The Art Student's War (71 page)

A good deal more of Ira’s story emerged eventually from Edith, whose sometimes tactless directness did have its advantages. Bianca and Edith got together for lunch in late February, a couple of weeks after the move. At Bianca’s suggestion, they met at Herk’s Snack Shack, where she and Ronny used to have coffee after Professor Manhardt’s class. Though the Institute Midwest had folded up long ago, Herk’s endured, still serving up watery coffee.

“He had a sort of breakdown in the War,” Edith said.

Somehow, although it wasn’t news she’d actually been told, Bianca knew this already.

Ira had been wounded in North Africa, Edith explained. He was hit in the leg, which is why he carried the cane. But he was also hit in the neck, which rendered him mute for weeks on end. He had naturally supposed he might never speak again.

“How terrible.”

“He says his voice has never been the same.”

This, too, made sense. There was a faint scratchiness to Ira’s voice, as though he perpetually needed to clear his throat.

“Well it’s an appealing voice,” Bianca said. Which it was.

“And he had another sort of breakdown about two years ago. You know his wife left him?”

“I knew he was divorced.”

“She left him for his best friend.”

Behind her homely tortoiseshell glasses, Edith gave her sister a hard look. If, according to Edith, boys were too often silly, girls were too often disloyal. Edith had shown no patience with Maggie when she’d gone through her two divorces, and never in a million years could Bianca confess to her sister that, not so long ago, she’d kissed Ronny Olsson under the Ambassador Bridge.

“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

“He says his father-in-law cried even more than
he
did. They loved each other. His father-in-law declared that he’d lost his only son.”

“All of this explains a lot. About how he is.”

“What do you mean—
how he is?”

Edith asked this defensively—as though Bianca had spoken disparagingly of Ira.

Bianca laughed. “Have you ever met a man who apologizes more? Or seems more in need of being taken care of? He’s older than I am but he brings out the mother in me.
Ira, tighten your scarf
, I want to tell him.
Ira, eat your peas
. It’s hilarious. Papa keeps vowing not to get involved and the next thing you know he’s haggling with some carpenter to save Ira twenty dollars. Mamma’s sending him home with a tin of brownies under one arm and a pot of Shipwreck under the other. He’s got you doing his darning, and yet when I suggest he may not be the most streetwise man who ever came down the pike, you look daggers at me.”

“He’s extremely intelligent.”

“You’re defending him and no one’s attacking him. Quite the contrary. I think Ira’s some sort of godsend. He shows up on our doorstep and everybody’s mood immediately lifts. It’s as if we all found some stray puppy shivering on our front porch one January day. Isn’t he one of the main reasons Mamma’s doing so much better than anyone expected? Who ever imagined she’d handle the move this well? And Papa, too. What could be better for him than getting swept up in renovating a beautiful house in Palmer Woods?”

And me, too
, Bianca was tempted to add. This sense that her parents’ lives were no longer unraveling had brought her a great easing. It was nearly twenty-four hours since her last cigarette. She was going to emerge intact from all this, and get her appetite back, and begin to care properly for the baby inside her.

“But he’s very intelligent,” Edith repeated.

“I don’t doubt that for a minute.”

“I keep telling him he ought to teach history. You know he’s a real history buff. I don’t think he’s a businessman.”

“He’s certainly no businessman. He’d have to go back to school if he wanted to teach.”

“He could go back to school.”

Not so long ago, at a time when she was floundering, someone had quietly interceded in Edith’s life—Uncle Dennis, of course—with the suggestion that she become a doctor, and everything had fallen into place. It was striking, now, the conviction with which Edith argued for the
fresh start
someone else’s life ought to take.

“He’d have to finish the house first,” Bianca said.

“He’ll finish the house.”

“Not anytime soon. I remember the day we met him. He’d just come by to deliver a message of thanks. He and I said goodbye on the front porch. He was leaving the next day for New Jersey. Where he belonged, he said.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

They rolled up to a stop sign and in the edge of Bianca’s vision something green and white flashed in a neighbor’s brown garden. A voice inside her head announced,
A crocus!
It was Mr. Bickey’s garden—the neighbor who had been rescued by the milkman, Mr. Bootmaker, charging upstairs to haul the old man’s body out of a freezing bathtub that had nearly become a casket.

