The Art Student's War (69 page)

CHAPTER XXXVI

She was alone in the house. Would she ever again be alone in this house that in many ways felt more like her real home than her real home did? Her legal address might lie on Middleway, with her husband and children, but today she was back on Inquiry, and though most of the household furnishings were in boxes—Edith had packed up ruthlessly once the frivolity of Christmas lay behind them—the late afternoon light was still the same timeless light of old. Nowhere else on earth did sunlight assume quite this quality. The word
beige
suggested blandness to most people, but this light contained a good portion of beige, and it was the richest light in the world. The word
tawny
suggested lushness, and there was a good share of tawniness as well, but in the end it was neither beige nor tawny, there was no term for such a color, and no tube in the world’s paint box could replicate it. She was alone in the house in which she’d grown up and which her family, in less than two weeks’ time, would abandon permanently, and when again would she ever be alone here? The doorbell sounded.

On the front porch on this cold but bright January afternoon stood a stranger. Bianca peered at him through the glass on the front door. He had long graying hair and was leaning on a cane. Bianca opened the door.

“Is this the Paradiso residence?”

“That’s right.”

“But you—you’re not—Forgive me. This was sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision. I should have telephoned before dropping in. Hey, perhaps I better begin by introducing myself. Sorry. Got off on the wrong foot. Typical. My name is Ira Styne. You see, I remembered the name of your street. Inquiry—who could forget that? Not even me. The number, on the other hand, that was another matter.”

He spoke very rapidly. He was nervous. Despite the cane and the graying hair, and a somewhat scratchy voice, he actually wasn’t very old—probably not much older than Bianca herself. This was all quite irregular, but she didn’t feel the slightest unease. It was impossible to
look into the man’s long, uncertain face, with its brown puppy-dog eyes, and distrust him.

“You see, I wrote a number of letters to this address,” he went on. “Years ago. I remembered the name, Inquiry Street. But you’re not—you can’t be … I wrote to a little schoolgirl. Edith Paradiso.”

“That’s my sister.”

“Then you—you must be Bea.”

And everything fell into place. “And you’re Ira Styne. She was given your name at school. A soldier to write to. You’re Edith’s soldier pen pal.”

“That’s right. But I wasn’t much of a pal, sorry to say. I was very bad about writing.”

“You sent Edith a five-dollar bill. Five hundred pennies in convenient paper form.”

He looked terrifically embarrassed—and pleased, too, to have his little witticism remembered. “For her birthday. Yes. I’d missed her birthday and I felt just awful. She’d written me all these amazing letters, and you can’t believe how long and full and mature they were, and you see I hadn’t written back, but I was in a bad way, I’d been wounded actually”—he tapped his cane against his leg—“and that was only the start. Oh my, listen to me, boring you like this, forgive me. The point is … Do I have a point? You might well ask. But I do, at least I think I have a point. The point is, I happened to be in town today, I remembered the name of the street, and I thought maybe it’s time to offer some real thanks. A day of atonement. Better late than never, I thought. Because those letters she wrote, they sure meant a lot to me, even if I was such a deadbeat I couldn’t remember a little girl’s birthday.”

“Edith isn’t here.”

He paused, confused, and then relief came to his long face. The distance from his lower lip to the base of his chin was remarkable. This was nobody in need of a chin enhancement. “That’s all right. You can deliver the message. Just tell her an old soldier came by to thank her. Tell her that her letters meant a lot at a time when—when he was in a bad way. Oh shucks, skip all that. But do give her my thanks, won’t you?”

“Why don’t you come in? She ought to be home soon.”

“Oh I don’t think I’d better do that. No. Actually, I’m in something of a hurry. You see, I’m heading back to New Jersey. Where I belong. Sad as that may sound. Woe is me. Better to shut up, huh? I’ll shut up. I just wanted to say thanks is all.”

“She’s at school,” Bianca said. “She should be back soon.”

“School? She must be in college.”

“She graduated last June. These are just extra classes. Things related mostly to medicine.”

“She’s going to be a nurse!” Ira Styne announced triumphantly.

“A doctor. She’s going to start medical school in the fall.”

“A doctor,” he marveled. “It figures. Very, very smart kid. A friend of mine, I showed him one of her letters, and he says, No little girl wrote that. It must have been her mother, he says.”

