The Art Student's War (63 page)

“Holy moly,” Maggie said. The story had turned very serious indeed.

“And Mr. Bootmaker hauls him out of the bath, wraps him in a robe, and carries him downstairs and into his truck, and they race to the hospital, and the only reason Mr. Bickey is alive today is because of Mr. Bootmaker. He’s a hero. He’s a genuine hero!”

“And Mr. Bickey’s going to be all right?” Bianca asked.

“Apparently. In any case, a helluva lot better off than he woulda been. He woulda been
dead
. I tell you, Roy Bootmaker is a hero.”

Grant’s eyes were shining. It was a lovely display of everything Bianca had been saying just now: how freely Grant esteemed the heroism of others. The man who had insisted that Henry Vanden Akker’s portrait remain on the wall was thrilled—just thrilled—to see Roy Bootmaker, the epileptic milkman, revealed as a hero.

It was also just like Grant to insist on taking the tale one step further: “And you know what, Maggie? Here’s the kicker to the story. A month or so ago, I proposed canceling Bootmaker’s deliveries. To save a buck or two. And Bianca wouldn’t hear of it. I tried to fire a genuine hero, and Bianca wouldn’t let me.”

“Grant, it’s not as if I knew. I just felt sorry for him. After I found out he has epilepsy.”

“I didn’t know that,” Maggie said. “I’m not sure I’d want an epileptic milkman.”

“That’s the
point!”
Bianca said. “That’s the problem! If nobody wants him, he’s out of a job, and then what is he—”

Grant was eager to return to the core argument. “Bianca, you had
the
instinct
, don’t you see? You knew it was wrong. I wanted to fire him. And you knew it was wrong.”

“This is absurd. It’s not as if I—”

“You were adamant. Absolutely adamant. I tried to fire a man who’s a genuine
hero
, and you said no.” Grant looked to Maggie for verification: surely they were confronting another demonstration of Bianca’s formidable second sight.

“It’s not as if—”

“But it
is
, Bianca. It
is
. Don’t you see? I said, We’re going to cancel Bootmaker. And you said, Are you out of your mind? You basically said, He may not look like it, but that man is a genuine hero.”

Grant found the story of Mr. Bickey’s rescue so stirring that, over a large whiskey, he recounted it a second time. Maggie—the new, plastically enhanced Maggie—kept pointing her chin at him, but Grant didn’t notice. After Grant told the story a third time, Maggie abruptly departed, looking a little nonplussed. “You know,” Bianca said, “the way you talked, you were only fueling Maggie. She seems to feel you hold me in too high esteem.”

Grant’s reply was chivalrously perfect: “But how would that be possible?”

And yet it wasn’t mere chivalry. His face still wore its wondering, boyish glow.

And hours later, as she was putting on her pajamas, he continued to throw her wondering, glowing glances.
“Quite
some day, don’t you think?” she said.

What reliably accompanied that glow was a neediness, and when they climbed into bed Grant curled his big body around her body and placed one hand on her rounded hipbone and one hand loosely outspread on her collarbone. Soon they were going to make love. He needed to touch her—to touch the body of the woman who, lit with clairvoyance, threw off the glimmerings of another world. “I tried to fire him,” Grant said. It was remarkable how deep in him ran this need to believe she communed with mysterious, inestimable forces. Perhaps as deep as her own appetite for a man who felt this need.

CHAPTER XXXIII

She was sitting where she rarely sat, in her studio, when the phone rang. It was Papa. “Bia, can you come? I need you to come.”

“Now?” It was eight at night. “Is there—sure, sure I can come. Is there something wrong?”

“Wrong? Yes. Something wrong.”

“But is everything all right?” Meaning: is everyone still alive? Has the house burned down?

“It’s all right. I need you to come.”

She wasn’t going to get anything more out of him …

Nervous,
very
nervous, but not quite in an absolute panic, Bianca explained everything, or as much as there was
to
explain, to Grant, who said of course she had to go: her father never summoned her like this. He would stay home and look after the boys.

Bianca drove down Woodward to Mack, Mack to Inquiry, all with a heightened visual sense of herself: she was a pregnant woman in a green Studebaker, alone on a gray windy October night, driving home toward some disaster. “Just what I need,” she said aloud. “Just what I need.”

Papa was waiting for her as she pulled up. “I want to show you something,” he said. His face was white with emotion.

