, while it made him sound so immature to propose that the tall, devilishly handsome son of the owner of the Olsson’s drugstore chain was jealous of an Irish boy from Battle Creek with a bandage over his face. But what else could have possessed Ronny to say, “You should see how flushed you’ve become! Honestly, Bianca, you look sweet on him …”
“Sweet on him? Ronny, he’s got a bandage the size of—of a dinner plate. On his face. What you can see of his face is bruised and swollen and discolored, and what you can’t see is full of metal. I should see my face? You should see his face.”
“Perhaps the lady doth protest too much?”
Bea knew the phrase, of course, but couldn’t place the reference, and this sense of her own disadvantaged ignorance—Ronny was so wide-ranging and articulate!—in combination with that superior, skeptical way he had of cocking one eyebrow, sparked a new emotion, not very pretty and yet not wholly regrettable: a slight chafed impatience with that sophisticated, elaboration-loving intellectual’s world represented by Ronny Olsson. Why couldn’t he be more like other boys?
And yet in ways she couldn’t begin to fathom (and, later, in bed that night, could hardly bear to contemplate) it wasn’t an hour after their talk, as they took a walk through Palmer Park, that she felt more tightly bound than ever. They were on a little wooded path. No one was about. She was trying again to explain the power of that looming image of Ferry Hospital. Straddling like a mountain range across her mind, it was too large to be envisioned: its borders exceeded her imagination’s borders … It was an object she couldn’t think about painting (how could you even start?), and yet every other object in her head—rabbit’s feet and pocket watches and nutcrackers and lemons—stood idly in its shadow. In the only canvas that might do it justice, you’d intuit all the soldiers within. Yes, you would look at that gray castle and feel them inside.
She felt the War—it was the largest thing she’d ever felt. She felt it, that is, with a sweep and a complexity burgeoning steadily over time. She absorbed it from every angle—from the newspapers, and the news-reels, and the chatter at the bakery and the butcher’s, and in Uncle Dennis’s careful, well-researched accounts … and yet, for all she absorbed, for all the widening of her vision, Bea occasionally discerned how its true dimensions escaped her. Even the hospital escaped her! It was all so unimaginable: to be sitting before the bed of Private Donnelly, who in the ordinary course of life probably wouldn’t have ventured a hundred miles from Battle Creek in ten years, but who had been shipped off to the South Seas, where strange yellow-skinned Japanese soldiers had exploded screaming white-hot metal fragments into his face…
Of course she couldn’t begin to express her thoughts coherently, which were not really thoughts but images linked to sounds and voices, Roosevelt on the radio and the newsboys calling Extra and a whirring projector behind you as an aircraft carrier proudly stretched across the screen of the United Artists, and impossibly remote place names like Singapore and Corregidor and Medjez-el-Bab, and was it any wonder she couldn’t express to Ronny everything she longed to express? To make her task all the more formidable, he had halted, and turned and faced her, seizing her hands, and he’d begun to stroke her palms, sending what already felt like a soothingly familiar warmth up her arms.
“Ferry Hospital is where the war comes home,” she said, and home felt unexpectedly right, it resounded in her chest, while the looming gray structure shimmered like some Monet cathedral in the sun.
“It’s like this big repair shop,” Bea said, feeling her imagination again taking wing. “For broken soldiers. They bring them back to be repaired, only—” Only? Only, some cannot be repaired, is that what she wanted to say? What in heaven did she want to say? Bea felt all but overmastered, as Ronny stoked the fire in her hands—a fire that climbed, as fire naturally will climb, right up the crackling veins in her arms. “All those broken soldiers,” she sighed—words that only enhanced the wordless realization that Ronny Olsson, by contrast, stood before her unbroken: intense and gifted and dizzyingly handsome. The heart of this young man with a heart murmur was beating ardently, irrepressibly, and she seemed to glimpse the two of them from slightly above—like a painter who has chosen to expand the view by climbing some knoll. A young woman in a red felt hat and red wool skirt, age eighteen, and a young man, twenty-one, were standing in a Detroit public park one late afternoon in August 1943. Soon the park’s greenery would be giving way to autumn colors. Outside the park, encircling it on all sides, stood the city’s pluming smokestacks, one after another after another, for this was the greatest manufacturing hub in the world. What had once been the world’s automobile capital had become,
almost overnight, an outspread and interconnected armamentarium. Everything had been retooled, redesigned, and it was right here, in all of Detroit’s beautiful factories, infernally aglow, that the War would be won. Right here began the endless, outbound exodus: Chrysler’s tanks and Ford’s airplanes and General Motors’ amphibious landing craft, rolling off the lines and being hauled away by ship and train, by river and railroad track. And what was returned to the city was a random poor human scatter of wounded soldiers, including one carrot-topped class clown whose face had been splattered with stray metal.
