The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  But that was not the end.

  Now who was the “lad”? Some actual boyhood friend—or was this what was called poetic license? And more to the point, who was the girl? (Did Henry’s past contain violent heartbreak? Bea could well believe it.) And when had his life seemed finished—when he fell on the jungle hillside and nearly paralyzed himself? More to the point, more to the point, when and why had his life recommenced?

  CHAPTER XIV

  Sometimes, ever so obliquely, Ronny seemed to be proposing marriage, but if so, this was a union grounded in assumptions Bea scarcely recognized. True, he didn’t again suggest retreating to some Pacific island (though she still regretted her snippy reply—“Ronny, they’re fighting a war out there”). But flight was the common motif of his far-flung hypothetical: “What if we went away to the north shore of Lake Superior?” Or: “They say the light’s beautiful in the Mexican highlands.” Or: “Just because there’s never been a good painting of the Grand Canyon doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.” This was unmistakably something other than a pretty game of Let’s Pretend. Ronny’s desire and needfulness were palpable. With all his heart, Ronny Olsson yearned for the one elusive sanctuary where, side by side with his heaven-appointed partner, he might finally paint the pictures he was intended to paint.

  In truth, the shortcomings in his art were inexplicable. No other student in Professor Manhardt’s class matched Ronny’s knowledge of the history of painting, or had seen and assimilated so much art. And no one approached his draftsmanship. And yet—when Bea stood with Ronny before one of his sketches or paintings, she had to accede to his gloomy self-assessment: “Something’s missing.”

  Something was likewise missing, it seemed, in her romance with Ronny, though to confess this even to herself made her feel impossibly spoiled. He could hardly have been handsomer. Or more intelligent. And whatever word might best describe this whole indelicate business, the private truth was that his body wielded a brazen physical authority over her body: at the touch of his hands, at the hot press of his lips, her knees knocked, her stomach flip-flopped. In addition (though she didn’t like to think in such terms), Ronny Olsson represented, as the sole son of one of Detroit’s leading businessmen, an amazing, a dizzying “catch.” Maggie could hardly forgive Bea for dating anyone so glamorous.

  Even so, and even though Henry Vanden Akker was nowhere near as good-looking as Ronny Olsson, it wasn’t Ronny’s “bad paintings” but Henry’s “bad poem” Bea found herself obsessively contemplating. “The girl I used to covet as a wife / Is someone else’s wife…”It was so heartrending! Was it possible to wear your soul in your face? If such a thing were possible, Henry Vanden Akker did it: he wore his soul in his face. And if, by some miracle, she could ever really produce Henry’s portrait, she might confidently affix her name, Bianca Paradiso, to something that would rightfully hang on a museum wall in a hundred years’ time.

  Sometimes it seemed most of Ronny’s problems were nothing but various facets of the War. All those dismissive remarks of his—weren’t they just the defensiveness of somebody whose draft board had classified him 4-F? (Wouldn’t everything be different if he had no heart murmur—and who on earth would look more dashing in a uniform?) Wasn’t his entire philosophy of the visual arts a response to the War? Truly, there was no way to gauge it or even to think about the War, for it was everywhere, it was bigger than anything—bigger than all else, ever, in human history. And as poor dead Mrs. McNamee’s scrapbook attested, the War had dragged on and on—with so many rosy predictions buried in the cold earth.

  The scrapbook brought it all back: those inassimilable first months, optimistic headlines competing with terrifying speculations. The Germans might set up Canadian bases from which to bomb Detroit! That, too, had been in the News. The Germans were much closer than you thought. A North Pole—centered map showed how nearby they really were. Bomb London first, then Detroit … Those were the days when Bea had read in the paper a passage she’d never forget: “The ordinary home has no defense from an incendiary bomb, which will burn through the toughest roof.” It was as though the sentence had scorched her very soul, and for weeks she hadn’t been able to walk down Inquiry without picturing a metal projectile screaming down out of the sky, sizzling a gaping black hole through one of her neighbors’ roofs—the Higbees’, the Slopsemas’, even the Szots’ …

