The two of them sat in the zoo refreshment shed in silence a minute or two, sharing a single commanding pulse. When at last Henry withdrew his hand, he said something both typical of him and a little peculiar: “Thank you.”
So once more they wandered out into a world recolonized by animals: bears, lions, bison, alligators. The thrill of their hands’ coming together continued to daze her. Oh, Bea had peered speculatively at Henry’s bony hands at times—rather homely hands, if the truth were told. Likewise, a few times she’d glanced at his thin lips and wondered about kissing him. Mostly, though, she didn’t like thinking of Henry in this way. All the more surprising, then, to have such powerful pleasures unlocked with his touch … This was all so unlike her experience with Ronny. She’d fully expected it would be marvelous to hold Ronny’s hand, to feel his kiss, and marvelous it had turned out to be. She hadn’t looked for anything so pleasurable in Henry’s touch.
It seemed the two of them had crossed an as-yet-unidentified threshold, and Bea was left feeling jittery and giddy and voluble, while Henry appeared inexplicably morose. Perhaps his back was bothering him.
But something more than his back oppressed him in the house of the great apes. Such an extremely peculiar, unforgettably unpleasant thing happened there …
They stood and watched a very animated chimpanzee behind a sheet of glass. He swung from a sort of hat rack, he hung upside down, he bounced off a stool on springs. There was a sign on the wall behind him: “Greetings! My name is Custard and I used to play with a spare tire. But I turned it in for salvage, as my part in the War Effort.”
Custard, the irrepressible patriot, peered out coyly from behind a wooden crate. Then he stooped low for a drink of water. He must have been ten feet away.
And then (with an altogether astounding accuracy and jetting force) Custard squirted from his mouth a stream of water, directly at the two of them. The water crashed and broke against the glass, sending Henry and Bea leaping backward—it was all so sudden!—and Bea released a little scream. And Henry, too, released a cry—a much higher sound, almost a bleat, than you’d ever expect from his measured throat.
And Custard? Custard threw back his evil skull and howled and howled. He danced—he bounced and leaped with blazing glee. From ear to ear he grinned, grotesquely. The human beings? Their backward stumbling and stunned sheepish looks—these were everything Custard had hoped for …
Truly, the creature’s joy was insufferable, and Bea and Henry fled the ape house just as quickly as Henry’s ailing back would allow. They would put the chimp behind them—but in fact there was no shaking Custard’s demented ecstasy: no ridding themselves of that smirking, ferocious, superior, inhuman face. “Well that was something,” Bea said, when they reached the outdoors. She felt utterly humiliated, somehow, and this was new: to be humiliated by an animal. “I guess he doesn’t have enough to do.” She waited for Henry to answer but Henry made no reply. “It’s the sort of stunt Stevie would pull. Honestly, wouldn’t you think a monkey might behave better than my little brother?”
Bea laughed, inviting Henry to join her, but he didn’t. Henry refused to make light of the encounter. Under his eccentric hat, he stared forward as thoughtfully as he ever stared—very thoughtfully indeed.
“You can see how deep that sort of pleasure runs,” Henry began at last.
“Hm?”
“The pleasure we all take in inspiring fear.”
“Well it certainly was very startling,” Bea said.
“Bea, admit it. It was more than startling. Think about it. For just a moment, for one split second, we were terrified. And the chimp knew we’d be terrified. Hoped we’d be terrified.”
“Well, it was all so quick.”
“Despite the glass, we were terrified.”
Henry Vanden Akker swung his head around and squeezed her hand. “Bea, don’t you see? It runs so deep in us, inside the primate brain. Even a chimpanzee can feel it with extraordinary intensity.” Under the brim of his ridiculous hat, Henry’s eyes were afire: “I’m talking about the pleasure, the unholy pleasure, of inspiring fear in the heart of a stranger.”
CHAPTER XVII
Uncle Dennis seemed so much his old self—affectionate, attentive, solicitous, a little scatterbrained—that Bea immediately forgot all her earlier misgivings about this encounter. Everything would be all right.
