The Art Student's War (36 page)

Nonno had never really learned English. Nor, it seemed, had he ever quite learned to converse with Nonna, his second wife, who came originally from a farm near Venice and spoke a remote dialect.

Nonna’s lack of English only made her more formidable. Everyone was frightened of her, even Mamma—and Bea took mischievous pleasure in seeing Mamma routed from her own kitchen. Nonna would arrive carrying bags and bags of groceries, since Mamma apparently couldn’t be trusted to select even a suitable eggplant or tomato. Nonna brought sausages, cheeses, vegetables, fish, even spices, and she would get busily to work.

Nonno and Nonna lived in a small apartment on Algonquin, so it made sense that Sunday dinners were held on Inquiry—made sense, in its way, that Mamma must wind up a guest in her own home, making distracted conversation in the living room while eavesdropping on the kitchen’s thumps and clangs.

It didn’t help matters that Nonna was such a marvelous cook. Out of Mamma’s kitchen would come steaming lasagnas and veal roasts, rabbit stews and stuffed trout, baked oysters and risotto marinaro. Usually, there wasn’t much talk during dinner—only a primitive chorus of sighs and grunts, purred mms and guttural aahs.

For most of her life, Bea hadn’t really minded the languid stretch in the living room after dinner. Nonna might nod off sitting upright on the davenport while the men listened to a Tigers game. Sometimes, if the weather was good and Nonno’s emphysema wasn’t bothering him, they all walked around the block. On good days, it cheered Bea to see him smoke a cigarette; it meant he was feeling better.

Now, though, the family’s Sunday dinners, particularly the long digestive interval after the food was consumed and the kitchen cleaned up, struck Bea as terribly sad. How much of any Tigers game could Nonno actually understand? Why didn’t Nonna ask to lie down, instead of napping upright?

One of the recent rituals of Sunday afternoons—a day dense with rituals—had been going on since she started art school. Papa would ask Bea to display for Nonno her recent work. When she’d first begun these exhibitions, Nonno had taken to the task eagerly, with quick nods and gestures. He’d offered evaluations in mixed English and Italian. Sometimes, thrillingly, he even took a pencil in hand.

In recent months, however, he approached the task sluggishly, as though tired of Bea’s work, or simply old and weary.

One particular Sunday in November, just before Thanksgiving, seemed particularly sad. A dreary gray rain was splattering against the panes; there would be no walk today. And it was the wrong season for a Tigers game. Bea hadn’t been able to eat much dinner, though the main course—risotto marinaro—was something she’d always loved. Things were different today; the flavors jostled aggressively in her mouth, leaving her faintly sick.

After dinner, they all sat in the living room, with the lamps on, though it was early afternoon. This was a dark day. Bea brought out her week’s drawing—a tropical atoll with palm trees, based on photographs in
Look
—which Nonno hardly glanced at. For the first time, Bea wondered whether he would even notice if she showed him last week’s drawing. Nonno patted her hand and Bea put the drawing away.

The rain went on falling. Nonna had nodded off. Edith knitted furiously, in her tranquil way.

The culminating moment of the afternoon—of a lifetime of such afternoons—arrived when Nonno hauled himself out of his chair and wandered into the kitchen. After a moment, feeling restless, Bea followed him.

The old man, her little Italian grandfather, stood at the sink with his back to her, rinsing his hands in a thin stream of water. “Nonno,” Bea called. But he did not turn around.

“Nonno,” she called, more loudly. He did not turn around.

It struck her as almost the saddest discovery she’d ever made—though honestly, what difference did it make, since her grandfather hardly communicated with anyone anyway? What difference did it make when, under the best of circumstances, she and he would never hold a real conversation? (But maybe she’d always hoped to—someday? And now she understood that she never, ever would?)

Her grandfather was mostly deaf.

CHAPTER XX

The end of the world arrived with the ringing of a telephone. At the other end, the caller might plausibly have been Ronny, inviting her for coffee, or Maggie, with brand-new complaints about Ma’am Hamm’s cooking, or the Jewish medical student, Norman Kapp, proposing another afternoon movie—any number of livable possibilities were still open as Bea sauntered toward the kitchen and the phone.

Bea didn’t immediately understand whose voice issued from the other end of the line, though the caller carefully identified herself.