  Eventually, those bombs had drifted off, into the distance; they were falling now in new places with unfamiliar names. Meanwhile, the Willow Run plant (once the butt of jokes, the Will It Run) was rolling out eight heavy bombers a day, according to Uncle Dennis. We were turning the War around. That was Detroit’s job: turning the War around. It was strange, whenever you stepped into a movie house, to know you might discover your own city on the screen, for Detroit was in the national newsreels. You stepped out of the streets of Detroit and sat down in the blue darkness to examine the streets of Detroit. Meanwhile, as the movie projector whirred, the smokestacks outside were belching round the clock, and whether you actually saw the smoke or not, every Detroiter—man, woman, and child—took it right into their lungs: with every inhalation, you breathed the War. It was stamped on your milk bottles; it trimmed your clothes of extraneous material; it lay in the dust of a streetcar floor. Soldiers on the sidewalks, soldiers in Ferry Hospital, soldiers in the newsreels, Roosevelt on the radio, explaining how the soldiers were faring …

  Placed before the War’s immensity, art schools shrank to the size of cereal boxes. What canvas in the world could move her so deeply—so unconditionally—as the reptilian-green walls of Ferry Hospital? Wars come and go, Ronny might tell her, and there was genuine insight in his observation, for the world would always need somebody to recall how Raphael and Bellini had been shining for hundreds of years now, bravely, like lamps on an overgrown hillside…And yet, it did seem plausible that off in an exploding jungle, where something changed, Henry had been granted a vision profounder than anything Ronny would ever know. Bea was haunted, anyway, by that not quite handsome, red-haired, pink-eared, bony Dutch face, wherein some sort of inner light—the soul itself, the soul itself—floated closer to the surface than in other faces. Over the years, when she’d gone fishing with her father, there had been some moments of sheer visual magic after Papa hooked something. It might have been an old boot, a tin can, a silted scarf, but no: when the catch was hauled close enough—up, up through the tannin-brown water—what thrashed into view was a brilliantly jeweled living body. The creature exploded into existence, just the way, when you stare heavenward on a winter day, falling snowflakes (dark silhouettes for all their whiteness) will sometimes spin out of a gray sky, materializing out of nowhere. Silently, for the waiting eye, beautiful things occasionally leap into a crystalline reality. And it was just that way with Henry’s soul.

  From the start, Bea felt emotionally enmeshed, and the second time she saw him, her drawing hand took to his face as though its every bone and muscle were intimately known. Yes: this time the drawing flowed, flowered; here was that puzzling certitude without which there was no reason to study art.

  Bea knew no sensation in the entire universe finer than this feeling that your hand’s far smarter than you are and you can do nothing but follow it appreciatively, seeing where it will lead. She was getting it down, bearing witness to the logic of a pilgrimage whose origins just might be found on the breathless floor of a jungled Pacific island where a shocked, sweating American boy-soldier lay with a shattered back.

  “I’m afraid I’m making you look feverish,” Bea said, laughing apprehensively—and yet contentedly.

  “Then you’re doing your job,” Henry told her. “I can’t tell you how many fevers I’ve had. Did you know the British in India used to build special malaria beds? The mattress was laid on bricks, so you could stoke a fire underneath, heating the bed when the chills came on.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s one of the few things I ever learned in my life that I wish I’d had no o
ccasion to learn.”

  For all its tone of certainty, Henry’s voice was mild. He added, “Though I’m feeling much better. It’s amazing how my back’s improved. At one point, they thought—well, they thought I might be semi-paralyzed for life.”

  “Yes. You mentioned.”

  “Sorry. The truth is, I don’t always recall what I’ve said. Or whether I said it aloud.”

  “I’m happy to listen more than once …”

  In the air between them, firm as any handshake, their glances met. Confidently, delicately, Bea said to him, “You must have been so frightened.”

  “All of us,” Henry Vanden Akker said. “Everyone on the whole island. We were all, everybody, so frightened. You know, I’d never seen an ocean before.”

  “Me neither. Not yet …”

  “And it was such a little island, really. Look at the Solomons on a map. Dots. Geometric points. The smallness made it much worse, somehow. I couldn’t honestly believe how enormous the sea was. Here I am, a trained mathematician. I’m accustomed to thinking about the infinite. And yet I couldn’t comprehend the cubic dimensions of the ocean. It bedeviled—” Henry paused. A look of what might have been confusion—might have been fear—shadowed his features. He began anew: “It troubled my imagination.”

