The Art Student's War (15 page)

Even Mamma had something for Ronny to inspect: a photograph of her prosperous-looking parents, on honeymoon, in Chicago, in 1897.

Although they were strangers to Bea, both having died in her infancy, she had spent enough time with this photograph to feel she knew them well: Grandpa and Grandma Schleiermacher. Yet Ronny had only to examine it for five seconds before he detected something Bea had never noticed: “But they look so alike! Why, they look more like brother and sister than husband and wife.”

Bea jumped up to peer over Ronny’s shoulder. Yes—yes, they
did
resemble each other. And one of the two daughters these honeymooners would eventually produce, Grace with the wide-set eyes, would resemble them far more closely than would that other daughter, narrow-eyed Sylvia, who now was watching Ronny Olsson so fixedly.

Papa brought forth the wooden lamb he’d made for Bea, the owl for Edith. Again, Ronny assessed the craftsmanship, posed intelligent questions, stroked the animals respectfully—almost lovingly. Bea mentioned that her father had also constructed her bed, carving animals into the very bedposts. A somewhat constrained silence ensued. But naturally this visitor wasn’t about to be shown Bea’s bed.

There was so much to display, it wasn’t easy getting out of the house—Ronny was taking her downtown to the new Gary Cooper picture—but at last they scurried down the sidewalk to his convertible. Bea wasn’t quite sure why, but she was laughing—giggling, really—as he held open the car door.

Nor was it easy, a few hours later, when Ronny had dropped her home promptly afterward, to shake off a whole new round of questions. How was the movie? (From Mamma.) Did you have popcorn? (From Edith.) What color is the interior of his car? (From Papa.) Does he play
any sports? (From Stevie.) And so on, and so on. Most of the questions would never have arisen if her date had been somebody else. But that bright, too-brief interlude when Ronny Olsson had been a visitor in their home, graciously perched on the davenport with a coffee cup in hand, had left the air aglow, and nobody wanted to see it fade altogether.

So it took Bea longer than she would wish to find herself in bed, with the light off. Once inside the environs of her little four-animal zoo, she could let her thoughts flow freely, at their own pace. She could review the day—everything Ronny had said from the moment he walked through the front door until, after the movie, he dropped her home again, and everything her family had said to him, and said about him later. Two remarks in particular demanded mulling over. The first was Papa’s—his final remark of the day: “It’s like Italy, isn’t it, Bia? The rich folk there. They understand the work.”

And what exactly did he mean by this? Did he himself understand everything he meant by this?

Papa rarely spoke Italian, except to his father, on Sundays, and Nonno, like his son, was a man of few words anyway—all the more so because of his emphysema. Papa could easily have made friends among the Italians in the neighborhood (those men you saw in the park, smoking and playing bocce), or he could have hired more of them for his crews, but he chose not to. Yet it seemed that in the background to all his thinking—in some world unsullied by the rise of Mussolini, whom Papa, long before war was declared, had always called a knucklehead—lay the true land of his imagination, his Italia. It was a place where builders “refused to cut corners.” In that fabled country, the owners of even the biggest villas esteemed the expertise of the man who, though he might be illiterate, knew how to trim an olive tree, to erect a stone wall, to patch a cracked ceiling—just as Ronny had understood, right away, the care and ingenuity invested in a wooden rooster you pulled with a string. So Papa’s praise was high praise indeed.

But what of Mamma’s concluding remark? She’d offered it with a cool shake of the head, as if to suggest not malice but admiration tinged with chary recognition. “I’ve met his type before,” she said. But what
could
she mean? When and where had Mamma ever met anyone remotely like Ronny Olsson?

The Olssons did not live where you might expect—but as it turned out almost nothing about the Olsson household conformed to Bea’s imaginings.
Better than any of her friends, Bea knew the city’s finest neighborhoods. It had always been one of her father-the-builder’s favorite weekend activities—a Sunday morning reconnaissance drive, checking up on which houses were going up where, which were getting added to. Though O’Reilly and Fein had never been in the business of building mansions (even before the War, when there was no five-thousand-dollar ceiling on new homes), Papa adored architectural grandeur, and over the years Bea had peered closely at the city’s most splendid residences. Given their money, you might think the Olssons would have migrated to the suburbs, like Henry Ford in Dearborn, or like the other Fords and the Dodges in their Grosse Pointe palaces along the lake. Or, choosing instead to stay in town, they might plausibly have inhabited one of those overgrown structures tucked away in Palmer Woods. And yet they lived in a somewhat older part of the city, in Arden Park, just off Woodward Avenue.

