The Art Student's War (77 page)

Bianca said, “Maggie’s husband, Walton, he’s deeply involved in that big shopping whatever-it-is they’re building out at Eight and Greenfield.”

“I’ve read about it.”

“Walton’s one of the big investors. Grant seems to think Walton’s going to make oodles of money.”

Uncle Dennis pondered. “I can’t believe it’s going to work. Not in the long run.”

“You honestly don’t think so?”

It wasn’t so much that she wished Grant to be wrong. It wasn’t even that the thought of Maggie’s having
more
money was distasteful. But Bianca very much wanted to believe in the wisdom of Uncle Dennis’s pronouncement. For Uncle Dennis, like Walton, had a vision of the city—and his was a city, unlike Walton’s, she wanted to live in.

Uncle Dennis said, “You spoke earlier of buying your daughter white gloves and taking her downtown for a soda at Sanders. Is any mother going to buy her daughter white gloves to take her to a super plaza, or whatever they’re calling it, at Eight and Greenfield?”

“A shopping complex, I think it is.”

“It’s like putting white gloves on your daughter to take her to a parking lot. Oh, it may succeed for a while. As a novelty. But how is a shopping complex going to compete with a real downtown? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Physically, these were far from comfortable days—it had been ages
since Bianca had been able to lie on her stomach—but she felt more comfortable than she’d felt in a long while, strolling on Middleway beside her uncle on this beautiful evening. She’d been quite tired when they set out, but the May night had revivified her.

With all the weight Uncle Dennis had been steadily putting on these past few harrowing months, he wasn’t merely chubby, he was looking positively fat. As they walked side by side, they filled the sidewalk. Tonight it felt good to fill a sidewalk.

“And your mother—she seems well?”

It was the same rhetorical formula he’d been using, only this time it surfaced as a question.

“I think so. I do. You did the right thing, insisting they move.”

Uncle Dennis made a confession: “Oh, how I worried over that one…”

It was an uncharacteristic thing for him to say—at least to her. No doubt he opened his heart about such fears to Aunt Grace. But with his niece, he generally played the confident counselor. He was the voice of optimism, advancement, the growth of slow but unstoppable enlightenment.

He went on: “It seems I’ve done nothing but worry for months and months. And eat. You see I’ve put on weight.”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Bianca said.

“You remember last fall? When your mother went away for a week? You know why I did that?”

“She went away for a
thorough examination
. Papa repeated the phrase a hundred times.”

Uncle Dennis studied the unlit pipe in his hand. “Well—yes. A thorough examination. But I also wanted to make sure your mother didn’t jump off the Belle Isle Bridge.”

In the gorgeous night air, Bianca’s skin crawled. “You weren’t genuinely worried she’d—?”

“I knew it was extremely unlikely. But I needed to be sure. The poor woman felt so worthless. So terribly ashamed.”

“But why put yourself in such a position? I mean, why do you think she did it—stole all those things? Why would anyone do something guaranteed to make them so miserable?”

“I wish I knew …”

“Self-punishment?”

“Yes, but for what?”

“You know what my friend Priscilla says? You remember, the psychiatrist? She says it’s no coincidence that most of what Mamma stole came from Olsson’s.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that Mamma was angry with Ronny Olsson—or just plain angry with life. Because maybe Mamma had dreamed someday I’d marry some millionaire’s son. When Priscilla proposed this, I told her she couldn’t be right, because if there’s one thing infuriates Mamma, it’s people trying to get above themselves. But Priscilla said that that’s the whole point. The ones who hate people getting above themselves are the very ones who dream of doing exactly that. And Priscilla looked so shrewd, I didn’t dare question her. Anyway, does that sound plausible?”

“It sounds plausible.”

“And there’s another thing. I remember the first time Mamma ever met Ronny Olsson—he drove up in his cream-colored convertible, and when he left, Mamma said something peculiar. She said, I’ve met his type before. What could she mean by that?”

Uncle Dennis thought for quite a while. Then he said, “Long before your father ever came on the scene, I gather that your mother—well, she’d set her cap for some very well-to-do, good-looking boy at her high school. But it didn’t work out.”

“A boy? What do you know about him?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you even know his name?”