Bianca looked more closely and the crocus metamorphosed into balloon and string, a deflated green balloon and a white string—a woebegone drifter, come to rest in Mr. Bickey’s garden. The misapprehension heartened her all the same. Gray as the city was on this overcast March day, the miracle of spring was in the offing.

Spring was in the offing, bringing with it the appearance of someone who, miraculously, would see another spring. Mr. Bickey’s front door swung slowly open and the neighborhood recluse emerged—or part of him did. An arm reached out and dropped an envelope into the mailbox for the mailman to pick up.

They were going for a drive in Maggie’s new car, a red Nash-Healey convertible. Another gift from Walton. Of course it was far too cold to put the top down, but the car was beautiful, with buttery leather seats, and Bianca, though usually immune to this sort of envy, found herself chafing. (Was there no end to Walton’s money?) And laughably out of place. As she entered her seventh month of pregnancy, climbing in and out of nifty little roadsters was laborious.

Maggie was exultant. She turned onto Seven Mile and punched the accelerator. The little car rocketed forward. “I’m thinking about having my nose done,” Maggie said.

“Done?
Maggie, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Straightened. Reshaped a little bit.”

“You’re going to let them go after your nose with
knives?
Maggie, I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this!”

“Nothing drastic.”

“Maggie, a knife at your nose
is
drastic. And there’s nothing wrong with your nose. I’m particularly fond of your nose. It has character.”

“Easy for you to say. You with your perfect nose.”

“My nose is too long. Maybe.”

“But it’s straight. Mine’s crooked.”

“Maggie, was this your idea, or Walton’s?”

“Just because he may have thought of it first doesn’t mean it wasn’t my idea. You never give me credit.”

“I just told you you look lovely.”

Maggie did. In some mischievous, ignoble corner of her mind, Bianca had been secretly hoping the chin enhancement would prove a failure. It scarcely seemed right—it felt
unfair
—for a person to alter so fundamental a feature. Some things were God-given. But the operation had worked out; pretty Maggie was even prettier with that solid new chin. And in the discomfort of eating after the operation, she’d shed some weight. She looked
good
. And now she was going to have her nose “done.”

“Walton put it very well. He said, You can spend the rest of your life with a crooked nose, or the rest of your life with a straight nose, now which do you prefer? Entirely up to me. Though he can be mighty persuasive.”

“Oh, tell him to have his own nose straightened, Maggie! Or his ear lobes realigned. Or his—well, I don’t know.” Bianca had just now recalled Walton’s deformed hand.

If this whole business were taken to Priscilla for analysis, she would doubtless spot a connection between Walton’s deformity and his pushy eagerness to subject his wife to plastic surgery. Was the connection genuine? Perhaps. Just because something sounds logical doesn’t mean it’s incorrect, as Ronny’s friend Chris Abendorfer would say. In any event, Walton certainly
was
persuasive. Even Bianca had begun to feel slightly daunted. For such a long time, she’d been able to think of him only as Wally Waller, despite his custom-made suits, which he actually bought in New York. (He was the only man Bianca knew who regularly bought his clothes in another city.) But in recent months Bianca, seemingly the last of the holdouts, had begun succumbing to the man’s authority. At a couple of recent parties he’d held forth about
the future of the city
. Eyes blazing, he uttered the phrase with proprietary excitement, as if its evolving shape naturally belonged to him, as if he beheld what the rest of them couldn’t: a whole new cityscape. Walton’s latest undertaking was a sort of shopping center or complex. The largest in the world. It was often mentioned in the newspapers. It was to be called Northland and would be located way out at Eight Mile and Greenfield. Walton was one of the chief investors.

“So where are we going?” Maggie said. They had no destination. They were joyriding in Maggie’s snazzy and no doubt very expensive new convertible.

“How about Inquiry?” Bianca said. “The old haunts?”

“Oh that just depresses me. It’s so run
-down
. Walton says all those old neighborhoods inside the Boulevard will eventually get bulldozed.”

“Maybe they merely need a chin enhancement. Or their nose done?”

“Very funny. Hey, I got an idea. Why don’t we drive up Woodward to Henry Vanden Akker’s house? You know I’ve never seen Henry’s house.”

