The Art Student's War (45 page)

Other than his wife, nobody has ever seen the adult Dr. Poppleton weep, who will not shed a public tear even on that merciless day, eleven years hence, when he contemplates the slow, tilted descent into the ground of the weighty box that holds his Grace. Over the years of their marriage, she alone has circulated within the inner room where his tears flow freely. But even for that casket being lowered into the chill hacked earth he cannot cry, for she isn’t actually to be found within it, Grace is miles from these wind-picked cemetery grounds, she is back home, they have returned home, she’s in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in a walk-in closet whose shirts he cannot bear to unbutton, since these are the last of his shirts over whose sleeves Grace’s ironing hand has passed. (He will wear one of these shirts on the day he pays a first visit to Edith and her new baby.) Dennis can weep in his kitchen, in his bathroom, in his tidy closet—but not here at Mount Elliott Cemetery, a few blocks from Inquiry Street, because no grace is here.

Yet he’s weeping and trembling now, on Inquiry Street, though Grace is far away, still in perfect health, in that other home which can never be their home, in that city whose soil is foreign soil. In the end, for all her adaptability, Grace will shudder at the thought of lying, motionless into eternity, some 165 miles from home. Home forever remains the East Side of Detroit. The ailing woman wishes to go home, and the two of them will pack up and go home. Meanwhile, Dennis is weeping onto Vico’s usually sturdy shoulder.

And on one additional occasion Dennis shall weep in public, though on a day of such abrupt astonishments no one will notice his weeping, or any other earthly thing. On July 16, 1969, Dr. Poppleton will stand on a ragged, littered Florida beach, among palm trees shaken by a sudden unnatural wind. Unchecked tears are coursing down his round features. This science-fiction reader has felt the very earth tremble underfoot, as it
should
tremble, for this is the scheduled day on which the planet’s most curious species—whose not-so-distant ancestors brachiated through the canopy and took the treetops as their ceiling—forges a path through the inviting vacuum of the universe; this is the day when Homo sapiens embarks for the moon.

On a sudden impulse, this unprepossessing and unimpulsive man has driven day and night to be here, drawn as thousands upon thousands have been suddenly drawn, to a marshy stretch of beach in Brevard County, Florida. Skies are clear. He’s a paunchy white-haired pop-eyed round-faced square-eared figure standing among equally unprepossessing figures—for when the single-minded engine lifts, when the seven million tons of aero-engineering scream skyward, we are none of us prepossessing.

The sewing needle lifts and goes on lifting, steadily yanking itself free of all the nagging primeval claims of the planet’s core. The needle trails behind it a thread of flame, a thread of rewoven dreams … The flashing needle pushes itself into and through the blue, seeking out the blackness behind the blueness, the battered white lantern lost within the blueness, as Dennis never doubted would happen, no, never doubted—though he never expected actually to be present. Yes, here he is,
present
, before the blazing enactment of his highest-flying flights of imagination—who now indeed cannot see much of anything, for the ground trembles underfoot and his eyes stream with tears.

… Pause a moment to ponder the numbers in play here, consider the towering improbability of it all. That’s what his books have taught him to do: think forward, think backward, think across the generations
beyond reckoning, all of them shaken out of the dice-cup womb of time.
Think backward
and
think forward …
Think of the wordless pre-hominids, cold and muddy, hunched and shoeless, wandering lost over yet another barren ridge, as real as you and I, and among all those multitudes
he
happens to find himself lodged in the first generation that can stand with its shod feet planted on God’s green earth and behold a spacecraft blasting off toward a rendezvous with a heavenly body. What were the odds of any man’s being so lucky? This lonely, brokenhearted widower—he is the most blessed of men.

The unremarked man stands on the shore, in Florida’s Brevard Country, weeping. He also stands in a kitchen on Inquiry Street, in a neighborhood already beginning to be called blighted, weeping. And looming between these shattering days is the low and overcast day when he will stand dry-eyed in Mount Elliott Cemetery, steadily observing somber, uncomprehending rituals as all that he most loves is locked underground.

Two men are embracing, two souls bathed in the only holy water the earth has ever produced—human tears—and how are we to speak of it, of that other day, more insupportable even than Grace’s funeral? Of that catastrophe too near and vast for Dennis to consider, even momentarily? Not even for a moment—Dennis cannot
bear
to think of it. No, the heart of this gentle and accepting man storms and howls at the mere thought … But if—
if
the influenza overcomes the girl? He is a doctor, he inhabits a world of pitiless microscopic military campaigns, where even the world’s most beloved child may suffer a defeat. And to a doctor, reality must be faced, even when it’s far less plausible than the alternative.

