“Hearts too,” he said gallantly, and took her by the arm. Oh, she adored his quick suavity! She’d been feeling like a cow all day—as of this morning she’d gained thirty-six pounds—and yet she turned giddy, almost airborne, as they mounted the steps together.
At the cloakroom, something amusing and actually quite delightful happened. Behind the counter stood one of those gray-haired women of a certain age for whom all pregnancies are an open topic. Nothing like Are you expecting, my dear? from her. “When’s it due?” she demanded.
“Not for almost two months,” Bianca confessed. And felt herself blush.
“This your first?”
“My third, actually.”
The woman appraised her admiringly. “You don’t look it. I had just the one, but I never did get my looks back.”
Bianca started to say I’m sorry, but caught herself. “Well—yes.”
“Congratulations,” the woman called to Ronny, who for a couple of seconds regarded her blankly.
And then he did what he so rarely did: he grinned unreservedly, a full-faced explosion of a smile. “Well, thank you very much,” he said.
Fatherhood—even mistakenly attributed—patently agreed with him. His face was aglow as he led Bianca through the great hallway, past the glassed-in suits of armor the twins loved so much. Ronny was even able to glance upward at the murals in the Diego Rivera courtyard with benign approval—something he’d never shown them before.
“How are your boys?”
“Mm?” she said. It was unlike Ronny to ask about her family right away. “They’re fine. They went through a rough patch a while back. I had some serious problems with my parents—my mother—and I guess the twins were feeling neglected.”
“But when were there no serious problems with your parents?”
The question wasn’t posed sarcastically or maliciously. In fact, it was a good question. Bianca pondered and said, “It’s just a coincidence, but do you know when the real problems started? About when I first met you. Ten years ago, I guess. You’ll have to take my word for it. But there was a time when life seemed quite happy at home.” She could confide things to Ronny she could confide to nobody else on earth, but she would never divulge that her mother had once regularly shoplifted from Olsson’s, any more than she would tell him about the evening when his mother—sitting in the kitchen in a jade-green robe, drinking whiskey—had raised the possibility that her boy might be “cur.”
“I didn’t mean to sound flippant,” Ronny said.
“You didn’t. It was a good question. You always make me think about things, which I appreciate. I remember you once asked me, Why do you want people thinking you understand less than you do? I’ll never forget that.”
“I don’t remember the circumstances.”
“Neither do I,” Bianca said, although she did. It was the disastrous evening at the Coral Club when Mrs. Olsson had spoken of courage and niggers and kikes. “Anyway, the point is that maybe someday I’ll piece it all together, but what I can tell you now is that everything changed that summer I met you. The summer of ’43. Everybody talks about how hard the Depression was, but that’s not my memory. For the most part, I remember my childhood as being so happy. It was the War that really did me in. And how’s your father?”
As they conversed, the two of them were not looking at each other. They were both staring upward at the Diego Rivera murals, into the blazing blue and green phantasmagoria that a modernist Mexican had created in response to the greatest industrial city in the world. To confront its packed, elevated inferno somehow made talking easier …
“It’s the oddest thing,” Ronny said. “He’s really come undone since Mother died. He’s aged ten years at least—you’d be amazed. I would have sworn he didn’t really like her. I would have predicted you’d see him two months later with some young honey on his arm. But he’s haunted by her.”
“She was a haunting woman.”
“You’re telling me?” Ronny said. And laughed.
They wandered around the museum, halting before the old favorites. Ronny showed little of that instructive impulse he’d displayed on their last visit. His comments were uncharacteristically minute: “I like the handling of the snow,” or “Isn’t the lining of the robe splendid?” or “He got the dog’s fur, didn’t he?”
