The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  And meanwhile Bianca, driving up and down Woodward, took solace in her own phrase: Please, God; please, God; please, God …

  Of course she’d quit smoking and drinking the moment she got official word of her pregnancy, but now she needed whatever assistance could be found. It was all the solitary driving that did it, cranked up her anxiety until she craved a cigarette to the point where she couldn’t think of anything else. Up and down Woodward … “I’m smoking again and I’m pregnant and I’m talking to myself.” And she was chewing mints and jelly beans, to cover the smell of the cigarettes, since nobody must know she’d gone back to smoking, it was all so shameful. “I’m living on candy, I’m becoming my mother, just when my mother’s acting”—up jumped the Tenniel illustration from Alice in Wonderland—“mad as a March hare.”

  And then Mamma returned home, smaller than before—it was the strangest, scariest thing. She was always a little too thin, but this wasn’t that. While making their thorough examination, the doctors must have removed a couple of vertebrae. And Mamma drifted through her own house uncertainly, and spoke more softly than usual.

  Bianca had seen a transformation like this before—but when? What was it? A couple of days had to pass before, lying beside Grant in the middle of the night, it returned to her. Of course. Mrs. Vanden Akker. After the tragic news. Her son had burned up in a tropical rainstorm, and she’d dwindled away to nothing … And Bianca, trembling, got out of bed and smoked two quick cigarettes in the downstairs bathroom, blowing the smoke out the open window.

  They had entered a new world, where Mamma kept posing questions both painful and unanswerable. “I let everyone down, didn’t I?” she would ask, sitting with Bianca at the kitchen table. Or, “I should feel ashamed, shouldn’t I?” Or: “What I did was really crazy, wasn’t it?” The silence after words like these was the saddest silence Bianca had ever known.

  Still, it rarely brought Bianca to the edge of tears. Her grief was all too deep for tears. You couldn’t cry, but you couldn’t laugh either, when, at Abajay’s market, your mother lifted a head of lettuce, peered at it as intently as though it were a skull, and said, “What is it inside me that sets out to destroy things?”

  Meanwhile, “You must spend as much time as you can with your mother,” Uncle Dennis advised, and Bianca seemed to spend half of each day on the road, on Woodward, driving back and forth to Inquiry, often talking to herself, and sometimes talking to herself about talking to herself. “Now I’m talking to myself while driving over to visit my lunatic of a mother.”

  She’d arrive at her mother’s hoping the smell of candy covered up the sour smell of cigarettes, to greet a woman who had always covered up life’s sour smells with candy …

  Actually, food was becoming a general problem. Bianca had lost all appetite for the things she ought to be eating: milk, cheese, salads, meat, fruit. This wasn’t anything like her morning sickness with the twins. It was odder, and fiercer. She would crunch almost angrily on a handful of jelly beans after having a cigarette, but to sit down before a moist chicken thigh and a bowl of green beans brought on instant nausea. She who’d been so worried about putting on weight—averaging more than two pounds a week in the first two months of pregnancy!—shied from the scale for a different reason. Was she losing weight? It was the question she couldn’t utter aloud: was she starving her baby?

  She had journeyed once before—nine years ago now—into a land where she’d lost all appetite and couldn’t sleep, and she must not, would not return there. The Lord has taken him—those were the words Mrs. Vanden Akker had used to break the news, which was the final stroke, shattering the balance between Heaven and Earth, and Bianca hadn’t understood how to move through Life anymore, until she reached a point where the Lord had almost taken her, too. Sometimes—typically when she was driving—those War days came back with such vividness her hands shook convulsively. Sometimes she had to pull the car over and collect herself. Please God, she prayed.

  This couldn’t last—the miserable days bleeding, blurring one by one—but when everything broke, when the flickering light of hope finally appeared on the calendar, she scarcely dared believe it. Could things actually get better? Hope? What was there to hope for?

  Papa made the momentous announcement one night at dinner, just the three of them, Edith being away at school. He said: “Uncle Dennis had an idea. And I agree. And now your mother agrees. We need a fresh start. We’re going to move. We’re going to sell the house.”

