The Art Student's War (3 page)

“I have a stomachache,” Bea said. “I’m going to lie down.”

“And apple crisp,” Edith called after her.

Bea’s bunk bed was a special bed: her father had constructed it for her. You might have supposed she would prefer the airy upper bunk, assigning the lower to Edith, but the sensation of lying within an elaborate wooden nest comforted her. Ever since she was a little girl, nights had been her difficult time and the abashing fact was that she had trouble sleeping at a girlfriend’s or a relative’s—anywhere but here in this bed of her father’s making. Into each of the posts upholding the upper bunk he had carved, totem pole—style, a creature. Whenever Bea lay here, she was surrounded by a lamb, a fish, a stork, and a rabbit.

This was clearly the best place in the world to revive today’s valuable gift: the image—unforgettable—of the handsomest soldier in the world, a bandaged boy on crutches, yielding up his seat for her. A boy who had said—casually, but painfully mindful of the moment’s poignancy—“Nice ridin’ with ya, miss.”

Yet Bea had hardly settled down when a great ruckus erupted in the alley.

She knew its source even before clambering out of bed. If in many ways Bea’s most treasured place on earth was this bedroom and the bed her father had built for her, the alley was the richest locale for her brother, Stevie. You found him out there in all seasons, sometimes morning till night. Long ago, his games had involved cars and circuses and athletic contests. These days, it was all the War.

Stevie and his friends were forever enacting battles out back of the house. From the rooftops of garages, from the shelters of trash cans and wheelbarrows, they ambushed each other and pitched themselves into headlong advances. Sometimes they took prisoners and tied them up with rope. Bea had even seen the boys, lined up neatly and solemnly, performing a clattering death by firing squad …

Just thirteen, Stevie no less than his little sister was tireless in his country’s defense. For despite heavy casualties, the finale was always a thoroughgoing rout of the “Krauts” and the “Japs.”

Bea had intended to throw open the window and yell at her brother. Instead, she watched intently. The scene captivated her. There must have been a dozen boys—crawling, running, whooping, making explosive noises. She had some trouble locating Stevie, half-hidden behind a barricade of packing crates. Picking him out of a crowd was usually easy, because of his thick glasses. He was all but blind without them.

Those glasses crystallized a family understanding shared by everyone but Stevie. Even Edith, in her mulling clandestine way, had probably guessed that Stevie, who yearned passionately for the day of his future enlistment, never would serve. If—if, unthinkably, the War
were
to continue until 1947, when he would turn seventeen, no branch of the military would likely have him.

The logic behind this disqualification was demonstrated as Bea watched a chaotic battle unfold. Stevie’s packing-crate fortress was attacked in a crackling fusillade. One of the crates was toppled and Stevie’s glasses fell to the ground …

Stevie did not stoop to retrieve them. With a look of crazed determination on his squinting molelike face, an expression of radiant martyrdom, Stevie went on firing his gun at an enemy he could no longer see. It was a haunting face, a haunting moment:
“Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!”
he cried.
“Rat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!”

Fifteen minutes later, it was a subdued and taciturn Stevie at the dinner table. His glasses were restored to his face.

Those glasses made him look studious—a misleading impression. Stevie lagged behind his classmates in reading skills. He lagged in mathematics,
too, and here Bea could identify with him, somewhat, though she’d always been an almost perfect student. In grade school, she’d twice been double-promoted, a half-grade each time, and had wound up graduating from Eastern High at the age of seventeen, near the top of the class. Still, math had sometimes kept her from a flawless all-A report card. It was as though Edith, who without even blinking could compute towering sums in her head, had somehow garnered math skills that by rights the Paradiso children should have divided equally.

As was too often the case, tonight’s dinner was a lifeless affair. It usually fell on Bea to spark any real conversation. Papa on returning home had repaired immediately to the bathroom. He’d emerged with a bandaged hand, as was fairly common: he often came home with bruises, lacerations, nasty splinters.

He’d done a neat job with the bandage, not surprisingly: he did a neat job with everything.

“You have an injury,” Mamma said, over the steaming Shipwreck.

“Not really.”

This was untrue on its face—fresh blood had seeped into the white cotton in Papa’s palm.

