CHAPTER XVI
Though almost punitively unappetizing, Mrs. Vanden Akker’s deep-fried cooking had its promised recuperative effect on Henry. Each time Bea saw him, he looked healthier and solider. His injured back, too, was mending. He moved slowly, and stiffly, but he was fully ambulatory.
Still, he wasn’t venturing often or far from home. Their encounters were restricted to his house in Pleasant Ridge. They sat in the living room. Mrs. Vanden Akker would station herself in either the living room or the adjoining kitchen. She was never out of hearing’s range—never so distant that Bea felt that the clink of a spoon against a plate, or the clearing of her throat, went unremarked.
Yet if Henry, like Mr. Vanden Akker, was thoroughly under the woman’s thumb, in one regard, anyway, he showed himself defiantly independent: he kept inviting Bea to visit. Nothing could be more apparent, as time went on, than Mrs. Vanden Akker’s disapproval of her. Mrs. Vanden Akker once went so far as to say, outright, that Henry would eventually marry “one of us”—somebody from the Dutch Reformed Church. As if Bea were scheming to lead feverish-eyed Henry Vanden Akker to the altar! Whenever Mrs. Vanden Akker issued such a remark, she had a characteristic way of jutting her head sideways and hoisting her chin—just the sort of gesture a fish might make after successfully taking the bait without the hook.
The day when Henry walked her to her bus stop seemed rich with progress, not just physical but psychological: the two of them were liberated, finally, from unshakable presences—from the other wounded soldiers in the bunks beside Henry’s, from Nurse O’Donnell, and, more to the point, from Mrs. Horace Vanden Akker.
And what did Henry do and say in their first moments of being utterly alone? He opened up the topic of religious doubt, Kierkegaard’s belief that meaningful faith must originate in doubt. And then he talked about Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, which Bea hadn’t read. It seemed Darwin had loved the South American jungle more than anything. But Darwin had been unnerved, down at the frigid southern tip of the continent, by the landscape’s bleakness and the Stone-Age lives of the Patagonian Indians. Patagonians? Who other than Henry would have heard of them? Or, having heard of them, would think them a suitable topic at such a moment? “I think my response would have been quite the opposite,” Henry said. “Starkness is fine.” He added: “It’s geometric.”
When in their slow pace they finally reached Woodward Avenue, Bea said, “Do you like living here, Henry?”
“Living where?”
“Here. In Pleasant Ridge.”
“I suppose so. It’s very pleasant, to choose the obvious word.” Henry gave her a penetrating look. “You wouldn’t like living here, Bea?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I just think it would be so odd.”
“Odd? How so?”
“To live so far from everything.”
“Far from what?”
“From the city, I guess.”
“We’re less than two miles from the city line.”
“Oh I know … I just think it might feel odd to be living out on the edge of things.”
“What edge?” Henry said. “The earth doesn’t have an edge. It’s a sphere. Roughly.”
“Oh I know—”
“If you grew up in New York,” Henry went on, “the whole city of Detroit might seem to lie on some edge. Of the Great Plains, I suppose.”
Of course Henry’s logic was unassailable. And that was part of Henry’s problem—for this was a topic, like so many of the world’s most interesting topics, where logic wouldn’t take a person too far. It was Henry’s advantage and disadvantage both: the things that animated his spirit were approachable through the linear analyses he excelled at. It wasn’t that way for her, Bea explained—or tried to. There were judgments to be based only on—only on how you felt the light fall. It was sometimes an issue of contending pigments, of complementing and warring distributions of lights and darks.
Ronny would have known what she meant, mostly, but this was nearly inexpressible with Henry. Still, for all the awkwardness, Bea tried to give him some feeling for this feeling that was such a strong feeling within her: this sensation she regularly experienced as she drifted through the outskirts of Detroit. A sense of something not quaint exactly, not cute exactly, though very like quaint and cute: this suburban conviction that fully real lives could be lived out here in Pleasant Ridge, in Royal Oak, in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills. But how could anyone fail to register a steady diminution of spirit when traveling north up Woodward Avenue—from the heart of the city into its ancillary reaches?
