The Art Student's War (54 page)

There were a good many peculiarities to Priscilla’s story, actually, not the least of which was the extent of her medical practice. Priscilla stayed home a great deal, puttering around in her backyard garden—which, for all the time she spent there, hardly flourished: this wasn’t a woman
with a green thumb. Grant joked that she was the city’s only doctor who had no patients, but Priscilla did have a real—if small—office and occasionally a patient telephoned while Bianca was visiting. Priscilla apparently worked part-time.

She was devoted to her brother, whom she visited almost every day. Michael lived in an institution for retarded adults way out in Farming-ton. Bianca had gone out there with Priscilla a few times.

Before meeting Michael, Bianca had let her imagination blossom, envisioning a troubled but strikingly handsome and unpredictably shrewd fellow. She’d met instead a bland, plump, genial, middle-aged man identifiable, at a glance, as retarded. Every time Priscilla visited, she brought him a little gift-wrapped present to unwrap: a box of raisins, a pink, rubbery eraser, a campaign button for Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman. Michael liked unwrapping things.

“I saw Ronny Olsson yesterday,” Bianca said, after Priscilla had brought her a cup of tea.

“Ronny Olsson! Imagine that. And how is he?”

One of the things Bianca liked best about Priscilla was how little prompting her memory required. She seemed to hold effortlessly in her head the dense, radiating web of everyone Bianca had ever known.

“Well, I’m not sure,” Bianca said. “We went to the art institute, and then downtown for lunch to a fancy place called Jason’s.”

“Jason’s? Never heard of it.”

“It’s relatively new, and we shared a bottle of wine, and then we went for a drive, out to where my earliest memory is.”

“The Ambassador Bridge?”

Did
everybody
know better than she herself what her earliest memory was? Honestly, what was going on?

“And that was the strange thing. I think it was all the wine, or how positively bizarre I’ve been feeling all week, but when Ronny mentioned my earliest memory, I had no idea what he was talking about.”

“The man on the bridge. As images go, it’s archetypal.”

In response to Priscilla’s questioning look, Bianca felt she must show her familiarity with the term. “Archetypal? Not so archetypal that I remembered it yesterday. And then you know what happened? Oh, Priscilla, I’m so mortified: I let him kiss me. Is that so terrible?”

“Maybe not so terrible?” Priscilla said.

Priscilla had quite a distinctive tone of voice. It was little-girlish—at times very close to baby talk.

“Under the circumstances,” Priscilla added, and laughed. Her laugh, too, was peculiar. It was the closest thing Bianca had ever heard to the tee-hee-hee of someone laughing in the funny pages: a high, whispery, almost hissing sound, all mouth and no throat, like an infant’s laugh.

“You’re thinking of that Christmas party when I caught Grant necking with Maggie.”

Bianca brought this up partly to excuse her own behavior. The ironic and alarming truth, however, was that yesterday’s behavior felt nothing like an act of vengeance. No, it seemingly had little to do with Grant.

“Yes, I was.”

The effect of the little-girl voice and babyish laugh was to suggest great innocence, but in conversation Priscilla was the opposite of innocent. Over the course of their friendship, Priscilla had turned out to be far more shocking than shocked—as when she’d happened to mention, with a little whispery tee-hee-hee, that one of her patients, a burly Chrysler foreman, regularly relaxed after work by listening to adventure shows on the radio while wearing nothing but a pair of tight bright-pink women’s panties. (Bianca was almost sorry Priscilla had told her this. It was an image—the tight bright pink—she had trouble shaking from her head.) Bianca had assumed that such activities existed only in books, or in New York City. In any case, not in Detroit … A genuine
Chrysler
foreman wearing women’s underwear while listening to the
Lone Ranger
or the All-American Boy, Jack Armstrong of the SBI?

“I thought Ronny was a homosexual,” Priscilla said. She always pronounced it with each vowel distinct—ho-mo-sex-u-al—as though establishing the point that it wasn’t a term one ought to mumble. Still, the word was startling enough that Bianca typically felt a jolt in her blood upon hearing it spoken aloud. Priscilla was the only person she knew who regularly uttered it.

