The Art Student's War

by Brad Leithauser

  “The medieval period.”

  “Nothing more beautiful,” Donald said. “Nothing more beautiful. The Saint Jerome in here? By Rogier van der Weyden? Nothing more beautiful in this whole place.”

  Ronny looked sharply at Donald and Ronny’s unpaintable eyes were glittering with extravagant intensity. Ronny seemed to be seeing Donald more fully than ever before. “Do you know what?” Ronny marveled. “Why, that may be my very favorite painting in the whole museum.”

  “Nothing more beautiful,” Donald repeated, and he met Ronny’s gaze.

  Then Donald turned. “You once telephoned me,” he said to Bianca. “You remember?”

  “I did. I do. You’d lost your notebook and I found it.”

  “I don’t know if I ever thanked you properly.”

  “You did. You always had impeccable manners …”

  But the confident look had bled from Donald’s gaze. Yes, he was recollecting what she was recollecting: Is that you, Tatiana? Donald had been hopelessly infatuated with the yellow-haired Russian doll. But all that was so long ago. Donald had been a boy then, and now he was a man, and he was happy with his wife, and his life, wasn’t he? He seemed so happy …

  “You had impeccable manners,” Bianca repeated. “Like your children.” Again, she called out to them. “Which do you like better? The paintings? Or the sculptures?”

  Another timorous pause. “The armor,” Donald Junior said. “The armor,” Albert echoed.

  “My boys too!” Bianca said. “My boys too!”

  “You see what I mean?” Donald said, and laughed conclusively. “You see what I mean? Regular rapscallions.”

  After farewell handshakes, after cries of well-wishing on all sides, she and Ronny parted ways with the Doobly family. The encounter left a lingering burnish, and Bianca took Ronny’s arm and exclaimed, “Isn’t it wonderful to see Donald doing so well? Isn’t it wonderful?” The paintings on the walls in this, her favorite building in the world, shone all the more resplendently for having looked out at Donald Doobly, Rosella Doobly, Donald Doobly, Jr., and Albert Doobly.

  “You telephoned him,” Ronny said.

  “I did. From a phone booth in front of an Olsson’s Drugs, actually—I didn’t dare call from home, isn’t that ridiculous? He’d lost his notebook and I found it.”

  “It was good of you to call.”

  “I don’t think I would have dared, I rarely called you, Papa was very fixed on the notion that girls didn’t call boys, but I felt so sorry for Donald, and for Negroes generally. You remember—that was the summer of the race riot.”

  “You’re right. It was. I’d forgotten. I guess it got overshadowed.”

  “Well there was something called the War going on. And isn’t it wonderful to see Donald doing so well?”

  “I didn’t know that Ford’s hired people like him. In jobs like that.”

  “Times are changing.”

  “He’s got to be one of the first …”

  It was all so hopeful and inspiring. Someone like Donald really could work hard and get a good job at Ford’s—and why couldn’t he and his wife eventually send their two boys to U. of M.? And why couldn’t those boys study medieval art with Professor Olsson? One of those boys was named after a pompous German would-be Brit who, nonetheless, had given the gift of art itself, and with it a solid livelihood, to a skinny boy who had grown up in Black Bottom. Bianca didn’t quite have the words to crystallize this feeling of having glimpsed, here in Detroit’s true palace of marvels, something more wondrous yet: the brilliant blueprint of a just commonwealth, a better city. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, but it was clear that Ronny—always so moody, so prone to a sudden plummeting melancholy—wasn’t sharing her elation.

  Well, she knew how to handle this. Over the years, she’d had a great deal of experience hauling Ronny out of his moods. You didn’t ask him about them, or acknowledge them. You simply kept on—you wore down his despondency.

  She thought about telling Ronny the true story behind her phone call. Is that you, Tatiana? But she found she couldn’t do that. She could have done it to the Donald she’d seen today—so substantial, so prosperous-looking—but not to the resolute colored boy whose legs were thin as broomsticks.