Oh, this was not only an impossible feeling to describe—she also risked insulting Henry and the Vanden Akker family. For it wasn’t as though Henry, even if he had grown up in a place Bea must finally regard as a stage set, himself was unreal. No, the great irony was that Henry Vanden Akker, although much the most abstruse man she’d ever met, was far “realer” than most everybody she knew.
There were no words for it, but as Bea waited for the bus she gamely struggled on. “I travel to the West Side, the light’s different. I’m still in Detroit, but the light’s different. Sometimes I think a painter needs to know only two places: a place, and a second place that isn’t at all that place. But it’s as if there are places where the light’s thicker, almost. It isn’t any brighter, just thicker, but if your goal is to paint good pictures, you want to go where the light—where the light’s thick as cream.”
The bus pulled up.
Where the light’s thick as cream… As Bea rides first a bus and then a streetcar ever deeper into the city, the phrase ricochets internally, it echoes and goes on echoing; she repeats it to herself, silently and then aloud. Her voice is low and quiet and nobody can possibly hear her over the streetcar’s racket. Nor the little giggle that follows. Oh, the things Henry’s noble gravity inspires her to say!
Or to wish to say. It sounded silly to put it this way, but Henry was unique. It was something she wanted to tell the world: here is one unusual soldier! And when Henry determined that their first outing ought to be a visit to the zoo, just round the corner from his house, Bea didn’t mention that she’d visited it recently with Maggie and Herbie. This was actually perfect. The two visits would balance each other; they would form a sort of painters’ diptych. Surely, the zoo with Henry would be a different zoo.
… And different it turned out to be—singular even before leaving the Vanden Akkers’. As if he saw himself heading off on some sort of safari, Henry sported a bizarre hat he must have picked up in the Pacific. It was woven of reeds that tended to fray, so that threadlike curlicues sprang up all over his head. Bea thought it best not to ask about it. (Ronny would have marched to the guillotine before stepping outdoors in such a hat.) Mrs. Vanden Akker, softly sighing disapproval, dropped them at the zoo entrance.
To ease the wear and tear on Henry’s back, they rode the little zoo train. “Next stop: Af-ri-ca!” the conductor roared. The toylike train inevitably turned children giggly with delight, and today there were many children, but Henry took his seat as somberly and peered out from under his hat every bit as appraisingly as someone riding a real train across the African savannah.
He was far more taciturn than usual. Generally, Henry liked to talk about ideas: about his reading, and about what might be called theological issues. When he encouraged Bea to speak (he did most of the talking), he often solicited her views on visual art, a topic about which, with appealing modesty, he claimed to understand “absolutely nothing.” He added: “You see so much.”
Perhaps because Henry hadn’t yet visited her house, most of her family stories left him looking bored—though he asked about Edith, of all people. Her mathematical gift piqued his interest, as did her organizational passions. Henry laughed aloud on hearing of her scrapbook entitled “My Testimonials.” And he loved the story of how, talking in her sleep, Edith once declared, with the clearest enunciation in the world, “I disagree completely.”
“She’s
a philosopher!” Henry cried, which actually wasn’t as fanciful as it first sounded. Whatever else she was, Edith was a deep soul.
Mamma and Aunt Grace didn’t ignite his curiosity as they did Ronny’s; in that way, Ronny had more imagination. (Bea couldn’t stop making such comparisons.) Still, though Bea knew the subject didn’t fully engage Henry, she couldn’t refrain from mentioning something that had troubled her for days.
“I had lunch this week with my aunt, Aunt Grace. You know I don’t mention such meetings to my mother. Anyway, Aunt Grace told me Uncle Dennis wanted to speak to me. Why would he want to speak to me?”
“Maybe he misses you,” Henry said. “It seems you don’t see much of him anymore.”
“But she didn’t say he wanted to see me. She said, speak to me. Why would he want to speak to me?”
“The truth is, we won’t find out until he does.”