“All those wounded, needy soldiers,” Bea sighed again, hardly knowing what she was saying, and it was as if this phrase, in all its flammable imagery, ignited the young man before her. Ronny lunged forward and flattened his lips against hers: their first kiss. And Bea thrilled to an equal answering forward lunging: she fully met the kiss. His arms were lashed round her back, his hips pressed tight enough to hers that she could feel the bulge of his belt buckle.
Before long, his lips parted, as sometimes other boys’ lips had parted during a kiss. But this time she did what she resolutely had not done before: she opened her mouth completely to that beckoning male mouth. The stroke of his tongue against her tongue threw a big voluptuous splash of color against the dark of her mind: an orange-gold glow that broke like a wave, tingling like one of those fireworks that die with such high reluctance against the sky’s velvet black. His tongue pushed in the other direction, and in the deepest Lascaux-cavern walls of the mind a whole pack of beast-shapes went loping over the rolling hills. Resemblances formed and broke, living things, dreams, colors, colors without objects, pale milky greens and reds with swollen veins of electric blue, and if he’d not continued holding her fevered body firmly in his hands, Bianca could hardly have remained upright: Ronny Olsson alone was keeping her from tumbling disgracefully to the ground.
• • •
Ronny wasn’t at all keen on the new painters: Picasso and Matisse and Modigliani and Munch and Dufy and Feininger, each represented by a single work at what she still thought of as the Art Institute but what Ronny always called the DIA. (There were other, often still newer painters—Braque and Klimt and Kandinsky and de Chirico and Magritte and Klee and Bonnard and Giacometti—but these were mostly names in catalogues, since she’d never actually seen their work.) He dismissed outright, as “cheap,” the Salvador Dalí show whose recent arrival at the DIA had filled Bea with such powerful mixed feelings. (Though it was like Ronny, too, to offer a subsequent qualification: “Paradiso, you do have to admit the man could paint a marvelous loaf of bread.”) Ronny was quite convincingly articulate about the painters’ various shortcomings, and wickedly humorous, too, and unlike many people who ridiculed modern art, he knew what he was talking about. He had been to New York City any number of times; he had visited the Museum of Modern Art, on Fifty-third Street, in Manhattan. (He saw it as MoMA.) Having so much less firsthand familiarity with the modern painters, Bea was far less confident. And Ronny was so much older. Ronny had seen a number of actual Vermeers—Vermeer was one of his gods. She’d never seen one. He’d seen a number of Brueghels. She’d seen one.
For that matter, she’d seen but one van Gogh, one Chardin, one Velázquez. Of course she had looked at catalogues, and she’d peered hard at magazine articles. But out there, beyond her hometown, and beyond the War that postponed indefinitely all such dream-visions, lay a chain of galleries as distant as the galaxies in Uncle Dennis’s science-fiction stories. Galleries in Philadelphia, Washington, London, mythical Paris …
Where did she come down on modern art? She knew for certain only that some of it unsettled her stomach—almost as if she’d eaten something strange. That’s what happened after she contemplated a magazine reproduction of a Picasso painting of a man and a woman on a beach—only, it wasn’t so much a man and a woman as two animate stone beings. They were two living sculptures sprung out of some drunken geometry textbook, with little triangles for heads and big sweeping parabolas, or maybe ellipses, for haunches. It made her feel so peculiar…
The only thing to which she could compare Picasso’s painting was wholly inappropriate—the “pulp art” in Uncle Dennis’s goofy and appealing and unnerving science-fiction magazines: Astounding Tales and such. Of course Uncle Dennis had no use for Picasso, Matisse, and all the rest, whose bizarre visions were hardly his bizarre visions. If asked, Uncle Dennis would doubtless dismiss them as “oddballs” or “goofballs”—a curious dismissal from somebody truly convinced that someday men would pack themselves into rocket ships and steer by the stars; in his universe, it was only a matter of time before “the man in the moon” became a literal man. She’d sometimes tried reading his magazines, but none of the stories ever caught her imagination. The illustrations, though—those were a different matter. They, too, made her queasy. They had populated her childhood with slinking, sliding, darting, levitating aliens: a host of unearthly creatures that nonetheless resembled earthly insects and dinosaurs, snails and great jungle cats. There were also creatures that quivered like Jell-O and creatures that glowed from within like radios and creatures that were, sometimes, queer cousins to Picasso’s triangle-headed men and women.