  Instead, she said, “We have a new friend in the family.” She told him about Ira Styne. About the strange way he’d materialized, after ten years—this soldier who once memorably sent Edith a five-dollar bill for her birthday. About how Mamma liked cooking for him, and Papa was overseeing his checking account. About how this man who originally came for a few minutes had stayed in town a couple of months already.

  But the story did nothing to lift Ronny’s mood—as she should have realized it wouldn’t. She was plunged back into those heady days when she was the girl-artist at Ferry Hospital, talking so excitedly about the poor Irish kid with the patch on his eye and the amputated foot, Private Donnelly, and finding Ronny chilly to her talk. Jealousy. He could never brook her speaking warmly about any other man.

  “Did you see the way Donald’s eyes bugged when he saw us? That was the second time today somebody mistook you for the baby’s father.”

  This did cheer Ronny. Always so attentive to visual impressions, he was keenly aware that the two of them were catching glances and drawing surmises: the tall fine-looking man in the tan linen suit, a distinguished flicker of gray at his temples, and the tall, pretty young woman who was so exorbitantly pregnant.

  She went on: “What a summer that was! First my mother gets it into her head that my father’s in love with my aunt, and our entire family explodes as a result, and then the city itself explodes, the radio actually reports that the Negroes are assembling on Belle Isle, they’re going to march on the city, and my family’s living three blocks from the Belle Isle Bridge … And all the while there’s the War, the War, the War, the whole city’s in a perpetual frenzy, and the wounded soldiers returning by the hundreds, and what is Bea Paradiso doing? She’s trying to do art. She’s trying to learn still-life painting.”

  Bianca paused, then pushed ahead: “She’s trying to do art? How could she concentrate, when one day the handsomest boy she’d ever seen, who was also the most beautifully dressed, steps into her classroom? And tells her her drawing isn’t right and asks if he can show her how it’s done?”

  Ronny laughed. “Did I really do that?”

  “You certainly did.”

  “My god I was insufferable,” Ronny said, and he was restored: he was fully happy once more. Yes, she’d done it—she’d brought Ronny Olsson back where he was supposed to be. “How did you bear me?” he asked.

  “Very easily,” Bianca said. “All too easily.”

  They had paused before her cherished Bellini. Madonna and Christ. Mother and Child. The two sacred figures looked not toward each other but outward—two spirits partaking in a human covenant of divine mercy. Behind them lay a gently hilly terraced landscape where lambs and rabbits gamboled, where fruit trees sweetened and Italian was spoken, the alternative world, the true paradiso of heaven on earth.

  “Do you realize it was ten years ago we first looked at this painting together?” she said.

  “And here we are,” Ronny said. “Still standing here.”

  This time, Bianca had the last word: “It’s because we’ve been here all along. We never left.”

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  Long Walk through the City

  “Here we are at last,” Uncle Dennis said. “You’re sure it’s not too late?”

  “No, no, no,” Bianca said. “This is a fine idea.”

  “Really not too late?”

  “Perfect timing.”

  They stepped off the front porch together. It was a warm, beautiful May night. Uncle Dennis was carrying his pipe, unlit.

  “I need some air,” she said. “Even if I do move like a tortoise.”

  “You know this really will all end.”

  “You mean the pregnancy? I don’t think so. No. I’m going to carry thi
s baby forever.”

  She would carry her baby until the end of time. That was all right. It was Thursday, the twenty-eighth of May, and she was nearly two weeks overdue. As of this morning, she weighed 168 pounds. Was she actually heading past 170? And was it possible that only last summer she’d weighed 127? It wasn’t possible. But that, too, was all right. She had been different people along the way. Or else she hadn’t—she’d dreamed them all. Actually, she was very tired.

  They turned right, toward Six Mile. The night had taken on that special ballasted quietness of late spring—a newly leafy quietness. Soon it would be summer.

  “Grant seems well,” Uncle Dennis said.

  “You know, I think he is. He went through a rough patch for a while.”

  “I know.”

  “With everything. But maybe the worst wasn’t that his mother-in-law turned out to be a thief. Maybe the worst was that his wife went crazy because her mother turned out to be a thief. I went through a rough patch, too.”

  “I know you did,” Uncle Dennis said.

