The Art Student's War

When the streetcar halts at Woodward and Mack, the young soldier who climbs aboard with some difficulty—he looks new to his crutches—is surpassingly handsome. Everybody notices him. His hair, long for a soldier's, is shiny black. His eyes are arrestingly blue. That gaze of his is a little unnerving and suggests a sizable temper, maybe. Or maybe not, for the crooked grin he releases at seeing himself securely aboard is boyish and winsome. Everybody in this dusty car feels heartened by him. A nation capable of producing soldiers as stirring as this young soldier—how could it possibly lose the War?

Although she doesn't allow herself to stare openly, nobody is more observant of the handsome wounded young soldier than someone called Bea, whose true name is Bianca: Bianca Paradiso. A tall girl wearing a red hat, she is standing in the middle of the car. The War has been going on for what feels like ages and those tranquil days before the soldiers overran the streets seem to belong to her childhood. The olive drab and navy blue of the boys' uniforms have reconstituted the palette of the city. Bea is an art student. She examines minutely the city's streets and streetcars, parks and store-window displays and billboards, and of course its automobiles. Her teacher last quarter, Professor Evanman, spoke of automobiles as the city's "blood vessels"—this is, after all, the Motor City—and he urged his students to view Detroit as a "living creature." It was advice that struck powerfully: the city as a living creature. Bea is eighteen.

She cultivates these days an enhanced receptivity to color, including the heavy black of this soldier's hair, and the hovering, weightless, gas-fire blue of his eyes, to say nothing of the emphatic fresh white of the plaster bandage encasing his left leg. Bea is heading home from a two-hour class in still-life painting. Her professor this quarter is Professor Manhardt, who would never counsel his students to contemplate anything automotive. Professor Manhardt is a purist. He, too, offers inspiring advice. An artist never stops mixing paint. . . . That's one of Professor Manhardt's maxims and while heading home from class Bea typically entertains a drifting armada of colors without objects—big floating swatches and swirls of pigment.

Yes, servicemen's uniforms have colored the city for a long time, but it's only recently, in this sodden late spring of 1943, that you've begun to see many of the wounded. There's a special light attends them, like El Greco's figures. Each glimpse of a wounded soldier forces you into a fearful medical appraisal. How bad is he hurt? That's always the first question in everybody's mind. And Please, God, not too badly. . . . That's the follow-up prayer. Please, God. Fortunately, nobody Bea personally knows has been wounded or killed, so far at least, although a high school classmate, Bradley Hake, has long been missing in action in the Philippines.

Well, this one, the very good-looking boy on the Woodward Avenue streetcar, isn't hurt too badly. Though his leg is bandaged all the way above his knee, and though he grimaced on the car step, he exudes a brimming youthful well-being once aboard. It's so good to be home, his grin declares. Good to be alive in a month in which, as the newspapers daily report, American boys by the hundreds are dying overseas. Yes, truly it is wonderful to be back in Detroit, on this last Friday in May, the twenty-eighth of May, after a record-breaking stretch of rainy days, riding a streetcar up Woodward Avenue, the city's central thoroughfare, with a mixed crowd of people who are—men and women, white and colored—heading home for supper.

It's approaching five o'clock and the streetcar is full, with recent arrivals like Bea left standing. Streetcars are always full, ever since the War started. Of course there's not a chance in the world the soldier will be left standing...