… Or one May afternoon you encountered a handsome, blue-eyed soldier on crutches who laboriously boarded a Woodward Avenue streetcar and then insisted on giving up his seat for you, and you exchanged a few glances that etched your soul—and this was the whole of it: the War in essence. You go home that night and throw yourself on your bed and weep with the piercing knowledge that you hadn’t properly thanked the one boy meant to be your true love … Oh, it made her laugh now! Only a few months ago, that particular incident, but it seemed so much longer! (She’d done so much growing up in the meantime.) She’d learned she must let them go, as they let her go—all those wounded boys, hobbling toward undisclosed destinations. It was one of the things people meant when they spoke of the War coming home.
And the hospital also taught her just how devastatingly attractive she could be. Oh, she was quite a pretty girl at the USO canteen downtown, but at Ferry, in the hospital of her own birth, whose hideous green walls eighteen years later housed such wartime despair and desperation, she was an irresistible creature. After a while, there was no not seeing it.
A pretty girl was customarily how Bea referred to herself to herself—sensing in anything more boastful an invitation to the worst sort of unhealthy and obnoxious vanity. But any pretty girl couldn’t spend too many afternoons at Ferry without seeing that in the eyes of the wounded and the “funny” she was absolutely the best thing to come along in a very long while. Here were big strong men—or men big and strong until recently—unable to recite their names without a shy schoolkid’s stammer or a tremor of their powerful, hairy hands.
Some of them she thought of as boys, and some as men, but most were boy-men, something in between … They were alike, anyway, in the awakened looks she kindled in their faces: such lit-up, keen, nakedly beseeching looks. One glimpse was often all it took. In truth, it made Bea uneasy, it felt dangerous—to wield this much power over strangers. It made her feel exultant and grateful and excited, and also shamefully unworthy. Some of the boys, particularly the farm boys, seemed little older than Stevie, and yet they’d been shipped overseas, sick and scared and lost, to confront horrors outside all her experience. But—but on their return from a hell on earth, they immediately ceded all power and authority to a girl who’d never left Detroit, really. (One of these farm boys, out of the blue, began gently crying as she sketched him. Thinking he soon must stop, Bea halted and took his hand—she didn’t know what else to do—but he went on weeping, uninsistently but unquenchably. Her own all-too-frequent tears usually followed a progression, with predictable shiftings of intensity and volume. But this was steady as a leaky faucet. And when at last he spoke, at first she couldn’t make him out. Poor lost soul, he was chanting, over and over, “No one … no one … no one …”)
They were transported thousands of miles only to be shipped back thousands of miles, humbled and shaken, jittery eyes pleading for a pretty girl’s approving glance, the bright bonus of a smile. Purely by virtue of being who she was, Bea possessed the means to comfort, perhaps even to restore them to themselves. For that’s what (so she came to realize, beginning with Private Donnelly) her mission must be: to give them back their carefree boyish prewar faces.
She frequently recalled one of Mrs. Olsson’s observations: what counts for more than being pretty is knowing you’re pretty. Well, Bea knew it. Her job at Ferry seemed designed to impart this knowledge—a situation tailor-made to make the boys fall head over heels. The Army goes and plucks some boy from his family’s sugar-beet farm outside Kalamazoo and he doesn’t talk to a girl for weeks on end, before he’s shipped off to North Africa, where he contracts dysentery and a grenade fragment explodes into his solar plexus … Then you ship him back home to Michigan, to the Ferry Hospital, where one day a pretty girl in a blue-and-yellow-plaid skirt and a white cardigan appears and asks if he’d like his portrait drawn. She says, in effect, Soldier, let me capture your essence on a sheet of paper… Oh, he’s half in love before her long-fingered hand has recorded a single hair on his head!
Ever since she was a girl Bea had loved to draw portraits, but at Ferry something new entered the process: a quickened command. This had little to do with how well any individual portrait turned out. It had everything to do with just how vulnerable these boys were—how invested in the business of being drawn. They stared up at her—the artist—with such hopeful and anxious faces …
Bea hadn’t been visiting Ferry for much more than a month before she infuriated Maggie no end by receiving two earnest marriage proposals. Bea learned to shrug off, with a pert but effective graciousness, even the most preposterous compliments: she was a homecoming queen, a potential Hollywood starlet, the world’s most beautiful woman. But she felt a little discombobulated when one clammy-looking Polish kid from Hamtramck stared up out of a distant fever to identify her—the tall dark-haired apparition at his bedside—as the Madonna herself.
When she talked about Ferry Hospital with Maggie, it all sounded charming, or wonderfully flattering, but Ferry was far, far more poignant than charming or flattering. Whenever she thought of the place, particularly while lying in bed, an immovable ache would invade her throat, and on came all the old nightly jitters … It was the same ache she experienced on stepping inside the hospital, for she never walked those grim corridors without feeling close to tears.