  It hardly seemed possible, some things cannot happen … So many emotions crowded Bea’s mind, they couldn’t be identified, except for one, more powerful than all the rest: yes, it was hopefulness. Oh, the freeing human potentialities of hope! An exit, a respite, a fresh start … Maybe it could be left behind, it would not follow them: that all-but-visible blackness permeating every room of the house, forming a cloud you could almost see over Mamma’s chair in the kitchen. Maybe the family could leave Inquiry Street, and perfect strangers would move into the rooms, shifting the light around, introducing new arrangements of bright and dark—and what on earth could be stranger than that? Well, maybe the house needed new people, and what on earth could be stranger than that?

  A fresh start. Uncle Dennis was right, of course. They were still young, Mamma and Papa, they could build a new life …

  The story emerged over days, in bits and pieces. Uncle Dennis was back in town, he never seemed to sleep, he was shuttling incessantly between Cleveland and Detroit, and Bianca had an hour’s talk with him at that favorite old restaurant, Uncle Danny’s, on Gratiot. This was the place, ironically, where he’d first announced the move to Cleveland. Did he remember that? Probably not.

  When she hesitated over the menu, feeling a little queasy, he basically ordered on her behalf: a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich. She was still having trouble eating regular meals. But she managed, under his watchful eye, to get some of it down without retching. “You’re looking very pale,” he observed.

  Uncle Dennis ordered a cheeseburger and a piece of lemon meringue pie for himself. He ate ravenously. Despite all his running back and forth, he seemed to be gaining weight these days.

  His conversation today was peppered with phrases like you know and you understand. Bianca didn’t, in fact. But Uncle Dennis was in a rush and she pieced things together. He’d been helping Papa find a house. Free at last to move, Papa was aspiring to something grand. And with all his hard work and economizing, it seemed he could now afford something rather grand. But Uncle Dennis was counseling against it. Mamma “musn’t feel overwhelmed.” A fresh start, yes—but in a house no bigger than what they had now.

  And last week a house had turned up, soundly constructed, on Reston Street, just a couple of blocks west of Indian Village, and this was important, too: it would be a change of neighborhood, but not so distant from Inquiry. Clearly, Uncle Dennis was running everything now. Nobody else had any inkling how to proceed. What do you do when the sky falls in? What else but call on Uncle Dennis, who somehow contrived the means to prop up a fallen sky. He could locate the right doctors, the psychologists and the nerve specialists; and he knew how to mend a shattered household with talk of a fresh start. Without Uncle Dennis, Papa slumped into paralysis, night after night uncomprehendingly shaking his wine-soaked head. With Uncle Dennis at his side, however, he was out tracking down the right new home, arguing price and location, no doubt raising objection after objection to Uncle Dennis’s proposals—but listening, always listening to the alluring voice of a fresh start. The family had placed themselves in the hands of this man who shuttled back and forth, who tended all his patients in Cleveland before racing up to Detroit, effectively to tend another set of patients. It was like Uncle Dennis now to urge on her the tuna sandwich and the milk, and to ask how Dr. Stimpson, her obstetrician, thought the pregnancy was going. “Honey, you must take care of yourself,” he said. “I remember a little girl who didn’t take care of herself, and her aunt Grace and I had to nurse her back to h
ealth.”

  A little girl? It was absurd—she stood at least half an inch taller than he did. But it was a comforting absurdity, and under his ministering eye Bianca managed to do what she hadn’t done in a couple of weeks: consume a full meal at one sitting.

  He was wonderfully capable, but not even Uncle Dennis could anticipate all the ways things could go wrong. The family’s problems were like some sort of cancer which, arrested in one location, erupts in another. When the next crisis arrived, it came from a totally unexpected source: Edith. And who would have guessed that Edith might fall apart?

  Edith had handled the business of Mamma’s thievery a little peculiarly perhaps—all that painstaking haggling with Stevie over the interest due in reparation—but this was just the finicky exactitude you’d expect from Edith, and hence was almost reassuring. And Edith had been showing Mamma extra kindnesses—helping more with the cooking and the cleaning, and trying harder to keep up a civil conversation at dinner. Under the circumstances, Edith was handling things reasonably well.