He took her to a restaurant on Gratiot, near Eastern Market, called Uncle Danny’s. Ever since she was a little kid, Uncle Dennis had been bringing her here, presumably drawn because its name so closely resembled his own. It was the sort of silly coincidence that tickled him. He bought her a clam roll and a chocolate shake. He ordered nothing but coffee for himself. And lit his pipe.
Actually, Bea would have preferred coffee, but the moment they were seated Uncle Dennis had said, “I suppose you’ll want a chocolate shake,” and she didn’t have the heart to disabuse him. He seemed to think he was still dealing with some sort of child—not an eighteen-year-old art student.
“So tell me the latest one you’re reading,” Bea said.
“Let me see … Well in the newest one, I forget the title, the earth’s being destroyed by earthquakes. Everything’s sort of collapsing and the only escape is outer space. Different groups go up in rocket ships, carrying whatever they most value. You see, they’re never returning to earth again.”
“How dreadful.”
“Yes.” Uncle Dennis’s huge bespectacled eyes kindled with pleasure. “And there’s one old woman who brings some ancient family journal she’s never gotten round to reading. It turns out to be a chronicle of her great-great-grandmother’s journey by covered wagon across the Rockies. Pioneer stuff. And you know what? She begins to spot all sorts of peculiar coincidences, weird parallels between the wagon-train group and her own rocket-ship group. The same personalities, same problems. In fact, the parallels soon grow so uncanny, she has to wonder whether she’s caught in some bizarre reincarnation loop. Either that, or she’s going mad.”
“Is she?”
“Mm?”
“Going mad?”
“Don’t know,” Uncle Dennis said. “Haven’t finished it yet.”
The menu requested customers to limit themselves to one cup of coffee, but Uncle Dennis got around this by ordering a cup for Bea, which he then appropriated. Coffee seemed to be the one phase of wartime rationing no one in Bea’s family paid much attention to. When it came to coffee, they hoarded, they wheedled, they bartered with the neighbors.
Uncle Dennis asked about the family and Bea sketched as cheerful a group portrait as she could. Much of what she recounted was familiar information, but because he looked so encouraging, puffing his pipe, she rattled on. O’Reilly and Fein were absolutely flourishing, given the streams of new defense workers, and Papa had more business than he could handle. He’d recently bought Mamma a prewar vacuum cleaner, brand-new and still in its box; Papa had a way of finding such things when new vacuum cleaners were scarce. Stevie was still shooting Japs and Germans in the alley. Edith the Mad Knitter had been asking Mamma to cook the breakfast bacon nearly black, so there would be more fat to salvage. And Mamma—well, she seemed maybe a little calmer. She liked her vacuum cleaner.
“I do worry Papa’s working too hard.”
“Well you can see why,” Uncle Dennis said. “O’Reilly and Fein know what they’ve got: the man’s a genius in his work.”
“A genius?”
It was lovely to hear genius applied to somebody who struggled while reading the funny pages. Night after night, it pained Bea to see her father make his dutiful way through even the wordiest strips—”Gasoline Alley” or “Vignettes of Life”—until he’d grasped everything but their humor …
“I don’t use the word lightly,” Uncle Dennis said. “Especially now with the War on. There’s a lumber shortage? A shortage of nails? Of wire? The man has a genius for making do—for cutting corners without cutting quality. Yes, it’s a kind of genius, Bea.”
The word heartened Bea so much, she longed to hear Uncle Dennis expand upon it. She prompted him: “Remember the time Mr. O’Reilly showed up with presents for each of us kids?” Of course Uncle Dennis had heard the story a million times …
“Your father’d quit the firm because O’Reilly wanted to install defective plumbing.”
“Mr. O’Reilly brought me a bracelet, and Edith a doll, and Stevie a huge baseball mitt that wouldn’t fit his hand for years.”
“He realized he’d lost the best builder in the city,” Uncle Dennis said, and sipped contentedly from Bea’s cup of coffee.
“Mamma had been crying for three days,” Bea went on. “She said we were going to lose the house. It was a notion I’d never contemplated before, it didn’t seem possible: we would lose our house. How could a house get lost? I was so young, and so confused.”