Say she
were
to perish, in the city’s great flu epidemic of 1943? In that case, there would be no escaping the day he cannot think about. And hundreds of Detroiters have already lost that very battle …

If it were to happen? The girl’s passing wouldn’t make the newspapers. It were to happen, and she becomes a mere statistic in some municipal volume brimming with statistics. It were, and the rippedopen earth becomes a desecration. It were, and father and mother, brother and sister, uncle and aunt—all discover they’ve lost the one most precious thing they know. The girl’s story breaks the heart of anyone whose heart can still be broken, but such losses hardly fit the columned newsprint that bounds our lives. No, it’s the novelist’s burden: there’s scarcely a place for it in the newspapers.

It’s a different matter when a singular, earnest young mathematician
dies in a plane crash on the Pacific island of Majuro. A mortal fire flares briefly in the rain and his is a death of greater import—yes, it makes the local newspapers—but Henry Vanden Akker is but one of the 2,573 fatalities Michigan will suffer before the rubbled neighborhoods stop smoking in Dresden and Nagasaki. He, too, goes largely unremarked, as the death count is raised by one. It seems the War has taken him, Henry Vanden Akker, whose dream of Heaven was someday to sit with Thoreau and Kierkegaard and Einstein at a colloquium table where every line of argument was pursuable. Henry’s simple, stupendous dream was always of some God-given liberty of the mind, the Lord himself having vouchsafed, at the outset, “Feel free to doubt Me, gentlemen, if you must.”

Meanwhile, she has gone off to matriculate at that Studio of the Tropics envisioned by Gauguin—where Gauguin and van Gogh and a few prize pupils stand before easels on a tropical slope. Work proceeds brilliantly, alongside burly blooms, and in their company stands the girl’s grandfather, her nonno, the Ligurian master of trompe l’oeil. His was the delicate art of verisimilitude in pursuit of illusion: his the hingeless door to nowhere, the open window really a wall.

Bianca has passed through just such a door; she has seen the notional become the negotiable … She knew a boy once, so handsome and so gifted he must in time blossom into a great artist—except he could never negotiate that door. Identifying it for what it was—an illusion—he logically concluded that it would never admit him. But the true artist, naïve enough not to discern its illusory nature, saunters right through the plaster wall upon which that door is painted. The true artist walks up the broad stairs of the lizards’ womb where she was born, and effectively declares, “Soldier, I want to capture your essence on a sheet of paper.” And the soldier answers,
Don’t you think I look brainy?
And the soldier answers,
Maybe you could draw me the way I really look?
—as if the metal in his face were merely a disguise.

That near-legendary figure, her young grandfather, in that near-legendary land, Liguria, long ago arranged Bianca’s passage through that door. Only a romantic fool would liken the wizened emphysemic man who shows up for Sunday dinners to the immortal Tiziano of the Renaissance, and only a romantic fool would see the matter dead-on right. For they are all the same painter, those figures deployed on the hillside in that visionary Studio of the Tropics, and it is all the same palette and canvas. They will unite the spectrum, the floating red of wind-blown Italian
rose petals, the floating blue of Greenland’s icebergs, for in the Land of Colors without Objects, all is afloat and there is no land. There is merely the Solidifying Impulse and the Dissolving Impulse, and once you identify these as one and the same, you’re ready to embark for the Land of Colors without Objects, where one can never alight for long. The jungle leaves are calling you forward. And those other voices—human voices—call you back. The burning girl hasn’t the strength to move in either direction. And yet she can’t stay where she is …

Fortunately the child is attended (as everyone ought to be attended) by a fairy godmother, whom Bia thinks of as Aunt Grace, but Grace is merely the figure’s latest incarnation. Her name was once Immacolata Paradiso, back in the days when she assumed the form of an illiterate peasant who hit upon the idea of keeping her newborn grandson alive in a woodstove. That infant was Bianca’s grandfather, Paolo Paradiso, and Immacolata’s was a reasonable enough idea, provided you were willing and able, for weeks on end, never to sleep. For weeks on end, Immacolata never slept. How could she? She had a baby in the woodstove.

