The Art Student's War (28 page)

“You
would
do this to me, wouldn’t you?”

“I needa go the toilet,” the boy said.

“Right,” Maggie said.” ’course you do.”

The three of them set out in search of a toilet—Herbie in the middle, dragging a bit—but none was to be found. They passed a tiger, looking sleepy, and some lions, also sleepy, and quite a few red-rumped baboons, most of them asleep.

“I needa go the toilet.”

“Well you’ll just hafta hold it. Or you can do what the animals do … You think the zebras have central plumbing? You suppose the giraffes have private rest rooms?”

“I ga go
now,”
Herbie said.

Mysteriously, since Bea would have sworn they’d been mostly following a straight line, they came full circle: here were the very benches they’d been sitting upon. More mysterious still, bathrooms stood right before them. Somehow they’d walked right past them.

Herbie, looking much revived, did not keep them waiting long. Maggie took a new tone: “All right, Herbie honey, whatcha wanna see next? Come to think of it, my stomach’s shaky too. All the walking, don’t you think? You know, it’d be a shame you mentioned this to your mom, because she might think it was all the treats. She might say I shouldn’t buy you
treats
, and we’d be sorry about that, wouldn’t we, hon?”

But they didn’t get far before Herbie’s face turned green and glassy once more. The three of them beat a quick retreat to the restrooms.

This time, Herbie stayed in a
very
long time—so long that Bea said, “Do you think he died?”

“Wishful thinking. Damn the little monster.”

After prompting each other, the two of them approached the doorway, and Maggie called in, “Her—bie. Her—bie.” No answer. A man exiting with his hands at his waist—he was adjusting his fly—flashed them an interested look. They hurried back to their bench. “She’s going to kill me,” Maggie sighed, and added, which made Bea laugh, “George is going to be a war widower.”

Two boys were nearing the men’s room. They looked approachably young—not much older than Stevie—and Bea called to them. “Boys,” she said. “Excuse me, boys.” Maggie interrupted and made it plain: “Would you go in and see if there’s a dead boy named Herbie in there?”

The boys raced inside and returned disappointed a minute later. “Oh he’s all right,” one of them reported. “He’s just been throwing up.”

“Throwing up? Oh hell, she’s going to kill me.”

“Now he’s just sort of sitting there,” the other boy said.

“If he’s thrown up on his clothes, I’m a dead girl.”

When Herbie at last emerged, he reeked of vomit. He had indeed thrown up on his jacket.

“Oh hell, oh dear,” Maggie said, not knowing which tone to take. “Herbie, honey, better if you sit down. Bea, couldja work on his jacket? Bea?”

Maggie removed the boy’s jacket and handed it over. Then she settled her arm around Herbie and said, “Now honey, normally I wouldn’t advise anything less than total honesty, but in this case I really think we shouldn’t worry your mother. She can be a bit high-strung is how it is.”

The only soap available in the ladies’ room was an abrasive pink powder.
Using first some paper towel and then, feeling desperate, a fine lace handkerchief from her purse, Bea worked and worked on the stained front of Herbie’s gray wool jacket. Given how sodden the material soon became, it was difficult to say how successful her efforts were. But she went on scrubbing. It had been her idea, after all, to stuff the boy into a stupor.

When Bea at last left the restroom, she found Maggie and Herbie still on the bench, Maggie’s arm extended around the boy. She had bought him a Coca-Cola to soothe his sugar-overloaded stomach. Her conversation had not budged. The first thing Bea heard was: “Naturally, I would never want you to be dishonest with your mother …”

CHAPTER XVI

Though almost punitively unappetizing, Mrs. Vanden Akker’s deep-fried cooking had its promised recuperative effect on Henry. Each time Bea saw him, he looked healthier and solider. His injured back, too, was mending. He moved slowly, and stiffly, but he was fully ambulatory.

Still, he wasn’t venturing often or far from home. Their encounters were restricted to his house in Pleasant Ridge. They sat in the living room. Mrs. Vanden Akker would station herself in either the living room or the adjoining kitchen. She was never out of hearing’s range—never so distant that Bea felt that the clink of a spoon against a plate, or the clearing of her throat, went unremarked.