“Hello, this is Mrs. Horace Vanden Akker. I wish to speak to Bea Paradiso.”

It was four-thirty in the afternoon and this was one of those rare intervals when nobody else was home. Papa was at work, Stevie was out playing, Mamma had gone with Edith to deposit two turtleneck sweaters with Needles for Defense. The light on Inquiry was always different when Bea was alone in the house. It softened, it deepened—it came into its own, as if it had been waiting to do so, patiently, for her eyes alone.

“This is Bea … Hello?”

“Is that Bea Paradiso?”

“Yes,” Bea whispered.

“I have some news,” Mrs. Vanden Akker announced, in that stolid way of hers. “The Lord has taken our Henry. I thought you would want to know.”

For a moment, the caramel light in the kitchen flared up, as though the sun had come out, but the sun was already out. Then things went dark. Bea leaned up against the wall, face flattened against the O’Reilly and Fein calendar.

“I thought you would want to know,” Mrs. Vanden Akker repeated.

“He—Henry—” was all Bea managed to say. But this couldn’t be. Simply couldn’t.

“We received official word two days ago. And then yesterday Mr. Vanden Akker spoke long-distance to an old friend in Washington,
D.C., a member of our church, who was able to provide additional information. You see, Henry’s plane went down in a tropical storm.”

But this couldn’t be. “I—oh I—” Bea said. Elsewhere, on the floor of the mind, it was like prying open some unused cellar door: an exploding blinded frenzy of low creatures scurrying from the light. Inside her head, everything was running away.

“It was about four-thirty in the afternoon. When we received word.”

“I’m so sorry,” Bea managed to say. “I’m just—I—I just wish I could express—”

“No need for such things,” Mrs. Vanden Akker replied, and went on to explain: “You see, our faith is different from yours. Mr. Vanden Akker and I, we understand that God took him for a reason.”

“But—oh my
God
—” Bea whispered.

“As Mr. Vanden Akker says, There is no sorrow in the ways of the Lord. Only in the ways of men.”

“But oh—oh
please,”
Bea begged. Weird, low, dizzying visions were uprising inside her.

“Although I know you and Henry had stopped seeing each other before he left, I still thought you’d wish to know.”

Stopped? Stopped seeing each other?

“That the Lord has taken him,” Mrs. Vanden Akker added.

But Bea had seen Henry the very night before he left, at Mitchell’s. What in the world had Henry told his mother?

Mrs. Vanden Akker was still talking—a service at the church—but Bea could hardly absorb anything. And she didn’t need to hear it—since the import was unmistakable. Politely, but firmly, Mrs. Vanden Akker was letting Bea know that her presence would not be required at the service. It was meant for “members of the church.”

Of course …

It was meant for members of the church, and what about that other one—that inadvisable, ill-suited Italian girl? The one whom their boy Henry had “stopped seeing”? Her presence wouldn’t be necessary. No. Not at the service.

There was nothing further Bea needed to do about Henry—ever. This phone call was intended as the end of it: Mrs. Vanden Akker was calling, on behalf of the Vanden Akkers, to bid Bea Paradiso goodbye and farewell.

“I thought you would want to know,” Mrs. Vanden Akker said.

“Henry is”—and Bea paused, faltered, but in the end clung loyally to the present tense—“he’s so brilliant.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Vanden Akker said. “A brilliant boy.”

“Oh Mrs. Vanden Akker, please accept—”

“We do,” Mrs. Vanden Akker interceded. “We certainly do.”

“I want you to know that I—” What Bea longed to say, and at the last moment, to her great relief, forewent saying, was,
I loved him
. What emerged instead was, “I’m so sorry.”

“Mr. Vanden Akker and I thank you.” And then the terminating word:
“Good
bye.” And a click at the other end.

Bea hung up the receiver but it slipped from its cradle and cracked its skull against the floor. Bea hung it up once more and drifted with a mounting sense of purpose upstairs to her bed. Where she planned to weep as she’d never wept.

And yet Bea did not weep. Instead, she stared at the rabbit her father had once painstakingly carved into the fine-grained wood of her bedpost. “Henry,” she said. “Henry Vanden Akker.” As clearly as though Mrs. Vanden Akker were in the room, Bea again heard the mortal pronouncement:
The Lord has taken him
. Bea tried out the words herself, layering her thinned voice directly atop Mrs. Vanden Akker’s voice: “The Lord has taken him.”

