The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  “Roy-the-son can’t drive a car. Now what sort of job is he supposed to get?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea …” Grant paused a moment—he seemed to take the question seriously—and then his expression clouded. “Bianca, you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Start up with them again.”

  Bianca felt her face flush. “Well, yes—yes, I did.”

  “After you wrote that note and everything?”

  “I didn’t know the circumstances at the time …”

  “And what if old Bootmaker Senior got cancer? Would that be a reason for starting up again? What if Roy’s house burned down, would that be a reason for starting up again? What if he got an ulcer, would that be a reason for starting up again?”

  “Maybe,” Bianca said.

  Grant’s line of questions veered unexpectedly: “And what if I were absolutely to forbid it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if I said, You and I came to a solemn agreement, Bianca, and now you’re reneging, which is wrong, and I absolutely forbid it, we’re not having the milkman again—what if that’s what I said?”

  “But you wouldn’t do that, Grant.”

  “I know. I know, I know. But what if? I say, What if?”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Bianca repeated.

  “I know, I know, and goddamn it we’ll have the goddamn milkman back, of course we will, but what if I were to actually forbid it? What if I said, Bianca, we made a solemn deal and you can’t go back on your word? You’d still have him back, wouldn’t you? Damn what anybody says, you’d have him back, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”

  The living room had become a courtroom. The two of them considered each other: the attorney and the woman of the house. Grant’s face wore an expression of great intensity, but for the moment Bianca couldn’t follow his line of thinking. He looked at her dead-on, demanding an answer, and she said, softly but firmly, “Yes, I would still have taken him back.”

  A queer moment’s pause, then Grant’s face broke beautifully into a smile, and Bianca saw that everything was all right. This was a smile of pride. In Grant’s eyes, she’d passed some sort of crucial test. She wasn’t “one of those wives.” He’d married someone else.

  He stood up and came eagerly to the sofa, sat down beside her, and took her in his arms. “You do what’s right, don’t you?”

  Instantly, she experienced all the warm radiant well-being her husband’s praise dependably stirred. She basked in the feeling, and his words allowed her the freedom of graciousness. “I don’t know about what’s right, sweetie. I just did what I felt I had to do.” Her arms had drifted around his back. Her mouth was at the side of his neck. She was murmuring into his ear.

  “My tough, tough little girl,” Grant said, murmuring into her ear. “Damn what anybody said. You’d take him back.”

  “Tough? Don’t I wish. Honey, I had to cave in quickly, otherwise I was going to start crying. You know who he suddenly reminded me of? I felt it very vividly. He reminded me of my nonno, back from the grave. I was helpless. A total pushover. For these little old men with big hearts …”

  But this wasn’t the direction Grant wanted to take. “Wouldn’t matter,” he said again. “Wouldn’t matter what anybody told you. No, you’d take him back. My girl would take him back.”

  The muscles in Grant’s big shoulders were quivering and she understood, belatedly, what he was referring to. He too was looking into the past. She’d tried to put that distant day behind her, as an insurmountable embarrassment. But Grant had never put it behind him. He never would. Yes, one day she’d left him a note—another of her notes!—and she and his children had gone away on a train. And having left his law firm early, he’d driven down to Cleveland at a hundred miles an hour to plead the case of his life. And his tough, tough little girl—the one who did what was right, damn what anybody said? She’d taken him back.

  CHAPTER XXX

  Having given it all some thought, Bianca concluded that the only place for a family celebration—and there did have to be a celebration—was her own home. No solution was ideal. Stevie’s little bungalow was out of the question. While her parents’ house could have done in a pinch, it would have been a pinch, for they were now eleven: in addition to Grant and herself and the twins, there would be Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, Mamma and Papa and Edith, Stevie and Rita. Mamma often seemed resentful about how the family’s social life had shifted from Inquiry to Middleway. But she’d be far more aggrieved, surely, if asked to arrange dinner for eleven.

