The Art Student's War (75 page)

“You know what’s odd?” she said. “I feel as though the light’s changing. Your mother was born in the nineteenth century. I remember seeing that date in the paper, 1899, and somehow being surprised by it, though I shouldn’t have been: I knew exactly how old she was. But I used to feel that that other world, a nineteenth-century world, was so close at hand. You’d see the old G.A.R. veterans parading, straggling along so proudly, and you could still smell the horses in garages that used to be stables. My nonno was born in 1877, and I remember all your wonderful excitement when I told you about his being born so premature and being kept alive in a woodstove. And none of those worlds seemed so far away, and I can’t help feeling they feel far away now
because the light’s changing. That’s the biggest historical change there is, and it’s the one that only painters know how to record. It changed sometime after the War. Am I making any sense?”

“You always make sense to me. You’re the only person I know who makes sense to me even when she isn’t making sense.”

“May I take that as a compliment?”

“A fond and fair compliment. A deft and memorable compliment.” Bianca laughed.

The sun through the skylight caught the silver at his temples. Good Lord, he was the most beautiful man she’d ever known. “You’re going gray.”

Because she said this so approvingly (surely his attractiveness was manifest in her every look and word and gesture, for she’d reached that bedazzled state wherein she could formulate no observation about him that wasn’t a compliment), she somehow expected Ronny to welcome her remark. But he looked pained. He said, “You haven’t had a single gray hair?”

“Not yet. My mother’s hair’s mostly dark, and she’s fifty. Grant and I have a little bet as to who’ll get the first one.”

“Who?”

“Grant? My husband, Grant?”

“Who?”

Ronny looked pleased with himself once more. He was going to keep this game going until the end, then.

“Let’s go look at more paintings,” she said.

“Let’s, my dear. Let’s.”

They were standing before Titian’s
Man Holding a Flute
when a male voice—an incredulous voice—inquired, “Bea Paradiso?” Somehow she knew who it was, even before turning around …

Years and years ago, she had placed a telephone call to that voice. She had walked over to the phone booth outside Olsson’s, deposited her nickel, and reached a voice likewise tinged with incredulity.
Is that you, Tatiana?
the voice had asked—yearningly, touchingly.

“Hello, Donald.”

Yes, it was Donald Doobly. The art student, the beautiful draftsman. The skinny Negro boy in the oversized clothes.

Only, he wasn’t skinny anymore. He had filled out; in fact, he had grown plump. But it was the same voice, and the same kindly and mindful eyes. She’d drawn his portrait once, or started to. She’d never finished it.

“It is! It’s Bea!” Donald announced, and laughed boisterously.

“Yes. So nice to see you, Donald.” She turned. “You remember Ronny—Ronny Olsson?”

Donald’s eyes seemed to double in size. His glance had already taken in her belly. “The two of you …?” he began, and his voice trailed away. His hands lifted and fell.

For the second time today, Ronny had been mistaken for the father of her child. “Just good friends,” Bianca said, and giggled. “I live with my husband out near Seven and Livernois. We already have twin boys.”

“Imagine that,” Donald said, and shook his head. “Imagine that.” Donald made it sound like an impossible feat, but it turned out that he, too, had two sons. They were standing bashfully over near the wall, beside a petite light-skinned Negro woman.

“Step forward,” Donald said, and the boys, with downcast eyes, obediently sidled forward.

“Shake hands,” Donald said, and both boys simultaneously extended their hands.

“I don’t know your last name,” Donald admitted.

“Ives.”

“This is Mrs. Ives. And this is Donald Junior. He’s six.” Bianca shook hands with Donald Junior. “And this is Albert. He’s five.” Bianca shook hands with Albert. “And this is my wife, Rosella. She’s a schoolteacher. Bea Ives, Rosella Doobly.”

Bianca shook hands with the woman. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Donald has told me about you,” Mrs. Doobly said. Had he? Bianca felt oddly guilty. Had she ever mentioned Donald to Grant?

“I go by Bianca now, actually,” she told Donald.

“Do you?” This, too, struck him as extraordinary. He was in such high spirits, most anything she might say was at once marvelous and humorous.

Ronny was introduced to Mrs. Doobly and the children. Having successfully negotiated another set of handshakes, the boys retreated to their wall.