The Vanden Akkers did not want her at the service. Henry’s girlfriend—they didn’t want Henry’s Italian girlfriend there … What had Henry confessed to his parents? What did they know? They knew, anyway, they didn’t want Bea there. Their unwelcoming God—
He
did not want her.
“Good
bye,” Mrs. Vanden Akker had said.
Good
bye.

The watchful rabbit in the bedpost contemplated the hushed girl lying dry-eyed on the bed. Still she did not weep.

Then she heard the clicking of the front door. Mamma and Edith. Instantly Bea sensed that she would not—must not—divulge a thing. Henry’s death could
never
become entertainment for the family. She must hold off. She who always delighted in being the family storyteller would be nothing of the kind. She owed Henry silence—the silence of the grave …

Yes, she would hold off on the weeping until bedtime. Bea went downstairs step by step and greeted her mother and her sister. Mamma was putting things into the refrigerator. Bea spoke of needing to run up to Olsson’s and, hardly awaiting her mother’s approval, threw on her coat.

Bea didn’t go to Olsson’s. She headed over to Buttery Creek Park, where Mamma used to bring her. The hours spent here as a little girl! So much of her life—and yet Henry had never once seen Buttery Creek Park. This was one whole sector of her life Henry would never share. In Henry’s personal universe, this park would never exist.

Henry had never seen Inquiry either, the street with the richest name in the whole city. Nor the bed her father had carved, the little menagerie in which she slept each night.

Bea sat on the very bench where she’d sat not so long ago—ages ago—with her mother. “There is no sorrow in the ways of the Lord,” Mrs. Vanden Akker had pronounced. Mrs. Vanden Akker would not mourn. She was a heartless woman—it was
terrifying
to contemplate so heartless a woman. Nor would Mr. Vanden Akker mourn. Mourning was solely Bea’s responsibility, who would put off all weeping until bedtime. And without a word to anyone …

Bea got through dinner all right—in fact, she was a little hungrier than usual. After dinner, she sat in the living room with Papa and listened to Jack Benny and Fred Allen on the radio. She did not mention Henry. Her family had never met Henry and was there anything in the cosmos odder than this: her family had never met the one man to whom Bea had chosen to give herself utterly? Henry was her lover. Henry Vanden Akker had been her lover and she would never have another. The future had grown clear. For her, it was to be just the one occasion, which is why she’d held back nothing from Henry. Yet nobody in her house would pick him out of a crowd. They would never understand. And that’s how it was. No one would ever understand what the War had taken from her: her lover.

When she did climb into bed, and lay listening to Edith’s steady breathing overhead, the tears finally arrived—but not in the torrential fashion she’d expected and even longed for. Bea had planned to cry all night and meet the dawn with tears streaming down her face. But she was soon asleep.

The real tears didn’t arrive until the following morning. She woke to an amazing thought:
the letters!
Of course, of course—the bottom drawer of her bureau contained three letters, unopened. How
could
she have forgotten? Three unopened letters from Henry!

To hold in her fingers those three letters made Bea feel extremely queer …

Henry had written them—these letters—just as he was being
shipped to his tragic fate. These were the final testament of a soldier whose plane soon afterward crashed, who burned to death in a hellish tropical storm.

The texture of the paper set her hands atremble. He’d sealed them himself, with those bony, lovely fingers of his. Henry’s touch would never again be so close. The letters must be opened carefully, and read in the proper order. Fortunately—
-fortunately
, she could do this without possibility of error. The postmarks were different, each a day apart.

The first letter was—it was her own dear bookish Henry all over. He had read the novel
Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad. It was a tale of shame. It was the story of a man who must purge himself from the taint of a single shameful act, and there were affinities, which not everybody would spot, between Conrad and Kierkegaard … Bea read this letter hastily. She would of course return to it. But what was Henry thinking about her? Dear boy, why could he never simply say what he needed to say?

The second letter was a different matter altogether. Here was a more intimate voice. Here was the voice she’d been yearning for.

“Yesterday I wrote you a silly letter,” it began, and who else spoke this way?