  Of course they could go to a restaurant, but they hadn’t all chanced a restaurant together since Grace’s birthday party at Chuck’s Chop House. Restaurants were dangerous. All the more so because this visit, though long postponed, had originally been intended to coincide with Aunt Grace’s birthday. She’d turned forty-nine a couple of months ago.

  The family dinner was set for Saturday. The Poppletons arrived the night before. On their Detroit visits they always stayed on Middleway, since Bianca had “so much room,” though Mamma and Papa’s house, now that Bianca and Stevie had moved out, held plenty of space for guests. But—an unspoken agreement—the days were gone forever when Aunt Grace would lodge under her sister’s roof.

  Aunt Grace arrived looking tired, and pale. Bianca always studied her aunt’s appearance closely, nervously. Of course Aunt Grace was cheerful …

  Uncle Dennis looked mostly unchanged, though perhaps a little heavier. Years ago, it seemed he’d reached a point of near-stability. Yes, the gray was slowly infiltrating his hair—but far more slowly than into Papa’s, who recently had grown silver, almost white, at the temples. This, and the limp Papa had developed, because of the plantar wart he could never shake, had seemed to bring the two men closer in age. It was no longer incredible that the two were contemporaries.

  The twins adored their great-aunt and great-uncle, who shortly on arrival were dragged into the basement for a display of Ping-Pong prowess, then into the screened porch, to watch a game of catch in the backyard.

  Aunt Grace accepted a glass of wine. Grant had already poured his day’s drink: a hefty whiskey. Uncle Dennis also had a whiskey. Bianca chose iced tea. The news that she was going to have a baby had turned alcohol, instantly, into a distant memory.

  It was amazing how quickly the news had smoothed everything. Less than two weeks ago—it seemed lifetimes ago—she’d met Ronny at the DIA, shared a bottle of wine with him at Jason’s, kissed him repeatedly under the Ambassador Bridge, and rushed off the next day, Sunday, to Priscilla the mind doctor’s. Sunday had been crazier in its way than the day before, and Monday had been worse still. She’d been nearly mad with frustration, waiting and waiting for Ronny to call … Now, just two weeks later, she had to ask herself: what exactly had she wanted him to say? What sort of insane avowal had she craved? Something like “Maybe you’re pregnant with your husband’s child, but I’ve just discovered I’m in love with you”? Or: “I want you to abandon your husband and your six-year-old twins and run off with me to Gauguin’s Pacific”?

  Leaving Dr. Stimpson’s office on the following day, Tuesday, she’d thrown into a waste bin her half-full pack of cigarettes. And when she’d telephoned Ronny on Wednesday, in order to confirm his amazing intuition of her pregnancy, she breezed right past his stumbling mixture of apologies and attestations. Ronny wanted to tell her he was sorry about his behavior on Saturday, and also that he wasn’t sorry. He wanted to say—She interrupted: “But you mustn’t apologize for a thing, Ronny.” To which she added a sentiment expressible only because, though nakedly revealing, it had become peculiarly irrelevant: “Saturday was the most thrilling day I’ve had in ever so long …”

  With regard to the others, she’d considered delaying her announcement until the family celebration. But this had seemed risky, given the tempestuous history of family celebrations. So after calling Ronny, she broke the news wide open: she telephoned Mamma and Papa and Edit
h, Stevie and Rita, Priscilla, Maggie … What lay before her now was the altogether pleasant task of informing Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace.

  It was a gorgeous summer evening, very late summer, for they were into early September now. The four of them were lounging in the screened porch, ice cubes clinking, while the twins played catch in the fading light. To Bianca, the evening felt like early June—as if a capacious summer stretched before her. The world itself stretched before her, and although a number of conversational junctures invited her to break her news, she held off. Everything was in abeyance.

  Only after the four of them moved to the dining room—the boys had already been fed—did the impulse strike home. Uncle Dennis, that great toast-maker, hoisted a glass and pointed out how much they had to be thankful for. And Bianca said: “More even than you may know.”

  A pause opened, with a give-and-take of puzzled looks, and Bianca felt herself blush all over. “It seems I’m going to have a baby.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful!” Grace cried, and Uncle Dennis released a funny, happy, harrumphing sound. He stood up and came over and kissed her on the top of the head, just the way you’d kiss a child, and said, “Now isn’t that fine, isn’t that something, isn’t that fine?”

