A bottle of red wine arrived, and in a couple of swallows Mr. Olsson re-created his winning imitation of a heron flipping a fish across its bill. He set the empty glass down perhaps more loudly than intended and ran a hand tightly over his narrow balding skull. Some sense of calm at last descended over the group.
After dinner, at Mrs. Olsson’s suggestion, Ronny asked Bea to dance. The song was “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” He appeared a little morose; he had been shuttered up all evening. “So you’re going to Grand Rapids!” Bea said in a cheery voice that—the recognized—parroted his mother’s. “I’ve never been.”
“Can you imagine anything worse?”
“It’s supposed to be a pretty town …”
“I’m not talking about Grand Rapids.” Ronny’s body felt distant. He could be quite a good dancer (though he lacked his father’s broad, audacious sweep), but tonight he seemed listless. “You know what I’m saying, Bianca—so why do you sometimes pretend you don’t? Why would you want people thinking you understand less than you do?”
It was one of those questions that made her so nervous, and made her so thankful for Ronny’s company—those powerful, probing questions that jostled her into untested lines of contemplation. He had a marvelously keen eye for veiled hypocrisies. She said, “It isn’t immediately clear—”
“I mean riding with him. For hours and hours. Battle Creek. Jackson. Kalamazoo. From one Olsson’s to the next. There where you need us there.”
“It’s a nice slogan.”
“Slogans …” Ronny sighed, and then he said, “Bianca, y’ever think you’d like to get far away from here?”
Far away from here? Whatever did he mean?
Still, at least he was opening his mouth, and Bea said, encouragingly, “I’ve always wanted to go to Chicago. It’s supposed to be ever so wonderful.”
“I don’t mean Chicago, and what is it you’re pretending now? I mean far. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you and I could draw the way God meant us to draw, paint the way He meant us to paint, if only we could get away far?”
You and I? But what was Ronny saying?
“Just picture it,” he went on, “if we went to the Pacific, like Gauguin.” And then he added, typically, “Not that I admire his paintings so much.” And added, yet more typically, “Though you’d have to say the exotic travel freed whatever talent he had …”
“The Pacific?” Bea said. Ronny sometimes treated her so impatiently when she failed to understand him, but wasn’t it obvious that in numerous ways he didn’t understand himself? “Ronny, Ronny, they’re fighting a war out there in Gauguin’s Pacific. Those beaches have land mines.” And this, too, was one of his fascinations for her: was there another young man in all of Detroit who could, however briefly, overlook the screaming fact of the greatest war in history?
Even so, even if the weight of human civilization endorsed her, Bea had managed to say precisely the wrong thing. She could feel it almost physically: enthusiasm draining from Ronny’s body, his heart withdrawing …
There’s no love song finer,
But how strange the change from major to minor,
Ev’ry time we say goodbye.
When Ronny led her back to the table, Mr. and Mrs. Olsson were having what could only be described as an argument, on the subject, unfortunately, of courage. “Charley, it’s simpler than that. The truth about them? They’re just afraid.” This them of Mrs. Olsson’s encompassed—so the swing of her hand suggested—all the members of the Coral Club. “Afraid what people think.”
“Maybe it isn’t fear,” Mr. Olsson countered. “Maybe it’s something we might call simple politeness. Or quiet decency. You follow me? Respect for certain civilities and time-tested codes of behavior which—”
“Honestly, you can’t smell it, Charley?” Mrs. Olsson answered her own question: “No-o, course you can’t. Fear’s got a smell, and like any other smell I suppose after while you get used to it. You honestly can’t smell the cowardice in here?”
Mr. Olsson again asked Bea to dance, which seemed an excellent idea. She rose eagerly.
More than ever, she felt sorry for Mr. Olsson, though Bea could never actually confide this to anyone, it sounded so smug and silly … An eighteen-year-old girl art student pitying one of Detroit’s most successful men? Yet sorry for him was precisely what Bea felt—he was always working so hard, while facing such mutinous opposition at home.
She appreciated the way Mr. Olsson initiated a dance: he sort of drifted you into it, as though dancing required no more thought than walking. They revolved around the floor. Bea very much wished Ronny would try harder to see things from his father’s point of view, and she wondered again: was there some way to draw the two of them closer? She wished she had something to give Mr. Olsson. What would he like? What would make him happy? Some bolstering word? Some earnest confession of respect and sympathy? But of course she had nothing to give Mr. Olsson.