But if Bea didn’t know what she felt, finally, about modern art, she knew she loved the Impressionists (Cézanne most of all, but van Gogh, too, even if those greens of his were the strangest, most disquieting greens in all the world). Her taste for Impressionism was something to underplay around Ronny, who saw it as “the beginning of the end of real painting.” (“Gauguin,” he declared with finality, “was no draftsman.” And: “The Impressionists managed some pretty effects, I’ll grant you. But we mustn’t let them off the hook for what came after.”) The only late-nineteenth-century painters he regularly admired were the Pre-Raphaelites (“At least their hearts were in the right place”), with their wide palettes and flattened vistas, gorgeous fabrics and exquisite drowned-looking women. He was far happier in a courtly, long-ago France, the sumptuous allées of Fragonard, Poussin’s evenhanded landscapes. (Bea found the former artist a little too frivolous, the latter a bit static.) But Ronny was happiest of all with the Old Dutch Masters: Rembrandt and Vermeer, of course, but also Claesz and Dou and Ter Borch and, sometimes, Ruisdael. He didn’t fully share Bea’s conviction that nothing in the world was so ravishing as the Italian Renaissance, when some summit in mankind’s eternal pursuit of Beauty had been attained, never equaled since. (“Signorina Paradiso,” Ronny teased her, “you’re such a blood loyalist!”) Although she’d seen them only in reproductions, she knew to a glittering certainty that Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert and Titian’s Venus with a Mirror were more beautiful than a whole gallery of Fragonards, even with a roomful of Louis Quatorze furniture thrown in for good measure. And if it wasn’t perhaps so beautiful as Saint Francis in the Desert, nonetheless the Bellini at the DIA, a Madonna and Child, might just be the most beautiful object Bea had ever beheld. And now there was a gratifying human anecdote attached to its beauty: the occasion when, at her urging, she and Ronny had stood before it for long, long minutes, until he turned and announced, concessively, nobly, “Yes, Paradiso, it’s much finer than I ever realized …”
It was her passion for Renaissance art that led to one of the oddest afternoons of her life. The episode really began on a Thursday night—the evening after the day when she and Ronny took their memorable walk in Palmer Park. At dinner with Ronny’s parents at what she’d begun to think of as the DAC—always formerly known, from afar, as the Detroit Athletic Club—Ronny happened to mention Bea’s “passion” for Italian art.
Mrs. Olsson interrupted: “Bianca, you must give me a tour. A tour of the Italian galleries at the art institute.” She followed this with a grandly humble yet imposing confession: “I have always longed to understand the Italian art.”
Useless to protest—though Bea did of course protest—that she was no fit guide for Mrs. Olsson, who surely could find somebody more knowledgeab
le. And useless to protest—though Bea did protest—that such a visit ought to be delayed until she could “do a little research.” The guided tour was set for Saturday, only two days away.
Naturally, early the next morning, Friday morning, Bea was at the library, where she located a book called Art in Northern Italy and a catalogue of the Academy Gallery in Florence and The Makers of Venice by a woman named Mrs. Oliphant. There was supposed to be a book by Bernard Berenson, but somebody had checked it out. Bea plunged desperately into the pile, for it grew immediately apparent that, although she frequently referred to the Italian eye and the Italian sensibility, she in fact knew precious little about the Renaissance, which apparently was subdivided into “early” and “high.” Giotto, Duccio, the various Bellinis, Leonardo, Perugino, Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca—she would flunk any simple art history quiz about their who, where, when.
But on the dreaded Saturday, little of Bea’s crammed research proved useful. Mrs. Olsson tired quickly of the paintings. (“Another Madonna? I suppose it’s quite beautiful, but wouldn’t you think they’d find other things to paint?” “It was a very religious time, I guess.” “I guess, but isn’t the whole point of being a Renaissance man the ability to accomplish many things? It’s pretty arrogant of them to call themselves Renaissance men.” “I’m not sure they actually—”) And Mrs. Olsson tired more quickly still of Bea’s commentaries. (“Oh you mustn’t give me any more dates, my dear. It’s only half the time I can remember Mr. Olsson’s birthday.”) Having been profusely and graciously thanked (the graciousness truly was imposing; a mere thank-you from Mrs. Olsson descended upon you like some precious gift), Bea found herself seated in the backseat of Mrs. Olsson’s car, beside Mrs. Olsson, who was not driving. In the front seat, impressively uniformed, sat a chauffeur. A chauffeur!
“Now we’ll go to lunch,” Mrs. Olsson said.
The Art Student's War Page 15