  “It must be very deep,” Bea replied—which came out sounding very shallow. “The sea,” she appended, by way of explanation.

  “And the fear. I couldn’t comprehend that either,” Henry Vanden Akker continued, with that weird exciting chilly directness of his. “I am a believer after all, a believer in a just and loving God. How could the universe contain anything so fearful to me?”

  “Well, the conditions sound positively—”

  “The sea made everything else so small.” And Henry’s voice had grown so small. “Even the sky. God’s very own Heaven seemed small. I’m not making sense, am I,” he apologized.

  “Neither am I,” Bea said, apologizing with him—side by side with him, you might say.

  “And most of the men around me, they were believers, too. I asked them. I talked with them about God. But it made no difference: all of us felt that fear. And you know what? It got so I would have sworn to you, absolutely sworn to you, that the vegetation felt it. The palm trees shook all day in perpetual fear. The vines were frightened, right down to their muddy roots. The crawling ant-infested earth was frightened silly.”

  “Well I’d be frightened too, if I thought I might be paralyzed—”

  “Oh but the accident came later. Don’t you see?” Henry’s ears were red as ripe tomatoes. “First came the fear …”

  This time it was too much to sustain each other’s gaze. Henry glanced off, and Bea peered into the half-materialized face of the young man on the white paper before her.

  A distant honking of horns vaulted up from the street below. It was odd how, here on the West Side, even the sounds of traffic felt different—they felt yellower, more loosely put together than on her own East Side. “Tell me about the jungle,” Bea said. “You know I’ve never seen jungle.”

  “It’s a very odd place,” Henry said. “Especially if you have a Michigan sort of mind. I’ve concluded I have a Michigan sort of mind.”

  It was precisely the type of remark that so piqued and attracted her. Was it possible to have a Michigan sort of mind? Did she have a Michigan sort of mind?

  “Of course I’d been in forests before, but there’s always lots of air in a Michigan forest. It’s not the same desperation. All that choking claustrophobia. You know what it’s like? Y’ever look at a drop of swamp water under a microscope?”

  “I must have,” Bea confidently replied—but when would she have looked at swamp water through a microscope?

  “A whole world. It’s really a whole world, and everything’s just so crowded and crazed, millions of these minuscule creatures—billions, trillions—hunting down even more minuscule creatures. That’s …” A sizable pause followed, Henry’s eyes met hers, he shrugged.

  Bea went back to her drawing.

  When, some ten mostly silent minutes later, she finally revealed the portrait, Henry scrutinized it narrowly and then—something unexpected, something not seen heretofore—he grinned, broadly. Corporal Henry Vanden Akker had a gorgeous smile.

  “Oh I approve of this.”

  “It’s nothing like the other soldier portraits I’ve drawn,” Bea hastened to explain. “Behind your head? Those are stars—jungle stars.” She had sketched in, lightly, as a sort of joke-tribute to van Gogh, tiny vortices, dense as spiderwebs. “And those are jungle ferns.” At the bottom she had supplied, again lightly, some outspread ornamental ferns. Courtesy of Gauguin.

  “Am I to keep this?” he asked.

  For all the stiffness of his phrasing, Henry resembled a child—a child about to receive a birthday present.

  “You are indeed. And I’ll take home the previous one and burn it to ash and bury the ashes.”

  “There’s no question this version is much finer. Don’t you think it makes me look quite intellectual? Don’t I look brainy?”

  Brainy? Such a lovely, odd, funny thing for Henry to say …

  “I told you, it makes you look feverish.”

  “I’ll be leaving here soon. Will you come visit me at home, in Pleasant Ridge? You know it’s just up Woodward.”

  “Well …” Bea paused judiciously. “The rules are very strict. It’s the law as laid down by Mr. Kronstein, he’s the administrator here, and also by Nurse O’Donnell. I’m not supposed to—”

  “To fraternize with the enemy?”

  “How cruel you can be, Henry.”

