The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  Those queer nighttime jitters counted for little most of the time. They faded in the morning sun and left her alone during the day. Lamps sometimes kept them at bay. And yet in the darkness they beckoned like a lit keyhole, opening into the all of her. What mattered most of the time were her boys and her husband, the baby due in May, her mother and father and sister and brother, the circle of her friends and relatives … What mattered was her house, and knowing herself pretty, and the paintings at the DIA, and the paintings she herself might paint but hadn’t yet painted, and clothes that showed more than good taste—clothes that showed some inner artistry … And then would arrive this alternative, nighttime conception of things—corruption of things—and what mattered were the lists to be drawn up, the phrases chanted and the cruel internal tasks to be tended to. Bianca would recognize, at the edge of sleep, that all day long one shape inside her head had been crowding upon another, maybe a baby-blue ungainly trapezoid edging up against a dented olive-gold oval, and what mattered was this precarious business of accommodating all the demands of one’s shifting inward geometry. What mattered was getting the colored shapes into some alignment where sleep was possible …

  Grant usually slept like a log, but at two-thirty one night he came down and found her at the kitchen table, the lists in front of her: a grocery list and a list of necessary or soon-to-be-necessary home repairs. “Honey,” he said. “Let it go. You’ve got to come back to bed.”

  She did, and she was sleepy enough that somehow it made sense, lying in the dark, to attempt to explain the odd reassurance found in compiling lists, and her sense of various objects pushing at her mind—best warded off by itemized rows. Her sense of shapes, worries, voices emerging from her head at night. And their wanting to claim her. And their insisting that every single aspect of her days was unreal. They were wrong, and yet they were irrefutable.

  There was no accommodating them—there was only a constant fending off of intrusions. Nor was there any knowing when the voices might emerge, when the shapes might appear. Or disappear, for when they were gone they were really gone … There had been a time, long ago, when she’d needed to figure out, in precise order, which of her family she’d seen first that day, and second, and third, and then one evening it was as though the task had been completed. It was like shoveling snow: once the job was done, there was nothing else to do.

  “The funny thing is,” Bianca said, still speaking into the bedroom dark, “it’s as if I can remember when the whole thing started. Probably my memory’s playing tricks, but it’s as if the whole thing started when I was eleven, in church, at MYF, the Methodist Youth Fellowship. Reverend Kakenmaster, this huge bald frightening man, he was sort of yelling at us. And a light from a stained-glass window throws this blazing dot on his bald forehead, as if God is pointing him out to us all.”

  Grant was half asleep—it was three in the morning—and she could feel a slow thickening in the body beside her.

  “He says something and all the kids are supposed to answer, ‘I say yes, I abide by that.’ You know, renouncing sin and selfishness and impurity.

  “I’m wearing a powder-blue dress Aunt Grace had made for me, with white faggoting on the sleeves and a white lace collar.

  “And Reverend Kakenmaster tells us we must choose between purity and filthiness, and Jesus Christ wants us to choose purity, and what do we say to that?

  “And just then, this terrible image pops into my head. I’ll stand up in my powder-blue dress with the white lace collar and I’ll yell out, I say blank to that. Where the blank was this unspeakable term.

  “And I was just dumbstruck—really terrified, and shocked, to find myself thinking this way. I could see it all so vividly. I would stand up and utter this unutterable remark. And you know what the funny thing is? You know what the blank was? It wasn’t anything so horrible, really, Grant. I mean—well, it wasn’t fuck. You may be thinking that’s what it would be—the most unimaginable word imaginable. But it wasn’t.”

  Grant flinched a little. He didn’t like it when she uttered a word like that. Not that she normally ever would—except under circumstances like these, when the word seemed less an obscenity than an illustration of a larger principle. She had thought she could get away with it now, since the story at bottom was so sweet: the little girl with the white lace collar who felt as if she’d invented filthiness and sin. Yet Grant had flinched, even though, paradoxically, he relished with his whole soul the notion that, provided he was her partner, she embraced the activity rooted underneath the word. For everything must depend on his making it possible.

