The Art Student's War (12 page)

Keeping to the awning’s protection, Bea wandered on her own alongside the restaurant. She peered through the rain-struck window. What she beheld looked remotely familiar, but it took a moment to focus. This was in the alcove. A quivering nest of bright jewelry, like a mobile chandelier, floated into it, borne by the enormous waitress, who apparently had not yet heard the party was over. The quivering jewels? The candles of Aunt Grace’s fortieth-birthday cake.

CHAPTER VI

The woman had set her blazing mark on that kitchen calendar she continually contemplated. She had created a day to go down in Paradiso history.

The rest of the world might not notice, but Mamma had issued a declaration of war. July 10, 1943, would henceforth serve, for the family living at 2753 Inquiry, as the domestic equivalent of December 7, 1941. A day which would live in infamy? A day, anyway, to banish any hope that a truce could be arrived at and wholesale destruction averted …

Perhaps the oddest aspect to it all was Mamma’s transformation. In the days immediately following the party, she sprang from her kitchen chair and set to work, indefatigably. She emptied the kitchen cabinets and wiped them down, inside and out; she scrubbed the linoleum; she polished the silver; she even took a dust rag to the furnace room. One of the household’s long-standing tensions was that Papa always kept up the exterior—paint, shutters, shingles, drainpipes—more meticulously than Mamma kept up the interior. No longer! Everything indoors shone.

No,
she
seemed fine; it was everybody else who stumbled around like numbed survivors of some aerial bombardment. Stevie’s toy guns fell silent; Edith retreated upstairs behind her mountains of knitting; Papa was even earlier off to work and later coming home, where he barricaded himself interminably behind the
News
, while the radio played. He smelled of beer and wine. He scarcely spoke, except in stifled telephone conversations, mumbled behind his bedroom door. He looked like somebody suffering the first queasy touches of seasickness. He even walked differently—with the plodding deliberation of a passenger on a pitching ship.

As much as she could, Bea stayed away from home. Merely to step inside the front hall was to feel her throat tighten and burn. Dinners were a horror and bedtimes were worse. Once the lights were out, she felt far more jittery than usual, and soon a truly ridiculous task formulated itself, requiring her to reconstruct childhood classrooms, ages ago, back at Field Elementary. Which pupil had sat where? And what were their names?

What were their names?
This was something she generally prided herself on—a better memory for childhood than most people had. (Maggie called her
my memory
. Maggie said, “I don’t bother remembering anything—Bea is my memory.”) But it was slipping away, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s what happened when you got older, when you approached twenty: your earliest years silently dissolved away. Until now, this process hadn’t seemed so catastrophic; now, it seemed as wrenching as a death in the family.

Bea would clamber out of bed in the middle of the night and tiptoe down to the kitchen in order to assemble lists of old classmates. Sometimes—often—she could recall the face, but the name eluded her. Her failure seemed far, far worse when a boy was involved. The boys might well be shipped overseas by now, and any failure to recall their names invited bad luck, didn’t it? Such callous indifference betokened disaster … It didn’t make any sense, but as she sat in the dim kitchen (she didn’t turn on the overhead, preferring the gentler light over the sink), a car might slip down Inquiry, pursuing some cryptic nocturnal errand, and the ghostly probe of its headlights, rifling through the living room, triggered an anxiety she had no words for, and a need—such a need—to make things right.

It was peculiar, but it seemed Bea had commandeered Mamma’s chair at the kitchen table. The wall calendar, with its twelve proud O’Reilly and Fein houses, peered down at Bea just as exactingly as it had always peered down at Mamma. Bea recognized her task as a kind of prayer—the setting of names into a litany—and wouldn’t merciless calamity follow if she neglected her prayers?

It turned out that the process of pencil sketching some remembered boyish face could sometimes unlock the secret of a missing name. She was sketching just such a face when her mother stepped into the kitchen. Mamma entered so quietly, it was as though Bea had been snuck up on. “Bea, what are you doing?”

Bea’s pencil jumped. Her mother was peering over her shoulder. There it was, visible proof of a deep current of lunacy running through another generation of the Paradiso/Schleiermacher family. “Mrs. Nelson, Grade 4B, Field Elementary School” it was titled, followed by a list of student names. “Glenn Havira, Mark Deane, Titus Gardner, Willy Jakiebielski …” A few sketched heads floated in the margin.