A new song began, “Skylark,” and she was not at all prepared for the quick tightening urgency of Mr. Olsson’s embrace. This might appear—Bea feared—inappropriate. It certainly felt inappropriate: to have their (from a practicing artist’s point of view) different-aged bodies pressed so tightly that she could feel her breasts flatten against his chest. Bea tried to pull back, but Mr. Olsson’s hold on her, however graceful, was unbudging. “Miss Paradiso, you are so tactful,” Mr. Olsson said. Tactful?
“And what an extraordinary name to parade through life with: Miss Bi-an-ca Par-a-di-so.” Mr. Olsson’s voice, too, was a bit of a mystery, dreamy and purry and seemingly at odds with his vivid physical presence. She did find herself wishing the Olsson family were easier to decipher—though perhaps the Paradisos might appear, to the eyes of an outsider, equally unfathomable …
“My father calls me Bia.”
“Be a?”
“The first part of my name.”
“Oh,” Mr. Olsson said. “Right. Your father.” After a pause he said, “Works for O’Reilly and Fein, right? They have a good reputation.”
“I told him you said that. He was very pleased.”
“You told him I said that?” This seemed to quicken Mr. Olsson’s interest. “What else did you tell him about me?”
On the one hand, it was odd having this conversation while dancing so close, with Mr. Olsson’s thin-lipped mouth lodged right beside her ear. On the other hand, it wasn’t odd at all.
“I don’t know. I told him you have a gym in your house. After all, Papa’s a builder.”
“Always looking for a little extra work, I suppose?”
“He has more than he can handle,” Bea replied truthfully, and proudly. “You know how it is—the city’s booming.”
“And will go on booming long after the guns stop,” Mr. Olsson said. “Once they start making cars again, all hell’s gonna break loose in this town.” His voice, especially when uttering the profanity, quivered with excitement; this was a hell he was looking forward to. “That’s when the real businessman’s war will begin.”
“I thought the city might slow down,” Bea said.
“Slow down?” Mr. Olsson laughed. “My dear little girl, nothing’s going to slow down. Ever again. It’s a new world. Faster and wilder. Faster and wilder,” he chanted, and Bea’s head went spinning, off toward a new world, and then in a softer voice Mr. Olsson said: “I think courage comes in a hundred different forms.”
And what in heaven’s name did he mean by that?
And when the music stopped, with a final climbing phrase (“Won’t you lead me there?”), Mr. Olsson uttered the strangest words of all. He held her even yet, seizing her upper arms, and stared frankly, full-heartedly into her eyes with that queer, arresting face of his—at times a lynx, at times a heron. “You must understand, Bianca, I am not what I seem,” he told her. His powerful thumbs pressed into the flesh of her arms.
“No?” Bea said. She could say nothing else.
“Me? I’m searching for purity,” Mr. Ol
sson said.
The agile dancing, and this impenetrable parting declaration, and the lingering print of his thumbs on her upper arms—they all worked to ensure on her return to the table that Bea scarcely heard Mrs. Olsson, who was still expounding on courage and cowardice. No, it took the sound of impermissible words—harsh as a slap to the face—to summon Bea fully: “Kikes,” Mrs. Olsson said, distinctly. “Niggers. I’m not afraid of them.”
“Gretchen.”
“I’m not afraid of the words, itsy-bitsy words, and why am I not afraid? Let me tell you why. It’s because I’m not afraid of the people behind the words. Gretchen Olsson is not scared of the Jews. I’m one of the few people in this room who would let them into this club. You know that, Charley. God, it’s pathetic. Albert Kahn designs the DAC and they make it clear they don’t want him as a member?”
“Did you know he also designed the lighthouse at Belle Isle?” Bea interposed. “Gretchen. It’s time to go home,” Mr. Olsson said.
“They’re all running scared in here. Running scared of people like Max Fisher and the Bormans, because they’re looking to build houses nearly as big as Henry Ford’s. The folks in here? They’re all afraid they’ve lost the keys to the bank. D’you honestly not feel the fear in here, Charley? Or is it you’re scared, too, Charley—of little two-bit operations like Saperstein’s Drugs?”
“That’s more than enough. More than enough, Gretchen.”