  Bianca went on. “No, the word in my mind was shit.” She laughed, which came out brittle sounding. “I saw myself getting up and yelling back at Reverend Kakenmaster, I say shit to that. And clearly to think such a thing, at such a time, in such a place, I must be the evilest girl ever born. It was as if my head was infected—invaded. And invaded ever since. And what do you say to that?” she said, and laughed at this echoing of Reverend Kakenmaster, who might well be dead by now, but who survived in his surreal way, with a light from Heaven forever drilling straight into his big bald dome of a forehead.

  What did Grant say to that? Nothing, for he had fully drifted off, leaving her alone to face the task of getting through the night, to get through the day, to get through the night, so she might get through the day … Surely—she needed desperately to believe this—surely things would be better when Mamma and Papa began their fresh start?

  Up and down, up and down Woodward she drove, over on Mack, over on the Boulevard, looking for chores and shopping, suitable movies and enticing soda fountains to get Mamma through another day—to edge her one day closer to the move.

  So, smoking like a furnace, Bianca drove up and down Woodward, knowing in her heart there were not enough chores and Christmas shopping expeditions, movies and soda fountains to forestall indefinitely the arrival of further heartbreak. There had to come a day—there did indeed come a day—when the two sat alone at the kitchen table and Mamma observed, “It’s a bit peculiar, don’t you think? That Grace never comes up with Dennis?”

  These days, Mamma rarely mentioned Grace and almost never in a context like this—opening up the complex, painful topic of the two Schleiermacher sisters. All at once, Bianca felt very wary.

  “Well, he comes for such short periods.”

  “Granted, but wouldn’t you think she might occasionally make the drive? Wouldn’t cost anything …”

  Grace hadn’t been up to visit since the shattering news of Mamma’s thievery. Though nobody had said as much, the truth was obvious: Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace had made a conscious decision to spare Mamma the burden of confronting her sister while the shamefulness was so fresh.

  “And there’s her health,” Bianca said.

  Grace’s health was more than a great worry. For Bianca it was additionally a source of tremendous guilt. Mamma’s catastrophic collapse had eclipsed everything else. Every attention had naturally focused on Mamma, and on Papa—on keeping the old household functioning. Meanwhile, another battle, almost unremarked, was being bravely fought in another city: Grace was having to surmount, day after day, the misery and the uncertainty and the simple all-out nausea of having her remaining breast removed—the left one, the one so vivid in Bianca’s memory, for this was the breast, nipple dark as a plum, Aunt Grace had unwittingly exposed that day at Lady Lake. The prospect of the maiming surgery was one of the things that made Bianca’s hands shake as she drove to and from Mamma’s, or that kept her up at night: she—Bianca—wasn’t doing enough for Grace, she wasn’t thinking enough about Grace, and by neglecting such duties she was inviting disaster …

  “Isn’t it peculiar,” Mamma said, clinging to that word, “the way her cancer hasn’t affected her looks? The last time I saw her, at your house in August, she looked beautiful.”

  “She did,” Bianca said. “Though she looked tired. Very tired.”

  “Of course she does dye her hair.”


  “She doesn’t pretend not to. She’s actually quite funny on—”

  “And who knows what else.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “You never had a sister like that,” Mamma said. “You don’t know what it’s like having a beautiful, beautiful sister.”

  The conversation was veering out of control. “Edith’s a very pretty girl. You’re beautiful too, Mamma.”

  “I suppose I can’t blame your father if he fell in love with Grace.”

  And here it was again, all at once: the prime, poisonous notion, to which nearly every current family misfortune could be traced.

  “Mamma, Mamma, Mamma—you do know that’s ridiculous. Papa’s never been in love with Grace.”

  It had been years since Mamma had broached this notion directly. But now it was vividly apparent—as vivid as blood—that she’d never abandoned it.

