The Art Student's War (24 page)

Ronny flanked his mother on the other side. Bea took a last sweeping look around the table. In front of Mr. Olsson’s coffee cup she saw her list, dutiful and forlorn:

Hairbrush
Noxzema (Face Cream)
Little Scissors
Nail Clippers
Emery Boards

Hardly a word was spoken on the return drive. A soundless rain was falling.

When they reached the Olssons’, Ronny disappeared. Mr. Olsson, too, disappeared. Mrs. Olsson sat in her music room, Bea at her side. “We shall have a cup of tea,” she announced. She seemed subdued, possibly chastened. She looked smudged, even in this dim light. Bea was aware of rain falling, though she could not see it or hear it.

Bea talked about Professor Manhardt, and Ronny’s extraordinary
gift for draftsmanship. She felt vaguely complicit in the night’s many mortifications. But what ought she to have done differently? Hadn’t she herself been blameless?

And Mrs. Olsson looked so
very
tired …

Then, rousing herself, Mrs. Olsson interrupted eagerly: “D’you hear that sound?”

“What sound?”

Yes, there it was—like a distant drumming, deep within the bowels of the house.

“Know what that is?” Mrs. Olsson asked, and something about her quickened tone, and the self-satisfied way she canted forward, was disquieting.

“No-o.”

“That’s Charley? See? D’you see?”

“I’m not sure—”

“Gone down to his gym. And you know what he’s doing? Punching his punching bag. And—don’t you know?—wishing the whole time it was me. Not that he would ever
dare
lay a finger on me.” It was a rain of blows—another sort of rain. With absolutely queenly repose, Mrs. Olsson leaned back in her chair. “But we all can dream, can’t we? I mean, it makes you almost feel sorry for old Charley, doesn’t it, Bianca? All those forbidden fruits. Things the man wants so desperately—and can never have.”

CHAPTER XIII

It was striking just how quickly a new routine established itself. Her portraits were deemed a success, apparently, although nobody in authority said so outright. But Bea’s field of operations was steadily expanded. First she was asked to shift from one day to two days a week at Ferry, then she was assigned as well to the USO canteen downtown, in the Hammond Building, where she did
many
portraits. She was much quicker now in moving from pencil to charcoal, but this was still the method—her artistic method as a portraitist. Emotionally, too, her work was easier, because her subjects were largely fresh recruits. They hadn’t been wounded, they hadn’t turned “a little funny” under the distant unimaginable terrors of world warfare.

But in another way the USO was a harder place to work. These boys seemed even younger than the boys at Ferry: teenagers, like her, and so touchingly innocent! Though just a girl, she had a better sense of what awaited them than they did. Most had never seen anything like the interior of Ferry Hospital.

And the War straggled on. Two years for the Americans; four years now, moving into five, for most of Europe … In four more years (could the War possibly drag on another four years?) Stevie’s friends, those little boys who dispatched Germans in the alley, might actually be drafted. (In her prayers, though it made her feel funny to do so, she’d sometimes thank God for giving Stevie the myopia that ought to keep him out of harm’s way.)

Just how long the War had been dragging on grew clear when old Mrs. McNamee down the street passed away. She was eighty-seven. Edith was asked to help sort out the salvage and Bea came along. (Of course Edith saw nothing peculiar in an arrangement where her big sister trailed along as assistant.) One of the things Mrs. McNamee left behind was a scrapbook of war clippings. Her only grandson was in the Coast Guard and poor Mrs. McNamee had saved only optimistic articles. The earliest headlines, from way back last year, recalled an optimism painful to contemplate:
JAPS ADMIT MORALE IS LOW, GERMAN
DESERTIONS CLIMBING, BIG DOUBLE AXIS DEFEAT, NAZI OFFENSE CRUMBLING
. Since nobody else wanted it, Bea had brought the scrapbook home. Somehow she couldn’t bear to see so much lovingly husbanded naïveté thrown away.

Meanwhile, the hospital’s castellated outlines continued to haunt her, looming through the twilight of her dreams, though Bea had a proud, adaptive sense of handling the place. Nurse O’Donnell’s air of impregnable disapproval had relented to the extent of a nod in reply to a spoken greeting. Bea would arrive every Tuesday and Thursday at ten and remain until noon. Working quickly, she could finish one soldier portrait, possibly two. (She was no sidewalk artist, knocking off commissions in twenty minutes.)