Tiny Paolo Paradiso lies inside an immense fever inside an overheated wood stove; Paolo Paradiso lies in the Land of Colors without Objects. And in time Paolo is summoned to paint a fictive door through which his granddaughter steps, as she, too, arrives in the Land of Colors without Objects.

Paolo, born two months premature in the year of our Lord 1877, inhabits a woodstove right out of a fairy tale, since it also houses his son, Ludovico Paradiso, and his granddaughter Bianca Paradiso, and (God willing) Bianca’s daughter, Maria, and Maria’s two daughters, all of them overseen by a woman who has not slept for months—a bustling, obdurate little creature who is descended from brachiating tree shrews, who is descended from plumed angels.

And Bea is attended by a fairy godfather. It is the construction worker of her earliest memory, the powerful man silhouetted on the Ambassador Bridge. (It is Heimdall, god of light and watchman of the Asgard bridge; it is Saint Peter, the gateway’s guardian.) Or—nearer at hand—it is the father who built the burning bunk bed she lies in, and who at this moment stands in the kitchen, embracing his weeping brother-in-law. Their huddled, pitiful postures remind us that the riddles of friendship may run deeper than the riddles of romantic love. For these two men, this long embrace is unprecedented. Mostly, they communicate through words—always a challenge for handsome Vico,
whose English is halting and whose reading, whether in English or Italian, is uncertain and laborious.

It is his medical-minded daughter Edith who will, twenty-two years hence, finally attach a mysterious term to Vico’s lifelong struggles:
dyslexia
. She will be investigating the matter on behalf of her seven-year-old son, who reads more slowly than his classmates. Edith will announce that dyslexia apparently runs through the male side of the Paradiso clan—her father, Vico; her brother, Stevie; her son, Jacob.

And she will later unpack from her medical bag another even more puzzling term,
obsessive-compulsive disorder
, and employ it to explain a few eccentricities that appear to run especially deep in the family’s female line—in her candy-hoarding mother, Sylvia; in her sister, Bianca; and in Edith the Mad Knitter herself.

Vico will greet this term,
dyslexia
, suspiciously and shyly and yet in the end eagerly, embellishing its remote Greek overtones with an Italian climb-and-fall. Although he will rarely broach the topic, he’ll take comfort in the term’s scientific ring, having always suspected that his habitual difficulties with print were not attributable, as others might suppose, to a mere lack of intelligence. Everyone assumes his two brilliant daughters—those all-A students—derive their aptitude from their mother, a woman quick to remind everyone that she, too, was once an exceptional student. There was no arguing with Sylvia’s conclusion, since it was perfectly logical. And yet—yet Vico has always believed in his own keenness of mind.

The only person on the planet to whom he feels his true mental capacities have been demonstrated is his brother-in-law, Dennis, in whose slow and measured responses Vico finds his one suitable audience. Dennis has supplied him with something more precious than affection or indulgence—Dennis has given him respect.

It isn’t in Vico’s nature to dissect his friendships, though in regard to this, his closest friendship, he occasionally suffers an uneasy sense of owing far more than he is owed. After all, Dennis understands the world. Dennis sees into the inner nature of politics and the newspapers, banks and insurance forms, the Germans and the Russians and the Japanese; he understands the War. And yet this man, this doctor, who knows so much about so much, will listen deferentially as Vico sets out his halting observations. What can Vico do in repayment, except see that at the Poppleton home there’s no rain gutter not tight and clear; no leaking faucet; no squeaking door? And what in the world can Vico now offer in repayment, since the Poppletons’ move to Cleveland?

Vico’s not one to write letters, and he’s certainly not one to chatter through a long-distance telephone call. When, suddenly, Dennis and Grace packed up and moved to Cleveland, Vico effectively lost his one true friend in the world.

Given his accent, given his name, given his Mediterranean good looks, Vico Paradiso has gone through life stamped as an Italian immigrant, but in the end it’s not among his old compatriots he has looked for understanding. The riddles of friendship may run deeper than anything born of romantic love, and the truth is that all those Italian men playing bocce in Chandler Park, drinking coffee while standing at the counter in one of the cafés off Gratiot, conferring in restaurants whose sunny, smoky murals recall a half-forgotten homeland—such people make him uneasy. Vico’s heart instinctively searches elsewhere—as it did many years ago when, blindly, needfully, and far less successfully, he went out seeking a wife.