The Art Student's War (25 page)

Evidently, Henry Vanden Akker’s family was likewise strict and censorious. They didn’t go to the movies, or drink alcohol, or dance. Henry had once spotted his father, alone on a park bench, smoking a cigarette, but the man had looked “absolutely stricken.” Furthermore, that was “many years ago,” and there was no indication he still succumbed to tobacco …

Something changed in the jungle
.

This was the phrase that kept surfacing in Henry’s talk:
something changed …
He was extraordinarily intelligent—he had graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, while still only twenty—and Bea, in studying his lean face, the lovely red hair and pale blue naked eyes, the rust-colored eyebrows and surprisingly red lips, could feel just how intensely he was analyzing, and struggling to understand, this
something
that
changed
for him
in the jungle
.

“It was not a crisis of faith,” Henry explained in his careful, distinction-carving way. “I never doubted the reality of God. Or the possibility of divine grace. The truth is, it was more a crisis of outlook—or perhaps a recognition that my previous outlook on the world was inadequate to my radically new situation. I had devoted myself heretofore to mathematics, but now it seemed I must read more widely …”

Well, Bea was secretly but potently drawn to any young man who could use a word like
heretofore
unself-consciously: where else was she to locate somebody who might understand her own complicated hunger to draw and paint—all her indefinable hungers? Though Maggie always teased her about her “overflowery vocabulary” (an unvarying phrase—Maggie’s own vocabulary, though inventively slangy, was narrow), Bea had a sense of needing every word at her disposal if she were ever to voice even half of the best, oftentimes peculiar, thoughts inside her. And it turned out that Bea had never met anyone, not even Ronny, who read with Henry’s speed and intensity and endurance. He had a serious back injury in addition to having contracted a brutal case of malaria out in the
Pacific. (“The truth is, those fevers were amazing. To say nothing of the chills. I must have come very close to dying,” he told her in a tone of scientific dispassion. “Can you have fevers like that without lying at death’s door? I think not.” And were those fevers the
something
that
changed
in the jungle?)

Henry was rapidly consuming the Harvard Classics, having made his way through more than two feet of its “five-foot shelf of books” while chronicling his reading in a series of notebooks. And he was devouring novels by more recent writers whose names Bea loosely associated with those modern painters—Picasso, Matisse, Braque—about whose work she could never fix how she felt. Henry was reading Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Knut Hamsun. And he was reading—with enough marginal annotations to create a sort of book-within-a-book—
Fear and Trembling
by Søren Kierkegaard.

“Have you read it?” he asked her.

“Me? No, I’m not really in a regular college. I’m an art student.”

“I’m not really in a regular college either. I’m in the U.S. Army.”

Henry was fond of clever little reversals of this sort, which evidently tickled the mathematician in him, and since math had always been Bea’s one tiny academic vulnerability, this side of him held a special appeal. Presumably, Henry discerned something whose existence she credited more through faith than experience: the exquisite, ethereal beauty of numbers. Beauty, as Ronny liked to point out, was haunting by its very nature. But more haunting still—Bea had come to see—was this notion of a beauty suspected but not quite uncovered. When one of Rubens’s sumptuous, sausage-plump nudes failed to stir her, was it the painter’s shortcoming—or hers? Had she seen what was displayed on the canvas, and gone beyond it? Or not yet trained herself to assimilate its hidden all-in-all?

Many details of Henry’s life were learned a little later—after a few weeks’ acquaintance. When she first met him, in Ferry Hospital, it was a grim Thursday in September, and the light was murky and indistinct—as was the pencil portrait she attempted. She didn’t dare move to charcoal with Henry. Her drawing failed specifically to capture the fervency of his gaze, while failing generally to fulfill the injunction about cheerful likenesses. (It was difficult, she saw right away, to produce any cheerful portrait of Henry Vanden Akker. Intense, intelligent, soulful, spirited—these she could “do” for him. But
cheerful
she couldn’t do.)

While she drew, Henry discoursed, slowly but unstoppably. His
words were so fascinating, she could hardly focus on her paper, which partially accounted for the disappointing result.