“I’m—I’m—sketching for class.”

And Mamma nodded serenely, as though sketching in the kitchen at
two-thirty in the morning were the most sensible thing in the world. She poured herself a glass of milk. (A glass of milk! When was the last time Mamma was seen drinking a glass of milk?) Then she said, “Good night, dear,” and retreated from the kitchen.

The next morning, feeling exhausted, to say nothing of desperate and bewildered, Bea went shopping with her mother. They walked down to Kercheval. They stopped in Marcellino’s for bread, and in Abajay’s for pork chops, and Pukszta’s for pork and beans, applesauce, potatoes. On the walk home, Bea proposed a detour to Buttery Creek Park and Mamma, a little surprisingly, agreed. When was the last time they’d gone to a park together? It seemed as if Mamma, too, understood it was time for a heart-to-heart, and that she, too, preferred that it take place anywhere but home.

Though tiny, Buttery Creek Park was laden with memories. Mamma used to bring Bea here to play when she was a little child. Later, she brought Bea and baby Stevie. Later still, Bea and Stevie and baby Edith. Now, Mamma let Bea lead the way. They settled on a park bench near the swings. “Feels good,” Mamma said, stretching her legs out. A white seagull had settled on the adjoining bench. He eyed them cheerfully, as if it felt good to him, too, to rest a moment.

A number of little boys were scampering around, aiming fingers and shooting at each other. Had boys always been so combative? Or was this, too, a result of the War? At the other end of the little park, keeping to themselves, a couple of families of Negroes were sitting at two picnic tables, their children playing in the tight space between the tables. In the old days, you didn’t see Negroes in Buttery Creek Park.

Closer at hand, a little red-haired girl, who must have been six or seven, was binding up one of the boy soldiers with strips of rag. Playing nurse. She was lanky. Her appearance was heartening; Bea could see herself in that small but lanky creature.

“I am aware, Bea, how much I’ve upset you,” Mamma began. “I’ve upset everyone, and I’m sorry, but I don’t regret it. You see the difference, don’t you?”

Mamma had always relished fine distinctions—extremely minute, almost lawyerly distinctions. Papa called it “hairsplitting”—another of his proud English idioms—and he had no patience with it. These distinctions were a reminder that Mamma, though she read little except the
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
McCall’s
, possessed a fine mind. Like Bea, she’d twice been double-promoted—two semesters—while still in
grade school. As she was perhaps a little too quick to announce,
she
had been the better student of the Schleiermacher sisters. Had Grace even once been double-promoted? No …

Mamma said, “I can’t regret what had to be done. I did have to say something: I couldn’t have them thinking I didn’t see. And you know what? I feel
better.”

The truth was queer but inarguable: Mamma looked better, too, in addition to being so much more industrious around the house. The whites of her eyes were whiter, there was vigor in the set of her jaw, she even
sounded
better—a whininess or weariness had dropped from her tone. These days, she spoke so much more forthrightly than she used to.

“Something had to be said, Bea. The truth is, Grace has always envied me. People think she’s perfect, but she never stops envying me.”

Grace envying
Mamma?
Grace envying
anyone?

“She envies me my good-looking husband. Do you know the story about Mike, Michael Cullers, her first husband?”

Bea knew a bit, and didn’t want to know more. “No, though I’m—” she began, but Mamma pressed on.

“Well
he
was good-looking, with pots of money, too—Grace always marries rich—and they weren’t married three years before … You know what he did? He got his secretary pregnant.”

Pregnant?
Mamma rarely talked about physical matters of this sort, except indirectly and disapprovingly, and the unwonted frankness of
pregnant
was startling. But so was the girlish, gossipy way she leaned forward, eyes wide and voice thrillingly hushed, as though they were high school chums, trading scandalous high school stories, rather than mother and daughter, discussing their own family.

But it seemed that Mamma, now that she felt so much
better
, was free to speak with reckless abandon: “As you must know, Grace can’t have children, and can you imagine how she felt? Mike’s secretary has a bun in the oven?”

Did Mamma just say
bun in the oven?