But if Papa declared himself uninjured, this pretty much ended all discussion. He didn’t like “fretting.” Most of the ministrations he required—the cleaning of wounds, the removing of splinters—he accomplished himself.
I can do it myself
was something of a motto of his.

Mamma said, somewhat defiantly, “I want Dennis to look at that tomorrow.”

Papa suspended a forkful of Shipwreck before his mouth. “All right,” he replied.

This was the great exception to Papa’s motto. Although he would never ordinarily step into a doctor’s office, Papa did allow his brother-in-law, Dr. Poppleton—Uncle Dennis—to peer down his throat, to poke into his ears, to eavesdrop with a little cup on his robust heart. Moreover, Papa would confer with Dennis about what sort of mortgage to apply for, which newspaper to subscribe to, whom to support for mayor. Needless to say, Dennis had had to be consulted before Bea could take the peculiar step of enrolling in art school. His approval had helped carry the day.

Uncle Dennis had come by his authority gradually, it seemed. He was the husband of Mamma’s sister, Grace—Grace’s second husband.
(He had chosen to marry a divorcée.) The Poppletons were childless. Though soft-spoken and seemingly unassertive, Uncle Dennis somehow managed to be the most persuasive person Bea had ever met.

Most Saturdays the seven of them got together—the five Paradisos and the two Poppletons. Years ago, classification-loving Edith had determined that Saturday was American Day and Sunday was Italian Day. The designation, gradually evolving into a little family joke, had stuck. Sundays were reserved for Papa’s father, Grandpa Paradiso, who was often called Nonno, and Papa’s stepmother, who was sometimes called Grandma and sometimes Nonna but often not called anything. There was no real conversing with her, she spoke so little English.

Bea was waiting for an opportune moment to narrate her affecting story—the Tale of the Handsome Wounded Soldier on the Streetcar. But now the table suddenly turned loquacious. Papa, who rarely said much during supper, began an amusing little story of his own, about Harry, one of his workers, who at the noon lunch break ate a fried-egg sandwich that had been sitting in a lunch box for three days; at the next break, punctually at two-thirty, he vomited it up in the alley. And then the telephone rang—ringing phones at suppertime always irritated Papa—and Mamma chose to answer it, which was a mistake, and she couldn’t get the caller (old Mrs. McNamee down the street) off the line. And then Edith launched into a long anecdote about running into Mrs. Marshland at Olsson’s Drugs. Who? Mrs. Marshland—
her fourth-grade teacher at Field Elementary
. (Her family’s lapses of memory frequently stirred Edith’s indignation.) And Mrs. Marshland was buying four hair ribbons,
isn’t that strange?

Bea didn’t feel free to begin her story until dessert. It was apple crisp, overcooked. (Mamma had been on a bad streak lately, burning even more dishes than usual.) Papa interrupted Bea’s narration to remove from his mouth a bullet of blackened dough and to say, “I’m going to crack a tooth.” Though he never visited a dentist, he was rightfully proud of his teeth: white, straight, absolutely unblemished by cavities.

“The oven isn’t working right,” Mamma replied, sullenly.

Bea resumed her story, rattling along until she reached the punch line, or at least one of the punch lines: “Can you imagine?
Can you imagine? He
offered
me
a seat.”

“Well now,” Mamma volunteered, “if a young man offers you a seat on the streetcar, you must accept. Decent manners have been dying ever since this war began, I can tell you.”

“Take a seat when
he’s on crutches?”

“Crutches? I didn’t know he was on crutches,” Mamma protested, which only proved she hadn’t been listening
at all
.

“That’s the whole point. He was a soldier on crutches. He was a wounded soldier.”

“Well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish,” Mamma said in the same authoritative tone, wholly undismayed about reversing herself completely. “For Pete’s sake, Bea, you can’t take a crippled man’s seat!”

“Don’t I know it!” Bea cried. “After all, that’s the whole point! I was thrust into a
quandary”
—and she saw her mother and father exchange a quick but significant glance. Although the two of them disagreed about many things, in this particular matter they were in tight accord: their oldest child, their elder daughter, was “overemotional.” The term had been supplied, years ago, by Uncle Dennis, and Papa in particular had seized upon it, in that characteristic way he sometimes seized on a slangy American phrase. “You are overemotional,” he would say, and pause—a long pause. “Overemotional, Bia.” Bia—pronounced
be uh
—was his special nickname for her. The other children had no special nicknames.

