The Art Student's War by Brad Leithauser

the unease—how could he not? The air was so dense with it.
    Mamma cast a look of fury and revulsion at the lake, at the sun-bathers, at the gathering clouds to the south, where the embattled city lay …
    Aunt Grace’s aplomb really was admirable. Pie—would anyone care for more pie? Or cookies? She was particularly solicitous toward Stevie, who no doubt sensed (something purblind Stevie seemed destined to sense throughout his life) that he’d inexplicably misstepped. Hey, Ste-vie, how’s about an oatmeal cookie? Or what about coffee anyone? “Vico, I have a whole nother thermos. I bet it’s still hot …”
    But nobody wanted anything. Clearly the day at the beach was over.
    According to protocol, Stevie and Edith ought to ride home withUncle Dennis and Aunt Grace, and Bea accompany her parents. But Stevie, uneasy and still perplexed, decided to go in his parents’ car. Alone in the Packard’s big backseat, Edith rode with her uncle and aunt.
    On the long drive back, Bea repeatedly tried to initiate a conversation. As did jittery Stevie. Even Papa, who could be so taciturn, worked to get some words flowing. He spoke of the fine house he was renovating in Sherwood Forest. And the promise of rain. And the visit tomorrow from Nonno and Nonna.
    But Mamma, hunched darkly in the front seat, lean face tilted toward the window, would have none of it. She wasn’t about to be cajoled into conversation. Nothing. Not a word.

CHAPTER III
    “You haven’t got it right—but it’s almost right.”
    This appraisal of her work—a pencil drawing of a wizened little apple and some long-stemmed onions—ought to have been unwelcome on a number of fronts. Chief among the unwritten rules at the Institute Midwest was a ban on gratuitous criticism: students were to proceed unobstructed by each other’s evaluations, unless expressly solicited. In addition, Bea’s onions and apple clearly were unfinished—all the more reason to exempt them from judgment. Furthermore, and finally, this particular critic and fellow student was somebody Bea hadn’t met yet (though of course she knew who he was). You might think he’d have the common courtesy to forgo criticism until they’d been properly introduced.
    Even so, this was somebody she’d been longing to meet: Ronald—Ronny—Olsson, who was not merely extremely handsome but handsome in a fashion guaranteed to fire up Bea’s imagination. He looked intensely literary—meaning not so much that he read books as that he belonged in one. She’d come across him before, somewhere in her constant novel reading. But which one was he—this pale, tall, dark-haired young man who wore a beautiful camel’s hair sports coat and a tawny suede hat? (Not many young men could have gotten away with that hat.) Some disguised prince in exile? Some nineteenth-century consumptive poet on a final pilgrimage?
    He always wore cuffed trousers. Cuffs on new trousers had been one of the first casualties of the War—by order of the War Production Board—and Ronny’s pants suggested a very deep closet. He dressed beautifully, in pale pastel shirts and bold but subtle neckties.
    After letting him stand unanswered for a moment, “What do you mean, almost?” Bea replied.
    Ronald had done something else odd and theoretically forbidden—he had entered the Institute in the middle of a term. He was a newcomer to Professor Manhardt’s class. Yet in just two weeks he’d established himself as its best draftsman—a superiority acknowledgedby all eight of the other students, as well as the Professor himself. It was quite remarkable, the speed whereby that pale hand of his could translate an apple or a lemon or a cattail on a tabletop into an apple or a lemon or a cattail on a sheet of paper—in the process losing far less of the thing’s tactility than any other student would likely lose. Bea had repeatedly allowed herself to stare, surreptitiously, at those long, quick, shapely, blunt-nailed fingers of Ronny