Bianca followed him into the kitchen. He was limping on his plantar wart. A peculiar ghastly sound, muffled behind the closed door, issued from her parents’ bedroom. It was—unbelievably—it was the sound of Mamma weeping.

Everything was neatly laid out on the kitchen table. Under the harsh overhead light, it seemed internally illuminated, like a dream, but what did it signify? Here were hairnets and bags of hard candy, sunglasses, candles, deodorant and toilet water, handkerchiefs, packs of chewing gum, thumbtacks. Here was a porcelain poodle, a pair of gnomes that served as pepper and salt shakers, a set of bamboo napkin rings, a rabbit’s foot key ring dyed emerald green. Here was a far wider array of merchandise than Bianca could absorb all at once. Beside each item, in Mamma’s neat handwriting, was a file card with the name of a store (Hudson’s, Crowley’s, Olsson’s), and a price, and a date.

Mamma was sobbing in the bedroom and meanwhile Papa, charged with mysterious intention, was asking Bianca to contemplate a blazing tabletop overrun with cheap, garish merchandise. Once again she had returned home in order to step into a dream. “I don’t understand … What does this mean?”

“What does it mean?” Papa repeated. He paused. “It means your mother is a thief.”

“I don’t understand.”

Papa’s words were stupefying. There was no way to absorb them all at once.

“She did not pay for these.”

“I don’t understand,” Bianca said again.

“It means your mother takes the things and she does not pay.”

A dragging sound like Oh-h-h issued from her throat, but it was more grunt than word. The horror was inexpressible. For a few seconds the room appeared to go dark, then to flame into a new spectrum, the merchandise on the kitchen table returning with vibrating intensity.
Your mother is a thief…
The horror was inexpressible, and yet even in the midst of it, Bianca recognized a low-lying hungry kind of excitement: surely, now,
something
would have to be done. Surely, now, some long-needed breaking open would break open.

Papa had set everything out neatly, painstakingly—almost proudly, you might suppose, if you didn’t know the circumstances. Each shiny item with its file card … Things from Hudson’s, Crowley’s, Cunningham’s, but most had come (Bianca began to understand, her eyes jumping here and there) from Olsson’s. And now the strongest of all emotions hit her: a wave of insupportable shame. “Shouldn’t we put these things away?”

“Better to leave them out,” Papa said.

“Who knows about this?” Bianca whispered.

“No one but you and me,” Papa said. “And Edith.”

“Where’s Edith?”

“In there with her.” Papa pointed with his elbow at the bedroom. Mamma was still sobbing behind the closed door. “And Uncle Dennis. He knows. He comes tomorrow.”

“Uncle Dennis is coming tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Thank heavens.”

But even as she offered these words, Bianca knew the problem was too vast and grave even for Uncle Dennis’s healing powers. What could
anyone do? She could not take her eyes from the kitchen table. Under the bright light, the stolen items were rioting. They were crying out:
It means your mother is a thief
. Her skin was crawling. There were no words for this sort of horror.

“Tomorrow morning,” Papa said. “Tomorrow I don’t go to work.”

“You stay here,” Bianca said.

“I stay home,” Papa said.

“So many
things …
,” Bianca said.

There was a pincushion in the shape of an apple. There was an unopened pack of bobby pins. There was a tube of wart-remover cream, which must have been intended for Papa’s plantar wart. Yes, Mamma had been tenderly looking out for Papa’s welfare, even as she was behaving in a way guaranteed to disgust and desolate him.

Never before in her life had Bianca seen her father so upset. The man who prided himself on his calm was shaking with emotion. His voice, too, was shaking.

“There are extra file cards,” Bianca said.

There was a substantial pile of them, nearly of the thickness of a deck of playing cards. The top one, again in Mamma’s cramped but neat handwriting, said, “Polident, Olsson’s, September 13, 1952, 39¢.”

“Those are for the ones she used.”

“I don’t understand,” Bianca said, although this time she did.

“They’re gone,” Papa said. “She used them up.
We
used them up. I have been brushing my teeth”—and Papa tapped his forefinger against those teeth he took such pride in, still not a cavity in the man’s mouth—“with stolen toothpaste. She made these cards as a record.”

“I still don’t understand. How did you find out about this?”

“It was a box. In her closet.”

“You opened a box in her closet and you found all this?”

“Yes.”

“And Mamma admits she stole all of it? She confessed?”

“After a while. Yes.”

“And there were cards for things that were missing?”

“Yes. Cards for everything. The missing things, too.”

