The Art Student's War

ALSO BY BRAD LEITHAUSER

Novels
A Few Corrections
(2001)
The Friends of Freeland
(1997)
Seaward
(1993)
Hence
(1989)
Equal Distance
(1985)

Poetry
Curves and Angles
(2006)
Darlington’s Fall
(2003)
The Odd Last Thing She Did
(1998)
The Mail from Anywhere
(1990)
Cats of the Temple
(1986)
Hundreds of Fireflies
(1982)

Essays
Penchants and Places
(1995)
Light Verse
Toad to a Nightingale
(2007)
Lettered Creatures
(2004)

FOR FOUR
WHO KNEW BOTH
THE CITY
AND THE WAR:

Lormina Paradise Salter (1924–1983)
Harold Edward Leithauser (1922–1985)
Gladys Garner Leithauser Higbee
Arthur Higbee

From some unimaginably distant corner of the cosmos
a light has come down to illuminate her personally.

A Few Corrections

Colors without objects—colors alone—
wriggle in the tray of my eye,

incubated under the great flat lamp
of the sun …

“Colors without Objects”
May Swenson

AUTHOR’S NOTE

While still a teenager, during the Second World War, my mother-in-law began drawing portraits of hospitalized soldiers. I never discussed this with her. By the time I began to contemplate a book set in Detroit during the War, she had been dead some twenty years. But it was a heartening moment when I realized that this vanished woman was offering me, from beyond the grave, with characteristic generosity, another gift: the premise for a novel.

My heroine, Bianca Paradiso, has few connections—of appearance, of character, of family—with my mother-in-law, who was born Lormina Paradise and who composed her soldier-portraits in various places, including New York City. But I retained, as an act of fealty, her surname—going it one better by restoring its original spelling. And I proceeded over the years of the book’s writing with a strong sense that it must serve as a tribute—to my mother-in-law, and to my parents, whose Midwest I would seek to capture, and not least to Detroit itself, my beleaguered and beloved hometown, in all its clanking, gorgeous heyday.

My mother-in-law gave the portraits to the soldiers themselves. What I’m left with are, literally, copies of copies of copies. A few of these have been scattered throughout these pages, as well as a solitary photograph: artist, bed-ridden soldier, and the portrait that binds them. It’s a small image that seemed to summon me to write a large and grateful book.

PART ONE
The War Comes Home

CHAPTER I

When the streetcar halts at Woodward and Mack, the young soldier who climbs aboard with some difficulty—he looks new to his crutches—is surpassingly handsome. Everybody notices him. His hair, long for a soldier’s, is shiny black. His eyes are arrestingly blue. That gaze of his is slightly unnerving and suggests a sizable temper, maybe. Or maybe not, for the crooked grin he releases at seeing himself securely aboard is boyish and winsome. Everybody in this dusty car feels heartened by him. A nation capable of producing soldiers as stirring as this young soldier—how could it possibly lose the War?

Although she doesn’t allow herself to stare openly, nobody is more observant of the handsome wounded young soldier than someone called Bea, whose true name is Bianca: Bianca Paradiso. A tall girl wearing a red hat, she stands in the middle of the car. The War has been unfolding for what feels like ages and those tranquil days before the soldiers overran the streets seem to belong to her childhood. The olive drab and navy blue of the boys’ uniforms have reconstituted the palette of the city. Bea is an art student. She examines minutely the city’s streets and streetcars, parks and store-window displays and billboards, and of course its automobiles. Her teacher last quarter, Professor Evanman, spoke of automobiles as the city’s “blood vessels”—this is, after all, the Motor City—and he urged his students to view Detroit as “a living creature.” The advice struck powerfully: the city as a living creature. Bea is eighteen.

She cultivates these days an enhanced receptivity to color, including the heavy black of this soldier’s hair, and the hovering, weightless, gas-fire blue of his eyes, to say nothing of the emphatic fresh white of the plaster bandage encasing his left leg. Bea is heading home from a two-hour class in still-life painting. Her professor this term is Professor Manhardt, who would never counsel his students to contemplate anything automotive. Professor Manhardt is a purist. He, too, offers inspiring advice. An artist never stops mixing paint… That’s one of Professor Manhardt’s maxims, and while heading home from class Bea typically
entertains a drifting armada of colors without objects—big floating swatches and swirls of pigment.

Yes, servicemen’s uniforms have colored the city for a long time, but it’s only recently, in this sodden late spring of 1943, that you’ve begun to see many of the wounded. There’s a special light attending them, like El Greco’s figures. Each glimpse of a wounded soldier forces you into a fearful medical appraisal.
How bad is he hurt?
That’s always the first question in everybody’s mind. And
Please, God, not too badly…
That’s the follow-up prayer.
Please, God
. Fortunately, nobody Bea personally knows has been wounded or killed, so far at least, although a high school classmate, Bradley Hake, has long been missing in action in the Philippines.

