The Art Student's War (57 page)

It was amazing how quickly the news had smoothed everything. Less than two weeks ago—it seemed lifetimes ago—she’d met Ronny at the DIA, shared a bottle of wine with him at Jason’s, kissed him repeatedly under the Ambassador Bridge, and rushed off the next day, Sunday, to Priscilla the mind doctor’s. Sunday had been crazier in its way than the day before, and Monday had been worse still. She’d been nearly mad with frustration, waiting and waiting for Ronny to call … Now, just two weeks later, she had to ask herself: what exactly had she wanted him to say? What sort of insane avowal had she craved? Something like “Maybe you’re pregnant with your husband’s child, but I’ve just discovered I’m in love with you”? Or: “I want you to abandon your husband and your six-year-old twins and run off with me to Gauguin’s Pacific”?

Leaving Dr. Stimpson’s office on the following day, Tuesday, she’d thrown into a waste bin her half-full pack of cigarettes. And when she’d telephoned Ronny on Wednesday, in order to confirm his amazing intuition of her pregnancy, she breezed right past his stumbling mixture of apologies and attestations. Ronny wanted to tell her he was sorry about his behavior on Saturday, and also that he wasn’t sorry. He wanted to say—She interrupted: “But you mustn’t apologize for a
thing
, Ronny.” To which she added a sentiment expressible only because, though nakedly revealing, it had become peculiarly irrelevant: “Saturday was the most thrilling day I’ve had in ever so long …”

With regard to the others, she’d considered delaying her announcement until the family celebration. But this had seemed risky, given the tempestuous history of family celebrations. So after calling Ronny, she broke the news wide open: she telephoned Mamma and Papa and Edith, Stevie and Rita, Priscilla, Maggie … What lay before her now was the altogether pleasant task of informing Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace.

It was a gorgeous summer evening, very late summer, for they were into early September now. The four of them were lounging in the screened porch, ice cubes clinking, while the twins played catch in the fading light. To Bianca, the evening felt like early June—as if a capacious
summer stretched before her. The world itself stretched before her, and although a number of conversational junctures invited her to break her news, she held off. Everything was in abeyance.

Only after the four of them moved to the dining room—the boys had already been fed—did the impulse strike home. Uncle Dennis, that great toast-maker, hoisted a glass and pointed out how much they had to be thankful for. And Bianca said: “More even than you may know.”

A pause opened, with a give-and-take of puzzled looks, and Bianca felt herself blush all over. “It seems I’m going to have a baby.”

“Isn’t that wonderful!” Grace cried, and Uncle Dennis released a funny, happy, harrumphing sound. He stood up and came over and kissed her on the top of the head, just the way you’d kiss a child, and said, “Now isn’t that fine, isn’t that something, isn’t that
fine?”

There were many questions, of course: what was the due date? And had she thought about a hospital? And did she think it was a boy, or a girl?

“And if it
is
a girl,” Aunt Grace said, “what might you name her?”

“I was thinking Maria. Grant seems to like it.”

“Maria Ives,” Grant said. “Can’t you picture her? We’re talking a beauty. A real heartbreaker. Almost pretty as her mother.”

Bianca explained that she didn’t plan on telling the boys for quite some time. She didn’t want to be driven crazy with questions.

That sounded very wise, Aunt Grace said.

Bianca asked everybody to remain seated and went out into the kitchen. She returned with the eggplant casserole and the spinach and blue cheese salad. She had become known, partly through emulation of her aunt, as a versatile cook. “Later, we’ll call in the boys for dessert,” she told them.

Aunt Grace ate sparingly but Grant and Uncle Dennis tucked in heartily. Everyone complimented Bianca on the food, and talk flowed. Grant, who always had a sound feeling for such matters, told a couple of jokes that were a little racy but hardly inappropriate. (Had they heard that Hollywood was the place where you lie on the sand and look at the stars—or vice versa?) Minute by succeeding minute, Bianca savored a rarefied sense of things being properly in place: her handsome husband across the table, her aunt and uncle on each side, the boys playing catch in the yard, the gentle, conversational slap-slap-slap of the ball against the leather gloves, and the steady blood-whisper of a child inside her … After so many turbulent days, she’d come to a graced clemency.

