The Art Student's War (30 page)

The menu requested customers to limit themselves to one cup of coffee, but Uncle Dennis got around this by ordering a cup for Bea, which he then appropriated. Coffee seemed to be the one phase of wartime rationing no one in Bea’s family paid much attention to. When it came to coffee, they hoarded, they wheedled, they bartered with the neighbors.

Uncle Dennis asked about the family and Bea sketched as cheerful a group portrait as she could. Much of what she recounted was familiar information, but because he looked so encouraging, puffing his pipe, she rattled on. O’Reilly and Fein were absolutely flourishing, given the streams of new defense workers, and Papa had more business than he could handle. He’d recently bought Mamma a prewar vacuum cleaner, brand-new and still in its box; Papa had a way of finding such things when new vacuum cleaners were scarce. Stevie was still shooting Japs and Germans in the alley. Edith the Mad Knitter had been asking Mamma to cook the breakfast bacon nearly black, so there would be more fat to salvage. And Mamma—well, she seemed maybe a little calmer. She liked her vacuum cleaner.

“I do worry Papa’s working too hard.”

“Well you can see why,” Uncle Dennis said. “O’Reilly and Fein know what they’ve got: the man’s a genius in his work.”

“A genius?”

It was lovely to hear
genius
applied to somebody who struggled while reading the funny pages. Night after night, it pained Bea to see her father make his dutiful way through even the wordiest strips—”Gasoline Alley” or “Vignettes of Life”—until he’d grasped everything but their humor …

“I don’t use the word lightly,” Uncle Dennis said. “Especially now with the War on. There’s a lumber shortage? A shortage of nails? Of wire? The man has a genius for making do—for cutting corners without cutting quality. Yes, it’s a kind of genius, Bea.”

The word heartened Bea so much, she longed to hear Uncle Dennis expand upon it. She prompted him: “Remember the time Mr. O’Reilly showed up with presents for each of us kids?” Of course Uncle Dennis had heard the story a million times …

“Your father’d quit the firm because O’Reilly wanted to install defective plumbing.”

“Mr. O’Reilly brought me a bracelet, and Edith a doll, and Stevie a huge baseball mitt that wouldn’t fit his hand for years.”

“He realized he’d lost the best builder in the city,” Uncle Dennis said, and sipped contentedly from Bea’s cup of coffee.

“Mamma had been crying for three days,” Bea went on. “She said we were going to lose the house. It was a notion I’d never contemplated before, it didn’t seem possible: we would lose our house. How could a house get
lost?
I was so young, and so confused.”

“And scared, I bet.”

“You bet I was scared. Our
house
was going to get lost.”

“And yet you’re still in it.”

“We’re still in it,” Bea said happily.

“Actually,” Uncle Dennis said, “speaking of moving, and things like that, I have a new job offer. In Cleveland.”

“Cleveland,” Bea marveled.

This sort of thing had happened in the past. Uncle Dennis had once been offered a job in Lansing. Another time, it was Grand Rapids. He’d even had an offer in Chicago. Of course he’d stayed put … He, too, was still here.

A colleague from medical school days had recently lost his partner to Hodgkin’s lymphoma, whatever that was. (Uncle Dennis often seemed to assume everyone had attended medical school.) Cleveland was a lot like Detroit, only smaller.

“You’re the very first one I’ve told,” Uncle Dennis said. “In your family, that is. Obviously, I must come over soon and tell the others.”

Only now did Bea ascertain that something was radically awry—something was terribly, terribly wrong. She stared sharply at her uncle. “But you don’t mean you’re taking the job.”

Niece and uncle peered searchingly at each other. Then the man’s glance wobbled and dropped away. “Actually, yes, I think so,” Uncle Dennis mumbled. “Actually, I’ve already accepted.”

“But you’re not moving to
Cleveland?”
Bea pointed out.

When her uncle’s eyes lifted once more, they wore an importunate look—as if he were begging her permission. “Well that’s correct, actually,” he said. “We are.”

“But you don’t
know
anyone in Cleveland.”

“Well that’s not exactly true. There’s Whit Callahan. He’s the one who extended the offer.”

“But no
family
. You won’t have family.”

“I’ll always have family. Your family.”

Uncle Dennis said this so sweetly, Bea knew she ought to return his smile. But she was beginning to feel quite indignant and upset …

“But for how long?” she said.