Bianca held her tour guide’s arm the whole time. It had been a long while since she’d felt so content—or so content in this particular fashion. Normally, she would not have been wholly comfortable continually holding the arm of someone not her husband in this open and public space. People might come to the conclusion reached by the coat-check woman … And yet it felt completely right—walking arm in arm with Ronny here. In some way that Grant himself would have understood, and even approved of, had she only been able to express the point properly, this museum was the one place on earth where she was Ronny’s; it was simply appropriate that she take his arm.
After a while, her weight got the better of her. Her lower back began to ache. “I think we better sit a spell.” They made their way to the Kresge Court and Ronny fetched her a cup of coffee. “I hope your father finds his bearings again,” she said. “It pains me to think of him aging all of a sudden.”
“More surprisingly, it pains me. You might think I’d welcome it. You know it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world being the son of the former U. of M. track captain.”
“I can imagine.”
“The weird thing is, I’m actually a pretty good athlete.”
“I know. I’ve danced with you. I’ve seen you ice-skate.”
“Even if I don’t feel the slightest desire to go down into a little gym and punch a punching bag.”
“I know you don’t. How’s Chris, by the way?”
She’d meant merely to sound warm and accepting, but Ronny stiffened. “Chris? Who could possibly say how he’s doing? He’s in advertising.”
“But you always liked advertising, Ronny.”
“Liked? I hope not. I prefer to think I sensed a magical power in it. It’s like television. You own a television set?”
“We do. But I don’t watch it so much.”
“Nobody does. Nobody does, and yet it’ll take over the world anyway. Who’s going to look at a canvas when you can look at a canvas that moves?”
“Oh Ronny, you’re depressing me.”
“I don’t mean to. It’s the painter manqué talking.” He looked to see whether she understood the term. She understood the term.
He went on: “I think that’s something you and I shared. Neither of us really belonged in art classes. Or you could say we were actually the only two who did belong. The son of the owner of Olsson’s Drugs wasn’t meant to be studying still life at the Institute Midwest. And neither was this Italian girl from the heart of the city. I always admired that about you, by the way: you didn’t play the girl artist. Tatiana Bogoljubov—she did, with the yellow hair and the breasts in everybody’s face.”
“I didn’t have the breasts.”
“You were deeper than that. You saw things.”
“Saw things?”
“Yes, you saw things.”
Such a welcome phrase … In their baldness, the words called up dear Grant’s repeated declaration, You make things interesting.
“Seeing things? Sounds a little cuckoo,” Bianca protested. “Which always makes me nervous, given my mother.”
“What I’m saying is, our not belonging was a sign we actually belonged.”
“I know what you mean,” Bianca said, and though his words sounded nonsensical, she did.
“You know what I think of? I think of a conversation we had, I don’t know, ten years ago. I said something, and you said, I’ll remember you said that.”
And it was proof of what soul-intimates they were that she, with so skeletal a clue, was able to say, “I know what you’re referring to.” Again, she did. “You said to me, I’d like to be sitting on a park bench with you when I’m sixty …”
/> Oh, Ronny looked grateful! Had she ever in her life felt closer to him?
“I did!” Ronny said. “That’s what I said. And you know what? In thirty years, they’re going to tell me I’m right. It’s going to come clear—all the peculiarities will come clear, you and me in Manhardt’s class, our romantic walks through the park …”
Did Ronny himself know what he meant by that? Or was the point only that, in time, he would know what he meant by that?
“We will,” she said. “We’ll be sitting there together.”
“As we’re sitting here now,” Ronny said.
