The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  “Meanwhile, Mrs. Olsson is taking me to restaurants where they serve venison—you know, deer. I’m not kidding. Appetizers at a dollar a piece—a dollar!”

  “Don’t even ask when’s the last time I went to a decent restaurant. Don’t even. You didn’t bring a picture of him, did you? ’Spite how many times I’ve asked?”

  Maggie simply refused to sit and listen to any comparisons between Mrs. Charles Olsson and Mrs. Horace Vanden Akker. Or to hear about Henry. Ronny, though—the exquisitely handsome young man in the exquisitely tailored clothes, the talented artist who balked at running his family’s drugstore empire—was a shining figure. He engaged Maggie’s imagination as the gaunt mathematical soldier with that most suspect of all disabilities, an injured back, could not.

  These days, Bea saw so little of Maggie that their rare get-togethers were probably destined to disappoint. Maggie’s typical habit of interruption, and her eventual monopolization of every conversation, had been less irksome back when she was still single and lived on Inquiry—when they saw each other all the time. But nowadays Bea came to their meetings with such a powerful need of unburdening herself, she couldn’t help resenting how all conversations circled back to the Jailer, the Turnkey, the Probation Officer. Bea found herself peevish with Maggie—then guilty at being peevish, when she ought to be commiserating: poor Maggie was so wretched!

  It seemed so long ago now that Maggie had been Maggie Szot, the little spitfire, sashaying down Inquiry secure in the knowledge of her sparkly appeal. Even Papa had bent every rule in Maggie’s favor. Though her lipstick had been too red, and her skirts too short, though her laughter was too loud and she wore far too much perfume, Papa’s face brightened on her arrival. Men’s faces did. If Maggie was no true beauty, she was something rarer and more precious: a spirit whose fierce vivacity beckoned you irresistibly into her world. Papa forgave Maggie even after he discovered she’d been concealing a pair of high heels under his own front porch—shoes with heels too elevated to get past the fitfully watchful gaze of Mr. Szot. Maggie would step from home in acceptable footwear, saunter down the block to the Paradisos’, fish her rain-slicker-wrapped high heels out from under the front porch, and proceed briskly down Inquiry, beaming at everyone she met …

  What Bea wanted to discuss, at least for the moment, wasn’t Ronny, or even Henry, but Ronny’s parents, and still more Henry’s parents. Henry had gone home from the hospital and Bea, at his urging, had visited him a couple of times in his white stucco house in Pleasant Ridge. It was a perfect mathematician’s house, with strict bilateral symmetry. From the front walk, everything was in balance. The trimmed hedges matched each other left to right, the candlesticks in the downstairs windows matched left to right, the arrangement of blue and white vases in the upstairs windows matched left to right.

  Henry’s father was an accountant, but his real discipline, which he discussed with more enthusiasm than clarity, was church history. Over the years Bea had been exposed to a broad range of Christianity (Catholicism, Lutheranism, Methodism), but nothing had prepared her for the Vanden Akkers’ Dutch Reformed Church.

  If its guiding principles remained a mystery, this wasn’t for Mr. Vanden Akker’s lack of trying. He talked about John Calvin, who had spent time in prison, and whose brother was executed, and someone named Zwingli, who evidently believed music was a distraction unsuitable for churches. Mr. Vanden Akker talked about the “beggars,” who were apparently not real beggars, and the “five heads,” which were not people but some kind of doctrine, and the oppressive Philip, who was the king of Italy. Or possibly Spain. Mr. Vanden Akker would rattle on until abruptly hushed by Mrs. Vanden Akker, who openly commanded the household. When she halted him in midsentence, Mr. Vanden Akker looked apologetic rather than resentful, like a child receiving a deserved reprimand. Henry, too, was a child in Mrs. Vanden Akker’s presence. But how strange, and disconcerting, to see this maverick young man lately of Ferry Hospital—so firm in all his pronouncements, so intellectually formidable through all his infirmities—transformed into somebody’s deferential and intimidated little boy …

  Stout without appearing the least bit soft, Mrs. Vanden Akker was blonde and round-faced and fair-skinned. At each visit, she offered Bea a great many strange things to eat: krakelingen, gebak, poffertjes. Mrs. Vanden Akker had shown herself so conscientious about Bea’s refreshment, and so inquisitive about her family and schooling and ancestry, that Bea didn’t initially grasp that Mrs. Horace Vanden Akker deeply disapproved of the sort of Italian-looking girl art student who rode the streetcar with a portfolio of soldiers’ faces under her arm.

