Bea had even less control than usual over her tears. She cried when she read in the Free Press about a Sicilian girl who had lost all four of her brothers in the War. She cried when she read in the News about a blind man’s offering his Seeing Eye dog to the military. She cried when, in a park, a big Negro woman slapped her little daughter for picking up a piece of chewing gum from the sidewalk—even though the girl hadn’t yet put it into her mouth. And she even came close to crying when Edith reprimanded her for throwing away a sheet of paper that should have been salvaged.
At home, they were all circling warily around her. Bea sensed this only dimly, since at the moment most everything was dim, and yet she could tell—and hated herself for being able to tell while being unable to do much about it—that she was perceived as being on what Papa would call “a terrible tear.”
What was she doing? Where would it end?
Given all her recent shocks, it seemed impossible that fate had in store any additional upheavals. But it did. In one astounding day, two further revelations arrived. The boundaries of her world were being redrawn, and again redrawn …
Exactly eight days after her catastrophic visit to Mitchell’s house, and seven days after Henry’s departure, she at last received a letter. She took it into her bedroom, settling in her “nest” before allowing herself to open it.
It seemed Henry had been in Illinois—he alluded to the land of Lincoln. The letter ran for eight dense pages, but she didn’t read them all, and she never would. Nor would she reply. Instantly, she vowed never again to speak to Henry Vanden Akker.
The first two pages were hard to follow. Henry described his recent thoughts about God, and his parents, and Kierkegaard, and he spoke of “the terrifying jungle, literally and metaphorically.” Bea hurried through these passages, figuring she could go back and study them later.
But when she turned to the third page, her every sentiment altered instantly and she had no more intention, ever, of going back and rereading. “But I’m afraid no preamble could ever excuse the confession I now must make,” Henry wrote.
I lured you to Mitchell’s house under false pretenses. I had no intention of meeting him there. It was all arranged beforehand that you and I would not meet him. Do you remember the phone call? That was Mitchell, calling as arranged. It was meant to look as though he’d been delayed. It was all a ruse I’d worked out to place us alone together at last.
What was I intending would happen at Mitchell’s house? As God is my witness, I truly do not know. But one of the possibilities in my mind was what in fact did happen.
I did try to confess that night. You may recall my saying I had something to tell you. And you replied that I’d said enough. Well, perhaps I had said enough. I have no excuse to offer except my love—a love so all-encompassing …
At this point Henry’s letter reached the bottom of the third page, but what possible reason was there to follow him further? Bea would read no more. It was clear at last: horribly, hideously clear. The whole scheme was exposed in its true underhanded ghastliness. Oh, the effort she’d wasted! All this past week, trying so frantically to find something, something noble or beautiful about their last night! But it offered nothing noble or beautiful. It was all slinking ugliness, it was all chicanery and betrayal. She’d been deflowered in some little nasty mathematician’s game and so long as she lived she would never again speak to Henry Vanden Akker. Ten, twenty years from now, she might just run into him on the streets of Detroit. It would be raining, and she would lift high a luminous lilac-colored umbrella and saunter right by. Some things couldn’t be forgiven.
Bea’s hands were shaking so hard, she could scarcely have read further had she wanted to, and she didn’t want to—ever. She let the letter drop to the floor.
Oh, she’d tried so hard, really, to give Henry, and their last evening together, the benefit of the doubt! Never, never again … She wouldn’t do him the favor of reading to the end. Bea sat up on the side of her bed, gathered up the letter, and methodically, patiently tore all eight pages into little bits.
These she did not place in the family salvage. They must be expelled from the house. Bea proceeded very meticulously. First she deposited all the little scraps into her purse and then she put on her coat and a pair of gloves. Then she walked up Inquiry all the way to Mack and down Mack until she felt she’d traveled a safe and sufficient distance. She dropped some scraps into a trash container on the corner of Bellevue and Mack, walked another couple blocks, to Mount Elliott, and deposited the rest of them. It was like scattering ashes …
And later that night, three days early, as if her body yearned to register its own ultimate rejection of Henry, her period arrived, in a flow far heavier than usual and maybe darker than usual too.