“And scared, I bet.”
“You bet I was scared. Our house was going to get lost.”
“And yet you’re still in it.”
“We’re still in it,” Bea said happily.
“Actually,” Uncle Dennis said, “speaking of moving, and things like that, I have a new job offer. In Cleveland.”
“Cleveland,” Bea marveled.
This sort of thing had happened in the past. Uncle Dennis had once been offered a job in Lansing. Another time, it was Grand Rapids. He’d even had an offer in Chicago. Of course he’d stayed put … He, too, was still here.
A colleague from medical school days had recently lost his partner to Hodgkin’s lymphoma, whatever that was. (Uncle Dennis often seemed to assume everyone had attended medical school.) Cleveland was a lot like Detroit, only smaller.
“You’re the very first one I’ve told,” Uncle Dennis said. “In your family, that is. Obviously, I must come over soon and tell the others.”
Only now did Bea ascertain that something was radically awry—something was terribly, terribly wrong. She stared sharply at her uncle. “But you don’t mean you’re taking the job.”
Niece and uncle peered searchingly at each other. Then the man’s glance wobbled and dropped away. “Actually, yes, I think so,” Uncle Dennis mumbled. “Actually, I’ve already accepted.”
“But you’re not moving to Cleveland?” Bea pointed out.
When her uncle’s eyes lifted once more, they wore an importunate look—as if he were begging her permission. “Well that’s correct, actually,” he said. “We are.”
“But you don’t know anyone in Cleveland.”
“Well that’s not exactly true. There’s Whit Callahan. He’s the one who extended the offer.”
“But no family. You won’t have family.”
“I’ll always have family. Your family.”
Uncle Dennis said this so sweetly, Bea knew she ought to return his smile. But she was beginning to feel quite indignant and upset …
“But for how long?” she said.
“It’s open-ended.”
“Well—but what about your house?” Bea asked, almost triumphantly, as though Uncle Dennis had altogether forgotten his lovely home on Outer Drive.
“We’re planning to sell it.”
“Selling it? Your house? So you’re not planning to come back?”
“We may. Someday. We very well may.”
“Someday? You know what you sound like? You know what you sound like? You sound like everyone else talking about the War. That’s what you sound like! Oh, this will all be over someday—or so they keep telling us, but maybe it won’t! I’m so sick of it! I’m so sick of it! Maybe it will all go on forever!” And she had begun to cry a little. “You’re going to leave us? Oh how could you, Uncle Dennis? What about us? How could you go and leave us, the way things are now?”
And with this last barrage of questions Bea saw, more piercingly than ever before, just how hopelessly dejected and ragged everything was at home. What a pack of lies she’d been selling just minutes ago! There was something dispirited and finally desperate to the way Papa nightly came home so stooped with fatigue, smelling of beer and retreating as soon as possible behind his News, just as there was something weird and desperate in Stevie’s raging battles, or in Edith’s asking for burned bacon. And there was something far, far worse than merely desperate in Mamma’s squirreling away candy … What hope was there of repairing things if Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace were no longer on the scene? Their departure would be an admission of how irretrievably broken everything was.
A giddy possibility struck her: “I could go with you! I’m sure there are good art schools in Cleveland. Well, why not? I’ve never gone anywhere. I could go with you to Cleveland.”
Behind his glasses, Uncle Dennis’s magnified eyes pondered her closely. “Of course you could, honey.”
And now Bea began crying in earnest, for what did his words mean but Of course you can’t, honey …? How could she leave home, the way things were? The family needed her. She might be a crybaby, and a chatterbox, she might be impetuous and moody and demanding, but they needed her. Who else would initiate conversations? Who else was going to make anyone—maybe—laugh out loud? To picture the remaining four of them, night after night, alone at the dining-room table—it was just heartbreaking …
Uncle Dennis said, “Oh look what’s happened. I’ve done what I least wanted to do: I’ve made my little one cry.”