The boys were constantly wanting to give her something. They couldn’t bear to see her depart without placing in her hands a return token—some repayment for the gift of the portrait. At first, she steadfastly refused even the littlest trifle. It seemed improper to accept anything from somebody who had already sacrificed so much for her, and for her country. But Bea soon saw such scruples as overly rigid—ultimately ungenerous. It pleased the boys so, to place something in her artist’s hands, even if the gift had little material value in the world’s eyes: a nickel Sky bar, a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, a postcard of the Federal Building in San Francisco, a blurry photograph of two boys atop a water tower somewhere in South Dakota, a not-quite-functional kaleidoscope, an actually rather lovely little wooden case in blond wood, which “might be big enough to hold cigarettes,” with a Chinese junk and a row of distant conical mountains inlaid in darker wood. Still, she wasn’t prepared for the soldier who presented her with a poem he had composed himself.
Henry Vanden Akker had grown up in Pleasant Ridge, out Woodward Avenue, just a couple of miles north of the Detroit city line. Henry’s family belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. He had a very Dutch face. He resembled Vincent van Gogh, or so Bea told him—which wasn’t quite true, although Henry did have van Gogh’s reddish hair and wild, naked-looking eyes. (Bea was qualified to make such judgments, having spent so much disciple’s time before the van Gogh self-portrait at the DIA—the first van Gogh purchased by any museum in the country.)
In actuality, though, for all her badinage, Bea hadn’t wandered so far from the truth: for the more she saw of Henry (and she seemed fated to see a fair bit of him), the more he plausibly might have been Vincent’s cousin or even brother. Henry had a high forehead—It was possible that, at the age of twenty-two, his red hair was already retreating. His skin was fair. His ears were pink and large.
Bea’s only previous exposure to the Dutch Reformed Church had come from the Slopsemas, up Inquiry toward Kercheval—those two impeccable sisters who looked down their pointy Dutch noses at the not always impeccable Paradisos, whose elder daughter was forever being fetched by different boys in different cars, and whose only son had turned Inquiry’s alley into a battlefield. (Did they realize, those two dour women, those indefatigable adversaries of dirt and disorder, who—spring, summer, fall—scrubbed their sidewalk every morning, how much delight they brought the neighborhood merely by having a name that began with Slop?) Bea had always maintained a wary distance from the Slopsemas.
Evidently, Henry Vanden Akker’s family was likewise strict and censorious. They didn’t go to the movies, or drink alcohol, or dance. Henry had once spotted his fath
er, alone on a park bench, smoking a cigarette, but the man had looked “absolutely stricken.” Furthermore, that was “many years ago,” and there was no indication he still succumbed to tobacco …
Something changed in the jungle.
This was the phrase that kept surfacing in Henry’s talk: something changed … He was extraordinarily intelligent—he had graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, while still only twenty—and Bea, in studying his lean face, the lovely red hair and pale blue naked eyes, the rust-colored eyebrows and surprisingly red lips, could feel just how intensely he was analyzing, and struggling to understand, this something that changed for him in the jungle.
“It was not a crisis of faith,” Henry explained in his careful, distinction-carving way. “I never doubted the reality of God. Or the possibility of divine grace. The truth is, it was more a crisis of outlook—or perhaps a recognition that my previous outlook on the world was inadequate to my radically new situation. I had devoted myself heretofore to mathematics, but now it seemed I must read more widely …”
Well, Bea was secretly but potently drawn to any young man who could use a word like heretofore unself-consciously: where else was she to locate somebody who might understand her own complicated hunger to draw and paint—all her indefinable hungers? Though Maggie always teased her about her “overflowery vocabulary” (an unvarying phrase—Maggie’s own vocabulary, though inventively slangy, was narrow), Bea had a sense of needing every word at her disposal if she were ever to voice even half of the best, oftentimes peculiar, thoughts inside her. And it turned out that Bea had never met anyone, not even Ronny, who read with Henry’s speed and intensity and endurance. He had a serious back injury in addition to having contracted a brutal case of malaria out in the Pacific. (“The truth is, those fevers were amazing. To say nothing of the chills. I must have come very close to dying,” he told her in a tone of scientific dispassion. “Can you have fevers like that without lying at death’s door? I think not.” And were those fevers the something that changed in the jungle?)
Henry was rapidly consuming the Harvard Classics, having made his way through more than two feet of its “five-foot shelf of books” while chronicling his reading in a series of notebooks. And he was devouring novels by more recent writers whose names Bea loosely associated with those modern painters—Picasso, Matisse, Braque—about whose work she could never fix how she felt. Henry was reading Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Knut Hamsun. And he was reading—with enough marginal annotations to create a sort of book-within-a-book—Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard.
“Have you read it?” he asked her.
“Me? No, I’m not really in a regular college. I’m an art student.”
“I’m not really in a regular college either. I’m in the U.S. Army.”
Henry was fond of clever little reversals of this sort, which evidently tickled the mathematician in him, and since math had always been Bea’s one tiny academic vulnerability, this side of him held a special appeal. Presumably, Henry discerned something whose existence she credited more through faith than experience: the exquisite, ethereal beauty of numbers. Beauty, as Ronny liked to point out, was haunting by its very nature. But more haunting still—Bea had come to see—was this notion of a beauty suspected but not quite uncovered. When one of Rubens’s sumptuous, sausage-plump nudes failed to stir her, was it the painter’s shortcoming—or hers? Had she seen what was displayed on the canvas, and gone beyond it? Or not yet trained herself to assimilate its hidden all-in-all?