In thirty years, the baby in her womb would be almost thirty years old—roughly her own age now. No such future seemed possible, though it was almost certain to happen. It was the world Chip and Matt would inherit—a world where one twin would be driving over, with his wife and kids, to visit the other, with his wife and kids, and given enough elapsed time this was the very world she, too, would naturally inhabit—but this could hardly be her world. Thirty years—1983? Everything likely was unimaginable, and where was her true, her own world? She was feeling quite upended today …
“You know what’s odd?” she said. “I feel as though the light’s changing. Your mother was born in the nineteenth century. I remember seeing that date in the paper, 1899, and somehow being surprised by it, though I shouldn’t have been: I knew exactly how old she was. But I used to feel that that other world, a nineteenth-century world, was so close at hand. You’d see the old G.A.R. veterans parading, straggling along so proudly, and you could still smell the horses in garages that used to be stables. My nonno was born in 1877, and I remember all your wonderful excitement when I told you about his being born so premature and being kept alive in a woodstove. And none of those worlds seemed so far away, and I can’t help feeling they feel far away now because the light’s changing. That’s the biggest historical change there is, and it’s the one that only painters know how to record. It changed sometime after the War. Am I making any sense?”
“You always make sense to me. You’re the only person I know who makes sense to me even when she isn’t making sense.”
“May I take that as a compliment?”
“A fond and fair compliment. A deft and memorable compliment.” Bianca laughed.
The sun through the skylight caught the silver at his temples. Good Lord, he was the most beautiful man she’d ever known. “You’re going gray.”
Because she said this so approvingly (surely his attractiveness was manifest in her every look and word and gesture, for she’d reached that bedazzled state wherein she could formulate no observation about him that wasn’t a compliment), she somehow expected Ronny to welcome her remark. But he looked pained. He said, “You haven’t had a single gray hair?”
“Not yet. My mother’s hair’s mostly dark, and she’s fifty. Grant and I have a little bet as to who’ll get the first one.”
“Who?”
“Grant? My husband, Grant?”
“Who?”
Ronny looked pleased with himself once more. He was going to keep this game going until the end, then.
“Let’s go look at more paintings,” she said.
“Let’s, my dear. Let’s.”
They were standing before Titian’s Man Holding a Flute when a male voice—an incredulous voice—inquired, “Bea Paradiso?” Somehow she knew who it was, even before turning around …
Years and years ago, she had placed a telephone call to that voice. She had walked over to the phone booth outside Olsson’s, deposited her nickel, and reached a voice likewise tinged with incredulity. Is that you, Tatiana? the voice had asked—yearningly, touchingly.
“Hello, Donald.”
Yes, it was Donald Doobly. The art student, the beautiful draftsman. The skinny Negro boy in the oversized clothes.
Only, he wasn’t skinny anymore. He had filled out; in fact, he had grown plump. But it was the same voice, and the same kindly and mindful eyes. She’d drawn his portrait once, or started to. She’d never finished it.
“It is! It’s Bea!” Donald announced, and laughed boisterously.
“Yes. So nice to see you, Donald.” She turned. “You remember Ronny—Ronny Olsson?”
Donald’s eyes seemed to double in size. His glance had already taken in her belly. “The two of you …?” he began, and his voice trailed away. His hands lifted and fell.
For the second time today, Ronny had been mistaken for the father of her child. “Just good friends,” Bianca said, and giggled. “I live with my husband out near Seven and Livernois. We already have twin boys.”
“Imagine that,” Donald said, and shook his head. “Imagine that.” Donald made it sound like an impossible feat, but it turned out that he, too, had two sons. They were standing bashfully over near the wall, beside a petite light-skinned Negro woman.
“Step forward,” Donald said, and the boys, with downcast eyes, obediently sidled forward.
“Shake hands,” Donald said, and both boys simultaneously extended their hands.
“I don’t know your last name,” Donald admitted.
“Ives.”
“This is Mrs. Ives. And this is Donald Junior. He’s six.” Bianca shook hands with Donald Junior. “And this is Albert. He’s five.” Bianca shook hands with Albert. “And this is my wife, Rosella. She’s a schoolteacher. Bea Ives, Rosella Doobly.”
Bianca shook hands with the woman. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Donald has told me about you,” Mrs. Doobly said. Had he? Bianca felt oddly guilty. Had she ever mentioned Donald to Grant?
“I go by Bianca now, actually,” she told Donald.