“I must have once. Grace could tell you.”

A good-looking boy without a name? Some other man in Mamma’s life besides Papa? The thought made Bianca feel very queer …

She said, “And I suppose Priscilla would say that it’s one more reason Mamma stole from Olsson’s.”

“It sounds plausible.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Maybe it’s plausible but not convincing?” Again, Uncle Dennis reflected. “I suppose I have the medical doctor’s skepticism of the psychologist. I don’t know what a
cure
means for them.”

Bianca laughed. “You’re saying you don’t believe in psychology but you honestly believe we’ll travel to the moon? We’ll travel to Mars?”

“Oh we will,” Uncle Dennis said, in a different, breathy voice. “Maybe your boys. Maybe the child within you. Walking on another planet.
Some
mother’s child will do just that.”

It was a clear night and a few stars were visible through the still-thin leaves of the elms overhead. Bianca had a feeling (the return of a dizzying, bizarre feeling) that the stars over her uncle’s head were different stars from the stars over her own; his heaven was a different heaven. For her, the night sky was a kind of shield. For him—oh, she was perched at the brink of dreams!—it was an open labyrinth. Beckoning pathways. For him, the sky’s boundaries were arbitrary—they were negotiable—and he was ready to launch the baby inside her into the firmament.

The two of them strolled along the brink of dreams. He had brought her back, years ago he’d brought her back. He had held her enfevered skull in his cupped hand and said, Now I’m going to tell you the most important thing I’ve ever told you … He’d sought to summon her, to understand her. She scarcely remembered this; she did not remember this. But he felt it too, yes, another mind was at work beside hers, and he’d brought her back, just as her great-great-grandmother brought her grandfather back, in the ark of a woodstove, by way of the only human claim that ultimately has counted for anything over the faltering centuries, the one that says,
No, little one, I will not let you go
. One night, in the dead of winter, the scientific man embarked on his long drive to the city in order to deliver his mystic’s message, and now they were taking their long walk through the city, the plump middle-aged doctor and the pregnant young woman, and she marveled at the two different heavens over their heads, which are the same heaven.

“Your father seems well,” Uncle Dennis said, resuming his ritual formulation.

Bianca took it up. They were earthbound once more. “Yes, he does. He, too, was floundering for a while. He was drinking too much—”

“I was eating too much—”

“And he just looked so—defeated. But he seems quite happy, and proud, in the new house. And speaking of houses, he’s having so much fun with Ira’s house. It’s the unlikeliest thing. Papa has found a new … friend.”

At the last moment, Bianca tendered the word warily, fearing that Uncle Dennis, Papa’s best friend, might meet it with jealousy. But just the opposite. Uncle Dennis nodded vigorously and she was struck by how little she understood about—her father? About male friendship? “Indeed he has,” Uncle Dennis concurred. “A new friend. And a good friend.”

“Have you seen the house? Ira’s house?”

“No—no, I haven’t.”

“Would you like to see it? It’s just past Seven—just a little ways into Palmer Woods.”

“Can you walk that far? Aren’t you tired, dear?”

It did seem a long way. But she took a special, almost proprietary interest in Ira’s house. In the darkness, its spacious contours were calling her. “My new plan is, I won’t stop walking until this baby’s born.”

“All right, then. Let’s. Let’s go have a look at Ira’s house. And then I’ll deliver the baby.” Uncle Dennis laughed. She joined his laughter.

They continued on Middleway, past her own house. Lights were off in the boys’ room: Grant had gotten them down for the night. He was so good at that. It was a comical, lovable scene right out of some illustration to a children’s book: the three of them so much alike, Grant in the chair by the window, talking like a coach (“Tomorrow, if the weather’s good, maybe we should hit a few”), and one twin or the other in the top bunk, and the other in the other, you never knew which would be where, and all so much alike as they nodded wordlessly, knowingly at each other: Grant a little boy, the boys two grown-up men.

It filled her with love, the image of that mute trio in the room, nodding male reassurances, just as it filled her with a different sort of love to be out in the open air, on the street, pregnant and purposeful, waddling alongside her uncle, a big baby girl upside-down inside her …

A thought came out of the blue. “Do you remember the time Papa used the word
nigger
in front of you?”

