The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  In the afternoon Bea recalled her relief when, three days early, her period had arrived, and only now perceived how unforgivably selfish she’d been, and wept more bitterly than she’d wept all day. Henry would never have children, and yet she had felt relief when Henry’s one and only chance for children was lost. What had happened to Henry’s children? Didn’t they, too, perish in that plane crash?

  Bea wasn’t to be cajoled down to dinner, though Papa tried and Mamma tried and even Edith tried. Eventually Papa brought up a bowl of ham and navy-bean soup. “You have to eat,” he said, and sat himself down in the desk chair. She promised she would try if he’d only leave her alone—but Papa wouldn’t budge. “I stay until you eat your soup,” he announced. He wasn’t often like this, but nothing was more characteristic of his inner self: intervals of proud doggedness when he declared himself immovable.

  Bea’s hands were trembling so pitifully, it wasn’t easy getting the soup to her mouth—and, besides, she wasn’t hungry. But Papa sat silently, steadfastly, until she’d finished half the bowl, then gave a slow, satisfied nod when she set it down on the bedside table. “That’s all,” she said. He asked what was the matter.

  For a while Bea couldn’t get the words out through her sobbing. But Papa was patient and in time she managed to relate much of the story. “I’m sorry you lost your friend,” he said.

  I’m sorry you lost your friend, her father said.

  Lost her friend? How could Papa possibly understand, who had never even met Henry? No—no—no: Papa had scarcely heard of Henry, partly because Papa was so busy, and partly because lately Bea had chosen to keep things to herself. As far as Papa knew, Henry was just a boy among boys. How could he comprehend that Henry was the one, the chosen unique one, to whom she’d elected to give herself?

  After a while Papa went away, downstairs, leaving the soup behind. Edith appeared eventually and asked if she could sleep in the upper bunk. The request started Bea crying anew. Alone—she needed to be alone …

  Then Bea slept and the next morning she woke up early, feeling much restored, and resolved to clean her room. She changed her sheets and Edith’s sheets, and yanked everything out of her bureau and refolded the clothes and tucked them back into the bureau. She was doing much better, but she suffered a serious setback when she found a minuscule scrap of paper, no larger than a quarter, under the bed.

  It spoke to her.

  Bea’s heart knew what it was, though she didn’t yet know what it was. But in the assimilating, puzzled interval before recognition, it murmured reassuringly against her fingertips.

  Bea examined it closely.

  It was Henry’s handwriting. This little scrap? It could only be one of those scraps created when she’d spitefully torn up his eight-page letter, so many weeks ago—so long ago. Yes, that’s what she’d done. First, he’d tried to apologize in person, and she had rebuked him: Henry, haven’t you said enough? Then, Henry had composed an eight-page letter, in which he’d laid out the lineaments of his soul, and she had methodically ripped it into angry bits … That was the sort of heartless, wretched person she was, and how could he, how could anyone, possibly love her?

  Bea had thought she’d discarded every last howling scrap in the two trash bins on Mack, but she hadn’t. One fragment, one stubborn little message-laden token of Henry’s soul, had survived under the bed.

  What was the ultimate message from her Henry?

  There was an ied and a th at the top of the scrap—the tail of one word and the head of another. Below lay a complete word, rut, though it, too, was probably a fragment. The word had presumably been truth—that pet favorite of Henry’s elevated lexicon: he had left her a fragment of the truth. Oh, she could hear him pronouncing it in his distinctive voice—But the truth is, Bea, he might begin. Or, Yet the difficult truth of the matter … And another flood of tears assailed her.

  Afterward, Bea felt much better—better even than she’d felt in the morning, and she headed off toward Ferry with her portfolio. But she had no sooner mounted the steps and found herself enclosed by the green corridors than she began trembling with such severity she had to scurry back out into fresh air. She dropped down—all but collapsed—on the front steps, though as far to the side as possible. And there she wept, while people went up and down, up and down. At Ferry Hospital, they were used to such sights.

  When she finally tottered off the steps, Bea realized only one destination was possible. Home. Simultaneously, she saw that this plan was unworkable. She couldn’t possibly face a streetcar, and it was miles too far to walk. From here, from this hospital where she’d been born, there was simply no getting home.