  “You know, I would have been all right,” Mamma said, “all right in my head, if only he’d loved me.”

  And Mamma began to cry.

  “But he did. He does!” Bianca said. “This is the most ridiculous, ridiculous—”

  An O’Reilly and Fein wall calendar looked down upon the woman slumped at the kitchen table, softly weeping. Of course, this wasn’t one of the old-style War calendars; this was a bigger, glossier production, featuring some of the bigger, glossier homes newly constructed in this city that had done so much to win the War. And yet the tears were the old tears … “Everything would have been all right, if only he’d loved me.”

  And Bianca, who had not cried in weeks and weeks, even as the world had collapsed and she’d taken up smoking again and talking to herself, even as every ghost in her brain had awakened and she’d lost the ability to sleep, finally yielded to hot prickling tears, right at the kitchen table, beside her crying mother.

  Mamma was crying because she’d come so close in life to authentic happiness, which only one stubborn obstacle had prevented her from achieving: the man she loved with such loyalty had not returned her love.

  And Bianca wept because her mother sincerely believed that she’d come so close to happiness and that every shortcoming in her life might have been rectified if only the man to whom she’d given her faithful heart had requited her. Bianca wept because her mother could not begin to see that the original fault lay deeper, deeper, with some fatal wounding in the soul of Sylvia Schleirmacher long, long ago—years before handsome Vico Paradiso ever appeared on the scene.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  “Sometimes I think I ought to be paying you. For your time. For your counsel.”

  Bianca offered this as a mere pleasantry, of course. We don’t pay our friends for advice. But Priscilla’s considered pause suggested that the proposal was hardly outlandish. Could it be—could it be that in Priscilla’s eyes Bianca was some sort of freeloader? Somebody who sought professional services but didn’t choose to pay?

  The idea had never occurred to Bianca. Priscilla’s life appeared so depleted, her conversation turning so narrowly from her parents (both dead) to her brother (retarded and institutionalized) to her beloved but necessarily distant Dr. Cuttwell (married to a woman crippled by multiple sclerosis) … Surely, Priscilla must embrace a friendly visitor bearing tales of turbulent and unusual encounters, with a colorful, rotating cast of characters?

  But there was this aspect, too, to Priscilla: an abiding unease about being taken advantage of. It was the burden of so many of her stories … Her neighbors, the landlord from whom she rented her office, her professors at medical school, the other medical students—they were alike in conniving to deceive or defraud her. More than once she’d declared, “The world preys on a single woman,” and while this observation was offered dispassionately, as a psychiatrist’s assessment of human nature, it bore accusatory overtones. Yes, there was a faint suggestion that Bianca, sheltered on all sides by family, did not grasp the world’s nastier realities.

  Thoughts were jostling thoughts in Bianca’s head as they sat in Priscilla’s little living room, a December morning sun playing a feeble game of hide-and-seek among the glass and china knickknacks on Priscilla’s mantel. Priscilla had asked her over for tea. There was no sugar, but they were “making do” with raspberry jam. “It gives the tea an excellent flavor,” Priscilla noted, “though the seeds can be a little annoying.” One of these having apparently lodged between two of her upper teeth, Priscilla was working it free with the nail of a pinky finger. Bianca had chosen to take her tea unsweetened.

  It was easy to dismiss Priscilla as a ridiculous figure—in her naked eccentricities, she seemed to court dismissal—but in truth she occasionally offered insights nobody else did. It was Priscilla who had pointed out, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, a link between Mamma’s recent shoplifting and her wartime hoarding of candies: a long-standing appetite for hidden, prohibited treasure. Perhaps this was the most obvious thing in the world, but Bianca had never spotted the connection. Likewise, Priscilla had pointed out that there was nothing so remarkable about Mr. Ives’s tolerance of his brother Hughie, the old fruit whose antiques shop specialized in grandfather clocks. As a competitive womanizer, Mr. Ives had probably welcomed a brother who presented no rivalry. Again, the logic was compelling, and again Bianca had failed to see it herself. So perhaps it wasn’t so absurd to conjecture that Priscilla might be paid for her analyses. Wasn’t this what a psychiatrist ideally did—point out the obvious, primal connections you somehow failed to see?