  There were many questions, of course: what was the due date? And had she thought about a hospital? And did she think it was a boy, or a girl?

  “And if it is a girl,” Aunt Grace said, “what might you name her?”

  “I was thinking Maria. Grant seems to like it.”

  “Maria Ives,” Grant said. “Can’t you picture her? We’re talking a beauty. A real heartbreaker. Almost pretty as her mother.”

  Bianca explained that she didn’t plan on telling the boys for quite some time. She didn’t want to be driven crazy with questions.

  That sounded very wise, Aunt Grace said.

  Bianca asked everybody to remain seated and went out into the kitchen. She returned with the eggplant casserole and the spinach and blue cheese salad. She had become known, partly through emulation of her aunt, as a versatile cook. “Later, we’ll call in the boys for dessert,” she told them.

  Aunt Grace ate sparingly but Grant and Uncle Dennis tucked in heartily. Everyone complimented Bianca on the food, and talk flowed. Grant, who always had a sound feeling for such matters, told a couple of jokes that were a little racy but hardly inappropriate. (Had they heard that Hollywood was the place where you lie on the sand and look at the stars—or vice versa?) Minute by succeeding minute, Bianca savored a rarefied sense of things being properly in place: her handsome husband across the table, her aunt and uncle on each side, the boys playing catch in the yard, the gentle, conversational slap-slap-slap of the ball against the leather gloves, and the steady blood-whisper of a child inside her … After so many turbulent days, she’d come to a graced clemency.

  The night, as it turned out, held only a single disappointment. Bianca had been awaiting a brief opportunity to speak alone with each of her guests, but this wasn’t to be. She wanted to ask Grace about her health, but she longed even more for a renewal of that vital connectedness Grace inspired—the woman in whose convalescing hands, back in that cataclysmic winter of ’43 to ’44, Bianca had placed herself after nearly dying. (Months after she’d fully recovered, Uncle Dennis once began a sentence, “When your temperature hit a hundred and seven, darling, I must admit—” but he hadn’t been able to finish.)

  She did have a few minutes with Grace in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, but this was no occasion for a heart-to-heart. Grace breezed into an anecdote about a man, a patient of Uncle Dennis’s, whose daughter, playing in the attic, had been stung by a wasp. Going up to clean out the nest, the man happened upon an old chest in the crawl space, presumably left by one of the house’s previous owners. It contained ten antique silver dollars. Grace always had on hand a story of this sort: goodness meeting up with unexpected bounty …

  “But how are you feeling?” Bianca said. “You look tired.”

  “Oh. My.” Aunt Grace made a face. “Some ups and downs.”

  In response to Bianca’s look of concern, she added, “Oh, I’m well. And I’m delighted with your news, darling.”

  As soon as the kitchen was tidied, Aunt Grace retreated to bed. A few minutes later, Uncle Dennis, yawning cavernously, announced, “I think I’ll follow the wife.”

  Bianca caught him alone at the bottom of the stairs. He stood above her, one step up. On level ground, Bianca was maybe a half inch taller.

  “Aunt Grace. Is she feeling all right?”

  “Oh I think so. Just tired,” Uncle Dennis said. “Now don’t you go fretting yourself about anyone but that baby of yours.” And once more he kissed her on top of the head.

  In the morning, Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace seemed revitalized. They were looking at a full day—old friends and old patients, and Uncle Dennis wanted to drop in on his old hospital. Having breakfasted heartily—scrambled eggs, pork sausage, toast with marmalade, orange juice, coffee—the two of them were out the door by nine. They promised to return well before the party started, at five.

  Bianca asked Grant simply to “get the boys out from underfoot”—a task he embraced. He would take them golfing. They liked to do the caddying, for which they received a quarter apiece, and he sometimes let them get a whack at the ball. Rita arrived at noon to help with the cooking. “What is it we’re making?” she asked a number of times.