The night, as it turned out, held only a single disappointment.
Bianca had been awaiting a brief opportunity to speak alone with each of her guests, but this wasn’t to be. She wanted to ask Grace about her health, but she longed even more for a renewal of that vital connectedness Grace inspired—the woman in whose convalescing hands, back in that cataclysmic winter of ’43 to ’44, Bianca had placed herself after nearly dying. (Months after she’d fully recovered, Uncle Dennis once began a sentence, “When your temperature hit a hundred and seven, darling, I must admit—” but he hadn’t been able to finish.)

She did have a few minutes with Grace in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, but this was no occasion for a heart-to-heart. Grace breezed into an anecdote about a man, a patient of Uncle Dennis’s, whose daughter, playing in the attic, had been stung by a wasp. Going up to clean out the nest, the man happened upon an old chest in the crawl space, presumably left by one of the house’s previous owners. It contained ten antique silver dollars. Grace always had on hand a story of this sort: goodness meeting up with unexpected bounty …

“But how are you feeling?” Bianca said. “You look tired.”

“Oh. My.” Aunt Grace made a face. “Some ups and downs.”

In response to Bianca’s look of concern, she added, “Oh, I’m
well
. And I’m delighted with your news, darling.”

As soon as the kitchen was tidied, Aunt Grace retreated to bed. A few minutes later, Uncle Dennis, yawning cavernously, announced, “I think I’ll follow the wife.”

Bianca caught him alone at the bottom of the stairs. He stood above her, one step up. On level ground, Bianca was maybe a half inch taller.

“Aunt Grace. Is she feeling all right?”

“Oh I think so. Just tired,” Uncle Dennis said. “Now don’t you go fretting yourself about anyone but that baby of yours.” And once more he kissed her on top of the head.

In the morning, Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace seemed revitalized. They were looking at a full day—old friends and old patients, and Uncle Dennis wanted to drop in on his old hospital. Having breakfasted heartily—scrambled eggs, pork sausage, toast with marmalade, orange juice, coffee—the two of them were out the door by nine. They promised to return well before the party started, at five.

Bianca asked Grant simply to “get the boys out from underfoot”—a task he embraced. He would take them golfing. They liked to do the caddying, for which they received a quarter apiece, and he sometimes let them get a whack at the ball. Rita arrived at noon to help with the cooking. “What is it we’re making?” she asked a number of times.

“Beef bourguignon.”

“French, is it?”

“That’s right.”

“They say
beef?”

“Actually,
boeuf.”

“Well at least they
almost
got it right.”

Rita offered this deadpan, but when Bianca glanced over, the girl was grinning slyly. Rita actually could be quite funny, in a self-mocking way. She understood the situation’s humor: the little hillbilly girl receiving an education from her big-city sister-in-law.

And to her credit, Rita left no question unasked.

“How come this fork’s like this?” she’d say.

“It’s a salad fork.”

Or: “What is this fabric called?”

“It’s called chamois.”

Or: “What do you mean this doesn’t go with that?”

“Sweetie, the colors clash.”

In many ways, Rita had become Bianca’s little sister, more so than Edith, who rarely asked Bianca’s advice—or anyone’s advice.

Back when she was still fitting herself into the Paradiso family, Rita had regularly criticized Edith in her absence. Even when Rita’s complaints were inarguable (Edith did nothing for her appearance, Edith was impatient, Edith didn’t understand small talk), Bianca had bristled. It wasn’t Rita’s place to criticize Edith. But as Rita came around to seeing Edith as everyone else saw Edith, disparagement yielded to a pure marveling. For that’s what they all did—they marveled at Edith, who was a breed apart. Count on Edith to enter a family celebration talking about an uprising in some English colony you’d never heard of, or to point out, on leaving a luncheonette, that three days in a row she’d received a bill that was a prime number, and three itself was a prime number—wasn’t that funny? Yes, Edith:
funny
.

It was one of life’s happy surprises that Bianca would have grown so fond of that sullen little Tennessee girl with the terrible teeth—who had become this sweet young woman hovering so attentively in Bianca’s kitchen, intoning,
beef bourguignon, beef bourguignon, beef bourguignon …
The girl was steadily remaking herself, and Bianca had a midwife’s role in the rebirth.

Though Bianca felt reluctant to turn to the subject, since she already was handling too many worries, eventually she asked after Stevie. It was one of those concerns that wouldn’t go away.