  She loved her classes at Wayne. And she was robust with good health, at a time when Bianca was smoking and munching on disgusting candies and suffering from such chronic diarrhea that she’d become familiar with most of the service-station ladies’ rooms on Woodward Avenue. Having read in one of her anthropology classes about a tribe of nomadic goatherds in central Asia who live almost forever, Edith had become a great walker, marching purposefully along with great sacks of books under her arms. Somewhere along the way, she’d burned off what apparently had been baby fat. She was solid but no longer pudgy. When exactly had the change taken place? Bianca couldn’t say. But one day she’d looked down Inquiry and seen a tallish woman approaching—Edith was almost five-seven—and Bianca had realized with a shock that this was her plump little sister.

  Striding easily down the street with all her weighty reading, Edith evoked strength. Even her square-framed imitation tortoiseshell glasses, which she never removed, suggested strength—rationalism, reliability, objectivity. Bianca had once made the mistake of urging Edith toward another pair, something softer and more feminine. It was like trying to give Stevie a car. You met the same bristling stiffness. Evidently, what looked so negligent had been a deliberate fashion choice: Edith wanted to resemble (as Maggie once mischievously but memorably put it) an assistant bank manager.

  And now the assistant bank manager began falling apart. Edith had handled successfully the catastrophic news of Mamma’s crimes, and Mamma’s departure for a week of rest, and the almost terrifying transformation when Mamma returned looking dwindled and speaking in an odd, marveling, almost tranquilized way while offering up one devastating observation after another. It was as if Edith didn’t notice any alteration. But Edith did notice, she was extremely observant, as Bianca realized on the couple of occasions when the two sisters sat down for a chat. “It’s as if something has given way inside Mamma, and she may never be her old self again.” Edith did not declare this cruelly; she was making a sort of diagnosis. “And Papa’s drinking has doubled.” “Well,” Bianca said, “there’s definitely been an increase in—” “Doubled,” Edith interrupted, with that fixed mathematical certainty of hers. “He used to drink a beaker of wine a night. Now he drinks two.”

  Edith saw the difficulties straight on, and her response was to proceed as she’d always proceeded: piling up little unspoken kindnesses, much as she’d piled up sweaters and socks and mittens for the soldiers during the War. It seemed Edith didn’t need to draw on one cigarette after another as Bianca did. And Edith didn’t drive up and down Woodward Avenue talking to herself.

  Who could have foreseen that what would break Edith’s spirit was the thought of moving from Inquiry? Surely it was time to go. Wasn’t it obvious? In the Free Press not so long ago, Bianca had seen all those blocks of the old neighborhood—south of Mack and just west of the Boulevard—described as a slum. A slum!

  Moving had never seemed possible because Mamma wouldn’t think of it—but even Mamma was mumbling about a fresh start. And Edith the good team player? Suddenly she was digging in her heels. She wasn’t going to move to Reston Street. She just wasn’t.

  The two sisters took a walk, though it was cold—a cold and gray December day—and Bianca was wearing an olive-green poncho rather than her black wool coat; she hadn’t planned on a walk. They headed down Inquiry to Jefferson, Jefferson over to the Boulevard, across Jefferson to the Belle Isle Bridge, which during the War had been renamed the Douglas MacArthur Bridge, though nobody ever seemed to call it that. Bianca let her little sister guide her. Of course it was even colder out by the river, and colder still on the gusty bridge, the wind throwing up little whitecaps beneath them. It seemed almost self-punishing to walk the bridge today, but Edith kept striding in that defiantly purposeful way of hers. Beyond Belle Isle, across the river, cold Canada lay shivering.

  Bianca, pregnant and weak, and desperately craving a cigarette, marched along beside her baby sister. The gray waters were flowing with iron determination beneath them, and by the time they were halfway across the long bridge, Edith was crying.

  Edith was crying—all at once. The girl who never wept was weeping. She did not remove her tortoiseshell glasses. Tears flowed down her cheeks, unwiped, and fell to the sidewalk.