  “Beef bourguignon.”

  “French, is it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They say beef?”

  “Actually, boeuf.”

  “Well at least they almost got it right.”

  Rita offered this deadpan, but when Bianca glanced over, the girl was grinning slyly. Rita actually could be quite funny, in a self-mocking way. She understood the situation’s humor: the little hillbilly girl receiving an education from her big-city sister-in-law.

  And to her credit, Rita left no question unasked.

  “How come this fork’s like this?” she’d say.

  “It’s a salad fork.”

  Or: “What is this fabric called?”

  “It’s called chamois.”

  Or: “What do you mean this doesn’t go with that?”

  “Sweetie, the colors clash.”

  In many ways, Rita had become Bianca’s little sister, more so than Edith, who rarely asked Bianca’s advice—or anyone’s advice.

  Back when she was still fitting herself into the Paradiso family, Rita had regularly criticized Edith in her absence. Even when Rita’s complaints were inarguable (Edith did nothing for her appearance, Edith was impatient, Edith didn’t understand small talk), Bianca had bristled. It wasn’t Rita’s place to criticize Edith. But as Rita came around to seeing Edith as everyone else saw Edith, disparagement yielded to a pure marveling. For that’s what they all did—they marveled at Edith, who was a breed apart. Count on Edith to enter a family celebration talking about an uprising in some English colony you’d never heard of, or to point out, on leaving a luncheonette, that three days in a row she’d received a bill that was a prime number, and three itself was a prime number—wasn’t that funny? Yes, Edith: funny.

  It was one of life’s happy surprises that Bianca would have grown so fond of that sullen little Tennessee girl with the terrible teeth—who had become this sweet young woman hovering so attentively in Bianca’s kitchen, intoning, beef bourguignon, beef bourguignon, beef bourguignon … The girl was steadily remaking herself, and Bianca had a midwife’s role in the rebirth.

  Though Bianca felt reluctant to turn to the subject, since she already was handling too many worries, eventually she asked after Stevie. It was one of those concerns that wouldn’t go away.

  Rita’s tone shifted. “When’d you ever see him look relaxed? You know what he’s like? He’s like a clench fist.” She clenched her fists in illustration. “I tell you, he’s like a clench fist. You know?”

  Bianca did. It was one of the great differ
ences between Stevie and his dad. In those times when Papa bore the weight of the world on his shoulders (as when, so long ago, he’d been jobless for three days, until a red-faced O’Reilly marched up the walk bearing children’s gifts), he never sped up, he never jerked or scurried, he maintained la bella figura. With Stevie, on the other hand, life’s tensions wound him agonizingly tight, turning his powerful body twitchy and ungainly.

  “He’s working too many hours.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Rita cried, almost triumphantly.

  “You’ve got to tell him when to stop.”

  Rita looked bewildered and repeated something she’d said recently: “Bay, I don’t dare.”

  Yes, the prospect frightened Rita. Did Stevie have Rita under his thumb? For all the physical power he exuded, it was difficult to view Stevie in such terms, given how thoroughly he seemed under the thumb of an unnamed Something Else. Something was constantly squelching him. Family expectations? The Ford Motor Company? A society intent on punishing him for impregnating a seventeen-year-old girl who had miscarried long before her shame became apparent to society?

  Rita repeated many details from their last conversation. Stevie was so pale. He never smiled. He had nightmares, night sweats. The conversation felt so ominous to Bianca, it was a great relief when Stevie actually materialized. Here he was, simply Stevie, her younger brother. “Hey, Bea,” he said. He was the party’s first guest.

  “H’lo, Stevie. Come on in, can I get you a drink?”

  “Jagotta beer?”

  This was how he often talked. It was a deliberate choice, and an ironic one, given that Papa, with his unshakable Italian accent, perpetually suffered the fear of being taken for low-class. Papa yearned to speak refinedly, but couldn’t; Stevie aspired to sound like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and did a pretty good job of it. The funny thing was, he didn’t even like beer.

  “Yes, Stevie, I have a beer.”

  “She been any help? Or she just been getting in the way?”