For months now, she’d been aware, in the careful arranging of pad and sanitary belt, of a powerful and uncomfortable irony—for these were products purchased at Olsson’s Drugs. Though never mentioning it to anyone, she’d come to recognize that there might be something a little peculiar, psychologically, and maybe just a little unseemly, in her reliance on Olsson’s for such intimate needs. What mental game was she playing? Was she playing a game?
If so, for God’s sake no more … Bea suddenly knew with bracing certitude that she was finished with all such games, rituals, symbolic enactments. She wanted nothing to do with Ronny either, who was always talking about psychological “games,” who was always so keen to interpret her dreams. No, she wanted nothing more to do with men—especially demanding men. Let Maggie serve as the cautionary tale: before you know it, you wind up married and miserable, with a jailer as a mother-in-taw and a whining brat as a brother-in-law, waiting for a man without any teeth to come home and claim you. No, Bea was finished with all that. And—as this newest discharge of muddy blood made clear—she had come through her difficult time safely. And all but pure.
CHAPTER XIX
She’d put it solidly behind her, that evening at Mitchell’s house, and yet it continued to spin off various consequences, a few of them actually welcome. In some way the whole extended business—particularly the revelation of Henry’s treachery—had freed her. After class one day she discovered a notebook left behind. It belonged to Donald Doobly, the Negro boy who dressed so neatly and drew so neatly too. Normally, Bea would have held on to it until the next class. Now, she decided to telephone him.
Predictably, his full name (Donald Gerald Doobly, Jr.) and address were neatly inscribed on the inside cover. Donald lived on Hastings Street, in a neighborhood most people called Black Bottom but Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace called Paradise Valley. It surprised Bea a little when the phone directory revealed a Doobly family on Hastings Street—though she felt a flicker of embarrassment at her own surprise. Why shouldn’t a Negro family be listed in the phone book? But the discovery scared her a little too, as she realized she truly was going to telephone.
Of course she’d never telephoned a Negro’s house. Over time, Papa had journeyed quite a distance in his attitudes toward colored people. It was many years since he’d used the word niggers in front of Uncle Dennis, who had rebuked him so sternly (“You don’t talk that way, Vico”) that Bea honestly had worried Papa would strike his brother-in-law in retaliation. It wasn’t merely that Bea had never again heard Papa use the word. These days, he made a proud point of saying it wasn’t allowed on his watch. Did Papa recall Uncle Dennis’s rebuke? Maybe not. Even so, Bea knew, without anything’s being said, that Papa would never approve of her telephoning a Negro boy. He didn’t approve of her calling boys at all.
Yet Bea was determined. She’d reached this point partly because she genuinely liked Donald, partly because, after last summer’s riot, she felt a heightened sympathy for Negroes. And partly because—the most important part—whether she was still a virgin or not, something had altered inside her and certain conservative, half-nonsensical codes of decorum no longer commanded blind respect.
Still, she wasn’t about to call Donald from home,
even on some rare occasion when nobody else was there (Mamma left the house less and less these days). Just after dinner, while it was still light outside, she told her parents she needed to buy some deodorant and walked up to the phone booth outside Olsson’s. In the orange glow of its neon sign (half her life, it seemed, was unfolding in the light of Olsson’s Drugs) she telephoned Donald’s number.
A phone rang. Somewhere in Paradise Valley a phone was ringing because she’d dialed it.
“Hello.”
She was all but certain it was Donald. Nonetheless, Bea stuck to her plan: “May I please speak with Donald Doobly?”
On the other end, a stunned silence opened. Bea could feel it: just how wholly taken aback Donald was. And then, in a voice thinned almost to a whisper by incredulity and excitement, Donald uttered an astounding question: “Is that you, Tatiana?”