  Though it was an unheard-of extravagance, Bea deposited herself in a taxi and rode all the way home, almost. Obviously, she couldn’t arrive on her doorstep in a taxicab. She crawled out in front of Olsson’s and straggled down Inquiry and through the front door and, explaining to Mamma as she stumbled upstairs that she wasn’t feeling well, finally collapsed on her bed. Where she remained the rest of the day.

  When she woke the next morning, Bea knew she couldn’t handle Ferry, or the Institute Midwest, and it occurred to her she might be finished with both forever. But what would substitute for them? If she were no longer an art student, the only sensible path was to find a job, but the very thought of getting dressed and heading off into the city—into the humming sleepless madness of wartime Detroit—injected nauseating chemicals into the churning bag of her stomach. What on earth was she to do? Women in slacks were employed in tank factories, they were running gas stations, they were bus conductorettes—but at the moment Bea could hardly imagine even climbing aboard a streetcar. What was she to do?

  It was a relief, mostly, when Ronny showed up. (She had telephoned him in the morning, hadn’t she? Their conversation, like so many recent conversations, seemed more imagined than real.) Anyway, here was Ronny, on her doorstep. This was sweet. Bea could see that: it was sweet of him to come.

  They walked to Buttery Creek Park, where they sat on a bench and she leaned on his shoulder and wept recklessly into the front of his shirt. After a while, once she’d calmed down, Ronny said, “I remember you telling me how lucky you felt because you hadn’t known anyone yet who died in the War. Though you did feel it coming closer and closer.”

  “Yes.”

  Yes, she’d told him that.

  “And then the news arrived. And it would turn out to be him, of all people.”

  “Yes. Though somehow I knew it was going to happen.”

  “I’m so sorry …” Ronny gazed at her, fondly, and maybe a little sadly, and he said, “You really loved him, didn’t you.”

  Oh: and weren’t these the perfect words? Oh, it was so good of Ronny to say such a thing! Now she could open her heart … Yes, of course yes: Yes, she’d really loved Henry, and she’d lost her one true love, who had never once heard her declare, and now would never hear her declare, I love you.

  So Bea wept with renewed anguish on Ronny’s shoulder and dried her eyes and confessed again that yes, she had loved Henry. And Ronny looked saddened but also vindicated: he’d thought as much. He’d known how she felt before she herself did.

  Oh, it was all so sweet of Ronny, so considerate and good of Ronny, who held her hand and walked her through the park and took her out for coffee and a cinnamon roll and didn’t upbraid her when she ate almost none of it. She drank her cup of coffee and most of Ronny’s coffee and then (since Ronny thought more coffee wouldn’t be good for her, even if the waiter would have brought it) a cup of tea. The warmth of the drinks was comforting.

  Ronny was back the next day and this time he drove her to Belle Isle, where the light inside the green-tiled aquarium somehow made her feel better than she’d felt in—in how long? She couldn’t say, really. It was a shame they didn’t have some sort of cafeteria set up inside here. The tiles were genuine Pewabic, one of the world’s loveliest greens, and Bea, securely enfolded in their unearthly, watery light, could have ling
ered all day, and her appetite would have returned, the two of them seated at some table overlooking tanks where pike and trout and shy, boldly colored clownfish stared out from one world into another.

  It was unexpectedly liberating—the sensation of peering through glass into another world. Yes, this was odd. A strange giddy giggly joy coursed through her veins as she stared at the four-eyed fish, which didn’t really have four eyes. They had two, split like bifocals. Half above the surface, half below. She recalled a little game she and Maggie used to play, so long ago. She said to Ronny, “If you put your head right at the surface, and watch them swimming at you, they look just like alligators. You know, the ones in the Tarzan movies. Coming to devour you, chomp, chomp, chomp …”

  The phrase—chomp, chomp, chomp—had come swimming straight and fast out of her childhood: Bea saw little pigtailed Maggie Szot, eyes ablaze.

  And Ronny tried it, hunched his head level with the water’s surface. He stared for quite some time. Then he straightened up and said something at once heartening and a little heartbreaking: “Bianca, I sometimes think you have more imagination than I do. Or at least a wilder imagination.”

