The Art Student's War (11 page)

Then the subject of race came up—what Mamma called “the colored problem”—which was unfortunate because nobody wanted to discuss this at a birthday celebration. Still, it was hard to ignore a civil uprising which had left dozens of people dead and which, for all the mayor’s reassurances that it represented only a few hours of madness, had transformed the city’s atmosphere. “Vico, these people have nowhere to live,” Uncle Dennis pointed out. “You understand better than anyone. Back in April, it’s decided none of these federal projects would be integrated, which really meant the Negroes wouldn’t get their share, didn’t it? They’re packed into the few rooms in the few neighborhoods—”

Papa interrupted: “Nobody has places to live.”

“That’s exactly my point! Who in all Detroit understands this better than you? Heck, Vico, you’re working fingers to the bone building places where all these new workers—”

“I’ve never seen the city like this,” Grace interrupted. It seemed she, too, felt jittery. The topic made Bea
very
nervous—especially as debated by these two men. It wasn’t so many years ago that Papa had used the word
nigger
in front of Uncle Dennis. This was on an outing to Chandler Park, a picnic, where Papa had been drinking wine.
A couple niggers
was the phrase. And what happened next was extraordinary—Bea had never forgotten it. She would never forget it. Uncle Dennis had walked right up to Papa and said, “Vico,
you
don’t talk that way,” rebuking him as sharply and dismissively as though he were some schoolboy. And Bea, standing beside her father, this man who prided himself on his arm wrestling, had seen Papa’s body tremble all over with fury. He’d
gathered his fists together, and Bea had honestly feared Papa would strike Uncle Dennis.

“It’s less of a problem Outer Drive way,” Mamma observed, which sounded offhand but was actually aggressive. The implication was that the Poppletons, living on Outer Drive near the Grosse Pointe border, were insulated from the Paradisos’ legitimate fears. Only a few short blocks separated Inquiry Street from Belle Isle, and when the radio had reported (falsely, it turned out) that Negroes were assembling on Belle Isle and were planning to march on the city, Bea had felt something odd: a social—racial—terror. It was quite unlike anything she’d ever known, this invasive fear of another race.

Uncle Dennis took the topic firmly in hand. “Oh, but it isn’t a problem in one neighborhood, it’s the whole city’s problem. And it has to be a citywide solution. We need more of those Sojourner Truth housing developments. Good heavens, this is America, how can you say to people, Your kind has nowhere to live in the fourth-largest city in the country?” Given Mamma and Papa’s attitudes, this wasn’t perhaps a wholly rhetorical question. Still, Uncle Dennis proceeded confidently. He was of course a great liberal, as was Aunt Grace, whose heroine was Eleanor Roosevelt. “That’s the thing all of us are learning,” he declared, and carried on in this vein, his
all of us
shepherding the dinner party safely into a territory where fairness and decency and progress flourished. Uncle Dennis pushed on, delving into some of the specific programs the city needed to adopt, and would adopt, because we remain a
very decent city
, and it soon became evident that at this celebration a potential disaster had been averted.

But still no whitefish. In desperation, Bea said, “Why don’t you tell us about your reading, Uncle Dennis?”

“My reading?”

“Your science fiction. You must be reading a science-fiction story.”

“Yessss …”

Although Uncle Dennis avidly discussed his reading with Bea, he’d never felt quite comfortable sharing such things with the world at large. “Oh, this one’s pretty dumb, actually,” he said, and his plump bespectacled face looked a little abashed.

Still, he carried on. “The book’s called
Lost Planet of the Amazons
. A spaceman from Earth crash-lands on some distant planet and discovers there aren’t any other men in sight. No boys. No males anywhere. Only females.

“And at first he’s utterly delighted. Jeepers, it’s like a harem! I don’t mean to suggest the book goes in for hanky-panky. But you can imagine how overjoyed our spaceman is to find himself the only man on a planet overrun by women.” Uncle Dennis halted. “That may not sound like heaven to you, but you’ll have to trust me on this, Stevie,” he said. “Eventually, you’ll get it”—which made Stevie blush and everyone else laugh. The laughter felt good. Uncle Dennis was trying so hard, really, to make the party a success …

“But then he fell to thinking. Men had to be
somewhere
. Otherwise, where did all the women come from? And he’d caught a few glimpses of pregnant women, and how could they be pregnant without—without the benefit of men?”