And this was deeply typical of Henry. He loved this phrase—the truth is—which served him the way others might rely on you know or well, actually. And when a particular topic’s data turned out to be insufficient, all speculation must end. It was futile to pursue what couldn’t be solved or clarified.
The truth is? The truth was, Aunt Grace’s announcement had only aggravated an already bad situation: Bea had been terribly uneasy for weeks and weeks. Nothing had been the same since the birthday dinner on July tenth, when everything came undone. Maybe the only way to proceed was not to talk too much, forcing your thoughts elsewhere, though it had occurred to Bea that the wild needy intensity of her feelings for Ronny, and more lately for Henry, might ultimately be laid to her troubles at home. These days, her passions felt even less controllable than usual.
Given her feelings for Ronny, how could Henry tug so on her emotions? It didn’t make sense—but Henry tugged hard on her emotions. Even if, unlike Ronny, he didn’t spin her wheels, as Maggie would say, Henry stirred her heart … Oh, to see him at the zoo in his preposterous vegetal hat, staring as intently as anyone could possibly stare at a sweet-faced, mild-eyed llama—this little tableau sang to her spirit. And when she saw him emerge from the men’s room with one arm folded behind him, propping up what must be an excruciating backache, she was flooded with a sentiment that, although you maybe wouldn’t call it longing, did encompass a yearning to see him physically comforted.
Slowly, methodically, the two of them visited the ducks, the bears, the camels. On every creature, Henry fixed the same penetrating glare. “Look at him!” Bea cried, when a bear, suddenly plump as a Buddha, sat up on its hind legs, begging for popcorn. “How cute!”
Yet cuteness evidently wasn’t what scowling Henry was seeking in the amiable animal faces around him.
They stopped to rest and Henry bought her a Boston Cooler. “Henry, tell me more about Calvin College. You really enjoyed it?”
Henry’s mouth twitched. He was about to establish a fine distinction.
“I think it was absolutely the right place for me, at the right time for me. I learned to love geometry there.”
“I liked geometry, too, especially the shapes,” Bea replied, though immediately aware of how fatuous this might sound. “Talk about geometry, Henry. If it’s not too complicated.”
“But it’s simple. Which is the greatest mystery of all.” Henry went on: “Sometimes the mystery in something—or let’s go ahead and call it the miracle in something—simply disappears when you look closely. But this was just the opposite.”
“Yes,” Bea said.
“I’d always loved the way you can translate some little string of symbols—something as simple as x = y, say—into a figure on a plane. And you know what? The closer I looked, the more miraculous it became. Generally, you lose something in translations, but here nothing was lost. In all the universe, there isn’t one x that doesn’t fall on the line; and there isn’t one point on the line that the equation fails to cover. Then you make what appears to be a minor adjustment—you adjust a plus sign to a minus sign, say, or you raise an exponent by one—and the form doesn’t merely alter: it transforms, it blossoms, it leaps into another dimension. Your finite ellipse becomes an infinite hyperbola, your circle becomes a sphere. With every step, there’s a new sort of blossoming. And I saw—you know what I saw?”
“No, Henry. Tell me what you saw.”
“Well, it’s like the opening, the very opening verses of the Book of John,” Henry said. “You have only the Word, and yet you could say the Word begets everything. You could say, the Word is the world itself. And here was the Word again, this time as a little string of mathematical letters, and you know what? All of Creation happens anew. Do you see what I’m saying, Bea? Every time somebody writes an equation, all Creation is created. I truly believe that. If I write x = y on your napkin, the world is born anew. Yes, math may be true in this world, but it also makes the world. And so what does that tell us about truth?”
“It tells us something,” Bea said.