Yet if Henry, like Mr. Vanden Akker, was thoroughly under the woman’s thumb, in one regard, anyway, he showed himself defiantly independent: he kept inviting Bea to visit. Nothing could be more apparent, as time went on, than Mrs. Vanden Akker’s disapproval of her. Mrs. Vanden Akker once went so far as to say, outright, that Henry would eventually marry “one of us”—somebody from the Dutch Reformed Church. As if Bea were scheming to lead feverish-eyed Henry Vanden Akker to the altar! Whenever Mrs. Vanden Akker issued such a remark, she had a characteristic way of jutting her head sideways and hoisting her chin—just the sort of gesture a fish might make after successfully taking the bait without the hook.

The day when Henry walked her to her bus stop seemed rich with progress, not just physical but psychological: the two of them were liberated, finally, from unshakable presences—from the other wounded soldiers in the bunks beside Henry’s, from Nurse O’Donnell, and, more to the point, from Mrs. Horace Vanden Akker.

And what did Henry do and say in their first moments of being utterly alone? He opened up the topic of religious doubt, Kierkegaard’s belief that meaningful faith must originate in doubt. And then he talked about Charles Darwin’s
Voyage of the Beagle
, which Bea hadn’t read. It seemed Darwin had loved the South American jungle more than anything. But Darwin had been unnerved, down at the frigid southern tip
of the continent, by the landscape’s bleakness and the Stone-Age lives of the Patagonian Indians. Patagonians? Who other than Henry would have heard of them? Or, having heard of them, would think them a suitable topic at such a moment? “I think my response would have been quite the opposite,” Henry said. “Starkness is fine.” He added: “It’s geometric.”

When in their slow pace they finally reached Woodward Avenue, Bea said, “Do you like living here, Henry?”

“Living where?”

“Here. In Pleasant Ridge.”

“I suppose so. It’s very pleasant, to choose the obvious word.” Henry gave her a penetrating look. “You wouldn’t like living here, Bea?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I just think it would be so odd.”

“Odd? How so?”

“To live so far from everything.”

“Far from what?”

“From the city, I guess.”

“We’re less than two miles from the city line.”

“Oh I know … I just think it might feel odd to be living out on the edge of things.”

“What edge?” Henry said. “The earth doesn’t have an edge. It’s a sphere. Roughly.”

“Oh I know—”

“If you grew up in New York,” Henry went on, “the whole city of Detroit might seem to lie on some edge. Of the Great Plains, I suppose.”

Of course Henry’s logic was unassailable. And that was part of Henry’s problem—for this was a topic, like so many of the world’s most interesting topics, where logic wouldn’t take a person too far. It was Henry’s advantage and disadvantage both: the things that animated his spirit were approachable through the linear analyses he excelled at. It wasn’t that way for her, Bea explained—or tried to. There were judgments to be based only on—only on how you felt the light fall. It was sometimes an issue of contending pigments, of complementing and warring distributions of lights and darks.

Ronny would have known what she meant, mostly, but this was nearly inexpressible with Henry. Still, for all the awkwardness, Bea tried to give him some feeling for this feeling that was such a strong feeling within her: this sensation she regularly experienced as she drifted
through the outskirts of Detroit. A sense of something not quaint exactly, not cute exactly, though very like quaint and cute: this suburban conviction that fully real lives could be lived out here in Pleasant Ridge, in Royal Oak, in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills. But how could anyone fail to register a steady diminution of spirit when traveling north up Woodward Avenue—from the heart of the city into its ancillary reaches?

Oh, this was not only an impossible feeling to describe—she also risked insulting Henry and the Vanden Akker family. For it wasn’t as though Henry, even if he
had
grown up in a place Bea must finally regard as a stage set, himself was unreal. No, the great irony was that Henry Vanden Akker, although much the most abstruse man she’d ever met, was far “realer” than most everybody she knew.

There were no words for it, but as Bea waited for the bus she gamely struggled on. “I travel to the West Side, the light’s different. I’m still in Detroit, but the light’s different. Sometimes I think a painter needs to know only two places: a place, and a second place that isn’t at all that place. But it’s as if there are places where the light’s thicker, almost. It isn’t any brighter, just thicker, but if your goal is to paint good pictures, you want to go where the light—where the light’s thick as cream.”

The bus pulled up.