“Are you enjoying the museum?” Bianca called over to them. “Yes, ma’am,” said the older boy, Donald Junior. “Yes, ma’am,” said Albert.

Donald was wearing a beautiful suit of a sober gray wool that held a gossamer shimmer of azure. Dressed like twins, both of his boys were wearing navy-blue suits and red ties. His wife was wearing a lovely black-and-white houndstooth dress. Donald had always been a careful dresser, though in the old days most everything he wore—impeccably
clean, scrupulously pressed—had been many sizes too large. He’d grown into his clothes at last.

“I brought the boys to look at the paintings. Never too young to learn about art.”

“I’m amazed at how well-behaved they are,” Bianca said. “Once when I brought my twins here, they started wrestling in front of that big Delacroix. The battle scene. I guess it inspired them.”

“Oh my boys are regular rapscallions,” Donald said.

They didn’t look it. They looked timid and precise and alert, much the way Donald had always looked, whose voice had deepened and broadened, who had a rowdy new laugh.

“And what about you, Donald? What are you doing?

“I’m with Ford’s. In the design department.”

This
with
of Donald’s—so blithe, so collegial—was deeply heartening. “Why, that’s wonderful!” Bianca cried.

“You remember, at the Institute, I studied both Fine Arts and Industrial Arts.”

“That’s right, you did!” Bianca marveled. “So, one of us who enrolled at the old Institute Midwest is actually putting something he learned into daily practice? My hat’s off to you. Do you really think it helped you—the Institute?”

Donald didn’t know how to answer. He regarded her with open amazement and Bianca was able to see, as she hadn’t before, the skinny little colored boy within him.

Donald formulated a declaration: “Why, it changed my whole life. It made me what I am today. I knew next to nothing when I arrived there. I was just a little kid with a gift for drawing. You remember Professor Manhardt?”

“Of course.” The funny little German man who said things like “sticky wicket.”

“You know what he did?” Donald went on. “Do you know what that man did? He gave me my first set of oil paints.
Gave
them to me.”

“Now isn’t that wonderful.”

“I named Albert after him. Albert was Professor Manhardt’s name.”

“Now isn’t that wonderful …” The words swelled in her throat—they were almost too big for utterance. Had she not met Donald today, Bianca would never have appreciated how profoundly she still longed to believe in the authenticity and the discernment of the now-defunct Institute Midwest. She would have told anyone who would listen that it
was at bottom a silly little school, doomed not to last, with eccentric and mostly laughable instructors and mostly silly students, including an eighteen-year-old girl in a preposterous red Hungarian beret who went around chanting to herself,
An artist never stops mixing paint
. But Bianca still believed in that girl, Bea Paradiso, and it elated her to come upon Donald Doobly, in a gorgeous suit, who had materialized as a reminder that she’d been right all along. She and her classmates hadn’t been silly. They had been engaged in the noblest of all undertakings: they were art students.

“And
you
could draw,” Donald said, turning to Ronny. “You were the best of us all.”

And Ronny, always so gracious, offered a tactless reply: “Maybe that’s not saying so much? Given the level of the group?” But he recovered quickly: “Though it’s true
you
could draw, too—and you stayed with it. That’s the important thing.”

“It’s how I make my living.” Donald paused. “And how about you, Ronny?” It was startling just how much more direct and self-possessed Donald had become.

“I’m an art professor. At U. of M.”

“I tell my boys that’s where they can go to college. But they gotta work hard.”

The boys’ mother nodded. The boys, first the elder and then the younger, nodded.

“They can study with Professor Olsson,” Ronny said.

“That’s an incentive. A genuine incentive.” Again, Donald confronted Ronny head to head: “What is your specialty?”

“The medieval period.”

“Nothing more beautiful,” Donald said. “Nothing more beautiful. The Saint Jerome in here? By Rogier van der Weyden? Nothing more beautiful in this whole place.”

Ronny looked sharply at Donald and Ronny’s unpaintable eyes were glittering with extravagant intensity. Ronny seemed to be seeing Donald more fully than ever before. “Do you know what?” Ronny marveled. “Why, that may be my very favorite painting in the whole museum.”

“Nothing more beautiful,” Donald repeated, and he met Ronny’s gaze.

Then Donald turned. “You once telephoned me,” he said to Bianca. “You remember?”

“I did. I do. You’d lost your notebook and I found it.”