“Edith wrote it. I can assure you.”

“That’s what I told him! That’s exactly what I said! You could
tell
it was a kid—a terrifically super-smart kid.”

“Please come in and wait.”

“Oh I don’t think I’d better. It’s kind of crazy to stop by like this, isn’t it? Rude, maybe? All unannounced?”

“I think it’s nice. And I’d be happy for the company. Nobody else is here but everyone should be arriving shortly. My mother’s just stepped out, she’s helping a neighbor, my father’s due home from work, and Edith will be back from school.”

“Thanks, but you see I better be on my way. Long road.” He stuck out his hand in farewell. “Tell Edith I know she’ll make a wonderful doctor. She already was a great help to me when I was a patient. No, actually, actually, just tell her an old soldier—”

They did not complete their farewell handshake. “You can tell her yourself. Here she comes now …”

Yes, here came Edith, overloaded with books but walking down Inquiry with that strong and purposeful walk. It was wonderful timing, for this was an encounter Bianca wouldn’t have missed for the world. Even Edith—unflappable Edith—was surely about to be dumbstruck.

And yet Edith wasn’t—quite. Bianca called out “We have a visitor” as Edith reached the front walk, and you could see Edith’s eyes, behind those ugly, practical, imitation tortoiseshell glasses she never removed, peering appraisingly at the man on the porch. She marched up the walk. “Hel-lo,” she said.

Ira Styne talked even faster than before, again withholding his name: “I should have telephoned first instead of dropping in unannounced but I was in Detroit for the first time in my life and I remembered the name of the street, Inquiry, you see I wrote you a couple of times, when I was in the Army, years ago. I suppose I should begin by identifying myself: I’m Ira Styne.”

He extended his hand.

Edith did not immediately take his hand. “Corporal Styne, what on earth are you doing here?” she said. Then she shook his hand and said, “Well, it’s way too cold to stand out here, my sister should have invited you in—”

“I did, I did—” Bianca said.

“Ira Styne, come in, come in.”

An invitation to enter—such as Bianca had offered—could be refused; but Edith, in her no-nonsense way, converted it into an order and the former Corporal Styne clearly was one to obey orders. Hobbling rapidly on his cane, he followed the two of them into the house. Bianca saw his eyes move to her stomach. He hadn’t realized her condition until now.

Even the living room held cardboard boxes, though most were stacked in the bedrooms upstairs.

“Forgive the look of the place,” Bianca said. “As you can see, we’re moving.”

“Yes,” Ira said. “I saw the ‘For Sale’ sign. I guess I got here in the nick of time.”

“What they call the eleventh hour,” Edith said.

“Please sit down,” Bianca said. She made a little joke to put Ira at ease: “Inexplicably, Edith hasn’t yet boxed up the couch. You see, she’s in charge of the move. And she’s
very
efficient.”

“I’ll bet she is,” Ira said, but he did not sit down. Instead, in his scratchy voice, he repeated to Edith much of what he’d already said to Bianca—about how grateful he had been for her letters and how ill-mannered not to answer them and how rude to arrive unexpectedly. Bianca had met a few girls and women who might compete with him, but she’d never met so apologetic a man.

He was in the middle of pointing out, for the tenth time, that he should first have telephoned when Edith interrupted: “I don’t know what to call you. I think of you as Corporal Styne.”

“Please call me Ira.”

“Sit down, Ira.”

Ira sat.

He said, rapidly, “You see the thing was, I didn’t remember the address, only the street. I thought it was 2753 but I wasn’t sure. But I remembered that you’d written that you liked living in a house that was a prime number. So the question was: is 2,753 a prime? So I go round the corner, there’s a luncheonette, the—”

“The Red Rose,” Bianca supplied.

“That’s it. And I get out a piece of paper and I divide 2,753 by every prime up to 60 and everything has a remainder so I figure it
has
to be prime.” And Ira actually removed from his pocket a piece of paper and unfolded it and held it up. It was covered, top to bottom, with calculations.

And Edith thought a moment and said, “You didn’t have to go higher than 47, Ira. Because 53 squared is 2,809.”

Why did Edith always have to say things like that? Why—when the guest in their home was so proudly holding up his page of calculations—did she have to notify him that he’d wasted his time?