The story of Bianca’s doomed lover, the virginity-stealer who died in the War, had a surprisingly stubborn purchase on Maggie’s imagination. Although she’d never met him, and although it was all so long ago, Maggie continually invoked Henry.

Bianca tried fitting Maggie’s suggestion into her present mood. Was today at last the day to survey the house of that young man who once, in a poem, called her his
harbor light
—that white stucco house in which everything was perfectly, mathematically balanced? Bianca shuddered. She wasn’t ready—no, not even yet. Although she’d passed Henry’s street countless times, she’d never once, since the last time she visited the Vanden Akkers, turned off Woodward and driven by the actual house. The very last time she’d seen it, she’d been handed a copy of that letter to his parents in which Henry confessed his wish to make Bea Paradiso his wife. And on that very day she’d started coming down with the influenza that nearly killed her.

“I don’t think so,” Bianca said. “I think that
would
be depressing. What if the house has burned down? Or been bulldozed? Or worse, maybe, what if it looks exactly the same?”

“Hey, I know. Let’s go see Stevie. I haven’t seen your brother in ages.”

“Stevie’s at work.”

“Let’s go see Stevie at work. I haven’t seen him in ages.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea either.”

“Come on. We’ll surprise him.”

Maggie wanted to show off her new car. And Bianca, still unnerved, in whose mind the mathematical white house had become a sort of face, like an illustration in a children’s book—a quizzical face, a yearning face—suddenly capitulated: “All right. What the heck. Let’s go visit Stevie.”

The truth was, she’d never visited Stevie at work, though she’d frequently driven by Turk’s Trucks. It was on Fenkell. Stevie could be so private and territorial that it had seemed inadvisable to pay a visit.

Turk’s Trucks was located in a military-brown building that looked like an armory. It wasn’t very welcoming, but Maggie, typically brazen, briskly slotted the car into a space marked “Reserved for Visitors.” Bianca experienced a sinking sensation. “I’m not sure this is such a good idea.”

“See the sign? Perfect. Visitors? Us.”

Having hauled herself out of the car, Bianca felt a good deal better, however, when she spied somebody who was an unmistakable figure, though she hadn’t seen him in years. It was a little silver-haired man, hurrying down the street. It was Mr. Caglayangil. The Turk. She didn’t hesitate. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she called.

The little man turned. His topcoat was open. He was wearing a gold tie, just as when she first met him. He looked puzzled, but he stepped in her direction.

“Hello,” Bianca said. “Excuse me. There’s no reason why you should remember me, but we’ve met a few times. I recognized you and just wanted to say hello. My name is Bianca Ives, but I used to be Bea Paradiso. I’m Steve Paradiso’s sister.”

The years had etched a great many new wrinkles in the little man’s rucked face. He was thinking hard, casting his memory backward …

Bianca went on: “We met first at a Sanders restaurant, downtown, maybe ten years ago now. I was with my aunt, Grace Poppleton.”

“The doctor’s wife.”

“That’s right.”

The old man’s face eased, and brightened. “You are the doctor’s niece.”

“That’s right.”

“He is a great man, Dr. Poppleton.”

“Well.” Bianca laughed. “We all think so.”

“He saved my daughter’s life. My only child.”

“He’s a wonderful doctor,” Bianca said.

“I remember you,” Mr. Caglayangil said. “I remember everything, though sometimes now, I am old, it takes me moments.” This seemed an empty boast, but his next remark demonstrated, amazingly, a vivid recollection of their first meeting. “You told me you never went to Italy. Turkey first, I told you. I told you visit Turkey. I invited you.”

“And you know what? I still haven’t been to either one.” Bianca laughed again.

“You are the doctor’s niece and I must not keep you in the cold. Please. You come in. As my guests.”

“But you were heading somewhere.”

“Please. You come in.”

“You must have business—”

“You come in.”

So they followed Mr. Caglayangil into a grim lobby and up some stairs and through a room where a secretary was sitting. Mr. Caglayangil opened a door and, the next moment, Bianca and Maggie were sitting in the world’s unlikeliest office. They were miles away from the traffic going by on Fenkell; they were miles away from the streets of Detroit. They had crossed a threshold into a sorcerer’s chamber.