“Charley thinks I’m letting down the team, buying my clothes from the Jews down on Livernois, rather than out in Grosse Pointe where they may know how to dress a horse but certainly not a woman. I say to him, It’s a question of justice. I don’t want clothes doing me an injustice. I say, Charley, it’s either Livernois or New York.”
Ronny inserted himself into the conversation: “Bianca has never been to New York.”
Mr. Olsson immediately picked it up: “We must all go to New York. Soon’s I get a little time. Gretchen, you’ll take Bianca shopping.”
But Mrs. Olsson was not about to be diverted from her firm enumeration of principles: “And the colored. Jesus, everyone in here, scared to death. Of that big black river, big as the Mississippi only it’s flowing north, from New Orleans to Dee-troit, one godforsaken jalopy after another. The people in here think the lights are going out, the whole damn city turning black as night, but I’m not scared, Charley, and you know why? Because the colored recognize they have a friend in Gretchen Olsson.”
“You want to know something, Gretchen?” Mr. Olsson had stood up in order to lean on the table—toward her, over her. Mrs. Olsson did not look cowed. She glared straight back. It was a frozen moment, a tableau right out of a painting. (Later, in her bed that night, Bea would recognize it for a queer sort of painters’ allegory: a Contest Between Strength and Beauty.) Mr. Olsson was swaying, obviously ransacking his wits for a suitably ample denunciation. Only now did Bea realize just how much he, like his wife, had drunk tonight.
When Mr. Olsson’s utterance arrived, it was unmistakably an anticlimax: “Gretchen, you have, you—you went and really outdid yourself this evening.” He tossed his chin, dismissing her, and glanced contemptuously around the room.
Another silence. Then Mrs. Olsson said, “You’re not scared of the word ‘Wop,’ are you, Bianca?” Her dark eyes looked a little bleary, as though peering through fogged glass.
“Scared?” Bea said.
“Gretchen,” Mr. Olsson said.
And another voice reentered the fray: “Mother.…”
But with something like self-righteousness—a notion that she would be not only absolved but wholly vindicated if only, if only permitted to have her say—Mrs. Olsson carried on: “Because you know what, Bea? I don’t care. Dago, Wop, I don’t care if your family’s hairy as monkeys and reeks of garlic. Doesn’t smell as bad as the smell of fear. And I don’t care that you’re Cat-lick, as we used to say in Scarp, North Dakota. You can pray to the Patron Saint of Lost Handbags, or Laddered Stockings, for all I care …”
“Actually, my family’s religion—”
“I don’t care,” Mrs. Olsson repeated, which she clearly meant nobly, though it came off brusquely.
Mr. Olsson had come around the table and placed his hand upon his wife’s arm. The imperious way she stared down at that hand was frightening. For just a moment, Bea feared (a horrible fear) that Mrs. Olsson would slap it away. But then the woman rose to her feet, with all her stylistic aplomb, although she had one more remark, or pair of remarks, to bestow. She said to Bea, almost sweetly, “You really are green as grass, aren’t you, Bianca?” And added, solicitously, “Oh Christ, Bea, do yourself a favor and never learn a goddamn thing.”
Ronny flanked his mother on the other side. Bea took a last sweeping look around the table. In front of Mr. Olsson’s coffee cup she saw her list, dutiful and forlorn:
Hairbrush
Noxzema (Face Cream)
Little Scissors
Nail Clippers
Emery Boards
Hardly a word was spoken on the return drive. A soundless rain was falling.
When they reached the Olssons’, Ronny disappeared. Mr. Olsson, too, disappeared. Mrs. Olsson sat in her music room, Bea at her side. “We shall have a cup of tea,” she announced. She seemed subdued, possibly chastened. She looked smudged, even in this dim light. Bea was aware of rain falling, though she could not see it or hear it.
Bea talked about Professor Manhardt, and Ronny’s extraordinary gift for draftsmanship. She felt vaguely complicit in the night’s many mortifications. But what ought she to have done differently? Hadn’t she herself been blameless?
And Mrs. Olsson looked so very tired …
Then, rousing herself, Mrs. Olsson interrupted eagerly: “D’you hear that sound?”
“What sound?”
Yes, there it was—like a distant drumming, deep within the bowels of the house.
“Know what that is?” Mrs. Olsson asked, and something about her quickened tone, and the self-satisfied way she canted forward, was disquieting.
“No-o.”
“That’s Charley? See? D’you see?”