Once, decades ago, these must have been among the city’s proudest houses. Now, they looked a little run-down. And the Jews had moved in. (Papa kept careful track of who was moving where.) And though the Olsson house was enormous—the largest house Bea had ever actually stepped inside—it was obscured behind a pair of towering blue spruce. From the outside, it appeared far less imposing than it was.

Ronny had informed her—a number of times—that his mother was quite beautiful, and Bea remembered the occasional glittering glimpses of Mrs. Charles Olsson in the
News
society pages … But no such advance signals could have prepared Bea for beauty like this: regal and otherworldly.

Mrs. Olsson was first glimpsed in a room Bea would soon learn to call the music room. (There was a record player in there, though it never seemed to be running.) The music room stood three steps up from the library, from which Bea beheld an elevated figure enthroned in a cone of golden light. Mrs. Olsson was wearing a burgundy-colored dress. Pearls were twined around her ivory throat, and angling lamplight wove through her tumbles of auburn hair. She held an icy glass in one hand. She was a figure crying out for a master portraitist. Titian himself would have rejoiced to set up his easel before her.

Ronny introduced Bea as Bianca Paradiso.

Mrs. Olsson did not rise from her chair. “I’ve heard a good deal about you, Miss Paradiso.” Her tone expressed less greeting than observation. Bea’s would-be-winsome reply—combining the hope that Mrs. Olsson had heard nothing
too
alarming and the wish that she might be
called Bea—was thoroughly unintelligible, but fortunately mostly inaudible. Ronny helped her into a seat. He himself had scarcely sat down, however, before Mrs. Olsson said, “Ronny, maybe it’s time for a glass of pop.”

So there the two of them were and just as quick as
that:
Bea and Ronny’s mother. The smallest pearl on Mrs. Olsson’s neck was larger than any pearl in Mamma’s jewelry box. The glance Bea had fallen under was open, appraising, amused. “You’re quite a pretty girl, Bianca Paradiso,” Mrs. Olsson noted.

This
was
the type of scene Bea had half expected, similar to glimpses of the formidably rich in old English novels or in Hollywood movies. And her own stammering but verbose reply fit a role too—that of the giddy, gawky ingénue. She tried a second time to clarify her name: “You can call me Bea. Or Bianca. Either. Ronny seems to prefer Bianca. I guess I go by either. Either name. My father calls me Bia. It’s a nickname.”

The encounter soon wandered into unfamiliar terrain, however. Ronny returned with a bottle of pop and two glasses, and, showing uncharacteristic ungainliness, spilled a sizable puddle on the leather-topped table. He, too, seemed quite nervous. “Oh you
are
a hopeless one,” Mrs. Olsson said—and, turning to Bea, asked, with unexpected and almost sisterly warmth, “What
can
be done with this boy?”

Mrs. Olsson drew from her purse a lacy handkerchief and mopped the fizzing pool. She placed the sodden hanky atop a seashell ashtray and declared, “You must tell me about your artwork, Miss Paradiso, Ronny informs me you’re quite the talented artist.”

Though the request was intimidating, the soft light in Mrs. Olsson’s enormous dark eyes appeared genuinely welcoming. And as one question succeeded another (Who were Bea’s favorite painters? Had she been born in Detroit? Brothers and sisters? What did her father do?), Mrs. Olsson’s tone sounded clement and sustaining.

So Bea sat nervously sipping her drink—Faygo orange, exactly what Mamma had every day at lunchtime—and Mrs. Olsson sipped her glass, and Ronny sat in the chair between them, his quick eyes darting from one to another. Bea talked about her father’s job with O’Reilly and Fein. She mentioned Aunt Grace, and mentioned, as a modest claim to social standing, her uncle the doctor. At one point, a man stood in the doorway who could only be a servant, and Mrs. Olsson tapped twice with a forefinger on the rim of her glass. He took it away and moments later returned with a replacement. All without a word spoken.

Bea was talking about Edith’s mountains of socks when another man appeared in the doorway. He was not a servant.

Many times in her life Bea had seen business tycoons—weren’t they in half the movies she went to? They were stolidly built men usually hunkered behind stolid desks, barking orders for stock shares into a telephone. None bore the slightest resemblance to Mr. Olsson. He was thin and rangy and blond—or what was left of his clipped hair was blond, for he was mostly bald. His skin was darker than his hair.