  Bea’s playful words wounded him: his pallid features thickened, his lower lip jutted into a childish pout. “Cruel?” Henry said. “I—but I was only joking.”

  “But Henry, I was too,” Bea answered Corporal Vanden Akker, who, if they were indeed to spend any time together, must learn to appreciate this other facet to her personality: the teasing, the banter.

  For a moment Henry’s face clouded abstractedly, as if he were pondering the sort of problem you pondered if you were a summa cum laude graduate in mathematics from Calvin College. Then he departed from all that, and did so in the sweetest way imaginable. He grinned at her. Beautifully.

  CHAPTER XV

  “No. I don’t feel sorry for you. Not the least teeniest eentsy bit.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to feel—”

  “Like fun you weren’t. Jabbering on and on about the burden of having two fascinating men absolutely mad for you.”

  “I wasn’t complaining about them. I was merely pointing out how their two mothers—”

  “Tell me about it. Do. Go tell me about how hard it is dealing with some boy’s crazy mother …”

  Although Maggie was in her preferred element—stagily tossing off grand-scale lamentations—there was no ignoring how miserable she was at bottom. Poor Maggie! Ma’am Hamm was making life impossible. The irony would have been funny if it weren’t so pathetic: having spent the first eighteen years of her life yearning to flee the Szot home on Inquiry, Maggie was spending her nineteenth scheming of ways to return to it. Anything—anything other than living with her in-laws.

  “She honestly thinks I’m a slut,” Maggie cried—a word Bea winced at. But Maggie’s exasperation was understandable: Ma’am Hamm kept her under round-the-clock surveillance.

  To make things worse, the Hamms lived way out Grand River—out near Lahser and Fenkell—and Mrs. Hamm didn’t approve of her daughter-in-law’s riding alone on streetcars or buses. Whenever she wanted to go anywhere, Maggie was dependent on Mrs. Hamm, who insisted that all journeys be planned well in advance and who could be counted on to contrive last-minute scheduling conflicts. Only after lengthy negotiation had Mrs. Hamm agreed to ferry Maggie on today’s outing to the zoo.

  And of course Maggie hadn’t come alone. George’s younger brother, Herbie, must come along. Poor Maggie had been reduced to arguing that the afternoon was desi
gned for Herbie’s benefit.

  Pale, plump, whiny, laggardly—Herbie Hamm was about as unlikable as any eleven-year-old boy who wasn’t positively hateful could be. He was forever getting literally underfoot: today, Bea had already twice trod on the boy’s heels, each time provoking a wan, contorted expression of pinched resentment. The furrow between his eyebrows was remarkably incisive for someone not yet in his teens.

  Bea had lost track of the number of times a pebble got into Herbie’s shoe. Also, his knee hurt, and his ankle hurt. The animal smells afflicted him. As did the gnats in the reptile house.

  All his complaints turned out to be wheedling maneuvers in pursuit of “treats”—he was a terrible glutton for sugar. Maggie in her seething impatience was determined to provide as few treats as possible; she even threatened Herbie with a good healthy lunch.

  It was Bea who concocted a jokey counter-notion: “Why don’t we stuff him into a stupor?”

  In a complete about-face, Maggie seized on the idea. She bought Herbie an ice-cream cone. She bought him a Boston Cooler. She bought him a bag of caramel corn. She bought him a 3 Musketeers and a box of jujubes. She bought him a brownie.

  Unlike so many bright-sounding ideas, this one actually succeeded as planned. Herbie asked to sit down and was guided to a bench overlooking a distant pond. He slumped forward in a pacified state, sucking on butterscotch balls. He allowed Maggie and Bea to sit on a different bench, some ways away, where they were free to talk—or where Bea tried to talk and Maggie regularly interrupted.

  “But I’m dealing with two of these women. These two very peculiar—”

  “Listen, I’ll gladly trade you one Ma’am Hamm for any two peculiar women of your choice and choosing.”

  “I mean the contrast couldn’t be greater. Have you ever heard of oliebolle? They’re these revolting Dutch pastries, nothing but grease really, I think they’re literally oil balls, topped—”

  “Don’t get me started on the Jailer’s cooking. Don’t get me started.”