  “You heard from George?” Bea asked.

  Maggie hesitated. Her response to this question customarily took one of two sharply divergent paths: imminent death, or paradise on earth. When she took the first path, Maggie could soon turn inconsolable. (“Bea, if the Japs attack, there’s nowhere to run. Did you know Hawaii’s nothing but an island?”) Fortunately, Maggie took the second path:

  “George? George is fine. Eating pineapples. You know what he wrote and asked me? If I’d ever eaten fresh pineapple. He’s eating fresh pineapple and I’m eating the Jailer’s cooking.”

  “Maybe that helps keep the weight down.”

  “That’s the worst of all. Because it’s completely inedible, I eat way too much.”

  In truth, Maggie looked a little broader than usual. Roundness was part of her charm—her bosomy bounciness—but Maggie, as Mamma often pointed out, would need to watch it when she got older.

  It wasn’t much of a day for the zoo, damp and chill, the sky a glossy gray through the autumnal trees. The season was nearly over. Not many folks had turned up, and even the animals shared in the listlessness.

  Herbie, meanwhile, uncharacteristically reflective, was sitting on his bench, languidly popping butterscotch balls into his face.

  “Bea, if I tell you something, promise you won’t turn all angry and proper? Or give me any lectures?”

  The day’s coolness turned a little cooler. Bea knew where this was headed, somehow.

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’ve been in touch with Walton. You know—Wally. He goes by Walton now.”

  “I thought that’s what you were going to say.”

  “You usually do. Know what I’m going to say.”

  Ages ago, Maggie had embraced this bit of Paradiso family lore: Bea had second sight. With Maggie, though, the notion was a kind of joke. She’d turned it into one more humorous mournful cry of self-deprivation: why oh why had she not been given Bea’s gift?

  “How do you mean in touch?” Bea said.

  “We spoke on the phone.”

  “Does in touch include seeing him?”

  “How else? We’re not supposed to tie up the phone, that’s unpatriotic. And only a few times. Only coffee. Obviously I couldn’t see anyone, not really. What with the Jailer breathing down my neck.”

  Maggie’s in touch naturally evoked the first of the two most salient things about Wally: his deformed hand, which he all but invariably kept pocketed. Bea’s fleeting glimpses had revealed something less like a hand than—dwindled, twisted, deathly pale—a chicken’s wing.

  “Coffee where?”

  “A diner. Out on Fenkell. He’d meet me anywhere. If I called right now and said, Wally, I’m sitting outside the Chimp Theater at the zoo, he’d say, Sit tight, kid, I’ll drop everything and be right there.”

  “He calls you kid?”

  “He’s still …” Maggie paused.

  “Still hopelessly, absolutely, doggishly devoted? Still carrying a torch big as the Statue of Liberty’s?”

  And Maggie laughed—laughed in a bright, throaty, mischievous way Bea hadn’t heard in months. Bea had almost forgotten the sound, though it was one of her favorite sounds in the world. This was laughter that took a bite right out of the air. “Yes,” Maggie said, her eyes shining. “I suppose that sums up Wally.”

  And here was the second striking thing
about Wally: his fidelity. It seemed he’d fallen for Maggie back in fourth grade at Field Elementary and had never righted his equilibrium. In the intervening years, all through the Depression, things had gone beautifully for the Waller family (Mr. Waller was the founder of Waller Plate Glass), who had moved first to a pillared house in Indian Village and later to a lakeshore home in Grosse Pointe. Yet it appeared that baby-faced Wally, peering out over Lake St. Clair, pined even yet for a girl immured in a dingy bungalow out at Fenkell and Grand River presided over by a woman called the Jailer.

  There should have been something grave about Wally, with his deformed hand and his hopeless passion, but gravity had a way of turning risible around him. It was true of his face—a handsome but boyish face, ideal for embodying puppy love. It was true of his name. So he went by Walton now. Walton Waller. Years ago, at his christening, the family presumably had detected something refined in those echoing similar-but-distinct syllables. But not even Maggie reliably remembered to call him Walton. No, he was destined to go through life with a moniker suitable for a fraternity-house skit: Wally Waller.

