The Art Student's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

herself a glass of milk. Taped to the side of the refrigerator was a newspaper article entitled THE TEN FOOD COMMANDMENTS. It began, We shall not use condiments extravagantly . It ended, We shall save all food containers made of materials that can be used in war production . The posting of the article was Edith’s doing, who had scattered similar injunctions throughout the house. Zap the Jap with Scrap! and Hit Hitler on HIS Homefront from OUR Homefront! and Put War Bonds in your Wallet, not Axis Bonds on your Wrist! (Edith was fond of puns.) Papa approvingly referred to her as his Salvage Officer, and in fact everyone in the house was a little afraid of Edith’s reprimands. Exactitude was another of her passions. When she read in the newspaperthat newspapers shouldn’t be sent to salvage until reaching a stack five feet high, she went down to the basement with a tape measure and marked the desired height on the wall.
    The seventh of the Food Commandments was, We shall drink only one cup of coffee a day , but even Edith knew not to challenge her mother in this regard.
    Mamma rose from the table and the two of them worked side by side, not saying much. Experience had taught Bea that her mother truly didn’t wish to be coaxed out of her moods—she preferred silence. Mamma was prone to melancholy by nature, but what was currently looming was something else again. It happened maybe every three or four months: the arrival of one of “Mamma’s moods.” And this could well subside into a gloom deeper than gloom, infiltrating every corner of the house.
    Bea chopped the celery and peeled the potatoes for the potato salad. Mamma diced onions for the tuna salad. The onions’ biting smell and the redness of Mamma’s eyes might have served as symbols—symbols of life’s prevailing injustice. It was one of her great themes: the world’s injustice. She combed the News for poignant accounts of crashing unfairness—the young bride drowned on a Florida honeymoon, the boy crippled in an accident while driving to his high school graduation. As Bea worked beside her mother in the incandescent morning sunshine, she was enveloped by something fundamental to her existence and yet ineffable: whenever one of her mother’s dark moods impended, she had no suitable vocabulary for her own complicated mixture of feelings, a blending of hot pity and resentment and inseparable guilt, of impatience and weariness and fear. More than anything else, perhaps, fear. At such times, her mother drifted off, and all the calling in the world couldn’t fetch her home again.
    Stevie clattered downstairs and Mamma set before him a bowl of Cheerioats and an unopened bottle of milk. There was already an open bottle in the Frigidaire—from which Bea had poured her own glass—but Stevie loved the cream at the top, which Mamma saved for her “growing boy.” (Papa urged her to reserve the cream for her coffee—she was so bony and thin—but this was advice seldom followed.)
    When Bea had all the potatoes peeled and palely resting in a pan of water on the stove, she assembled six grape-jelly-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and sliced them diagonally. Unfortunately, her mother could not or would not break the habit of cutting sandwiches into rectanglesrather than triangles. Mamma grumbled sometimes that Aunt Grace’s picnic basket always looked more appetizing than her own, as if this were another injustice: Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace had money for luxuries. What Bea was tempted to point out—but did not point out—was that it cost nothing to cut a sandwich diagonally, to fold a napkin tastefully. Little things … So often, it was not a matter of expense but merely of caring how things looked, and Aunt Grace, Mamma’s beautiful younger sister, attended tirelessly to the look of things.
    When Uncle Dennis and Aunt Grace arrived, the Paradisos were ready to go. Aunt Grace was wearing a straw sun hat, with a lime-green ribbon wound around the crown. Grace, as