Henry said, “It speaks of God. You remember my telling you I talked to the other soldiers about God? Well one of them was an atheist—he freely admitted it—though actually I think he was an agnostic, since he was open to persuasion.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“Anyway, he kept wanting me to talk about theology from the mathematical angle. He’d say, If you added up all the good scientific arguments for God’s existence, what percentage likelihood would you arrive at? He’d say, And if you added up all the arguments against, what percentage would it be? It sounds a little silly, but I eventually realized it wasn’t at all. The question maybe was naïve, but it was also brilliant. It’s precisely what the greatest, greatest mathematician—the ideal mathematician—would accomplish. He’d find a way to quantify all the arguments and sum it up. If you believe in God, and you believe in mathematics, I don’t see how you can fail to posit the magical point of intersection where—where … Oh my—listen to me,” Henry said, and he looked both vulnerable and exultant, and Bea felt closer to him than she’d ever felt before. “I’m back in deep water, aren’t I?”
“It’s a big ocean. So you tell me.”
Henry smiled at this. And added, apologetically, “It’s all but impossible to express such things without sounding like a blockhead. To say it right, you’d have to be not only a mathematician but a poet.”
“But you are! A poet. And I have it by heart.” Bea began to recite: “‘The life I used to think of as my life—’”
An anguished look crossed Henry’s features and a quelling hand lunged forward, seizing her forearm. Bea paused, unsure why she felt so embarrassed. But Henry, too, was acutely embarrassed. Then a different sort of look dulcified his remarkable features. “You do? You have my poem by heart?” he said.
“I could prove it, Henry. If you’d only let me.”
Bea waved her hand at him, imitating his lordly gestures. Henry understood, and took this mockery well. She went on: “Silencing me with a royal wave. Honestly now. Sir Henry of Pleasant Ridge.”
Henry said, “Certain things are very hard to say, but I sometimes think they’re the only things worth saying.” He sipped his ginger ale, or would have done so if any had remained; he rattled the cubes instead. “Do you remember the first time we ever went walking? I walked you to the Woodward bus stop.”
“’course I do. You make it sound as if it were months ago, Henry.”
“Well, that was another of those mystical occasions. Remember, you were talking about art?”
“Not very articulately, I’m afraid.”
“And the light thick as cream—remember?”
“Don’t remind me.”
But Henry shrugged off her levity and self-disparagement. And in the end there was no denying his earnestness, his heavy expectant pauses.
“Yes, Henry,” Bea said somberly. “I do remember.”
What next emerged was the most roundabout and also the most extraordinary utterance the extraordinary Henry Vanden Akker had managed so far: “Well I realized
then, in some objective way that had nothing to do, finally, with my subjective state, or with anything I’ve been through this past year … The truth is, I realized that you are, as a physical presence—you are, as I say, in some absolutely objective, in almost mathematical fashion—well, that you are, Bea, without question, the most beautiful girl in the world.”
Her breath couldn’t find its way out of her throat. Then it came forward in a headlong rush: “Oh Henry, I don’t know what to say …”
In fact her words were precisely the sort of demure reply she’d been trained to make when, over the years, lavish and unexpected tributes had dropped into her lap. But this time, they were literally accurate. Up until now, Henry had never offered—not once—a true compliment about her appearance. And when he finally chose to do so, how like him it was—how wonderfully Henry it was—to dispense with preliminaries and plunge headlong into the wildest superlatives.
“Bea, have I let my feelings as a male influence my judgment? Perhaps. I don’t think so. But perhaps. Still, I’ll tell you something where no perhaps is admissible. Having watched you draw—having watched you so closely—I can inform you that you have the most beautiful hands in the world. Honestly, they’re so perfect, I don’t know whether I dare try to hold one of them.”
One of Henry’s hands, big-knuckled and yellowy pale, twitched on the tabletop. He didn’t appear to be joking or exaggerating—no, not the least little bit. And whether now, if given time, Henry would actually have reached across and taken her hand wasn’t something Bea would ever know for certain—given the way, oh so naturally, she reached across to slip her hand into his.
Slowly, Bea laced her fingertips through Henry’s, interlocking their hands, and when the bases of their fingers conjoined she experienced an internal thud-in-the-blood so potent it made her eyes water. It came with the force of a revelation: who would have guessed that, merely by taking his hand, she would feel this way? But Henry had felt it, too, and who in the world would have guessed that Henry Vanden Akker’s raw-looking eyes would well up at a simple touch?
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