  “And what if the Jailer were to catch you having coffee in a diner with Wally?”

  “Probably will,” Maggie assented gloomily. “And that’ll be it, won’t it? Finito to Maggie’s life. It’ll be solitary confinement, broken only by inedible meals. I wrote George saying I was thinking of moving back home, with my parents …”

  “Yes, you mentioned.”

  “And he said I mustn’t,” Maggie went on, as though informing Bea for the first time. “Ma’am Hamm might be hurt. Obviously, he’s as terrified of her as I am.”

  “I think of you as fearless.”

  “No. Terrified of Ma’am Hamm. Worse than shots.”

  “Yes, shots,” Bea echoed, and laughed happily. Given Bea’s nighttime jitters, Maggie’s general fearlessness was hugely endearing. Oh, to be so bold! But Maggie’s sole phobia was also endearing. She was the only person Bea knew who had actually fainted at the sight of a hypodermic needle.

  “Boys and their mothers,” Bea went on. “I was talking about Henry’s mother and Ronny’s mother.”

  And it seemed Maggie had finally pitched herself into such abject gloom as to be willing to listen without interrupting. Bea told her a little more about Mrs. Olsson—the drinking, the extraordinary clothes, the spats with Mr. Olsson. Bea then turned to Mrs. Vanden Akker: the greasy Dutch pastries and the vats of steaming coffee, the affirmative nodding that masked disapproval … but Maggie didn’t want to hear about Mrs. Vanden Akker. Or about Mrs. Olsson, except maybe her clothes. Ronny, though—Maggie was keen for more about him.

  “You said he’s so moody. What do you mean moody?”

  “Moody the way anybody’s moody. And about—about being romantic. I mean I get into his car, I don’t know if he’s going to sit and talk about art—or whether he’s going to turn into an octopus.”

  “But you haven’t gone to bed with him …”

  Count on Maggie to say something like that! “No, of course not, but you know there are various degrees.”

  Bea paused. Who was she to explain such things to Maggie, who was a married woman—who was no virgin? Maggie over the years had always shown a willingness to discuss such matters—far more than Bea herself. But Maggie had had surprisingly little to say about what must be the culmination of all such discussions, and what she had said was clipped and self-contradictory. It changes everything, Maggie once remarked, referring to the loss of her virginity. But on another occasion she said, Hey, honey, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Under other circumstances, this honey might have seemed annoying—condescending and affected—but Bea had felt too keenly inquisitive to bristle.

  Throughout their endless friendship Maggie had always been strikingly insouciant about exposing her body. In the old days, before their builds went such different ways, she was forever coming upstairs to Bea’s room to borrow clothes—pausing for long moments in her underwear while narrating another story, initiating a new line of conversation. The same thing happened in the locker room, when they went swimming at the Y: Maggie took on a special glow while chatting, naked as a jaybird, under the covertly appraising eyes of friends and strangers alike. The result was that Bea had a sharper, more painterly feeling for Maggie’s body than for anyone’s but her own, and what made this a little unsettling, even faintly repulsive, were Maggie’s anatomical peculiarities: Maggie was double-jointed; Maggie could wiggle both ears; Maggie could nearly touch the tip of her nose with her tongue. And Maggie openly enjoyed making a naked exhibition of herself, which wasn’t the Paradiso way. It was part of Papa’s proud propriety that, except at the lake, you never saw him with legs or chest uncovered, and Mamma—Mamma would scramble, almost frantic, when surprised in some state of dishabille. Even Stevie, entering his teens, would glow like a beet on discovering he’d left his fly half zipped.

  “So you wouldn’t go to bed with him? Under any circumstances?”

  “Maggie, stop.”

  “So what’s he got to be moody about—Ronny?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because he’s an artist?”

  “Well thank heavens George is no artist. Moody is one thing George isn’t.”

  Though George was quite good-looking in a short, compact, neat-featured way, Bea had trouble picturing him in a romantic setting. She couldn’t get past the knowledge that the Army had yanked out all his teeth. She knew she ought to be able to get past it—simple patriotism demanded nothing less—but she couldn’t shake the image of George with a caved-in mouth depositing his choppers in a glass. (Sometimes Bea wished she didn’t picture things so vividly.)