Where the light’s thick as cream…
As Bea rides first a bus and then a streetcar ever deeper into the city, the phrase ricochets internally, it echoes and goes on echoing; she repeats it to herself, silently and then aloud. Her voice is low and quiet and nobody can possibly hear her over the streetcar’s racket. Nor the little giggle that follows. Oh, the things Henry’s noble gravity inspires her to say!

Or to wish to say. It sounded silly to put it this way, but Henry was unique. It was something she wanted to tell the world: here is one unusual soldier! And when Henry determined that their first outing ought to be a visit to the zoo, just round the corner from his house, Bea didn’t mention that she’d visited it recently with Maggie and Herbie. This was actually
perfect
. The two visits would balance each other; they would form a sort of painters’ diptych. Surely, the zoo with Henry would be a different zoo.

… And different it turned out to be—singular even before leaving the Vanden Akkers’. As if he saw himself heading off on some sort of safari, Henry sported a bizarre hat he must have picked up in the Pacific. It was woven of reeds that tended to fray, so that threadlike
curlicues sprang up all over his head. Bea thought it best not to ask about it. (Ronny would have marched to the guillotine before stepping outdoors in such a hat.) Mrs. Vanden Akker, softly sighing disapproval, dropped them at the zoo entrance.

To ease the wear and tear on Henry’s back, they rode the little zoo train. “Next stop:
Af-ri-ca!”
the conductor roared. The toylike train inevitably turned children giggly with delight, and today there were many children, but Henry took his seat as somberly and peered out from under his hat every bit as appraisingly as someone riding a real train across the African savannah.

He was far more taciturn than usual. Generally, Henry liked to talk about ideas: about his reading, and about what might be called theological issues. When he encouraged Bea to speak (he did most of the talking), he often solicited her views on visual art, a topic about which, with appealing modesty, he claimed to understand “absolutely nothing.” He added: “You
see
so much.”

Perhaps because Henry hadn’t yet visited her house, most of her family stories left him looking bored—though he asked about Edith, of all people. Her mathematical gift piqued his interest, as did her organizational passions. Henry laughed aloud on hearing of her scrapbook entitled “My Testimonials.” And he
loved
the story of how, talking in her sleep, Edith once declared, with the clearest enunciation in the world, “I disagree completely.”

“She’s a philosopher!” Henry cried, which actually wasn’t as fanciful as it first sounded. Whatever else she was, Edith was a deep soul.

Mamma and Aunt Grace didn’t ignite his curiosity as they did Ronny’s; in that way, Ronny had more imagination. (Bea couldn’t stop making such comparisons.) Still, though Bea knew the subject didn’t fully engage Henry, she couldn’t refrain from mentioning something that had troubled her for days.

“I had lunch this week with my aunt, Aunt Grace. You know I don’t mention such meetings to my mother. Anyway, Aunt Grace told me Uncle Dennis wanted to speak to me. Why would he want to speak to me?”

“Maybe he misses you,” Henry said. “It seems you don’t see much of him anymore.”

“But she didn’t say he wanted to see me. She said, speak to me. Why would he want to speak to me?”

“The truth is, we won’t find out until he does.”

And this was deeply typical of Henry. He loved this phrase—
the truth is
—which served him the way others might rely on
you know
or
well, actually
. And when a particular topic’s data turned out to be insufficient, all speculation must end. It was futile to pursue what couldn’t be solved or clarified.

The truth is? The truth was, Aunt Grace’s announcement had only aggravated an already bad situation: Bea had been terribly uneasy for weeks and weeks. Nothing had been the same since the birthday dinner on July tenth, when everything came undone. Maybe the only way to proceed was not to talk too much, forcing your thoughts elsewhere, though it had occurred to Bea that the wild needy intensity of her feelings for Ronny, and more lately for Henry, might ultimately be laid to her troubles at home. These days, her passions felt even less controllable than usual.

Given her feelings for Ronny, how could Henry tug so on her emotions? It didn’t make sense—but Henry tugged
hard
on her emotions. Even if, unlike Ronny, he didn’t spin her wheels, as Maggie would say, Henry stirred her heart … Oh, to see him at the zoo in his preposterous vegetal hat, staring as intently as anyone could possibly stare at a sweet-faced, mild-eyed llama—this little tableau sang to her spirit. And when she saw him emerge from the men’s room with one arm folded behind him, propping up what must be an excruciating backache, she was flooded with a sentiment that, although you maybe wouldn’t call it longing, did encompass a yearning to see him physically comforted.