  He looked stricken, and suddenly she wanted to comfort him … Yes, in this aquarium, anyway, roles could be reversed and she could comfort Ronny. But of course she couldn’t stay indefinitely in the aquarium, and how many days could she possibly expect him to walk her slowly about, like some recovering invalid? What was she going to do now? She had wept herself raw: Bea’s throat, her nostrils, her eyes ached all the time. It hurt just to swallow. To blink.

  … A sense of direction arrived from an unexpected quarter: another telephone call from Mrs. Vanden Akker. The voice was as cold and stiff as ever, and just as unwilling to accept the tiniest offering of condolences, yet it carried an invitation—or maybe a directive. She and Mr. Vanden Akker wished to see Bea again, provided it was convenient. Would there possibly be a convenient time?

  Well, what Bea couldn’t convey to this terrifying woman, but wished with all her heart to convey, was that nothing significant remained in her life, really, except memories of Henry. In other words, there wasn’t a single day when she couldn’t come. She was basically free every moment for the rest of her life, now that she’d lost the most important thing in it.

  Bea arranged to meet in three days’ time.

  And this appointment, though so deeply dreaded, had a steadying effect—it allowed Bea to get on with her life. She returned to her landscape class, comforted to be a student again, even if unable to focus. And soon she would return—not yet, but soon—to drawing soldiers’ portraits. She would get on with her life.

  For they had scared her—those days when it seemed she might never return to the Institute, to Ferry Hospital. She had spent a stretch of days peering into an ongoing emptiness. She’d seen a metal landscape, a grease-fire sun. Yes, Mrs. Vanden Akker’s request was almost comforting. Bea was grateful for something to dread.

  CHAPTER XXI

  The woman who opened the door could only be Mrs. Vanden Akker, though for an instant this seemed impossible. How could anyone alter so quickly?

  If she hadn’t been fat exactly, Mrs. Vanden Akker had been a solid woman—an imposing solidity was her very essence—and yet the woman at the front door was far from solid. It wasn’t merely all the weight she’d lost, though she’d dropped a substantial amount of weight. Mrs. Vanden Akker moved differently now. She had turned tentative, and tremulous. This woman who had always served as a domestic drill sergeant, instructing everyone where to sit and when to rise, ushered in her guest with a jerking wave of uncertainty.

  Only her voice remained constant—that cool impregnable voice which had convinced Bea, over the telephone, that here was a mother unmoved by her only child’s death. Nothing could be further from the truth. No, Mrs. Vanden Akker was being eaten alive by grief.

  Mr. Vanden Akker’s transformation was less dramatic but no less complete. His silver hair was longer and uncombed; in fact, it stood up in wild patches from his skull, because as he spoke he kept scratching at his scalp—digging at it—with both hands. He had always seemed brilliant but eccentric, with his domed forehead and those jumpy eyes behind constantly drooping spectacles; now, for the first time, hair upthrust as if in flame, he looked, just possibly, mad.

  “Would you have—coffee?” asked Mrs. Vanden Akker. Heretofore, a guest had been simply presented with whatever she—Mrs. Vanden Akker—deemed suitable.

  Bea adopted the peculiar locution. “I would have coffee—please.”

  So she was left alone with Mr. Vanden Akker.

  Bea swallowed hard and said, “I’m very, very sorry about Henry.”

  Mr. Vanden Akker flinched, nodded, gouged at his scalp, and said something Mrs. Vanden Akker had already quoted over the telephone: “There is no sorrow in the ways of the Lord.”

  The three of them sipped coffee in the living room and Mrs. Vanden Akker passed around some spitefully hard biscuits. Mr. and Mrs. Vanden Akker—those two formerly august presences—seemed so hapless and so routed that Bea felt emboldened to lead the conversation.

  “I don’t exactly know how it happened …”

  Mr. and Mrs. Vanden Akker exchanged looks. There was a pause, and a second exchange, during which they evidently agreed that this particular story was Mr. Vanden Akker’s.

  “Henry’s plane went down. Trying to land on an island called Majuro in the Pacific. There was a tropical rainstorm.”

  “I’m so sorry …”

  “I telephoned a friend in Washington who is with the government. He belongs to our church. He was able to give me some additional details. I hadn’t actually heard of Majuro before.”