Now it was Bea’s turn to halt, dumbstruck. How in the world? Clearly—clearly Donald had recognized her voice as a white girl’s voice, but how could he possibly mistake her for Tatiana Bogoljubov? Tatiana spoke with a Russian accent …
“No, it’s Bea, Bea Paradiso. I just wanted to let you know I found your notebook. You left it. In class. I found it. Your notebook.”
“You found it,” Donald said, in a still more dwindled voice.
“I thought you might need it.”
“I’m glad you found it,” Donald said. His voice was fading away altogether.
“I thought you might be worried. That’s why I called.”
“It’s exceedingly kind of you,” Donald said, at something like normal volume. “Now I needn’t worry.”
No matter what, this conversation was probably destined to be stilted. But Donald’s initial, bizarre misapprehension couldn’t be surmounted, and everything that followed must be excruciating. After some elaborate, ritualistic repetitions, the two of them finally determined that Bea would bring the notebook to Friday’s class. “You are most kind,” Donald said in closing.
It was on the walk back down Inquiry (Bea was in front of the Slopsemas’—nearly home) when the truth belatedly dawned. Such an obvious thing—she should have seen it right away. And yet a revelation so devastating, Bea immediately turned around and began walking back toward Olsson’s. Oh, here was something to ponder.
She could hear Donald’s voice so clearly, he might still be speaking into her ear. Is that you, Tatiana?
And Donald’s tone of voice? It was the yearning sound of somebody on the threshold of a miraculous consummation.
In a couple of seconds, in a mere phrase, Donald had unwittingly disclosed his innermost heart. Oh, Donald was smitten—hopelessly smitten—with the exotic Russian girl, Tatiana Bogoljubov. Ronny and Bea might laugh themselves silly at Tatiana’s absurd get-up, her candy-colored yellow hair and sweet little doll’s face under its portentous mat of makeup, her devil-may-care scarves and asphyxiating blouses. Ronny might even declare that he was so tired of Miss Bogoljubov’s breasts. But in another corner of the classroom, where quiet Donald Doobly sat, watching the world through his Negro’s vantage, Tatiana embodied everything that was tantalizing and exquisite and unattainably remote.
Poor Donald! As Bea walked back and forth under Inquiry’s familiar constellation of just-lit streetlights, this revelation seemed less amusing or touching than purely sad. Talk about your hopeless passions … Even if they all took classes together until the end of time, Tatiana Bogoljubov would never notice Donald Doobly.
Sad, oh how it was sad, and this was lately becoming a much-too-familiar process—this sliding away of facades, revealing life’s true, blighting verities. It’s what Bea felt more and more at the family dinner table, where dolor turned everything to ash in her mouth. And Ferry Hospital broke her heart whenever she stepped inside …
She met a new boy, who was a Jew. He wasn’t a soldier, although they met at Ferry Hospital. At the age of only twenty, he was a first-year medical student. His name was Norman Kapp.
They went a couple of times to a luncheonette and twice to afternoon movies. Like Ronny, like Henry, Norman was a great talker, though not so entertaining as either of them. Still, he had a self-disparaging sense of humor Bea found appealing. He also had the heaviest beard of any boy she’d ever dated; by late afternoon, his cheeks looked nearly black. Something inside her recoiled at this, even as the portraitist marveled at skin that in certain lights looked less like flesh than stone—like a sort of wall. This was appropriate, since Bea sensed a sort of wall between them. Norman, too, made her sad.
Norman lived on the West Side, out near Dexter, where many Jewish people lived. He seemed in no hurry to introduce her to his parents, which was quite hurtful—or would have been if Bea hadn’t been similarly reluctant to bring a Jewish boy home. She would have, though, if she’d really liked him.
One thing had to be said for Norman: he couldn’t have been more appreciative. It wasn’t merely the incessant compliments; it was his air of being unable to stop complimenting her. You’re quite beautiful he declared more than once, the incredulity in his voice perhaps a comment on his own appearance: by any conventional standards, Norman was no looker. (Maggie would have quickly set him down as one of her LLs—Luckless Losers.) But there was an appealing vivacity to his features, and besides, he was so grateful.