So the cards were not something recently compiled. No, they had served all along as the meticulously kept diary of a working thief—and Bianca shuddered once more, for this painstaking process of self-incrimination screamed madness. Would anyone but a madwoman do such a thing?

“No one must know,” Bianca whispered.

“No,” Papa said. And added: “But we know.”

“I feel sick,” Bianca said. “Sick to my stomach.”

“Sick all over,” Papa said. “I’ve been washing myself with stolen soap. I’ve been brushing my teeth with stolen toothpaste.” Everything about him, body and voice, was shaking.

One of the items from Olsson’s was the little pair of porcelain gnomes, presumably a husband and wife. A pepper-and-salt-shaker set. The man was Pepper. He had lifted his hand to his face. He was sneezing. The woman was weeping. Salt tears. Even for gnomes, the two of them were intensely ugly—they had the special grotesquery of objects that fused intended and unwitting ugliness. So it made sense that the gnomes hadn’t been removed from their cellophane. But who in their right mind would risk police arrest, public humiliation, and all the gnawing guilt of indelible sin, in order to steal such a pair? What sort of mind could eye them and see temptation and opportunity?

There was no reason to shoplift
any
of these things, of course, but Bianca’s attention fixated on the porcelain gnome couple: the sneezer and the weeper. Still in cellophane …

“Thank heavens Uncle Dennis is coming,” she said, but what could he do for a woman who would shoplift such cheap and useless and
stupid
eyesores? And if Uncle Dennis could do nothing, what on earth could be done?
What could be done?
Bianca knew she hadn’t begun to negotiate all the layers of her revulsion, but she also knew, knew to a dead bright trapped certainty, that for days and days and days her problems could only deepen before anything, ever, got any better.

A new day broke, under a sick gray sky, and Uncle Dennis arrived for various surreal consultations and he spent the night on Inquiry Street and returned to Cleveland and then drove back to Detroit the very next day. He had arranged for something. Mamma would be away for a couple days—maybe as long as a week. She would undergo a “thorough examination.” She would be staying out near Ann Arbor.

Papa took comfort in the phrase, which he repeated incessantly. Mamma was going for a “thorough examination.” This would be both sorts of tests, Uncle Dennis explained to Bianca—as he had no doubt explained to Papa, and to Edith, and to Stevie, though Stevie probably hadn’t required much of an explanation. He’d already formulated one. “She’s gone off her rocker,” he declared with finality, as if this sound medical opinion rendered further discussion superfluous. What was the point? And besides, the whole subject made him very tense—like a
clench fist, as Rita would say. Edith, on the other hand, was keen to analyze the whole business, mostly in the light of her anthropology courses. It seemed that in order properly to understand Mamma’s behavior you first had to recognize that the very idea of property—and hence, theft—was a culturally created notion. What one culture regarded as “stealing,” another might view as sharing … In other words, neither Stevie nor Edith was any help at all, and the best thing to do, Bianca realized, was to assign them very specific secondary tasks, like the question of reimbursement.

The money had to be returned, of course. Edith could have quickly summed the numbers in her head, but Stevie, working laboriously, calculated everything on paper. The total came to $27.72. It was Edith who pointed out that mere reimbursement would not be sufficient. A number of thefts extended back over a year and an accrual of interest would be required. This, the two of them eventually agreed, should be set at 10 percent, a figure Edith initially considered exorbitant. Stevie may well have been motivated by a wish to keep calculations simple, but he won Edith over with the argument that the stores in question would have “processing costs.” He worked for a trucking company, he knew about such things. The actual delivery of the money—in plain envelopes, with a brief and vague anonymous letter of Edith’s composing—was left to Stevie, who predictably undertook it with gusto, as an exciting bit of espionage.

It would have been funny, if it weren’t all so gruesome and horrible.

Yes, certain problems could be satisfactorily handled, or even delegated, but others resisted all mediation. Bianca had just turned onto Woodward, she was heading off to Inquiry to meet Papa and Edith, when a cold perception crept over her: she didn’t know where her mother was. Yes, her mother was in Ann Arbor, getting her thorough examination, but Bianca didn’t actually know
where
—she couldn’t identify the physical site where her mother was spending the night. Never before in her life had she been unable to identify where her mother was passing the night, and this icy recognition, though she was hardly a religious person, spontaneously prompted a prayer, spoken aloud. It was maybe the shortest meaningful prayer anyone had ever composed, a mere two words, repeated over and over as she drove south on Woodward:
Please, God
, is how it went.
Please, God; please, God; please, God…