She’d come to understand that Ferry was like the hub to a wheel. Soldiers arrived and were spun out along the various spokes—home to rest, maybe, or out to the front, if the healing was mostly complete, or, in the saddest cases, out to another hospital or a mental home. The unsettling thing about those who had “turned funny” was how numerous they seemed—not what you’d suspect if you knew the War only through newspapers and newsreels. And still more unsettling: you couldn’t always initially identify them.

Bea learned with time not to be surprised, or terribly upset, when a familiar face abruptly vanished. On the day, early on, when she decided to check on Private Donnelly and his bandaged eye, and learned he’d been transferred to another hospital, she’d experienced a surging desperation. She’d immediately felt near tears. Oh, she must
find
him—must write him, visit him! The two of them had shared something significant—a swift but cherished friendship—and she couldn’t allow all their amusing, sweet, poignant banter simply to vanish … But as the weeks went by, it grew clearer that such vanishings were precisely what the War was all about. Boys were forever being shipped from Point A to Point B. You crossed their paths once, maybe, before they caromed off in unforeseen directions. You met a soldier who knew exactly how to make you laugh—though he had a face peppered with shrapnel and a recently amputated leg—and then he was carted elsewhere, to make some other girl laugh, and in his bunk you encountered a new body, a soldier with a new disability and a new story.

… Or one May afternoon you encountered a handsome, blue-eyed soldier on crutches who laboriously boarded a Woodward Avenue streetcar and then insisted on giving up his seat for you, and you
exchanged a few glances that etched your soul—and this was the whole of it: the War in essence. You go home that night and throw yourself on your bed and weep with the piercing knowledge that you hadn’t properly thanked the one boy meant to be your true love … Oh, it made her laugh now! Only a few months ago, that particular incident, but it seemed so much longer! (She’d done so much growing up in the meantime.) She’d learned she must let them go, as they let her go—all those wounded boys, hobbling toward undisclosed destinations. It was one of the things people meant when they spoke of the War
coming home
.

And the hospital also taught her just how devastatingly attractive she could be. Oh, she was quite a pretty girl at the USO canteen downtown, but at Ferry, in the hospital of her own birth, whose hideous green walls eighteen years later housed such wartime despair and desperation, she was an irresistible creature. After a while, there was no
not
seeing it.

A
pretty girl
was customarily how Bea referred to herself to herself—sensing in anything more boastful an invitation to the worst sort of unhealthy and obnoxious vanity. But any
pretty girl
couldn’t spend too many afternoons at Ferry without seeing that in the eyes of the wounded and the “funny” she was absolutely the best thing to come along in a
very
long while. Here were big strong men—or men big and strong until recently—unable to recite their names without a shy schoolkid’s stammer or a tremor of their powerful, hairy hands.

Some of them she thought of as boys, and some as men, but most were boy-men, something in between … They were alike, anyway, in the awakened looks she kindled in their faces: such lit-up, keen, nakedly beseeching looks. One glimpse was often all it took. In truth, it made Bea uneasy, it felt dangerous—to wield
this
much power over strangers. It made her feel exultant and grateful and excited, and also shamefully unworthy. Some of the boys, particularly the farm boys, seemed little older than Stevie, and yet they’d been shipped overseas, sick and scared and lost, to confront horrors outside all her experience. But—but on their return from a hell on earth, they immediately ceded all power and authority to a girl who’d never left Detroit, really. (One of these farm boys, out of the blue, began gently crying as she sketched him. Thinking he soon must stop, Bea halted and took his hand—she didn’t know what else to do—but he went on weeping, uninsistently but unquenchably. Her own all-too-frequent tears usually followed a progression, with predictable shiftings of intensity and volume. But this was steady as a leaky faucet. And when at last he spoke, at first she couldn’t make him out.
Poor lost soul, he was chanting, over and over, “No one … no one … no one …”)

They were transported thousands of miles only to be shipped back thousands of miles, humbled and shaken, jittery eyes pleading for a pretty girl’s approving glance, the bright bonus of a smile. Purely by virtue of being who she was, Bea possessed the means to comfort, perhaps even to restore them to themselves. For that’s what (so she came to realize, beginning with Private Donnelly) her mission must be: to give them back their carefree boyish prewar faces.