“I don’t know if I ever thanked you properly.”

“You did. You always had impeccable manners …”

But the confident look had bled from Donald’s gaze. Yes, he was recollecting what she was recollecting:
Is that you, Tatiana?
Donald had been hopelessly infatuated with the yellow-haired Russian doll. But all that was so long ago. Donald had been a boy then, and now he was a man, and he was happy with his wife, and his life, wasn’t he? He seemed so happy …

“You had impeccable manners,” Bianca repeated. “Like your children.” Again, she called out to them. “Which do you like better? The paintings? Or the sculptures?”

Another timorous pause. “The armor,” Donald Junior said. “The armor,” Albert echoed.

“My boys too!” Bianca said. “My boys too!”

“You see what I mean?” Donald said, and laughed conclusively. “You see what I mean? Regular
rapscallions.”

After farewell handshakes, after cries of well-wishing on all sides, she and Ronny parted ways with the Doobly family. The encounter left a lingering burnish, and Bianca took Ronny’s arm and exclaimed, “Isn’t it wonderful to see Donald doing so well? Isn’t it
wonderful?”
The paintings on the walls in this, her favorite building in the world, shone all the more resplendently for having looked out at Donald Doobly, Rosella Doobly, Donald Doobly, Jr., and Albert Doobly.

“You telephoned him,” Ronny said.

“I did. From a phone booth in front of an Olsson’s Drugs, actually—I didn’t dare call from home, isn’t that ridiculous? He’d lost his notebook and I found it.”

“It was good of you to call.”

“I don’t think I would have dared, I rarely called
you
, Papa was very fixed on the notion that girls didn’t call boys, but I felt so sorry for Donald, and for Negroes generally. You remember—that was the summer of the race riot.”

“You’re right. It was. I’d forgotten. I guess it got overshadowed.”

“Well there was something called the War going on. And isn’t it
wonderful
to see Donald doing so well?”

“I didn’t know that Ford’s hired people like him. In jobs like that.”

“Times are changing.”

“He’s got to be one of the first …”

It was all so hopeful and inspiring. Someone like Donald really could
work hard and get a good job at Ford’s—and why couldn’t he and his wife eventually send their two boys to U. of M.? And why couldn’t those boys study medieval art with Professor Olsson? One of those boys was named after a pompous German would-be Brit who, nonetheless, had given the gift of art itself, and with it a solid livelihood, to a skinny boy who had grown up in Black Bottom. Bianca didn’t quite have the words to crystallize this feeling of having glimpsed, here in Detroit’s true palace of marvels, something more wondrous yet: the brilliant blueprint of a just commonwealth, a better city. “Isn’t it
wonderful?”
she said, but it was clear that Ronny—always so moody, so prone to a sudden plummeting melancholy—wasn’t sharing her elation.

Well, she knew how to handle this. Over the years, she’d had a great deal of experience hauling Ronny out of his moods. You didn’t ask him about them, or acknowledge them. You simply kept on—you wore down his despondency.

She thought about telling Ronny the true story behind her phone call.
Is that you, Tatiana?
But she found she couldn’t do that. She could have done it to the Donald she’d seen today—so substantial, so prosperous-looking—but not to the resolute colored boy whose legs were thin as broomsticks.

Instead, she said, “We have a new friend in the family.” She told him about Ira Styne. About the strange way he’d materialized, after ten years—this soldier who once memorably sent Edith a five-dollar bill for her birthday. About how Mamma liked cooking for him, and Papa was overseeing his checking account. About how this man who originally came for a few minutes had stayed in town a couple of months already.

But the story did nothing to lift Ronny’s mood—as she should have realized it wouldn’t. She was plunged back into those heady days when she was the girl-artist at Ferry Hospital, talking so excitedly about the poor Irish kid with the patch on his eye and the amputated foot, Private Donnelly, and finding Ronny chilly to her talk. Jealousy. He could never brook her speaking warmly about any other man.

“Did you see the way Donald’s eyes bugged when he saw us? That was the second time today somebody mistook you for the baby’s father.”

This did cheer Ronny. Always so attentive to visual impressions, he was keenly aware that the two of them were catching glances and drawing surmises: the tall fine-looking man in the tan linen suit, a distinguished flicker of gray at his temples, and the tall, pretty young woman who was so exorbitantly pregnant.