“Do you?” This, too, struck him as extraordinary. He was in such high spirits, most anything she might say was at once marvelous and humorous.
Ronny was introduced to Mrs. Doobly and the children. Having successfully negotiated another set of handshakes, the boys retreated to their wall.
“Are you enjoying the museum?” Bianca called over to them. “Yes, ma’am,” said the older boy, Donald Junior. “Yes, ma’am,” said Albert.
Donald was wearing a beautiful suit of a sober gray wool that held a gossamer shimmer of azure. Dressed like twins, both of his boys were wearing navy-blue suits and red ties. His wife was wearing a lovely black-and-white houndstooth dress. Donald had always been a careful dresser, though in the old days most everything he wore—impeccably clean, scrupulously pressed—had been many sizes too large. He’d grown into his clothes at last.
“I brought the boys to look at the paintings. Never too young to learn about art.”
“I’m amazed at how well-behaved they are,” Bianca said. “Once when I brought my twins here, they started wrestling in front of that big Delacroix. The battle scene. I guess it inspired them.”
“Oh my boys are regular rapscallions,” Donald said.
They didn’t look it. They looked timid and precise and alert, much the way Donald had always looked, whose voice had deepened and broadened, who had a rowdy new laugh.
“And what about you, Donald? What are you doing?
“I’m with Ford’s. In the design department.”
This with of Donald’s—so blithe, so collegial—was deeply heartening. “Why, that’s wonderful!” Bianca cried.
“You remember, at the Institute, I studied both Fine Arts and Industrial Arts.”
“That’s right, you did!” Bianca marveled. “So, one of us who enrolled at the old Institute Midwest is actually putting something he learned into daily practice? My hat’s off to you. Do you really think it helped you—the Institute?”
Donald didn’t know how to answer. He regarded her with open amazement and Bianca was able to see, as she hadn’t before, the skinny little colored boy within him.
Donald formulated a declaration: “Why, it changed my whole life. It made me what I am today. I knew next to nothing when I arrived there. I was just a little kid with a gift for drawing. You remember Professor Manhardt?”
“Of course.” The funny little German man who said things like “sticky wicket.”
“You know what he did?” Donald went on. “Do you know what that man did? He gave me my first set of oil paints. Gave them to me.”
“Now isn’t that wonderful.”
“I named Albert after him. Albert was Professor Manhardt’s name.”
“Now isn’t that wonderful …” The words swelled in her throat—they were almost too big for utterance. Had she not met Donald today, Bianca would never have appreciated how profoundly she still longed to believe in the authenticity and the discernment of the now-defunct Institute Midwest. She would have told anyone who would listen that it was at bottom a silly little school, doomed not to last, with eccentric and mostly laughable instructors and mostly silly students, including an eighteen-year-old girl in a preposterous red Hungarian beret who went around chanting to herself, An artist never stops mixing paint. But Bianca still believed in that girl, Bea Paradiso, and it elated her to come upon Donald Doobly, in a gorgeous suit, who had materialized as a reminder that she’d been right all along. She and her classmates hadn’t been silly. They had been engaged in the noblest of all undertakings: they were art students.
“And you could draw,” Donald said, turning to Ronny. “You were the best of us all.”
And Ronny, always so gracious, offered a tactless reply: “Maybe that’s not saying so much? Given the level of the group?” But he recovered quickly: “Though it’s true you could draw, too—and you stayed with it. That’s the important thing.”
“It’s how I make my living.” Donald paused. “And how about you, Ronny?” It was startling just how much more direct and self-possessed Donald had become.
“I’m an art professor. At U. of M.”
“I tell my boys that’s where they can go to college. But they gotta work hard.”
The boys’ mother nodded. The boys, first the elder and then the younger, nodded.
“They can study with Professor Olsson,” Ronny said.
“That’s an incentive. A genuine incentive.” Again, Donald confronted Ronny head to head: “What is your specialty?”
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