She frequently recalled one of Mrs. Olsson’s observations: what counts for more than being pretty is
knowing
you’re pretty. Well, Bea knew it. Her job at Ferry seemed designed to impart this knowledge—a situation tailor-made to make the boys fall head over heels. The Army goes and plucks some boy from his family’s sugar-beet farm outside Kalamazoo and he doesn’t talk to a girl for weeks on end, before he’s shipped off to North Africa, where he contracts dysentery and a grenade fragment explodes into his solar plexus … Then you ship him back home to Michigan, to the Ferry Hospital, where one day a pretty girl in a blue-and-yellow-plaid skirt and a white cardigan appears and asks if he’d like his portrait drawn. She says, in effect,
Soldier, let me capture your essence on a sheet of paper…
Oh, he’s half in love before her long-fingered hand has recorded a single hair on his head!

Ever since she was a girl Bea had loved to draw portraits, but at Ferry something new entered the process: a quickened command. This had little to do with how well any individual portrait turned out. It had everything to do with just how vulnerable these boys were—how invested in the business of being drawn. They stared up at her—the artist—with such hopeful and anxious faces …

Bea hadn’t been visiting Ferry for much more than a month before she infuriated Maggie no end by receiving two earnest marriage proposals. Bea learned to shrug off, with a pert but effective graciousness, even the most preposterous compliments: she was a homecoming queen, a potential Hollywood starlet, the world’s most beautiful woman. But she felt a little discombobulated when one clammy-looking Polish kid from Hamtramck stared up out of a distant fever to identify her—the tall dark-haired apparition at his bedside—as the Madonna herself.

When she talked about Ferry Hospital with Maggie, it all sounded charming, or wonderfully flattering, but Ferry was far, far more poignant than charming or flattering. Whenever she thought of the
place, particularly while lying in bed, an immovable ache would invade her throat, and on came all the old nightly jitters … It was the same ache she experienced on stepping inside the hospital, for she never walked those grim corridors without feeling close to tears.

The boys were constantly wanting to give her something. They couldn’t bear to see her depart without placing in her hands a return token—some repayment for the gift of the portrait. At first, she steadfastly refused even the littlest trifle. It seemed improper to accept anything from somebody who had already sacrificed so much for her, and for her country. But Bea soon saw such scruples as overly rigid—ultimately ungenerous. It
pleased
the boys so, to place something in her artist’s hands, even if the gift had little material value in the world’s eyes: a nickel Sky bar, a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, a postcard of the Federal Building in San Francisco, a blurry photograph of two boys atop a water tower somewhere in South Dakota, a not-quite-functional kaleidoscope, an actually rather lovely little wooden case in blond wood, which “might be big enough to hold cigarettes,” with a Chinese junk and a row of distant conical mountains inlaid in darker wood. Still, she wasn’t prepared for the soldier who presented her with a poem he had composed himself.

Henry Vanden Akker had grown up in Pleasant Ridge, out Woodward Avenue, just a couple of miles north of the Detroit city line. Henry’s family belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. He had a very Dutch face. He resembled Vincent van Gogh, or so Bea told him—which wasn’t quite true, although Henry did have van Gogh’s reddish hair and wild, naked-looking eyes. (Bea was qualified to make such judgments, having spent so much disciple’s time before the van Gogh self-portrait at the DIA—the first van Gogh purchased by any museum in the country.)

In actuality, though, for all her badinage, Bea hadn’t wandered so far from the truth: for the more she saw of Henry (and she seemed fated to see a fair bit of him), the more he plausibly might have been Vincent’s cousin or even brother. Henry had a high forehead—It was possible that, at the age of twenty-two, his red hair was already retreating. His skin was fair. His ears were pink and large.

Bea’s only previous exposure to the Dutch Reformed Church had come from the Slopsemas, up Inquiry toward Kercheval—those two impeccable sisters who looked down their pointy Dutch noses at the not always impeccable Paradisos, whose elder daughter was forever being
fetched by different boys in different cars, and whose only son had turned Inquiry’s alley into a battlefield. (Did they realize, those two dour women, those indefatigable adversaries of dirt and disorder, who—spring, summer, fall—scrubbed their sidewalk every morning, how much delight they brought the neighborhood merely by having a name that began with
Slop?)
Bea had always maintained a wary distance from the Slopsemas.