  But on this morning when Priscilla was perhaps harboring resentments, Bianca wasn’t about to discuss Mamma any further. Sipping from her bitter tea, she said, “And so I got a call from Edith this week. Chipper as you please. She announces, I’m applying to medical school. And I’m just as obtuse as they come, I say, But what for? And she says, Well, to become a doctor. My baby sister the doctor, isn’t that something?”

  “Medical school!”

  Priscilla brightened at the news. Though she’d never met Edith—never met any of Bianca’s family except Grant and the twins—Priscilla clearly felt affinities with the brainy girl who considered most of the boys she dated too silly.

  “And I said …”

  Bianca paused. For what she’d said to Edith—an impulsive remark, amusing in its stupidity—was hardly something to repeat to Priscilla. She’d said: “But what about getting married?” And Edith—the baby of the family who was, in her way, more philosophical than all of them—had replied: “If I get married, I get married. But I’m going to become a doctor.”

  Bianca looked at Priscilla, who was canted over in excitement, and said, “And I said, You’ll be a wonderful doctor.”

  “It isn’t easy,” Priscilla replied. “Being a girl in medical school.”

  “Oh, Edith’s tough,” Bianca said. “Like you,” she added respectfully. She was still feeling uneasy about the pause following her joke about payments.

  Bianca went on: “You know, it’s always been this sort of lost dream of my mother’s. She could have gone to medical school. That’s what the famous Miss Patterson told her, who taught high school biology. I’ve heard the story a thousand times. Miss Patterson said she had the brains to be a doctor. And now Edith’s going to do it.”

  “Of course it threatens you in some way,” Priscilla said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t even have your B.A.”

  “I went to art school instead. And I would have gotten a B.A. The twins weren’t planned, you know.”

  “Yes …”

  A silence fell, and then Priscilla, assuming a vindicated look, remarked, “It does take a certain toughness. A girl in medical school. You have to sacrifice the idea that what you’re after is popularity.”

  “I think Edith sacrificed that idea long ago.”

  “Did I ever tell you about my roommate at Mount Holyoke, Annie McKinney?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Annie was a most wretched girl, from a large well-
to-do Catholic family in Wilmington, Delaware. She wasn’t a hunchback, exactly, but she suffered from severe scoliosis. That was neither here nor there, in my eyes, but Annie seemed quite embittered about it. She kept a journal, and one day she left it open, and there it was plain as day: It doesn’t seem to bother Priscilla that she’s so unpopular. I was unpopular? Honestly, the notion had never occurred to me.”

  Though her claim hardly seemed enviable, Priscilla looked smug as she lifted her teacup.

  “Well,” Bianca said, “in Edith’s case, I knew who was behind the idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I knew who’s been guiding her.”

  “Who?”

  “My Uncle Dennis. Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you picture it? The last time he was here. Saying to Edith, You might possibly consider medical school.”

  “Maybe she arrived at the decision herself.”

  “It was Uncle Dennis.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  For whatever obscure reason—all the more obscure given that she’d never met him—Priscilla resisted notions of Uncle Dennis’s enormous behind-the-scenes influence. But Bianca knew that if Priscilla could only meet him—meet that pop-eyed square-eared man who was never happier than when raising a glass, toasting another’s accomplishments—he would disarm her.

  Yes, Bianca’s little sister would enroll in medical school, and like so many startling developments in Edith’s life, the decision quickly assumed a logical inevitability. Wasn’t this where Edith, marching up and down Inquiry with her overloaded sacks of books, had been trending all along? Didn’t it make perfect sense that Bianca would eventually be telephoning Edith when one of the kids got sick?