Bea retreated to the ladies’, where she rinsed her face with cold water and patted it dry. She reapplied her lipstick and threw a few practice smiles into the mirror.
When she returned to the table, she floated in on a tide of words. “But I haven’t even congratulated you, you must think I have no manners, really this is so thrilling. You’ll see new sights! And you’ll be so much closer to all sorts of things!”
“Yes,” Uncle Dennis agreed, and then, looking frankly puzzled, he added, “What sorts of things?”
“Well.” Bea came to a wordless halt.” Pittsburgh—won’t you be closer to Pittsburgh? And Dayton. Surely you’ll be closer to Dayton?”
“I suppose we will.” Uncle Dennis went on, “I think we all need a new start …”
“Of course we do,” Bea said. “I couldn’t agree more.”
“I don’t think you understand just how hard it’s been on Grace. It’s been a tremendous strain.”
“A terrible strain …”
“And on you too, I think.” Uncle Dennis eyed her professionally. “You look as if you’ve lost weight.”
“Maybe. Just a little.”
“Cleveland’s less distant than you might suppose. We’re talking under six hours in my good old Packard. Even with wartime speed limits.”
“That’s not bad at all.”
“And there’s the overnight ferry. Guess what the ferry costs.”
“I don’t know.”
“Only six dollars. Round-trip.”
“Imagine that.”
“And these days people fly. It’s less than an hour by airplane.”
“Isn’t that something.”
“I know you’ve never flown, Bea, and I want to make you an offer. Within a year, Grace and I promise to buy you a ticket to fly down and visit. Everyone ought to fly in an airplane once in their life. You see the world differently, afterward. It’s an education.”
“Why, that’s extremely generous.”
“Stevie and Edith, too, once they get a little older.”
“Stevie would die of excitement.”
“I’m afraid I have to run …”
Uncle Dennis rose from the booth and Bea rose with him. But when she got to her feet, an unshakable weight dropped squarely across her slender shoulders. She could hardly make her way unassisted out of the restaurant.
The weighted sensation only intensified in the parking lot. As traffic crept by on Gratiot, Bea stooped under the crushing burden of the Poppletons’ impending move—the worst of all imaginable abandonments—even while Uncle Dennis, who with all his buoyant, boyish heart adored the very essence of aviation, was chanting, “
Yes, you’re going to fly, Bea darling. Darling Bea, you are, you are, you’re going to fly.”
On the night when her relationship with Ronny was to change subtly but permanently, he wasn’t even there. He was away on another road trip with Mr. Olsson. Father and son were checking up on stores in Ohio and Indiana.
Predictably, Ronny’s mood had plummeted as the trip approached. Those last few days, he hadn’t been much fun to be with …
In truth, he’d been something of a pain in the neck for quite a while. Was he becoming more difficult, or was it simply Bea’s having too many other problems? She no longer felt able to give Ronny all the attention he sought. He accused her, a little petulantly, of being “distracted.” Well, there were so many problems at home, and Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace were moving to Cleveland, and there was Henry to consider …
Ronny was obsessed with Henry. He wanted to be informed whenever Bea saw him, or whenever he telephoned. Honestly, if she hadn’t limited his interrogations, Ronny would have had her confessing each time Henry took her hand.
Things would have been easier if she and Ronny were in a class together. Bea had enrolled in Professor Ravenscroft’s Principles of Landscape. But Ronny had refused to sign on. “Manhardt may be a pompous fool, but he can actually draw. Ravenscroft can’t.”
“But how can you continue without—”
“Without the Institute? Boy, you must not think me much of an artist if I need the Institute Midwest.”
Yet it turned out Ronny did need Professor Ravenscroft’s class—or something like it. His previous role had been a little unusual maybe, but not so unusual that Ronny, in his impeccably stylish way, couldn’t pull it off with aplomb: being a twenty-one-year-old male art student of stilllife painting in a city engulfed by war. But to be a twenty-one-year-old young man without a job or a schedule, pursuing art on his own—this was an all-but-indefensible role. It certainly left Ronny with no grounds for demurral when a proposal arose of a road trip to Ohio and Indiana with his father.
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