He told her about his back injury. “For a while, I was semi-paralyzed. The doctors weren’t sure I’d walk again. Perhaps I should be ashamed. I simply fell. On a steep little hill in the Solomons, in the New Georgia Islands. Most of the soldiers here are here because of actual wounds. Enemy fire. Me? I slipped and fell.”

“It must have been very slippery.”

“And of course it’s
embarrassing
—a back injury. Nobody believes you. They think you must be goldbricking—shirking.
Ooh my aching back …”

“But the doctors believed you.”

“Frankly, I’m not sure all of them did.”

“Maybe you weren’t feeling well. And that’s why you fell.” Bea had a sudden inspiration. “Maybe you were dizzy because you were feverish.”

“That does seem more than likely.”

Nobody she’d ever met before had seemed so capable of viewing himself disinterestedly—as though discussing some separate person. “The truth is, most of the time, I was feverish. That’s what makes it so difficult to reconstruct—exactly what happened.”

With most soldiers, it scarcely mattered whether her portraits were any good. Beguiled by the mere process of being drawn, they marveled at the rawest resemblance and weren’t about to inquire whether Bea had captured vestiges of the soul within. But when she said, apologetically, “I’m afraid it’s not a very good likeness,” Henry Vanden Akker agreed—though he did append, politely, “I must be a very difficult subject.”

“Oh but you’re not,” Bea protested. “It’s all to do with me.”

“I don’t look like myself, for one thing. I’m eighteen pounds lighter than a year ago.” It’s true he was
very
thin. “Though saying I don’t look like myself is to posit one essential me, and that’s precisely the issue, isn’t it? The existence of an essential self among multitudes of selves?” His fervid eyes ransacked her face. “Am I making
any
sense?”

“Oh yes.” The words leaped from her throat. Bea added, after a pause: “Sort of.” And then: “I want to come back and draw you on Tuesday, assuming you’ll still be here.”

“As far as I know. Among other things, they want to analyze my digestive system, which has become very fussy. It refuses to process many things it once processed. Apparently, I’ve become a figure of great medical interest.” It was surely an unenviable distinction, but Henry
looked almost pleased to be the possessor of an unusually fussy digestive system. Not for him conventional food, any more than conventional thinking. “But perhaps I’ll be gone.” He—Henry—paused, and a new tone, shadowed by a stammer, entered his voice: “But since they may m-m-move me, I would ask for your address now. Provided that’s acceptable to you.”

Whenever other soldiers had sought her address or telephone number, Bea had managed to sidestep them, but it never occurred to her to refuse Henry’s stiffly worded and very adult request. To do so would have seemed disrespectful.

Two days later, on Saturday, an envelope arrived so overloaded it had required six cents in postage. Who was it from? The neat return address told her: H. Vanden Akker. Its length—six dense handwritten pages—sparked immediate misgivings. Surely he was pushing things too fast?

But its actual contents stirred misgivings of another variety … Dreading an extravagant mash note, Bea was nonetheless chagrined to find Henry’s letter mostly devoted to meditations on Kierkegaard, with a few “random aphorisms” thrown in for good measure.

Random aphorisms? How was she supposed to respond to random aphorisms inspired by some Dutch writer (or was he Danish?) whose name she consciously mumbled, lest her pronunciation be corrected? (Why was there a line through the “o” in his first name?)

Misgivings of a third sort were roused on Monday by a new letter, only one page long. “I’m not a poet,” it began, “and I won’t pretend to be, but I recently wrote what I suppose might be called a poem. By way of exchange, how about an indifferent poem for an indifferent portrait?” (Was Henry being condescending? Or was he actually showing her respect—figuring she would “savvy,” as Maggie would say? So many of Henry’s remarks required serious consideration.)

But it wasn’t a bad poem, was it? No, whatever it was, Bea felt certain it was far from bad. It was singular, it was
interesting
. Bea lay in bed, the poem held up waveringly overhead. Although she soon had it by heart, she kept reading from the author’s own comely hand—an angular, mathematical combination of printing and cursive:

The life I used to think of as my life
Was someone else’s life.

The lad I once considered my best friend
Has found another friend.