Well, this one, the very good-looking boy on the Woodward Avenue streetcar, isn’t hurt too badly. Though his leg is bandaged all the way above his knee, and though he grimaced on the car step, he exudes a brimming youthful well-being once aboard. It’s so good to be home, his grin declares. Good to be alive in a month in which, as the newspapers daily report, American boys by the hundreds are dying overseas. Yes, truly it is wonderful to be back in Detroit, on this last Friday in May, the twenty-eighth of May, after a record-breaking stretch of rainy days, riding a streetcar up Woodward Avenue, the city’s central thoroughfare, with a mixed crowd of people who are—men and women, white and colored—heading home for supper.

It’s approaching five o’clock and the streetcar is full, with recent arrivals like Bea left standing. Streetcars are always full, ever since the War started. Of course there’s not a chance in the world the soldier will be left standing. It’s only a matter of who’s to have the honor of first catching his eye and offering up a seat.

This privilege falls to a badly shaved, grizzled little man wearing a patched jacket and a tan corduroy cap. His hands, although scrubbed, are still grimed from a day at the factory. Bea observes everything. As he rises from his seat he instinctively doffs his tan cap, revealing a threadbare scalp on which a nasty-looking boil—his own modest wound—gleams painfully. If the young black-haired soldier had been his own flesh and blood, the grizzled little man couldn’t regard him with deeper paternal satisfaction. The man with the boil has been granted an opportunity both honorable and precious: the chance for a small but conspicuous display of patriotism.

The young soldier nods obligingly. He has a boy’s still-skinny neck,
with an outsized, bobbing Adam’s apple. It isn’t just his crutches that make him gawky. If he weren’t so handsome, he might almost be silly-looking. He takes a step forward, on his crutches, halts and glances around the car. Decisively, his eye hooks Bianca Paradiso’s attentive eye.

And then—then, to the girl’s horror, to her crawling, incredulous, consummate horror—the soldier signals to her. She prays she’s mistaken, but there it is, undeniably: the soldier repeats the gesture and lifts a beckoning eyebrow.

No possible doubt what he intends: he means for Bea to occupy the seat vacated by the man with the tan corduroy cap. Instantly, Bea’s face blushes so intensely that her nose and forehead actually ache.

Everybody’s
watching. It’s just as though the streetcar has halted. It’s as if the whole city has halted and everybody in Detroit is gaping at her, while she, so keenly susceptible to embarrassment, undergoes paralysis. She shakes her head once, vehemently, and with her free hand throws off a jerky motion of dismissal—a helpless, importunate gesture. Is she going to sit while the wounded soldier stands?

Don’t
, her gesture says. It’s all she can say.

But resolution is written on the handsome soldier’s face. This boy isn’t about to retreat. Retreat? In recent months he has endured far too much to consider
that
. He has been shot at by absolute strangers, people doing their best to kill him, out in unimaginably strange lands. Is he now going to be fended off by a pretty girl in an odd red hat, standing in a Detroit streetcar with a notebook under her arm?

He continues to regard her with his charged blue glance, into which seemingly has entered a beseeching, indeed a vulnerable aspect. He is requesting a favor.
Won’t
she oblige him? Please? Or will she refuse him—refuse him a privilege she’d grant unthinkingly if he stood before her whole and unimpaired?

If he stood before her as the boy he used to be, not so very long ago, without crutches or bandages, wouldn’t she unhesitatingly take the offered seat?

The ghastly moment unfreezes itself, there is no way out except forward, and, stooping (she’s quite a tall girl, who tends to stoop accommodatingly), Bea slips into the empty seat. She plants her gaze on the gritty floor, where a couple of last-drag smokers have, on boarding, pitched cigarette butts. The true painter observes everything, and yet she cannot
bear
to meet anyone’s eyes. She vows not to look up again—not once—until her stop is reached.

It’s a pity Bea doesn’t look up, for the ensuing drama would naturally engage any artist’s eye. The delicate, tense pantomime of the handsome wounded soldier and the lanky, dark, strikingly pretty Italian-looking girl serves as a mere prelude. Once Bea has awkwardly swiveled, face aflame, into the offered seat, the rest of the car leaps into motion. Simultaneously, four, five, half a dozen men spring up, each volunteering a place for the soldier. He had their goodwill from the outset, of course, by dint of his uniform and his cheerfully wielded crutches. But something far more potent has been awakened: at the fatigued end of a hot day, and of a long week, he has restored for them the meaning of gallantry. They are abashed and upraised, and they all adore him.

Gaze steadily downcast, Bea holds true to her vow for two more stops. Her red hat is in her lap. She refers to it—a little joke—as her Hungarian beret. It’s neither Hungarian nor a beret; it’s something she picked up across the river, in Windsor, Canada. It’s made of bright red felt, almost scarlet, with a velvet rim of a different red, almost crimson. She’d chosen it after determining that it looked arty without looking
too
arty.

Nagging curiosity soon overcomes her, and she allows herself a few peeks out the window. The storefronts are, if possible, more patriotic than usual, in celebration of Decoration Day, which this year falls on a Sunday, two days from now. A holiday weekend is beginning, and the streetcar passes a movie theater advertising a two a.m. showing for defense workers, whose schedules might not otherwise allow a movie. The War has changed everything.