Uncle Dennis glanced searchingly around the table. His gaze settled on his wineglass and he took a sip.

Stevie and Edith were staring hard at Uncle Dennis, who only now realized his tale might not be completely appropriate for children.

“But where did the babies come from?” Edith asked in her level, fact-gathering way.

Uncle Dennis was saved by the belated arrival of the whitefish.

Like Chuck, the waitress was very fat and very red-faced. The two of them might almost have been brother and sister, though they didn’t otherwise look much alike; it seemed if you were fat enough and red-faced enough, other resemblances scarcely counted.

The fish was covered with bread crumbs—wonderfully crunchy bread crumbs—and it came with buttered carrots and mashed potatoes with dark brown gravy. Uncle Dennis had selected well. They ate in silence. They were going to get through this potentially disastrous celebration. It was merely a matter of everyone’s proceeding cautiously—tonight, tomorrow, next week—and letting time do its healing work. They were all one family, the Paradisos and the Poppletons, and they were, besides, all the family each of them had.

The waitress refilled the children’s ginger ale, refreshed the grownups’ wine. Uncle Dennis was readying himself to make a toast—he was a great one for toasts.

A clinking of knife against glass silenced the alcove. “To the woman at the other end of the table,” Uncle Dennis proclaimed, hoisting high his wineglass. “You can’t tell me that woman is forty. My God, she looks as fresh as a new bride.”

Aunt Grace smiled—beautifully, demurely—and her lips moved in some unspoken message of humility and thanks.

And it was at this precise, exquisite moment that Mamma chose to speak up—opened her mouth to utter something surpassingly blunt and cruel. It was as though all the last few weeks of dark brooding had solidified in a phrase that fell like a butcher’s cleaver.

“But she wasn’t,” Mamma pointed out. “A fresh bride. When you married her. Grace was divorced.”

It was a topic rarely mentioned, and
never
mentioned in a public setting.

Mamma, who had pushed her plate aside, now took an interest in her food. She scooped up a large mixed forkful of fish and mashed potatoes and—as everyone at the table, aghast, intently watched—chewed it reflectively.

Mamma swallowed and resumed talking. Almost more upsetting than her words was her matter-of-fact tone. It was all so eerie—her calmly thoughtful and seemingly nonjudgmental mien, as if she wished merely to set the record straight. “In the eyes of the Catholic Church, she’s still married to Michael Cullers. Grace is married to a man who isn’t even here. I suppose he wasn’t invited.” Her fork sought out the fish again.

It fell upon Uncle Dennis to speak: “But Sylvia, none of us here
is
a Catholic.”

“None of us? Grace and I are a quarter Catholic by blood. And aren’t you forgetting Vico? I
married
a Catholic, Dennis. And in the eyes of that church, he is pledged to me forever.”

All eyes swung around to Papa, who was leaning forward and squeezing the edge of the table. At times like this, when seriously challenged, he exuded an air of physical forcefulness.

Papa cleared his throat. “The Church,” he said. He was visibly searching for something to say.

Papa a Catholic? He did have a soft spot for nuns, particularly the ones collecting for charity. But as for the Church’s views on marriage, and its prohibition on divorce, he would certainly dismiss such things with that favorite phrase, a “load of mumbo jumbo.” If he believed wholeheartedly in anything, he believed in this marriage between his sister-in-law and his best friend. “Sylvia, we were not married in the Church,” he said, slowly. “It was your own wish—”

Uncle Dennis interceded. Behind his thick glasses, his magnified eyes caromed round the table and landed on Edith. Clearly, he scarcely knew what he was saying:

“You were asking about the planet, and where the babies came from,
and that’s just what our spaceman eventually figured out: they had to come from—seeds, from the male seeds. The women were made pregnant, scientifically impregnated, in laboratories, using the—the seeds stored in the laboratories. And the Amazons want to get rid of the spaceman, but first they needed to get, they were going to collect—” Uncle Dennis halted, thoroughly discombobulated, and his jumpy gaze alighted on Bea. “You
see,”
he said.
“You
see.”

Just then, providentially, the enormous waitress appeared—large as any Amazon—and Uncle Dennis announced, in an amplified voice not his own, “I think we’re all done, very nice, yes, all
done
, you can bring on the cake. My yes. You can bring on the cake.” His face swung round the table and he explained, superfluously, “There is going to be a birthday cake for Grace …”

“I wanted cake,” Edith said.