The girl I used to covet as a wife
Is someone else’s wife.

One day it seemed my life had reached its end.
But that was not the end.

Now who was the “lad”? Some actual boyhood friend—or was this what was called poetic license? And more to the point, who was the girl? (Did Henry’s past contain violent heartbreak? Bea could well believe it.) And when had his life seemed finished—when he fell on the jungle hillside and nearly paralyzed himself? More to the point, more to the point, when and why had his life recommenced?

CHAPTER XIV

Sometimes, ever so obliquely, Ronny seemed to be proposing marriage, but if so, this was a union grounded in assumptions Bea scarcely recognized. True, he didn’t again suggest retreating to some Pacific island (though she still regretted her snippy reply—“Ronny, they’re fighting a war out there”). But flight was the common motif of his far-flung hypothetical: “What if we went away to the north shore of Lake Superior?” Or: “They say the light’s beautiful in the Mexican highlands.” Or: “Just because there’s never been a good painting of the Grand Canyon doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.” This was unmistakably something other than a pretty game of Let’s Pretend. Ronny’s desire and needfulness were palpable. With all his heart, Ronny Olsson yearned for the one elusive sanctuary where, side by side with his heaven-appointed partner, he might finally paint the pictures he was intended to paint.

In truth, the shortcomings in his art were inexplicable. No other student in Professor Manhardt’s class matched Ronny’s knowledge of the history of painting, or had seen and assimilated so much art. And no one approached his draftsmanship. And yet—when Bea stood with Ronny before one of his sketches or paintings, she had to accede to his gloomy self-assessment: “Something’s missing.”

Something was likewise missing, it seemed, in her romance with Ronny, though to confess this even to herself made her feel impossibly spoiled. He could hardly have been handsomer. Or more intelligent. And whatever word might best describe this whole indelicate business, the private truth was that his body wielded a brazen physical authority over her body: at the touch of his hands, at the hot press of his lips, her knees knocked, her stomach flip-flopped. In addition (though she didn’t like to think in such terms), Ronny Olsson represented, as the sole son of one of Detroit’s leading businessmen, an amazing, a dizzying “catch.” Maggie could hardly forgive Bea for dating anyone so glamorous.

Even so, and even though Henry Vanden Akker was nowhere near as good-looking as Ronny Olsson, it wasn’t Ronny’s “bad paintings” but Henry’s “bad poem” Bea found herself obsessively contemplating. “The
girl I used to covet as a wife / Is someone else’s wife…”It was so heartrending! Was it possible to wear your soul in your face? If such a thing were possible, Henry Vanden Akker did it: he wore his soul in his face. And if, by some miracle, she could ever
really
produce Henry’s portrait, she might confidently affix her name, Bianca Paradiso, to something that would rightfully hang on a museum wall in a hundred years’ time.

Sometimes it seemed most of Ronny’s problems were nothing but various facets of the War. All those dismissive remarks of his—weren’t they just the defensiveness of somebody whose draft board had classified him 4-F? (Wouldn’t everything be different if he had no heart murmur—and who on earth would look more dashing in a uniform?) Wasn’t his entire philosophy of the visual arts a response to the War? Truly, there was no way to gauge it or even to think about the War, for it was everywhere, it was bigger than anything—bigger than all else, ever, in human history. And as poor dead Mrs. McNamee’s scrapbook attested, the War had dragged on and on—with so many rosy predictions buried in the cold earth.

The scrapbook brought it all back: those inassimilable first months, optimistic headlines competing with terrifying speculations. The Germans might set up Canadian bases from which to bomb Detroit! That, too, had been in the
News
. The Germans were much closer than you thought. A North Pole—centered map showed how nearby they really were. Bomb London first, then Detroit … Those were the days when Bea had read in the paper a passage she’d never forget: “The ordinary home has no defense from an incendiary bomb, which will burn through the toughest roof.” It was as though the sentence had scorched her very soul, and for weeks she hadn’t been able to walk down Inquiry without picturing a metal projectile screaming down out of the sky, sizzling a gaping black hole through one of her neighbors’ roofs—the Higbees’, the Slopsemas’, even the Szots’ …