“Grace has always envied me my husband. And envied me my children. So what does she do? She sets out deliberately to steal my husband from me, to steal my children from me. Stealing the very things she can’t have.”

And Mamma, who didn’t often touch her children, seized Bea’s hand. “But you mustn’t let her,” she pleaded. “You mustn’t, Bea.”

And if, just moments ago, Mamma had seemed almost schoolgirlish,
there was now—odder yet—something almost old-womanish in this clutched grasping at her daughter’s hand, and in her trembling-eyed and importunate look. “Bea, don’t let her steal you from your mother.”

“Mamma, no one’s
stealing
me,” Bea cried.
Stealing:
the word was so ugly … She withdrew her hand and shifted her gaze toward the red-haired girl, even as she offered her mother a partial reassurance: “No one will ever steal me from … all of you.”

“You’re a good girl,” Mamma said. “Yes, a good girl.” Then she was launched again: “Do you see why I had to speak out? She
stole
my husband’s heart and my husband’s loyalty. She’s very crafty—Grace. You know the way she always gets her way? It’s all done silently, by craftiness. Grace
schemes
. She never stops scheming. She never
rests
. But you’re a good girl, Bea. You won’t let her steal you away.”

This time, Mamma did not clutch Bea’s hand but simply patted the top of it. Normally, it was Bea—overemotional Bia, the art student—who was the family “toucher.” (Italian families were supposed to go in for touching, but the Paradisos didn’t.) Mamma said, “I have
good
children. Yes I do,” she insisted, and smiled broadly, a look of authentic joy softening her features. She went on smiling, staring out at this park where, in the olden days, she used to bring her
good
children.

And she looked pretty. (She had always been pretty—a pretty girl with a beautiful sister.) There were occasionally moments, like this one, when you could imagine eighteen-year-old Sylvia Schleiermacher (just Bea’s age!) looking irresistibly fetching to Vico Paradiso, who stumbled with his words but was handsome and determined and already making a good living. Yes, Mamma had been just eighteen when she became a bride.

“I am perfectly willing to be civil,” Mamma went on. “She may have stolen my husband’s heart, but she’s my sister after all and I am willing to be perfectly civil. We can proceed on that basis. I only require that she understand she isn’t fooling anyone, that the two of them not go around thinking they pulled the wool over old Sylvia’s eyes.”

The pretty red-haired girl now had a gaggle of wounded soldiers awaiting her ministrations. Mamma smiled at Bea, benignly, and calmly delivered her concluding note: “If Grace and I can only both recognize that she has ruined my life, there is no reason in the world the two of us cannot get along.”

What do you say when your mother makes a pronouncement as confident and crackpot and heartbreaking as that? Bea could think of
nothing to do but to coax her mother from the bench—“We should get our things into the icebox”—and make their way back down Inquiry. Bea helped put the groceries away and then, as soon as she was able, raced out the door, heading toward the phone booth outside Olsson’s Drugs. She slipped a nickel into the slot. Her hands were atremble and her stomach was heaving. She prayed she would raise an answer at the other end …

“Hello.”

“Aunt Grace,” Bea said. “It’s—” But her throat had already constricted. For the millionth time, she wished she weren’t such a hopeless, hopeless crybaby.

Of course her aunt showed marvelous aplomb. “Bea,” she said—she sang—she sighed. There was such a world of welcome in the musical, down-sliding way her aunt spoke her name. “I was so hoping you would call.”

Aunt Grace pretended not to realize Bea was on the verge of tears—or a little past the verge—and quickly arranged everything. They would meet tomorrow for lunch, before Bea’s class, at Sanders, downtown. At twelve o’clock. Everything was going to be all right—Bea could almost believe this, though there was a hint of more than ruefulness, a touch of true mourning, in Aunt Grace’s closing words:

“We’ll have an hour anyway, won’t we? We’ll make do with that.”

Usually so pretty, Aunt Grace looked far from her best in the doorway at Sanders. She hadn’t slept well for days, obviously. But the quick glint of recognition in her eyes, the eager way she stepped forward and seized Bea by the arm, the gentle, melodious fervor with which she declared, “Bea, I’m
so glad
to see you”—these little flourishes were profoundly reassuring.