In truth, Priscilla talked so often of ho-mo-sex-u-als, and les-bi-ans, that initially Bianca had wondered whether Priscilla herself might be one of the latter—began to wonder, indeed, whether this woman who apparently had little social life besides visits to her retarded brother might have formed some sort of passionate attachment to
her
, Bianca. Later, Bianca had realized how misguided she was. Priscilla had finally introduced the subject of Dr. Cuttwell, and there was no mistaking the flushed, rapturous look on the woman’s face: Priscilla was hopelessly smitten.

“I thought he was one, too. Or at least part of me finally did. Agreed
with Grant when he called Ronny an old fruit. But there was always contrary evidence.”

“Evidence?” The word amused Priscilla, who emitted her little laugh: tee-hee-hee.

“You see, well, Ronny finds me attractive. He always has. I excite him. I did again yesterday. I happened to see.”

“He had an erection?”

Oh good Lord. This sort of talk was all so much easier with Maggie—with her slapdash, breezy chatter about “his thing” and “your thing.” Priscilla’s more medical-sounding language brought home all the disturbing physical reality—Ronny’s “thing” suddenly tingled with blood and nerve endings. Still, Bianca pushed on: “Yes, he did. I guess what I’m asking, it’s the question I keep asking myself, is, Is it possible?”

“Is what possible?”

“Is it possible for Ronny to be both one of them and still be very attracted to me? I can’t put the pieces together.”

“Certainly it’s possible. The heart is a very … disorganized organ.” And that high hissing conspiratorial laugh again: tee-hee-hee.

Priscilla said: “It doesn’t always go where we choose. At least that’s
my
experience.” Over the top of her glasses, she gave Bianca a nod of unmistakable meaning.

This was a reference to Dr. Cuttwell, of whom Priscilla often spoke, though usually, like this, in roundabout fashion. Bianca had known Priscilla for many months before the name in all its improbable but magnificent grandeur—Doctor Oliver Cuttwell—had been uttered. But one day, in this kitchen, over soggy Saltines and a half tin of smoked oysters, Priscilla had offered up something of her life story. In addition to a retarded brother, she’d had a hydrocephalic sister, Lois, who died when Priscilla was in medical school. Given her two handicapped siblings, Priscilla had concluded she must never have children and she’d reconciled herself to a single life. She would care for Michael.

She had dated a number of men over the years but nobody who shook her vow to remain single. Then she met Dr. Cuttwell, whom she could not have married but who evoked a tantalizing image of what an ideal partner might be. Dr. Cuttwell was a good deal older, exactly twenty years older than Priscilla. He was now fifty-eight. Dr. Cuttwell’s wife had multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair. They had talked—Priscilla and Dr. Cuttwell—about the tremendous burden of caring for somebody unable to care for himself or herself. It was a topic
of great delicacy, of course, but a deep, respectful bond of appreciation had been forged. A conventional romance was, alas, impossible, but the two of them had chastely entered into—Priscilla’s quaint phrase—an affair of the heart. In time, Dr. Cuttwell had revealed that Priscilla was the only one who truly understood his life …

“I feel very guilty,” Bianca went on, “but I can’t get yesterday out of my head.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.”

“In particular, the kissing under the bridge?”

“I suppose.”

“And that erection of his?”

“That, too, I suppose. I mean, I’d like to know what it means. Oh, doesn’t
that
sound awful.”

“Some people would say that what it means is obvious.”

“I know. Maggie would.”

“But I don’t think it’s necessarily so obvious.”

“What I can tell you is—the whole experience was very, very powerful.”

“Of course it was. What did the experience mean for Ronald Olsson? I don’t know. But for you?”

There were times when that little-girl voice of Priscilla’s, and the evasive old-womanish game she played of looking over and through her glasses, in conjunction with that absurd hissing laugh, made her seem almost painfully antic and eccentric, leaving Bianca to feel like a fool for confiding in her. But then in the midst of her absurd posturing, a wonderfully insightful observation would surface. One of those emerged now.

“Of course it was powerful. No wonder you can’t get that erection out of your head. You were encountering your earliest memory: at last you were meeting your man on the bridge.”

Bianca would have liked to linger at Priscilla’s, discussing further the mistake she’d made in letting her feelings for Ronny run away with her, and for letting him kiss her, and for forgetting her true principles, but she needed to rush home in case he called. Surely he would call. What he would say, how she would reply—these were open questions. But he must call. He would understand the need to acknowledge yesterday’s momentous turn.