  “I don’t want to move,” she announced. For all her tears, her words moved purposefully forward—just the way she walked. “Does anyone consult me? Does anyone say, What does Edith want? Do they care about my feelings?”

  “Oh sweetie,” Bianca sighed. Her sympathy ran deep. But fear ran deeper still. The sight of her unflappable sister coming undone was more than she could bear. “Of course they do. We all do.”

  “Is it the house’s fault? Is the house to blame because Mamma’s a thief? Because Papa’s a drunk?”

  “Papa’s not a drunk.”

  “You know what their logic is? It’s the opposite of logic. They don’t see that. What’s the one thing we have when everything’s falling apart? When Mamma’s become someone else, and Papa’s become someone else—what’s the one thing to remain the same? Isn’t it the house, which no one has a loyal word for except me? Oh it’s fine for you if we move, you’ve got your mansion up there on Middleway.”

  “It’s no mansion—”

  “You’ve got your husband and your kids, and it’s fine for Stevie, he’s moved on, he never liked the house anyway—”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Remember when he left us all for a year and a half? It’s all Stevie ever talked about when he was a boy: someday he would grow up and leave us.”

  “I don’t remember that …”

  “But what about me?” And now Edith’s crying had altered. The words were not moving purposefully forward. She was choking with emotion. “When does anyone say, What about Edith’s welfare?”

  “Oh darling, darling, darling.” Shivering worse than ever, Bianca drew an arm around her little sister. “Of course we do. We think about your welfare all the time.”

  Edith didn’t exactly shrug off the embracing arm, but she began walking resolutely forward once more. Bianca kept her arm around her sister.

  Actually, it didn’t matter if Mamma and Papa moved—Edith explained—because she herself was about to embark on her own life. One of her professors, Miss Dinney, was a graduate of Barnard College. Edith would enroll in graduate school, she would study biology, she planned to settle in New York City. Or she was moving to Sarasota, Florida. A friend of hers who also wrote for the Wayne Collegian, her name was Joanna Mufflin, her family owned a newspaper in Sarasota, and Edith would move down there.

  But crazy as these ideas sounded (Edith in New York? Edith in Florida?), what she proposed next was crazier still: she would remain on Inquiry. Mamma and Papa would move—that was fine, she wished them all the best, but she needed a place of her own. She would stay put, and pay them rent, and eventually she would buy it outright: the others could do as they wished, but she wasn’t about to
abandon her home.

  Bianca started to say, “You know Papa would never permit that.” Which was true. Papa move and leave his daughter behind? What was Edith thinking?

  Catching herself in time, Bianca said instead, “I think you should talk to Uncle Dennis. He’s coming up this weekend. Tell him what you’re telling me. He may have an idea.” Bianca was shivering so much in her poncho, it was impossible to tell whether, in holding on to her sister, she was offering or seeking warmth. “I’m sure he’ll have an idea.”

  She was smoking again, which in itself maybe wasn’t so disturbing. What was disturbing was the violence of her hunger for her vile packs of Tareytons—and her lack of hunger for all the foods her baby required. What lesson was she supposed to draw from this? Why was her body telling her, so commandingly it made her limbs tremble, that she needed what she knew she shouldn’t have, and didn’t need what she knew was essential?

  She had been here before, and perhaps most unsettling of all was to see that her recognition of the process in no way prevented its steady devolution. “Everything’s falling apart,” she declared, any number of times, driving down Woodward Avenue, but the unflinching words were absolutely no protection. Please, God, she prayed. Please, God. And sometimes her prayer took another form, which would have sounded crazy if anyone had heard her, but no one did, she was talking to herself: Please, Baby. And this was a prayer for forgiveness—a prayer to the not-yet born.

  There was something almost comforting, actually, when things started coming undone on Middleway. The boys didn’t know the full details, of course. They didn’t know that their grandma Paradiso was a thief. But they knew Grandma wasn’t well. They knew their mother was often away, and wasn’t fully present when present. The boys began to squabble and to cry and to ask uncharacteristically jittery questions: “Will Grandma be all right?” And: “Why are you always gone?” And from Chip, with naked puzzlement: “When will it be like before?”