The Art Student's War Read Online Free PDF

always, looked wonderful.
    “You have a new hat,” Mamma said.
    Aunt Grace naturally awaited some further observation or appraisal. When nothing followed, she said, “Thank you,” and smiled, and called to Edith, standing by the fireplace, “And you have a new dress, darling. How lovely you are!”
    Lovely had never been the word for Edith, not even as a newborn who arrived on Inquiry Street looking furrowed and highly discriminating. Still, the compliment found its blushing mark: for the first time this morning, Edith glowed.
    Edith’s yellow jumper, trimmed in forest green, was indeed new. This was another of the girl’s singularities: her pudginess. She had needed the new dress, having outgrown so much of her wardrobe.
    Saturday expeditions followed their own protocol. On the way out, wherever their destination, Bea rode in Uncle Dennis’s car—a 1942 royal-blue Packard. On the way home, Stevie and Edith had the privilege. Uncle Dennis had a passion for riddles, and he enjoyed pointing out that his car was perpetually new, always the latest model—one of the few ’42s assembled before the automobile companies had briefly closed down to reemerge as airplane and tank and munitions factories. Cartown no longer made cars. There were no 1943 Packards. There would be no ’44 Packards either.
    Predictably, the children’s eagerness to ride with their uncle and aunt irked Mamma. In the old days, there used to be arguments, and lingering bitterness, until Uncle Dennis hit on the system: Bea would ride with the Poppletons going out, Stevie and Edith would ride with them coming back. Over the years, Mamma had indirectly inspired a number of such little systems.
    When Bea rode anywhere with her uncle and aunt, Grace usually satin back. “You with those long legs, you need the room,” she would sometimes say. Other times she might say, “The two of you so rarely get a chance to talk.”
    As a little girl, Bea sometimes had fantasized that her uncle and aunt would adopt her. Perhaps she might be tragically orphaned, forcing the Poppletons to take her in. (Stevie and Edith would be settled elsewhere.) Bea had always felt more comfortable with the Poppletons than with any other couple. For years now, long before she possessed the words to form the thought, Bea had intuited that Mamma was jealous of gorgeous Grace, but only in the last year—after graduating from high school and enrolling in art school and mostly becoming an adult—had Bea come to see just how deep this jealousy ran.
    It was a realization that inevitably raised a larger issue: did Grace herself see it? There were moments when Bea felt quite certain that Aunt Grace understood everything and made it her policy to answer her elder sister’s coolness with warmth, her suspicion with trust. But there were other occasions when Bea felt certain nothing calculated informed Grace’s high-mindedness. It was just her particular nature—the nature of the kindest woman Bea had ever known—to view her surroundings trustingly.
    That business with the hat just now—it was typical. “You have a new hat,” Mamma had noted—unmistakably an accusation and a lament, one sister saying to another You get more than I do . And how had Aunt Grace replied? With a “Thank you.” And it may well be that Grace, contentedly settled in the backseat as they drove up Woodward Avenue, now sincerely believed that her sister had praised her hat.
    Uncle Dennis lit his pipe. Even when he wasn’t smoking, his car smelled of tobacco—a lovely, primordial aroma that tendriled around, as pipe smoke will, so many of Bea’s childhood memories.
    It was one of the rituals of their drives that Bea ask her uncle about his reading. Uncle Dennis loved science fiction. He subscribed to magazines with names like Amazing Stories and Astounding Science-Fiction . He was always reading about spaceships and distant planets, about scary trips into the future and futile trips to rewrite the past. They