The Art Student's War (5 page)

This was another aspect of family life that Bea had only recently come to analyze and appreciate: just how complicated and complementary the dealings of these two men were. Uncle Dennis was a soft, unathletic doctor who spent his off-hours reading about a dizzy, rocketing future. Papa—who read haltingly, not only in English but in his native Italian—was a lean, athletic builder who in his spare time constructed wooden toys and made wine in the cellar and grew roses in the backyard while the rest of the family tended the victory garden. And yet, he and Dennis were not only brothers-in-law but best friends.

Uncle Dennis’s show of incompetence was repeated whenever he asked Papa how to fix a leaking faucet, how to pack the crowded trunk of a car, how to trim a shrub. In such moments, if you didn’t know better, you might conclude that this man who served the Paradisos so ably as general doctor, financial advisor, political and military analyst, education specialist, legal-affairs consultant, guide to American history, and interpreter of foreign cultures was a bit of a nincompoop.

But roles were completely reversed once the rental had been arranged. “Vico, I need a look at that hand,” Uncle Dennis declared, and Papa, meek as any altar boy, sat himself down at a picnic table and unwrapped his bandage. Everybody crowded around. Papa no longer had the authority to shoo them away. He had no authority at all.

“This one’s nasty,” Uncle Dennis said. Papa had gashed the inside of his palm. “You shoulda come to me yesterday and let me drop a few stitches.” Papa mustered an apologetic grin. “Nasty, nasty, nasty,” Uncle Dennis chanted as he slathered salve on the wound and redressed the bandage.

“Listen to me, Vico,” he began, “you’ve got a team of men working for you now. You hear me? Let them do the heavy work. Tell
them
what to do. Right?”

Papa nodded eagerly, grateful for such good counsel. It was the same nod he always gave when Uncle Dennis offered this advice.

“Grazie, dottore, sto bene, sono guarito,”
Papa said when Uncle Dennis had finished rebandaging the wound. He sometimes employed Italian like this—partly as ceremony, partly as solemn joke. Bea only sometimes understood what he said; her Italian was spotty. “I have the best doctor in the world,” Papa went on, proudly. “The only one who doesn’t like hospitals.”

“Now Vico, that isn’t quite so,” Uncle Dennis corrected, patiently. But it was a matter of steady, unalterable satisfaction for Papa and no clarifications could modify this point: Dennis disliked hospitals. Uncle Dennis went on: “I just don’t believe in going unnecessarily—they breed infection. And I certainly don’t believe in staying bedridden any longer than you have to.”

Uncle Dennis advocated
early ambulation
. It was something of a crusade. To everyone in the Paradiso home, the phrase
early ambulation
was one of those elaborate mouthfuls—like War Production Board or Office of Price Administration—worn smooth by familiarity.

At last the two men had their boat in the lake, which was a milky tan-green color, cloudy with stirred-up sediment. Papa rowed, of course,
despite his injured hand. Uncle Dennis wouldn’t catch anything. Papa would probably catch something and throw it back. Papa would smoke cigarettes and Uncle Dennis his pipe. They had six bottles of Stroh’s between them. They wouldn’t return for lunch until the bottles were empty.

Stevie rushed off to swim. There was always something at once comical and depressing in this, because of course he had to remove his glasses. It seemed—poor kid—he could hardly make out the murky water he charged at so excitedly.

Remaining on shore were the “four girls”—Mamma, Aunt Grace, Bea, and Edith. They sat on two blankets. Carefully shielding her fair skin, Aunt Grace had placed her blanket in the shade, with Bea beside her. Having placed hers in the sun, Mamma squinted into the light.

Once Bea had come fully to appreciate the extent of Mamma’s jealousy, it was remarkable how many family dealings were freshly illuminated. What was Mamma doing now? She wasn’t merely sitting in the sun… No, she was registering her disdain for the pampering solicitude Grace showed herself—her disdain, even, for the pretty new sun hat with the lime-green ribbon.

Edith sat beside Mamma in the sun. She had been given a jelly-and-cream-cheese sandwich to “hold her” until lunch. In a patient and exacting process, Edith had set about consuming as much grape jelly as possible without actually biting into the sandwich. Gradually, gently, she squeezed and kneaded the bread, coaxing out little purple seams, which she licked up. Only when satisfied that no more jelly was to be extracted would she bite into the sandwich.