With his high, rounded cheekbones and tawny coloring, he reminded Bea of the lynx in her favorite book from childhood,
The World’s Most Wonderful Animals
.

Although he stepped forward to shake Bea’s hand, he immediately retreated to the doorway, where he asked a number of the same questions Bea had just answered. Mr. Olsson had heard of O’Reilly and Fein. “They turn out good work,” he said—a comment Bea happily filed away, to tell Papa later. In answering questions already answered, Bea tried to vary her responses—so as not to bore Mrs. Olsson—and wound up feeling increasingly nonplussed. Mr. Olsson’s blue almost-too-close-set eyes were both direct and evasive: they had a way of hitting you and sliding off you.

None of Bea’s answers enticed him from his doorway post. He seemed en route elsewhere, so it was something of a surprise when, Mrs. Olsson having suggested that Ronny give Bea “a little tour of the downstairs,” Mr. Olsson decided to tag along.

More surprising still, he took on the role of co—tour guide. Ronny’s approach might be termed aesthetic—he set out to show Bea the little architectural details and
objets d’art
that most appealed to him. Mr. Olsson’s approach might be called anecdotal—he interrupted Ronny with colorful, lengthy stories. He showed Bea the mantel on which, last Thanksgiving, Mrs. Olsson’s sister, Betty Marie, had cracked open her head after slipping on the edge of a rug. He pointed out the grandfather clock he’d won in a poker game. (“Unfortunately, I didn’t also win the price of shipping. My mistake.”) He showed Bea where a huge wind-torn branch had blasted through the ceiling, missing Mrs. Olsson by a few feet. (“We almost lost her to a piece of lumber.”) Ronny gradually fell silent. This development scarcely fazed Mr. Olsson, who cheerfully took over as full tour guide. He was—it was already clear—quite a storyteller.

And—apparently—still quite an athlete. As Ronny had mentioned repeatedly, Mr. Olsson had been the track-team captain at the University
of Michigan. He ambled through his huge house with a rolling sportsman’s gait. To be guided by him was exciting—he radiated pleasure and energy—even as Bea was aware, beside her, of Ronny’s stiffening resentment.

Mr. Olsson led them into the basement, which held something Bea had never seen in a house before: a small gymnasium. There were mats on the wood floor, dumbbells and barbells, medicine balls and a punching bag. “I built the place bigger than I needed to,” Mr. Olsson said. “I didn’t know I’d be the only one using it.” And a quick glance between father and son.

Mr. Olsson surely did not need to add anything, but he did: “You see, I was thinking Ronny might want to spend time down here with me.”

Bea understood this tension—she felt oddly at home in it, despite the distance from this cavernous palace in Arden Park to her crowded home on crowded Inquiry Street. Notwithstanding Mr. Olsson’s ease and geniality, the tensions between Ronny and his father were evidently as labyrinthine and as rich and as difficult to voice as anything between Bea and her mother.

CHAPTER VII

“Miss Paradiso, may I see you after class?”

So unprecedented was this request, Bea’s concentration came utterly undone. Edges of the objects arrayed before her—a halved lemon, a cracked teacup, a rabbit’s foot—softened and blurred. What
could
Professor Manhardt want? Was she going to be, as had happened in classrooms before, promoted? (Had he recognized her full bounding potential?) Or maybe demoted—asked to leave class? (Had he discerned her fundamental lack of talent and originality?) There was no saying, really: Professor Manhardt was an impenetrable man.

So at 4:06, six minutes after the official end of class, Bea found herself in the professor’s overheated office. The tilted pane of the window was open a crack—enough to admit traffic sounds from Woodward Avenue—but not enough to bring relief. Apparently, the temperature didn’t discomfit Professor Manhardt, who wore his usual vest under his tweed sports coat.

Previously so formidable, Professor Manhardt had become, under Ronny’s frequent sniping, an almost fatuous figure. Ronny had got the man’s number immediately. Though Professor Manhardt was German (a Kraut, Ronny called him, as everybody these days called them—a word to make Bea wince with the knowledge of being a quarter Kraut from her mother’s side, and a half Wop from her father’s), he’d been educated in London and wanted
desperately
to be taken for English. It wasn’t his slight German accent that betrayed him; it was his entire manner. Even Bea, who’d never traveled more than a hundred miles outside Detroit, ascertained in a moment that this was one bogus Englishman.