  “No,” Bea murmured.

  “The plane crashed and burned. It would have been very quick. I could show you where Majuro is,” Mr. Vanden Akker suggested. “I have a fine atlas.”

  “Yes,” Bea said, but Mr. Vanden Akker did not rise. She did not expect him to. He simply sat, and tore at his scalp, and went on staring in his matter-of-fact madman’s way.

  “I hope at least there wasn’t much pain in the end,” Bea said.

  Of course it was the strangest thing in the world to be talking in this fashion—to be sitting in the Vanden Akkers’ living room discussing Henry as though Henry could really be dead. Could Henry really be dead? Surely not—yet there was a sense, at the edge of Bea’s thinking, that it was only because Henry was dead that the three of them dared attribute to him anything so monstrous as death.

  “In the end?” Mrs. Vanden Akker replied, with some of her old forcefulness. “But this isn’t the end. Explain it. Explain it to the girl, Horace.”

  Mr. Vanden Akker took a deep breath. He righted his glasses on his nose and leaned forward. “I would begin this way, Bea,” he said. It was perhaps the first time he’d addressed her by name. “My initial premise would be this: heresy is born not through ignorance but through pride.”

  The pause that followed begged for some response, so Bea replied “Right,” and added, “I see,” even though she hadn’t an inkling, of course, what Mr. Vanden Akker meant. She was struck, again, by a sensation of how remote was this man—how remote this man and woman—from any world she recognized. This was how they talked about their dead son, whose torn-open plane had exploded in flames …

  “Now, it is a premise of our faith that each of us cannot identify whether we are among the elect—whether we are truly saved. And you can discern the hand of divine wisdom in this arrangement, for what better way to protect us all from the twin vices of pride and complacency?”

  “That’s true,” Bea said.

  Mr. Vanden Akker went on: “But just because it is impossible to tell for certain whether you yourself are among the saved, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s impossible to make the determination about some other person. It is much like life in the workaday world: we can see others but we can hardly see ourselves.”

  “That’s true.”

&
nbsp; “The truth is, the workaday world offers us many clues. Things are the way they are for a reason.”

  “There are signs,” Mrs. Vanden Akker eagerly interjected.

  Mr. Vanden Akker turned toward his wife. “I’m coming to that,” he said and though his voice was mildness itself, this was the first time Bea had ever seen him stand up to her. Mr. Vanden Akker again leaned forward. “And I don’t think that’s heresy. It’s a conclusion I come to quite humbly. You see, Bea, I am a mathematician by trade. Oh I’m nothing like the mathematician our boy was—”

  “He was so brilliant.”

  “Yes, indeed he was. Quite brilliant. You could see it from the very start—”

  “Before he spoke his first word,” Mrs. Vanden Akker pointed out.

  Mr. Vanden Akker weighed his wife’s words, then nodded sagely. “Yes, before Henry spoke his first word. You could see he’d been granted a special gift—”

  “There were signs,” Mrs. Vanden Akker inserted.

  “Yes, signs of a gift,” Mr. Vanden Akker agreed. “Now, I am no mathematician of that sort, but I have taught myself to observe things closely, to search for clues, and in the case of Henry’s death, too, there are signs—”

  Mrs. Vanden Akker evidently could not help herself. She interrupted again: “There are signs.”

  “There are clear signs that Henry is among the elect.”

  “Henry is in Heaven now,” Mrs. Vanden Akker said.

  “At the right hand of God,” Mr. Vanden Akker said.

  “At the right hand of God,” Mrs. Vanden Akker intoned.

  “I have no doubt,” Bea told them.

  Of all the many surprises in this household, none was more arresting than husband and wife’s reversal of roles. Previously, Mrs. Vanden Akker had made no effort to conceal her impatience with her husband’s cloudy theological speculations. And Mr. Vanden Akker would stop midsentence—a flush-faced culprit—whenever she cut him off. But now all conversational authority lay with him alone. Mr. Vanden Akker had become an oracle. For he alone could construe the signs: he alone had the subtlety of mind and the expertise needed to calculate that string of mystical terms by which one arrived at the glittering certainty that Henry was among the eternally elect.