Edith was utterly absorbed in her task, and Mamma was lost to some dangerous foul mood. So it fell upon Bea and Aunt Grace to keep the conversation alive.

Aunt Grace asked about her still-life class and Bea told her about Professor Manhardt, who even on the hottest days wore a vest, which he called a “waistcoat.” Aunt Grace’s sincere interest facilitated Bea’s talk—about her classmates, and even about her bright ambitions for her art. Bea had sold one artwork in her life: a watercolor done on Belle Isle, called
International Waters
, with Detroit lying on the right side and Windsor on the left and the distant Ambassador Bridge, uniting the two countries, in the central background. Aunt Grace had bought it last year, for ten dollars, for Uncle Dennis’s forty-fifth birthday. The painting hung in Uncle Dennis’s office, behind his desk.
International
Waters
wasn’t a very good watercolor—Bea could see that now—and she’d offered a free replacement. But Uncle Dennis wouldn’t hear of it.

Then Bea recalled someone and something she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten until now: the soldier on the Woodward Avenue streetcar yesterday. “Oh, but listen to
this,”
she cried. Bea recounted the story at length, and Aunt Grace’s little interpolations—“Really?” “Oh my,” “You poor thing”—made clear she appreciated its every nuance.

“How mortifying! You must have felt terribly self-conscious,” she said.

Oddly,
this
time the story fired Mamma’s imagination. “But what did he
say?”
she asked.

“I told you. Just the one remark: Nice ridin’ with ya, miss.”

“You do know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers on streetcars.”

“But I didn’t. That’s the whole point. I don’t think he even heard me thank him, for heaven’s sake.”

Mamma deliberated. “You say he was handsome?”

“He was very handsome.” Yes, he
had
been handsome, though in Bea’s imagination he’d now become almost the handsomest boy she’d ever seen.

“It’s a good way to find trouble. Talking to strangers on streetcars.”

“But I didn’t, and what trouble was I going to get into? He was a very nice boy, otherwise why would he insist I sit down? Besides, he was on crutches.”

“As if that matters! Grace, you remember Pearlie Kulick, and the boy who’d been in the accident.”

Pearlie Kulick was a name Bea had never heard. Still, she didn’t ask about Pearlie, or the boy, or even the accident—since if she
were
to ask, the story would doubtless prove unsuitable for children’s ears. This was another conversational peculiarity of Mamma’s, especially in Grace’s presence: she was forever alluding darkly to people and anecdotes unfamiliar to Bea and then refusing to elucidate. You might almost suppose, given how many unspeakable stories she knew, that Mamma over the years had encountered nobody who wasn’t a dope fiend, a wife beater, a sexual deviant, a shoplifter, a floozy, a confidence man, a heartless seducer—just as you might spend weeks in Aunt Grace’s company and conclude that she’d never met anyone who wasn’t kindly, generous, sympathetic, well-intentioned. How could the two of them be sisters?

Yet they were and—perhaps more to the point—each was the only life long family the other had. Bea’s Grandpa and Grandma Schleiermacher
had died too long ago for Bea to remember either clearly. There had been no other Schleiermacher children—just the two girls, Sylvia and her eleven-months-younger sister, Grace—and the only Schleiermacher cousins were settled way out in California. Given, also, that Uncle Dennis had no immediate family nearby (only a half brother, in New Jersey), and that Papa was an only child, it was logical that the Poppletons and Paradisos got together as often as they did: most every Saturday, and sometimes weekdays as well. Likewise it made sense that Grace had chosen to ignore the whole issue of her older sister’s jealousy, blithely fending off an endless series of digs, accusations, slights, complaints.

Yet this was to presuppose that Aunt Grace actually identified them as such. Really, there was no saying how much she understood. Contemplating her now (noting the solemn if sympathetic way Grace shook her head over poor, mysterious Pearlie Kulick), you might swear that here was a woman who embodied the notion that petty sniping cannot exist among those grand enough to surmount it.

After the men returned, empty-handed, and Stevie emerged blue-lipped from the lake, the seven of them settled around the picnic table. This moment was always eagerly awaited: the unveiling of Aunt Grace’s picnic basket. She wasn’t merely a marvelous cook. Her things always
looked
so pretty.