Bea excused herself as soon as she could and raced upstairs and hurled her body onto her bed. Again a burning lump closed her throat, but she didn’t cry—instead, something consoling happened. In her mind’s eye, with a clarity vainly wished for ever since she’d stepped off the streetcar, she visualized the handsome soldier. He was staring down at her, into her. She was returned to that blazing moment just before he disembarked, when their glances truly fused.

Bea gazed up into his startlingly blue and yet altogether soothing eyes and found they opened onto unexplored regions—a territory where there was no doubting he understood her essential self. And surely both of them were to be pardoned if they hadn’t known how to proceed, given how unlooked for was this one-in-a-million encounter between two young people just possibly made for each other.

There was a knock on the door: Papa’s knock. He did this sometimes, when he suspected Bea was feeling sad or overwrought. Usually he made no references to her state, while seeking to supply cheering news.

Bea sat up in bed. Papa took the seat at the desk, sitting backward on the chair, forearms resting on the top. He had freshly bandaged his hand.

“You have an injury,” she said.

“Not really.” And that was that.

“How’s Mr. O’Reilly?”

O’Reilly and Fein built and renovated houses all over the city. The company was widely referred to as Really Fine, a little pun that had represented, in Bea’s childhood, a summit of human cleverness. One famous day back when Papa was still new at the firm, big bluff O’Reilly showed up right here on Inquiry Street carrying gifts for each of the children. This was three days after Papa had quit the firm in a huff—or been fired—after refusing to oversee the installation of a cheap brand of copper pipe in a house whose construction he was supervising. Mamma had not stopped crying for three days. Because of Papa’s mule-headedness, they were going to lose everything: their home, their automobile, their radio… But white-faced, tight-lipped Papa had won that particular battle, in which every material thing the family possessed was jeopardized for an intangible principle. For in the end, red-faced, garrulous O’Reilly had stumbled up the walk, arms laden with gifts.

“The same. Always the same. Drinks too much.”

“And Mr. Fein?”

Poor worried-looking Mr. Fein—his only child, a boy, had been born deaf.

“The same. Always the same. Gambles too much.”

Mr. Fein liked to play the horses.

Talking with Papa wasn’t the easiest thing. He sat there expectantly, as if making conversation were none of his responsibility, and Bea chatted about Professor Manhardt and her art class, until Papa interrupted with the cheering news he’d come to deliver: “Tomorrow, Bia? Maybe we go to the lake.”

“The lake!” It would be their first trip this year. They used to go all the time, before the War brought its shortages and restrictions. “And will we swim?”

“Pretty cold.”

“Stevie will.
He’ll
swim.”

Papa chuckled in that way he had—a sort of clucking. “Stevie will go in.”

“And you’ll go in too.”

“Probably so.” Papa rose from his chair. “Don’t let your brother stay in too long,” he said. Papa often departed on a note of solemn advice.

Later that evening, when Edith had climbed into the upper bunk and the lights were extinguished, Bea did at last yield to tears. This time,
the lump in her throat wouldn’t be swallowed down, for it grew bitterly apparent, in the bedroom darkness, that Bea had encountered and lost her one true love. Never again would she catch sight of him—a burden, itself almost insupportable, rendered all the heavier by the knowledge of not having
thanked him properly
.

Bea lay on her stomach and leaked tears into her pillow, as mutedly as she could, but Edith heard anyway. Edith, who never cried, whispered beseechingly, “Bea, please,
don’t.”

And the shame of once more being the crybaby, of being an eighteen-year-old art student at the Institute Midwest whose twelve-year-old kid sister requested, not reproachfully so much as pleadingly, “Bea, please,
don’t”
—this only made Bea sob the harder. She would be all right, she knew, if only she could again summon that soldier’s face, with its promise of soulful, wordless exchanges.

But the face materializing in her mind’s eye, and refusing to exit from her mind’s eye, wasn’t the soldier’s. No, it was Stevie’s—that weird, unsettling glimpse of him from her bedroom window. Stevie was a soldier too, out in the alley, with the other neighborhood boys, transformed into Japs and Krauts. He had lost his glasses.
“Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!”
he hollered in explosive defiance. Firing at an enemy he could not see.