Rita’s tone shifted. “When’d you ever see him look relaxed? You know what he’s like? He’s like a clench fist.” She clenched her fists in illustration. “I tell you, he’s like a clench fist. You know?”

Bianca did. It was one of the great differences between Stevie and his dad. In those times when Papa bore the weight of the world on his shoulders (as when, so long ago, he’d been jobless for three days, until a red-faced O’Reilly marched up the walk bearing children’s gifts), he never sped up, he never jerked or scurried, he maintained
la bella figura
. With Stevie, on the other hand, life’s tensions wound him agonizingly tight, turning his powerful body twitchy and ungainly.

“He’s working too many hours.”

“Don’t I know it!” Rita cried, almost triumphantly.

“You’ve got to tell him when to stop.”

Rita looked bewildered and repeated something she’d said recently: “Bay, I don’t
dare.”

Yes, the prospect frightened Rita. Did Stevie have Rita under his thumb? For all the physical power he exuded, it was difficult to view Stevie in such terms, given how thoroughly he seemed under the thumb of an unnamed Something Else.
Something
was constantly squelching him. Family expectations? The Ford Motor Company? A society intent on punishing him for impregnating a seventeen-year-old girl who had miscarried long before her shame became apparent to society?

Rita repeated many details from their last conversation. Stevie was so pale. He never smiled. He had nightmares, night sweats. The conversation felt so ominous to Bianca, it was a great relief when Stevie actually materialized. Here he was, simply Stevie, her younger brother. “Hey, Bea,” he said. He was the party’s first guest.

“H’lo, Stevie. Come on in, can I get you a drink?”

“Jagotta beer?”

This was how he often talked. It was a deliberate choice, and an ironic one, given that Papa, with his unshakable Italian accent, perpetually suffered the fear of being taken for low-class. Papa yearned to speak refinedly, but couldn’t; Stevie aspired to sound like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
, and did a pretty good job of it. The funny thing was, he didn’t even like beer.

“Yes, Stevie, I have a beer.”

“She been any help? Or she just been getting in the way?”

This, too, was typical of his speech: not
Rita
, but
she
.

“Rita’s been loads of help.”

“I’m learning how to make beef bourguignon,” Rita said.

“French?”

“Right.”

“My Italian grampa always said it: French is twice the price at half the quality.”

Bianca nodded approvingly. In his taciturn way, that odd ailing little man, once a celebrated artist but dead now for seven years, had left behind a meager supply of quotable remarks. But this was one, which Nonno had always delivered with that sage, slanted shaking of the head, that was his alone—a unique gesture, lost to the grave.

Still, Stevie looked pleased to be married to somebody learning to cook a dish as extravagant as beef bourguignon. Though he made a point of grumbling about the costs, Rita’s constant efforts at self-improvement—the braces, the better makeup and clothes—obviously heartened him. If Stevie had no use for Bianca’s art museums and concert halls, any more than for Grant’s law offices and golf courses, still it was to the house on Middleway he instinctively sent his wife for schooling.

Grant arrived next with the twins, both muddy as hunting dogs; it seemed they’d found their way into a swamp. Grant mentioned in passing that his Studebaker wasn’t firing properly, despite recent repairs, and that was enough for Stevie: poor Grant was hauled back outside even before having a chance to greet Rita.

Meanwhile, Bianca ordered Matt and Chip up to the shower and told them their party clothes were laid out on the lower bunk. The twins went upstairs quite docilely. Unlike most boys their age, they were actually good about cleaning up. Grant had somehow instilled the notion that that’s what an athlete did at day’s end: soaped up from head to foot. Grant called it “building a snowman.” Though recently the boys had turned shy about being glimpsed naked by their mother, withdrawing from sight those private parts once her exclusive business to clean and powder, it remained perhaps the most endearing memory she knew: Matt or Chip industriously working himself into an all-encompassing lather. They had such skinny, beautiful bodies, her boys. (It almost embarrassed her—how beautiful she found their bodies.)

Papa and Mamma and Edith arrived next. There was always something a little poignant in Papa’s visits. The head of the family became a different sort of man here, oddly diffident when requesting something he would naturally have expected at home. Might he ask for a glass of
water? Would it be possible to have a napkin? He had of course brought a jug of Paradiso wine. No family celebration would be complete without it.