Uncle Dennis’s reply was immediate: “Your father doesn’t talk like that.”

“Oh but he did. And that’s exactly what you said to him. We were at a family picnic. Do you remember? Don’t you remember? You went up and said, quite sternly, you said, Vico,
you
don’t talk that way. Do you remember?”

Uncle Dennis sucked on his plump lower lip. He was searching his memory. “You know, I guess I do …”

“I was just a little girl, but I remember it vividly. You said, Vico,
you
don’t talk that way. And Papa clenched his fists. Boy, did he clench his fists. The veins in his arms were bulging. I don’t think you saw that. Oh he was furious! And I honestly thought he was going to hit you.”

Sudden, hearty laughter erupted—clearly, Uncle Dennis had never heard anything so preposterous. “Oh darling, listen to you.
Listen
to you. You always did have the wildest imagination of any child I ever—”

“But he
did.”

“Your father
hitting
me …”

“But he did. He came very close.”

“Of all the most ridiculous … Honestly, your father hitting
me.”
And laughter exploded out of Uncle Dennis once more. Had he once publicly rebuked his brother-in-law at a family picnic? If he had, he’d done so in absolute safety. How could his brother-in-law resist him? For on his side he’d had rightness—dignity, justice, the prospect of a fairer brotherhood of man.

They crossed Seven Mile. Immediately, the houses grew grander—the streets more expansive and winding. Here were wider yards, looping contours. It was in this neighborhood that Ira’s aunt had holed up in a house almost destroyed by a dozen cats. And it was here that Papa used to bring his daughter, just a little girl, when he was still a brown-haired man, and the two of them would examine the houses one by one—some of the finest houses in the city. One by one, he would ask her opinions. And he would listen to what she said. He, too, had been teaching her, his little Bia, to observe.

“So what have you been reading?” Bianca said.

“Well—this one’s
really
dumb.”

“Good,” she said happily.

“This one’s a time-travel story. A man builds a time machine because his wife has an incurable disease and he wants to see if future scientists have developed a cure. Well, it turns out they
have
, and he brings it back, along with a box of newspapers. He saves his wife. But when he reads the newspapers, he discovers that in the original world, the one where there was no cure, he’d eventually married another woman, after his wife died, and he’d had three children. Which means that by curing his wife and not marrying this second woman, he’d effectively murdered his children. Are you following me?”

“Mostly.”

“It’s a bit tricky. Anyway, having cured his wife, he decides he’ll divorce her—she’s a bit of a pill, actually—and marry the other woman, so he can still have the children he would have had. But when he travels again into the future, he discovers that his third child’s child—his grandchild—is destined to become a terrible tyrant. A sort of Hitler. What should he do? Should he not have that third child? Or go ahead and have that child, but then travel again into the future and somehow stop his grandchild from becoming a tyrant? I suppose the lesson of the
story is the terrible danger of meddling. If so, it’s not a lesson I’ve taken to heart. It seems I’m forever interfering in all your lives.”

“You answer cries for help,” Bianca said. “That’s a different matter.”

“Well, thank you.” And Bianca saw she’d said exactly the right thing. “Well, thank you.

“Here’s the house,” she announced. “The one that Ira planned to sell for twenty-four thousand, before Papa talked him out of it.”

In the darkness, the place looked particularly inviting. Ira had left a few lights on. The foyer glowed through the front door’s tinted panes. Upstairs, the room with the big bay window also glowed.

“Beautiful house,” Uncle Dennis said. He lit the pipe he’d been carrying all this time. He inhaled his first breath of smoke with a grunt of pleasure. To stand beside him was as near to smoking as she would ever come again—the intricate and primordial aroma of her uncle’s pipe.

“Absolutely beautiful,” she said. “Papa’s advice was sound. Ira’s going to make a tidy sum. And that’s only fair.”

Even in the darkness, the house exuded a sense of careful, loving husbandry. It had all taken place under Papa’s watchful eye: the new gutters, the new shrubbery. A light had also been left on at the top of the house, in the room Ira was converting into a library. Over that little room, the slate roof shone, as if with moonlight, though no moon was visible.