It was this gratitude that induced Bea to allow him to hold her hand, even to kiss her. His touch lit nothing inside her—why couldn’t Norman see that? Yet almost as though her languor enhanced her appeal, Norman’s hands would grow slick with sweat, his talk accelerate, his eyes pop in his head.
Still, it was easier being with Norman than with Ronny. She’d run out of patience, completely, with Ronny’s moods—with the whole delicate and involuted business of trying to discover what, this time, was troubling him, and how best to placate him. And Ronny, doubtless sensing her withdrawal, increasingly adopted a tone of bittersweet retrospection. He even used the phrase “threw me over”: she’d thrown him over for a soldier mathematician.
Henry Vanden Akker? Bea had put him out of her head, mostly, though it vexed her when a couple of weeks passed without some further word. Perhaps the letter she’d torn up, mostly unread, had been a sort of goodbye? Perhaps it had explained something she now longed to know? But one day she received three letters from Henry, two of them thick, and though she didn’t tear these up, she didn’t read them either. She stored them, unopened, in her bureau’s bottom drawer. It felt good not to read Henry’s letters.
Yes, in many ways she was doing well, despite everything. Her thinking had swung into focus. She had entered a new state of mind, more intimately fused to the city than ever before, and what did it matter if Detroit was the only true metropolis she knew? No other city in the world was so alive. No, nowhere on earth, never before … She didn’t need the newspapers, or the newsreels, to confirm what the air declared: the whole of Detroit was a single machine. One of the newspapers got it exactly: This was the town where the Iliad met Henry Ford. The assembly lines were running twenty-four hours a day, the overburdened railroads were clanking in and out of the city, and she, Bianca Paradiso, portfolio under her arm, was a piece of it all: riding the streetcars to Ferry Hospital, to class, to the USO, observing everything. She was sketching more hours per week than ever before.
This new state of mind imposed its own demands and Bea couldn’t eat as she used to. Mamma’s meals felt too heavy, all those recipes out of The Modern Housewife’s Book of Creative Cookery weighing Bea down just when her thinking was beginning to lift. She hungered for clarity, for levitation. She rebelled at dishes with names like Shipwreck or Sammy’s Sloppy Joes or City Chicken Sticks or Drowned Tuna Loaf. Of course it wouldn’t do to malnourish herself and she was careful, when she could get them, to put cream and lots of sugar into her coffee. She ate apples and cucumbers and a great many carrots. This wasn’t lack of appetite but an enhancement of appetite, hence it mattered all the more that she eat the right things.
It was Papa, seated at d
inner one night, who first remarked on her altered eating habits, in that abrupt way of his. The words came blurting out after a long mulling over. He accused her: “You don’t eat.”
“Oh I do.” She felt herself instantly blush.
And it was Mamma who—surprisingly—came to the rescue. “She eats fine. Tonight isn’t so good. I think the meat’s off.” The meat was calf’s liver, which Bea had hardly touched. “That new butcher at Abajay’s, I think he’s a crook.”
Papa said, “That’s what you said about the folks at Wrigley’s. And A&P. Everyone’s a thief.”
“Leave the poor girl alone, Vico.”
It was an odd reversal of roles. Usually Mamma was the one offering criticism, Papa the one urging leniency. Mamma’s support ought to have been comforting, and it would have been—only, there was something disconcerting in having your eating habits defended by somebody who subsisted on candy and black coffee. Mamma’s glumness could be unnerving, but even more upsetting were those moments when, as now, gloating triumph suffused her face. Sudden, unexpected mirth creased her features, heightening your awareness of the skull under the skin. It was a skeletal apparition who grinned across the table, encouragingly, at Bea.
• • •
The sadness underneath everything, deep down at the wordless root of things, began darkening even Sundays—the family’s Italian Day, when Nonno and Nonna came for dinner.
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