When Bea was occasionally asked where her passion for art originated, the obvious answer was from the Paradisos. In addition to being a fine builder, Papa was a master craftsman. The wooden pull-toys he’d constructed for his children when they were little—a lamb for Bea, an owl for Edith, and for Stevie a rooster whose wings waggled when you dragged it behind you—were extraordinary. And Papa’s father, Grandpa Paradiso, had once been (long ago, back in Italy, before his health broke) a genuine sort of artist who specialized in those trompe l’oeil effects so dear to the Italian imagination. (Bea had seen examples in books.) Grandpa Paradiso had adorned simple houses and he had embellished palazzi. He was a kind of muralist. He’d painted windows opening out of nonexistent rooms, doors leading into nonexistent corridors, shrubs bordering nonexistent gardens. Yes, at one time he’d been a celebrated artist, up and down the coast of Liguria, in Italy, cradle of the greatest art the world has ever seen.

But there was an art-loving side to the Schleiermacher family, too, as embodied in Aunt Grace, whose visual flair surfaced in unexpected
byways. Her house brimmed with curiosities that had enchanted Bea’s childhood: peacock feathers, a pink blown-glass snail whose shell was revealed as midnight-blue and not black only when held up against the sun, a malachite frog, a dark-skinned strangely melancholy Indian doll from Mexico. There were Asian flourishes as well. Some years ago, Grace had befriended a Japanese woman, Mrs. Nakamura, whose husband, Dr. Nakamura, had worked beside Uncle Dennis. The Nakamuras, like the Poppletons, had no children, though Mrs. Nakamura was indeed as small as a child. Though she spoke even less English than her husband, she had delighted in initiating Aunt Grace into a realm of bewitching oriental tricks: how to use chopsticks, how to fold a simple sheet of paper into a crane or a horse, even how to whittle a humble carrot until it metamorphosed into a flower blossom. In the summer of 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor, Dr. Nakamura had completed his studies and he and his wife had returned to Tokyo. It was peculiar to think that the Nakamuras were now the enemy. The bombs from General Doolittle’s raid could have fallen on them.

Aunt Grace drew from her picnic basket a tray of sticks which she called brochettes, little skewers on which were alternated small cubes of garlicky lamb, pearl onions, pieces of carrot and green pepper: no one cooked like Aunt Grace. And she unearthed from the basket two pies—cherry pies, the fruit so abundant it was popping free of its lattice. “Sylvia’s favorite,” Aunt Grace announced. “The very first cherries from California. Dennis got them from a patient who works for the railroad.”

“California,” Mamma said, and her face brightened right up. Gifts wielded a peculiar power over her imagination. That these pies had unexpectedly become
her
pies—it was a notion to cheer Mamma considerably, even while she ate sparingly. She consumed little at mealtimes, despite various urgings—everyone was keen to fatten her up. It wasn’t so much that she was picky; rather, food didn’t deeply interest her, with the dual exceptions of coffee and candy. She preferred her coffee syrupy thick. Partly because of rationing, she hesitated to throw anything away, heaping new scoops onto the old and exhausted grounds. Hers was a bitter, gritty brew. She didn’t understand how people could “mess up” their coffee with milk or sugar, and yet she would snack on sugar all day, in the form of candy. Here, too, her tastes were unusual and off-putting. She didn’t much care for chocolate. She favored bright-colored—primary colored—chewy fruit candies. Unusual, too—worrisomely so—was her habit of hiding candy. You’d be poking under
the sink for something, or you’d lift the lid of a shoebox, and out would tumble a bag of jawbreakers, a cache of candy corn. This was a practice born with sugar rationing; sly Mamma wasn’t going to let anyone take her candy away.

The sight of Mamma’s brightened face inspired Uncle Dennis to proclaim, as he so often proclaimed, “Time for a picture …”

So the two sisters were posed side by side at the picnic table, with a pair of cherry pies before them. Aunt Grace looked lovely in her straw hat with the lime-green ribbon and Mamma’s face still wore the radiance of the gift of the pies. Grace set a hand lightly on Mamma’s forearm and Mamma, after a moment’s hesitation, laid a hand atop Grace’s hand. It all came together in a vivid diminished
click:
the comely sisters, the distant sound of children yelling and splashing, the wind purling through the trees, and, above the trees, no louder than a honeybee in your neighbor’s yard, an airplane ascending over a city in wartime.

The day at the lake progressed quite well—far better, anyway, than anyone might have predicted—until the swimming after lunch. Mamma was the only one who chose not to enter the water. As Bea had come to understand, she was self-conscious about how bony she was, and about the varicose veins in her legs.