Many details of Henry’s life were learned a little later—after a few weeks’ acquaintance. When she first met him, in Ferry Hospital, it was a grim Thursday in September, and the light was murky and indistinct—as was the pencil portrait she attempted. She didn’t dare move to charcoal with Henry. Her drawing failed specifically to capture the fervency of his gaze, while failing generally to fulfill the injunction about cheerful likenesses. (It was difficult, she saw right away, to produce any cheerful portrait of Henry Vanden Akker. Intense, intelligent, soulful, spirited—these she could “do” for him. But cheerful she couldn’t do.)
While she drew, Henry discoursed, slowly but unstoppably. His words were so fascinating, she could hardly focus on her paper, which partially accounted for the disappointing result.
He told her about his back injury. “For a while, I was semi-paralyzed. The doctors weren’t sure I’d walk again. Perhaps I should be ashamed. I simply fell. On a steep little hill in the Solomons, in the New Georgia Islands. Most of the soldiers here are here because of actual wounds. Enemy fire. Me? I slipped and fell.”
“It must have been very slippery.”
“And of course it’s embarrassing—a back injury. Nobody believes you. They think you must be goldbricking—shirking. Ooh my aching back …”
“But the doctors believed you.”
“Frankly, I’m not sure all of them did.”
“Maybe you weren’t feeling well. And that’s why you fell.” Bea had a sudden inspiration. “Maybe you were dizzy because you were feverish.”
“That does seem more than likely.”
Nobody she’d ever met before had seemed so capable of viewing himself disinterestedly—as though discussing some separate person. “The truth is, most of the time, I was feverish. That’s what makes it so difficult to reconstruct—exactly what happened.”
With most soldiers, it scarcely mattered whether her portraits were any good. Beguiled by the mere process of being drawn, they marveled at the rawest resemblance and weren’t about to inquire whether Bea had captured vestiges of the soul within. But when she said, apologetically, “I’m afraid it’s not a very good likeness,” Henry Vanden Akker agreed—though he did append, politely, “I must be a very difficult subject.”
“Oh but you’re not,” Bea protested. “It’s all to do with me.”
“I don’t look like myself, for one thing. I’m eighteen pounds lighter than a year ago.” It’s true he was very thin. “Though saying I don’t look like myself is to posit one essential me, and that’s precisely the issue, isn’t it? The existence of an essential self among multitudes of selves?” His fervid eyes ransacked her face. “Am I making any sense?”
“Oh yes.” The words leaped from her throat. Bea added, after a pause: “Sort of.” And then: “I want to come back and draw you on Tuesday, assuming you’ll still be here.”
“As far as I know. Among other things, they want to analyze my digestive system, which has become very fussy. It refuses to process many things it once processed. Apparently, I’ve become a figure of great medical interest.” It was surely an unenviable distinction, but Henry looked almost pleased to be the possessor of an unusually fussy digestive system. Not for him conventional food, any more than conventional thinking. “But perhaps I’ll be gone.” He—Henry—paused, and a new tone, shadowed by a stammer, entered his voice: “But since they may m-m-move me, I would ask for your address now. Provided that’s acceptable to you.”
Whenever other soldiers had sought her address or telephone number, Bea had managed to sidestep them, but it never occurred to her to refuse Henry’s stiffly worded and very adult request. To do so would have seemed disrespectful.
Two days later, on Saturday, an envelope arrived so overloaded it had required six cents in postage. Who was it from? The neat return address told her: H. Vanden Akker. Its length—six dense handwritten pages—sparked immediate misgivings. Surely he was pushing things too fast?
But its actual contents stirred misgivings of another variety … Dreading an extravagant mash note, Bea was nonetheless chagrined to find Henry’s letter mostly devoted to meditations on Kierkegaard, with a few “random aphorisms” thrown in for good measure.
Random aphorisms? How was she supposed to respond to random aphorisms inspired by some Dutch writer (or was he Danish?) whose name she consciously mumbled, lest her pronunciation be corrected? (Why was there a line through the “o” in his
first name?)
Misgivings of a third sort were roused on Monday by a new letter, only one page long. “I’m not a poet,” it began, “and I won’t pretend to be, but I recently wrote what I suppose might be called a poem. By way of exchange, how about an indifferent poem for an indifferent portrait?” (Was Henry being condescending? Or was he actually showing her respect—figuring she would “savvy,” as Maggie would say? So many of Henry’s remarks required serious consideration.)
But it wasn’t a bad poem, was it? No, whatever it was, Bea felt certain it was far from bad. It was singular, it was interesting. Bea lay in bed, the poem held up waveringly overhead. Although she soon had it by heart, she kept reading from the author’s own comely hand—an angular, mathematical combination of printing and cursive:
The life I used to think of as my life
Was someone else’s life.
The lad I once considered my best friend
Has found another friend.
The girl I used to covet as a wife
Is someone else’s wife.
One day it seemed my life had reached its end.
The Art Student's War Page 19