“And cake you shall have, my dear. Cake you shall have, little Edith,” Uncle Dennis all but sang.

But not yet. For when the table had been cleared, as they all sat awaiting the birthday cake, Mamma assumed the floor again: “Have I spoken inappropriately?” she said. “Are we going to ignore certain truths and conditions staring us right in the face?” she said.

“Sylvia,”
Papa called.

“You know what?
I’m
going to have my say.” And once again, though her unrestrained words were scary, more frightening still was the inhuman detachment in her voice—she seemed as unstoppable as some machine.

“Sylvia, you shut up.”

“I’m going to have my say, Vico. Old Sylvia has thought long enough and hard enough and she’s going to have her say. There are certain truths and conditions that can be ignored no longer, certain truths and conditions, and one is that Grace
had
a good-looking husband and couldn’t hold on to him. Should we all pretend this isn’t true? Do you remember what you used to say about him, Grace? About Michael Cullers? You said he looked like a Greek god. Remember? Am I the only one who remembers? A Greek … god. And you couldn’t hold on to your god.” Mamma peered with dark horrible intensity at Aunt Grace, who, with frightened upturned eyes, cowered under her older sister’s gaze.

“And that’s why you married Dennis, wasn’t it? Because you couldn’t hold on to a good-looking man? And do you remember how you
described Dennis the first time? After your first date? Remember? Come on, Grace, you do remember. Yes, Grace, you said he looked like a
frog
. Beautiful Grace, the most beautiful girl at Eastern High School, the perfect princess, she married a
frog
because she couldn’t hold on to a good-looking man.”

The cries and protests were universal: everyone was begging her, begging her to stop. But she would not stop. Mamma could not stop. You might as well seek to arrest some allegorical figure in a painting—some streaming-haired Fury, some flying Angel of Death in a plain brown housedress, sowing mayhem and flattened devastation. What could anyone do but sit stunned and motionless, watching the dismembering of a family?

“So what did you do next? You stole Vico’s heart. You stole the heart of a good-looking man, that’s what you did. Oh I’m not accusing you of any impropriety—because that would be wrong, and our beautiful, perfect Grace
never does anything wrong
. No, you stole Vico’s heart. That’s all you did. No more than that. You stole my husband’s heart, that’s all you did. You ruined my marriage, and my life, that’s all you did …”

Aunt Grace had begun to cry. “How could you—” she began, looking down at her plate. She could hardly find a voice through her sobbing. “How could you think—” She lifted her eyes, beseechingly, toward her older sister.

“What did I ever do to you?” Grace went on. “What did I
do?
Where was the offense? You say I ruined your life, but it’s been this way forever, long before you ever met Vico. You’re always attacking me, belittling me, attacking me,
attacking
me, and I try to ignore it—I do my level best to ignore it—”

And on this night of catastrophic accusations and revelations, one durable mystery was illuminated: Grace had understood the truth all along. Yes, she had sensed the hostility, and she’d tried to overlook it, or to defuse it, only to discover that it must ultimately declare itself.

Sobbing, pleading, struggling to get the words out, Grace demanded of Mamma, “What did I ever
do
that you treat me this way? On my—my fortieth birthday?”

And Aunt Grace was such a miserable, pitiable, wronged creature that Bea must reach over and place one hand upon the woman’s quaking shoulder, the other hand atop Grace’s hand, which was wet with tears. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Bea whispered.

But it was
not
all right and Mamma had some final bitterness to fling
at the world. Nothing could be left intact. Tonight, at this birthday celebration, everything must be irretrievably broken:

“Oh
go
ahead, Bea. Side with her.
Side
with her,” Mamma hissed. “Sure you do. You’ve always been an unnatural girl. You never loved your own mother, did you?”

There: the terminating and seemingly inevitable words had been pronounced, which weirdly seemed to free them all, and Papa and Uncle Dennis hurried everybody up from their seats. Bea strode blindly through the restaurant and stepped out into the chill darkness of a drizzling rain, a summer night that felt like autumn. The children ranged on the sidewalk in assorted stunned postures, loosely huddled under the restaurant’s awning, but saying nothing. Papa and Uncle Dennis were still inside, evidently settling the bill. Mamma stood apart, having edged out from under the awning into the pattering rain.