  “And I knew you knew. I keep using that phrase, rough patch, but it was all much scarier than that suggests. And you sensed it. You’d drive up for a day or two, back when you were arranging the move and everything else, and you kept urging me to take care of myself.”

  “You were very pale.”

  “I could hardly eat. I was losing weight, which is quite ironic. This morning I weighed one sixty-eight.”

  “I’ve been gaining weight, too. The difference is, it doesn’t improve my appearance any. You look wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful pregnant woman.”

  “Is that a medical opinion?”

  “Certainly,” Uncle Dennis said. “Certainly.” The air was heavy—heavy and light at once—with the fragrance of blossoming trees. In the distance—also heavy and light—came a rumbling sound of explosives, and a pause, and another rumble.

  “Fireworks,” she said. “Someone’s celebrating Memorial Day a little early.”

  “I’m old enough to think of it as Decoration Day.”

  Memorial Day fell on Saturday this year. Aunt Grace and Uncle Dennis had driven up for the holiday weekend. They had long planned this trip around the baby’s birth, which would surely have arrived by Memorial Day. Was it possible they were going to drive home without glimpsing the baby? Possible. Likely.

  They had arrived at noon today, and Mamma and Papa and Edith, Stevie and Rita had all come over for an early supper. The dinner guests had just now departed, and Aunt Grace, pleading tiredness, had gone up to bed. Bianca had been waiting weeks to have this walk with Uncle Dennis.

  “Your boys? They seem very fine.”

  “I guess so. They had their own rough patches.”

  Formulaic questions, ritualistic and repetitive answers … The two of them had been here before, so many times. And yet their conversation was—Bianca sensed eagerly—moving forward.

  “Especially Chip,” she went on. “He had all these fears, and Grant couldn’t seem to reassure him—only I could reassure him. But he seems better, which I guess means less dependent on me. You know what I was thinking? I can tell you because you’re someone who truly understands I wouldn’t change a hair on either boy’s head, I love them with all my heart. But I keep thinking this child, the one I’m carrying, which my intuition tells me is a girl—this child will be my child. You’re a doctor. Have you ever seen sons who look more like their father? Or act more like their father?”

  “It is remarkable.” Uncle Dennis chuckled. But having been asked a medical question, he must answer in medical fashion. “I can honestly report I’ve never seen a closer resemblance.”

  “Down to the least littlest gesture,” Bianca said. “You know Edith keeps talking about anthropology, she uses words like socialization, she talks about how cultures perpetuate themselves, and I keep thinking they should send a team of anthropologists to study Matt and Chip. How do they learn these things? Did you know the boys open a straw exactly the way Grant does?”

  “A straw?”

  “A drinking straw. They each tear the paper at the bottom and then give the top three little taps with an index finger. Always three: tap tap tap.”

  “How extraordinary!”

  “Isn’t it? As I say, Where do they learn these things?”

  “I mean extraordinary that you’d notice. You’re remarkably observant.”

  “I am observant,” Bianca declared, relishing her immodesty. She could talk this way to her uncle. “It was something I consciously cultivated, when I was studying art.”

  “And this other child. This daughter you’re carrying. Is she going to be an artist?”

  “I’m not sure. A novelist? Or, better yet, a poet? In any case, I guarantee she’ll be a beautifully dressed little girl. I’ll buy her white gloves and take her down for a soda at Sanders, just the way Aunt Grace took me.” There was a pause. “Grace looked tired tonight.”

  “You know she’s not well.”

  “I know,” Bianca said. She halted, considered, then plunged ahead: “How bad is it, really?”

  More fireworks rumbled in the distance, expanding and subsiding—like a collective city heartbeat—and all the while a sleeping woman’s life hung in the balance. “I don’t lose hope,” Uncle Dennis said finally. “But it seems they didn’t get it all. The cancer. It’s spread.”

  “Oh no,” Bianca moaned, but she already knew this. Maybe she’d known it for weeks now. “But there’s hope?” There had to be. The alternative wasn’t imaginable.

  “Of course,” Uncle Dennis said. “Always hope. Plenty of hope.”