“It’s open-ended.”

“Well—but what about your house?” Bea asked, almost triumphantly, as though Uncle Dennis had altogether forgotten his lovely home on Outer Drive.

“We’re planning to sell it.”

“Selling
it? Your
house?
So you’re not planning to come back?”

“We may. Someday. We very well may.”

“Someday?
You know what you sound like? You know what you sound like? You sound like everyone else talking about the War. That’s what you sound like! Oh, this will all be over
someday
—or so they keep telling us, but maybe it won’t! I’m so sick of it! I’m so sick of it! Maybe it will all go on forever!” And she had begun to cry a little. “You’re going to leave us? Oh how
could
you, Uncle Dennis? What about us? How
could
you go and leave us, the way things are now?”

And with this last barrage of questions Bea saw, more piercingly than ever before, just how hopelessly dejected and ragged everything was at home. What a pack of lies she’d been selling just minutes ago! There was something dispirited and finally desperate to the way Papa nightly came home so stooped with fatigue, smelling of beer and retreating as soon as possible behind his
News
, just as there was something weird and desperate in Stevie’s raging battles, or in Edith’s asking for burned bacon. And there was something far, far worse than merely desperate in Mamma’s squirreling away candy … What hope was there of repairing things if Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace were no longer on the scene? Their departure would be an admission of how irretrievably broken everything was.

A giddy possibility struck her: “I could go with you! I’m sure there are good art schools in Cleveland. Well, why not? I’ve never gone anywhere. I could go with you to Cleveland.”

Behind his glasses, Uncle Dennis’s magnified eyes pondered her closely. “Of course you could, honey.”

And now Bea began crying in earnest, for what did his words mean but
Of course you can’t, honey
…? How could she leave home, the way things were? The family needed her. She might be a crybaby, and a chatterbox, she might be impetuous and moody and demanding, but they needed her. Who else would initiate conversations? Who else was
going to make anyone—maybe—laugh out loud? To picture the remaining four of them, night after night, alone at the dining-room table—it was just heartbreaking …

Uncle Dennis said, “Oh look what’s happened. I’ve done what I least wanted to do: I’ve made my little one cry.”

Bea retreated to the ladies’, where she rinsed her face with cold water and patted it dry. She reapplied her lipstick and threw a few practice smiles into the mirror.

When she returned to the table, she floated in on a tide of words. “But I haven’t even congratulated you, you must think I have
no
manners, really this is so thrilling. You’ll see new sights! And you’ll be so much closer to all sorts of things!”

“Yes,” Uncle Dennis agreed, and then, looking frankly puzzled, he added,
“What
sorts of things?”

“Well.” Bea came to a wordless halt.” Pittsburgh—won’t you be closer to Pittsburgh? And Dayton. Surely you’ll be closer to Dayton?”

“I suppose we will.” Uncle Dennis went on, “I think we all need a new start …”

“Of course we do,” Bea said. “I couldn’t agree more.”

“I don’t think you understand just how hard it’s been on Grace. It’s been a tremendous strain.”

“A terrible strain …”

“And on you too, I think.” Uncle Dennis eyed her professionally. “You look as if you’ve lost weight.”

“Maybe. Just a little.”

“Cleveland’s less distant than you might suppose. We’re talking under six hours in my good old Packard. Even with wartime speed limits.”

“That’s not bad at all.”

“And there’s the overnight ferry. Guess what the ferry costs.”

“I don’t know.”

“Only six dollars. Round-trip.”

“Imagine that.”

“And these days people fly. It’s less than an hour by airplane.”

“Isn’t that something.”

“I know you’ve never flown, Bea, and I want to make you an offer. Within a year, Grace and I promise to buy you a ticket to fly down and visit. Everyone ought to fly in an airplane once in their life. You see the world differently, afterward. It’s an education.”

“Why, that’s extremely generous.”

“Stevie and Edith, too, once they get a little older.”

“Stevie would die of excitement.”

“I’m afraid I have to run …”

Uncle Dennis rose from the booth and Bea rose with him. But when she got to her feet, an unshakable weight dropped squarely across her slender shoulders. She could hardly make her way unassisted out of the restaurant.