But Ronny didn’t call, not before Bianca and her family finally climbed into the Studebaker and drove to her parents-in-law’s. Usually, Bianca would have been hurrying everybody out of the house—punctuality wasn’t one of Grant’s virtues—but today she was easygoing. Tense but easygoing. She was awaiting a call from Ronny, and he did not call.

The truth was, there was something faintly irritating about the cheerfulness with which Grant visited his parents. He seemed to feel none of the apprehension she regularly experienced before visiting her own parents. Grant never grew pensive as they drove up Waddington, his parents’ street in Birmingham, even though the Ives household was usually in a deplorable state. Had Grant wanted to turn morose, he had every excuse.

On this particular Sunday, Grant’s cheerfulness was especially annoying, the traffic was especially annoying, the twins’ competitive banter in the backseat (they were looking for cars with out-of-state license plates) was especially annoying—and why hadn’t Ronny called? And then—almost a relief—she was swallowed up by the various demands of the Ives home.

It had been two years now since Mr. Ives’s stroke, and though he could get around with a cane—barely—he was essentially chair-bound. He’d never regained the use of his right side. He was right-handed. Before his stroke, Mr. Ives had been a powerful man—one of the city’s leading bankers—and his infirmities galled him.

The twins’ actual time inside the house, greeting their grandparents, was probably less than two minutes. Irresistible temptation beckoned. In the backyard of Grandpa and Grandma Ives’s house stood a huge oak from which a knotted rope swing dangled.

So the group was reduced to the four adults, plus of course the hired help, since Mrs. Ives couldn’t be expected to deal alone with Mr. Ives’s disability—though the truth was that Mrs. Ives had employed live-in help years before Mr. Ives’s stroke.

This particular visit ran true to form, though Bianca felt far less patient than usual—why hadn’t Ronny called? She was greeted with a little kiss from her mother-in-law, who looked pained and overworked—pointedly pained and overworked. Bianca greeted her seated father-in-law with a stooping kiss delivered from a safe distance.

Before his stroke, Mr. Ives had been a tireless womanizer—a mortifying situation that Mrs. Ives had refused to acknowledge. He was flagrant, she was closemouthed. His stroke, ironically, reversed everything:
immobilizing Mr. Ives’s body, loosening Mrs. Ives’s tongue. At any gathering, she could be counted upon to pull Bianca aside and catalogue a numbing list of Mr. Ives’s marital offenses, past and present—yes, present as well, for, though largely confined to his wheelchair, he still had wandering hands.

How did Grant manage to remain so cheerful about his parents? Partly by shrugging off every observation Bianca made about his mother’s bitterness. While Grant might acknowledge his parents’ “ups and downs,” he steadfastly refused to see what Bianca saw so clearly: how profoundly, after all her years of humiliation, Mrs. Ives disliked her husband.

Yes, this visit ran true to form, and the dreaded moment arrived when Mrs. Ives motioned Bianca into the den and, with an exasperating broad-gestured theatricality, closed the door behind them. The boys were still out back, swinging on the rope swing, and Grant and his father were swapping jokes and anecdotes out in the family room. They got along famously, Grant and his father.

“I’m going to lose Edna,” Mrs. Ives said.

“Edna?”

“One of the nurses and she’s seventy-three.”

Mr. Ives’s nurses came and went with such rapidity that Bianca had trouble distinguishing them. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“She told me, ‘As a great-grandmother, I’m tired of having to watch my backside.’”

“I’m so very sorry,” Bianca said. She was sorry, too, that Mrs. Ives was telling her this. This was no day to hear about illicit passions—not when she was feeling crestfallen that Ronny hadn’t called.

“You remember at first I thought I’d be safe with Negroes, since Mr. Ives isn’t—isn’t all that fond of Negroes.”

Mr. Ives was actually quite genial and respectful toward Negroes, except when, as happened only occasionally, he got into his cups. Then he could say quite shocking, virulent things.

“I remember.”

“But that didn’t stop him. Pinching and poking and squeezing—and the worst of it was, they were willing to put up with it. Well, one of them was.”

“Yes.”

“So then I figured I’d go with real homeliness. Bianca, I hired some women whose faces would stop a clock.”

“I remember the one named Dolores.”