  It was all too grim and terrifying to contemplate, especially when she was so tired. Later, in her brooding insomniac’s way, she would think about it and think about it. She would find a suitable prayer … In the meantime, she would cling to her uncle’s encouragement: Always hope.

  He talked awhile in his medical way, introducing terms and procedures she didn’t understand, as if she were a medical colleague. Well, Edith would become one.

  The problem, you see, was a lack of selectivity in the treatment. It wasn’t that the scientists didn’t know how to kill the cancer cells. The problem was that the chemicals and the radiation destroyed so much with it. But the science was improving by the day. There was a good deal of hope …

  They had reached Six Mile. The houses across the street were smaller, denser, a bit run-down. On evening walks, Bianca rarely ventured across Six Mile. They turned around.

  “Stevie and Rita seem fine,” Uncle Dennis said. He desired a change of subject, clearly.

  “Now they really do. Buying a bigger house? Little Stevie buying a bigger house? It was a godsend, your getting him out of Ford’s.”

  “Didn’t have much to do with me.”

  “No—no—no,” Bianca half said and half sang. “’Course not, ’course not,” she went on in a gruff mock-male voice. She was teasing her uncle in a way he enjoyed. She was raising his spirits. “Which reminds me of something else.” Oh, she’d been longing to bring up this for weeks. “You know what Rita told Grant her braces cost?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what Rita told Grant.”

  “She told him the total cost, everything, I mean years of orthodontics, and you remember what her teeth looked like—the total cost is one hundred dollars. Doesn’t that seem a very good price to you?”

  “Well Dr. Ropinsky, the orthodontist, he’s a particular friend of mine.”

  “Right. And so he’s willing to do your nephew and his wife a huge favor. That’s what Grant figured. But the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t add up. Only a hundred dollars? Just the equipment must cost more than that. So you know what I think? You know what I think?”

  There was a silence and then a little laugh. This wasn’t Uncle Dennis’s usual laugh, which was bright and boisterous—it was a kind of low giggle, which rolled outward in an unloosed fashion. Among the people she was closest to, t
here were many laughs Bianca cherished: there was Mamma’s rare, unexpectedly lovely, evenly spaced girlish laughter; there was Grant’s bluff triumphant rumble when, playing the storyteller at a party, he “got off a good one;” there was Priscilla’s funny-pages tee-hee-hee and Maggie’s bright bite of mischief. But this was the laugh Bianca loved perhaps best in the world. For this laugh was grafted to the very taproot of human charity. This was the mischievous hilarity, shared with Yusuf the Turk, of the soul that perceives its own acts of kindness as funny.

  Uncle Dennis’s laughter confirmed everything. Bianca went on: “Now this is just a wild surmise, but you know what I think? I think you arranged with Dr. Ropinsky that Stevie, who’s an absolute mule, as we all know, and who won’t take charity from anybody, that Stevie would pay a hundred dollars up front and you would surreptitiously make up the difference. That’s what I think.”

  The low nervous happy chortle rolled on. Then Uncle Dennis collected himself. “Well, we all said it since you were just a tot. Little Bea has second sight.”

  “Second sight my eye,” Bianca said. “Good heavens, what a terrible poker player you’d make! One hundred dollars. Couldn’t you have done better than that?”

  “But Stevie and Rita don’t know …”

  “No, they don’t. Your terrible secret is safe with me.” And they both laughed.

  “But Stevie and Rita are doing well,” Uncle Dennis said again. Tonight he was seeking encouragement.

  “I think they’re doing very well,” Bianca said. But what was she herself seeking tonight? She wasn’t sure, she only knew she’d been waiting weeks and weeks for this opportunity. Things were always so rushed when Uncle Dennis dropped into town; there never seemed time for a real palaver.

  “I haven’t seen Maggie in ages,” Bianca said. Uncle Dennis had always adored Maggie. “She’s lying low after getting her nose done. Did I tell you she’d had plastic surgery on her nose?”

  “I think you said chin.”

  “That, too. First chin, then nose. She’ll show up any day now, bright as you please, with a sharp little nose high up in the air.”