  Maggie went on: “Or you could say he has one mood: he wants it.” And Maggie, quite wantonly, ran a hand across her flank.

  Just then another hand—Herbie’s pale and pudgy hand—pulled on Maggie’s sleeve. “I don’t feel so hot,” he said.

  “Oh Herbie, for Pete’s sake. Haven’t I given you everything you’ve asked for and more?”

  The boy was not only pale but glassy looking. As though his face might shatter if you gave him a slap.

  “I don’t feel so hot,” Herbie repeated stubbornly.

  “You would do this to me, wouldn’t you?”

  “I needa go the toilet,” the boy said.

  “Right,” Maggie said.” ’course you do.”

  The three of them set out in search of a toilet—Herbie in the middle, dragging a bit—but none was to be found. They passed a tiger, looking sleepy, and some lions, also sleepy, and quite a few red-rumped baboons, most of them asleep.

  “I needa go the toilet.”

  “Well you’ll just hafta hold it. Or you can do what the animals do … You think the zebras have central plumbing? You suppose the giraffes have private rest rooms?”

  “I ga go now,” Herbie said.

  Mysteriously, since Bea would have sworn they’d been mostly following a straight line, they came full circle: here were the very benches they’d been sitting upon. More mysterious still, bathrooms stood right before them. Somehow they’d walked right past them.

  Herbie, looking much revived, did not keep them waiting long. Maggie took a new tone: “All right, Herbie honey, whatcha wanna see next? Come to think of it, my stomach’s shaky too. All the walking, don’t you think? You know, it’d be a shame you mentioned this to your mom, because she might think it was all the treats. She might say I shouldn’t buy you treats, and we’d be sorry about that, wouldn’t we, hon?”

  But they didn’t get far before Herbie’s face turned green and glassy once more. The three of them beat a quick retreat to the restrooms.

  This time, Herbie stayed in a very long time—so long that Bea said, “Do you think he died?”

  “Wishful thinking. Damn the little monster.”

  After prompting each other, the two of them approached the doorway, and Maggie called in, “Her—bie. Her—bie.” No answer. A man exiting with his hands at his waist—he was adju
sting his fly—flashed them an interested look. They hurried back to their bench. “She’s going to kill me,” Maggie sighed, and added, which made Bea laugh, “George is going to be a war widower.”

  Two boys were nearing the men’s room. They looked approachably young—not much older than Stevie—and Bea called to them. “Boys,” she said. “Excuse me, boys.” Maggie interrupted and made it plain: “Would you go in and see if there’s a dead boy named Herbie in there?”

  The boys raced inside and returned disappointed a minute later. “Oh he’s all right,” one of them reported. “He’s just been throwing up.”

  “Throwing up? Oh hell, she’s going to kill me.”

  “Now he’s just sort of sitting there,” the other boy said.

  “If he’s thrown up on his clothes, I’m a dead girl.”

  When Herbie at last emerged, he reeked of vomit. He had indeed thrown up on his jacket.

  “Oh hell, oh dear,” Maggie said, not knowing which tone to take. “Herbie, honey, better if you sit down. Bea, couldja work on his jacket? Bea?”

  Maggie removed the boy’s jacket and handed it over. Then she settled her arm around Herbie and said, “Now honey, normally I wouldn’t advise anything less than total honesty, but in this case I really think we shouldn’t worry your mother. She can be a bit high-strung is how it is.”

  The only soap available in the ladies’ room was an abrasive pink powder. Using first some paper towel and then, feeling desperate, a fine lace handkerchief from her purse, Bea worked and worked on the stained front of Herbie’s gray wool jacket. Given how sodden the material soon became, it was difficult to say how successful her efforts were. But she went on scrubbing. It had been her idea, after all, to stuff the boy into a stupor.

  When Bea at last left the restroom, she found Maggie and Herbie still on the bench, Maggie’s arm extended around the boy. She had bought him a Coca-Cola to soothe his sugar-overloaded stomach. Her conversation had not budged. The first thing Bea heard was: “Naturally, I would never want you to be dishonest with your mother …”