But Ira did not seem deflated or resentful. He looked happily dazzled. “I never was much of a one for higher math,” he said. And added, “You can do that in your head?”

“Let’s have some coffee,” Bianca said.

“I’ll make it,” Edith said.

“I’ll
make it,” Bianca said.

She listened in from the kitchen. Ira lived in New Jersey. He had driven all the way to Detroit to look at a house. His aunt—sister of his long-deceased father—herself had recently died and bequeathed him her house, which was in Palmer Woods.

The house, Ira went on, must once have been quite nice. (“I’m sure it is, Palmer Woods is where the swells live,” Edith said, which—so often the case when Edith employed slang—rang strangely. Who called them
swells?
And yet, with her fact-establishing tone, she might have been saying,
That’s where the Irish live
or
That’s a Polish neighborhood.)
Anyway, his aunt, who had died an old maid, had kept twelve cats and the filth and wholesale destruction were indescribable. Having carefully examined the house earlier today, Ira had determined to sell it immediately. He would begin the long drive back to New Jersey tomorrow.

Then Mamma came home. She was often at her suspicious worst with strangers and unexpected events, but from the very first moment she was warm and welcoming. He had turned up at last: the mysterious soldier who had sent her thirteen-year-old daughter five dollars. It was like something out of the movies—first the arrival of the money, then the ultimate arrival of the man—and Mamma loved the movies. Ira began a whole new round of apologies and she cut him off—graciously, wittily. She invited him to supper, and though he declined, he seemed honored (a word he repeated a number of times) by the invitation.

Over coffee, at Mamma’s attentive urging, more of Ira Styne’s story
emerged. He’d grown up in New Jersey. His family was Jewish. He was currently unemployed. He’d been working until October for his father-in-law—or ex-father-in-law, for Ira had become a divorced man in October. He had been separated from his wife, Judy, for more than two years, but he’d continued to work for his father-in-law, who owned a furniture business in Morristown, New Jersey. Ira loved his father-in-law, who had urged him to stay at the job, all the while hoping Ira and Judy might reconcile. But once the divorce became final, Ira had felt the need to move on …

“I think the endless drive must have scrambled my wits. I’m not usually such a blabbermouth about myself, especially with complete strangers.”

“But we’re not strangers,” Mamma informed the Jewish stranger in their living room. “We’re your friends,” she said, and smiled her lovely smile. Who
was
this woman?

And yet in a way Mamma wasn’t being merely hospitable—she was acknowledging a sort of truth. For it seemed the Paradisos were not total strangers in Ira’s imagination. He had already pointed out, a number of times, that Edith had sent him long letters—but their manifest degree of detail, like the tenacity of Ira’s memory, was little short of astonishing. He recalled how Bianca had studied painting under a man who wore a toupee (“You’re right, it was Professor Ravenscroft!”) and how Uncle Dennis adored science fiction and how Edith had received a testimonial from Needles for Defense. He recalled Mamma’s spearmint leaves and Papa and Nonno listening to the Tigers and Stevie playing in the alley. As they sat among cardboard boxes, in a house they would soon be vacating, Ira transported them to a distant and seemingly happier time. “Do you still make Edith’s favorite dish, Shipwreck?”

Mamma laughed joyously, and said that, yes, she did. Her laughter ushered in a moment of such pure lambent happiness that not even Edith’s obsessive fact-loving need to set all records straight (“Actually, I’ve grown very partial to Chinese food and my favorite dish is moo goo gai pan, but I still love Shipwreck”) could do anything to tarnish it.

And then Papa came home. He, too, was clearly heartened by this unexpected visitor. “You’ll stay for supper,” he told Ira, who, hardly pausing, nodded.

It wasn’t long, naturally, before Papa turned the conversation to the house in Palmer Woods. “You’re going to sell?” he asked Ira.

“That’s right.”

“How much?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You sell the house for how much?”

“The realtor I talked to today, he said I could probably get twenty-four thousand.”

“Twenty-four thousand?” Papa said. “How many bedrooms?”

It seemed Ira hadn’t bothered to count. “Four,” he said. “Or maybe five. What you have to understand is: the filth. You can’t
believe
the filth.”