“I’m not sure—”
“Gone down to his gym. And you know what he’s doing? Punching his punching bag. And—don’t you know?—wishing the whole time it was me. Not that he would ever dare lay a finger on me.” It was a rain of blows—another sort of rain. With absolutely queenly repose, Mrs. Olsson leaned back in her chair. “But we all can dream, can’t we? I mean, it makes you almost feel sorry for old Charley, doesn’t it, Bianca? All those forbidden fruits. Things the man wants so desperately—and can never have.”
CHAPTER XIII
It was striking just how quickly a new routine established itself. Her portraits were deemed a success, apparently, although nobody in authority said so outright. But Bea’s field of operations was steadily expanded. First she was asked to shift from one day to two days a week at Ferry, then she was assigned as well to the USO canteen downtown, in the Hammond Building, where she did many portraits. She was much quicker now in moving from pencil to charcoal, but this was still the method—her artistic method as a portraitist. Emotionally, too, her work was easier, because her subjects were largely fresh recruits. They hadn’t been wounded, they hadn’t turned “a little funny” under the distant unimaginable terrors of world warfare.
But in another way the USO was a harder place to work. These boys seemed even younger than the boys at Ferry: teenagers, like her, and so touchingly innocent! Though just a girl, she had a better sense of what awaited them than they did. Most had never seen anything like the interior of Ferry Hospital.
And the War straggled on. Two years for the Americans; four years now, moving into five, for most of Europe … In four more years (could the War possibly drag on another four years?) Stevie’s friends, those little boys who dispatched Germans in the alley, might actually be drafted. (In her prayers, though it made her feel funny to do so, she’d sometimes thank God for giving Stevie
the myopia that ought to keep him out of harm’s way.)
Just how long the War had been dragging on grew clear when old Mrs. McNamee down the street passed away. She was eighty-seven. Edith was asked to help sort out the salvage and Bea came along. (Of course Edith saw nothing peculiar in an arrangement where her big sister trailed along as assistant.) One of the things Mrs. McNamee left behind was a scrapbook of war clippings. Her only grandson was in the Coast Guard and poor Mrs. McNamee had saved only optimistic articles. The earliest headlines, from way back last year, recalled an optimism painful to contemplate: JAPS ADMIT MORALE IS LOW, GERMAN DESERTIONS CLIMBING, BIG DOUBLE AXIS DEFEAT, NAZI OFFENSE CRUMBLING. Since nobody else wanted it, Bea had brought the scrap-book home. Somehow she couldn’t bear to see so much lovingly husbanded naïveté thrown away.
Meanwhile, the hospital’s castellated outlines continued to haunt her, looming through the twilight of her dreams, though Bea had a proud, adaptive sense of handling the place. Nurse O’Donnell’s air of impregnable disapproval had relented to the extent of a nod in reply to a spoken greeting. Bea would arrive every Tuesday and Thursday at ten and remain until noon. Working quickly, she could finish one soldier portrait, possibly two. (She was no sidewalk artist, knocking off commissions in twenty minutes.)
She’d come to understand that Ferry was like the hub to a wheel. Soldiers arrived and were spun out along the various spokes—home to rest, maybe, or out to the front, if the healing was mostly complete, or, in the saddest cases, out to another hospital or a mental home. The unsettling thing about those who had “turned funny” was how numerous they seemed—not what you’d suspect if you knew the War only through newspapers and newsreels. And still more unsettling: you couldn’t always initially identify them.
Bea learned with time not to be surprised, or terribly upset, when a familiar face abruptly vanished. On the day, early on, when she decided to check on Private Donnelly and his bandaged eye, and learned he’d been transferred to another hospital, she’d experienced a surging desperation. She’d immediately felt near tears. Oh, she must find him—must write him, visit him! The two of them had shared something significant—a swift but cherished friendship—and she couldn’t allow all their amusing, sweet, poignant banter simply to vanish … But as the weeks went by, it grew clearer that such vanishings were precisely what the War was all about. Boys were forever being shipped from Point A to Point B. You crossed their paths once, maybe, before they caromed off in unforeseen directions. You met a soldier who knew exactly how to make you laugh—though he had a face peppered with shrapnel and a recently amputated leg—and then he was carted elsewhere, to make some other girl laugh, and in his bunk you encountered a new body, a soldier with a new disability and a new story.
The Art Student's War Page 18