The weighted sensation only intensified in the parking lot. As traffic crept by on Gratiot, Bea stooped under the crushing burden of the Poppletons’ impending move—the worst of all imaginable abandonments—even while Uncle Dennis, who with all his buoyant, boyish heart adored the very essence of aviation, was chanting, “Yes, you’re going to fly, Bea darling. Darling Bea, you are, you are,
you’re
going to fly.”

On the night when her relationship with Ronny was to change subtly but permanently, he wasn’t even there. He was away on another road trip with Mr. Olsson. Father and son were checking up on stores in Ohio and Indiana.

Predictably, Ronny’s mood had plummeted as the trip approached. Those last few days, he hadn’t been much fun to be with …

In truth, he’d been something of a pain in the neck for quite a while. Was he becoming more difficult, or was it simply Bea’s having too many other problems? She no longer felt able to give Ronny all the attention he sought. He accused her, a little petulantly, of being “distracted.” Well, there were so many problems at home, and Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace were moving to Cleveland, and there was Henry to consider …

Ronny was obsessed with Henry. He wanted to be informed whenever Bea saw him, or whenever he telephoned. Honestly, if she hadn’t limited his interrogations, Ronny would have had her confessing each time Henry took her hand.

Things would have been easier if she and Ronny were in a class together. Bea had enrolled in Professor Ravenscroft’s Principles of Landscape. But Ronny had refused to sign on. “Manhardt may be a pompous fool, but he can actually draw. Ravenscroft can’t.”

“But how can you continue without—”

“Without the Institute? Boy, you must not think me much of an artist if I need the Institute Midwest.”

Yet it turned out Ronny
did
need Professor Ravenscroft’s class—or something like it. His previous role had been a little unusual maybe, but not so unusual that Ronny, in his impeccably stylish way, couldn’t pull it off with aplomb: being a twenty-one-year-old male art student of stilllife painting in a city engulfed by war. But to be a twenty-one-year-old young man without a job or a schedule, pursuing art on his own—this was an all-but-indefensible role. It certainly left Ronny with no grounds for demurral when a proposal arose of a road trip to Ohio and Indiana with his father.

Ronny was not even in Michigan, but Bea received a phone call anyway from Arden Park. It was Mrs. Olsson, feeling under the weather. She’d begged off an engagement, and now, with nobody to dine with, she was feeling “orphaned.” Would Bea come over?

On arrival at the Olssons’, Bea was shown upstairs for the first time. Here was the parents’ bedroom. Mrs. Olsson was lying on a gigantic four-poster canopy bed, propped upon a mountain of pillows.

It soon grew apparent that this was no terribly sick woman, though her voice bore a faint rasp. Of course it was typical of Mrs. Olsson, in her splendid theatrical way, to exhibit her illness in this fashion. She was apparently wearing no makeup and her hair was piled any which way on her head. She was no longer larger than life, and when she rose from bed, after a few minutes’ conversation, Bea glimpsed a Mrs. Olsson never seen before: simply another woman in a robe (even if the robe was an exquisite jade-green silk). Though remarkably beautiful, Mrs. Olsson looked a little puffy-faced, and it seemed her body was beginning to show a small potbelly.

“Where shall we sit? Where shall we sit?” Mrs. Olsson chanted, as Bea followed her down the central staircase. “Don’t you think it’s a remarkably uncomfortable house?”

Uncomfortable? It wasn’t a criterion Bea would have thought to apply to any house that boasted a carriage house in back, where Scottish husband and Irish wife, the driver and the cook, resided. In truth, however, Bea had never felt at ease here, though her discomfort probably wasn’t with the house so much as its occupants. Who could feel wholly relaxed in a home where lynx-faced Mr. Olsson padded the dark hallways and Mrs. Olsson was forever issuing explosive declarations?

“Let’s try the kitchen. I swear it’s the only livable room in this whole monstrosity.”

So Bea was guided into another largely unfamiliar portion of the
house. The cook, whom Bea could not make herself call Agnes, though everybody else did, was sitting at the table reading a copy of
Look
.

“You can call it a day, Agnes,” Mrs. Olsson said.

“You haven’t had any dinner, ma’am.”

“You know I’m not feeling well.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

And so it was that Bea wound up sitting companionably at the little kitchen table with a Mrs. Olsson whose hair was still haphazardly piled. “I want to hear more about your family,” Mrs. Olsson said. “Italy was once the center of the world, wasn’t it. The origin of all culture? You talk and I’ll make tea.”