by Jody Shields
“Tell me about the men with injured faces.”
“Ah. The patients.” The word was mockingly drawn out. “Do you dream, ma’am? Because the men could be in your nightmares.”
“Aren’t you afraid of them?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I only fear for them. Some men can’t breathe through their noses. Or talk with their lips. Some are blind too.”
Her hands gestured her dismay. “How can you bear to see them?”
He spoke more gently. “When I administer anesthesia, no matter how many times I’ve witnessed it, a man’s last look is a weight thrown at me. I carry their trust. They are bare men.”
“Are the wounded men recognizable as men?”
Brownlow laughed. “They look like the damned.”
As if from a distance, he focused on her, then turned and walked away. Catherine was angry, not so much at his lack of courtesy but because she hadn’t finished questioning him.
At the east wing of the house she slipped behind the japonica shrubs, their skeletal branches ornamented with blunt buds, and peered through the window into the patients’ ward. The red-shaded lamps on the night tables spread a hot crimson glow over the furniture and the motionless figures swaddled in blankets and bandages on the beds. Above their heads the chandelier prisms were aimed downward like daggers of glass, luridly stained red by the lamplight. Invisible air forced the prisms into motion, blurring their sharpness. A nurse suddenly jerked upright in her chair, startled from her doze, and stared directly at Catherine.
Catherine shoved her way through the branches and stumbled onto the lawn. Red light was impressed on the radius of her eye, and wherever she turned, a film of red was suspended over the landscape.
Anger at the men’s dumb presence in the house, their terrible vulnerability, rippled into a sensation that shook her weightless. Behind her, the windows of their rooms were crimson rectangles, as if the house were a burning ship, sinking into the dark swell of the landscape. Fire would find these wounded men who were never at peace—the sleeping hollows of their eyes, empty mouths, combustible bandages—waiting for the lick of flames.
Chapter Five
CATHERINE STOOD AT HER bedroom window watching the patients—figures uniformed in hospital blues—as they sat in canvas chairs or slowly wandered without purpose over the grass. It was a strange ballet, the nurses in identical costumes the only rapidly moving figures, hurrying to a patient with a blanket against the wind, retrieving a dropped newspaper, a hot-water bottle, a fallen crutch, their performance by turns harried and gently solicitous.
Two patients spoke animatedly together, and at the taller man’s gesture, her breath stopped as she recognized Charles. No, not Charles himself, but his presence, as he animated this stranger to signal her. He occupied this man like a glove, a suit of armor, a waiting emptiness that he filled. She recognized her husband among these men whose appearance was constantly changing, their identity fluid, impermanent, unstable.
Someone stepped in front of the tall man and he was lost to view.
She raced downstairs, stopping at a back entrance. She imagined approaching the silent patients as they waited for her horrified reaction to their damaged faces. They were the audience, the watchers, and she was the performer. She returned to her room.
That night, the stream of Catherine’s sleep was interrupted by the soft sound of Charles’s hat and gloves tossed onto the chair in his dressing room.
“Catherine?” His voice.
Half asleep, she blindly stumbled into Charles’s bedroom. Her foot stubbed against an open trunk; a compass fell out and rolled across the floor, the luminous blur of its progress halted by a chair leg. Its glowing, circular green heart waited, the black numerals pulsing like writing against fire, the needle positioned at eleven o’clock. It was a sign. The eleventh day of the month was Charles’s birthday. He was here.
This was proof that the presence of the dead could be summoned by the fierce possessiveness of the living. The force of her memory had called her husband, would keep him with her.
The next day before sunrise, Catherine was at the window, craving the sight of the patients as they assembled on the lawn, confident that Charles would send her another sign. A man could be recognized by his mannerisms as easily as by his robe of skin. Occasionally one of the men’s gestures or a movement caught her eye and then he would be submerged into the crowd.
Suddenly, as easily as wind moves leaves, a tall stranger assumed her husband’s identity. See how his hand smoothed his hair back from his forehead? This was Charles’s habit. See how he walked? A fragment of Charles had struck this stranger as sparks fly from fire. She didn’t need her husband’s body or voice to divine his presence. All the men sang of him. This vision abruptly vanished, and she stared at the patients, protected by their bandages.
But she would wait for her husband. Waiting was familiar; it was constructed around an empty center, secure as stones around the hollow center of a well.
A jeweler at Cartier had once told her that some diamond cutters could recognize one another by the way a diamond had been cut. She had asked how a cold stone could retain the mark of an individual hand. Identity isn’t permanent as a sum of figures, the jeweler had answered.
She could peer into the dazzling heart of light and read what other eyes would miss.
CHARLES BEGAN TO APPEAR in Catherine’s dreams and seemed about to speak, but his mouth was still, his eyes anguished. He was always empty-handed. For three days, she waited for him in the places that had been significant for her husband. The Pink Drawing Room. The morning room. The tapestry corridor. Footsteps approached, then paced away outside the rooms without stopping. It was unbearable. But in the corridor, she noticed the unmistakable scent of his cigarettes, a blend of Havana and Latakia tobaccos.
Perhaps Charles could no longer recognize his home, the rooms occupied by strangers and hospital equipment. He must be insensible, drugged into forgetfulness. Or wounded, unable to speak, his mouth sealed, bandaged. She must find Charles, help him. She would seek him outside the house, find her way among these terrible men, carrying the memory of her husband like a thread. Perhaps the bold touch of her hand on a stranger’s shoulder, a kiss, or a tear would be enough to break this stalemate, this spell.
SHELTERED BY THE ALLéE of linden trees, Catherine nervously twisted a leaf, thinner than glass, and it snapped, leaving a faint, bitter scent on her fingers. She watched the patients on the lawn, their movements seeming to unwind from a slower sense of time, as if they waited for clarity of what had befallen them, the common catastrophe of their injuries.
At a costume ball, she’d once marveled at a guest who had dressed as half man, half beast. The Minotaur. Didn’t the patients resemble the Minotaur, with their monstrous faces masked by bandages and the bodies of normal men?
Frightened, she saw that the figures in blue suits made a spectacle of feints, hidden exchanges, and maneuvering, sending messages she couldn’t interpret, meant only for one another and their caretakers.
Charles had returned, but she must earn his appearance with faith and patience. She was equal to the task.
CATHERINE BEGAN to listen more carefully to the workmen’s shouts, the whispering of the nurses and V.A.D. women passing by the window. Will you wait for me? What about it? a tenor’s voice wavered in song from the staff quarters. Other voices, those of the orderlies outside, did not carry with enough clarity to tell her anything. But when they worked in the house, she stood by the door and heard words and phrases that her husband had routinely used. She overheard a conversation about a garden near Naples, which Charles had insisted they visit on their honeymoon. She heard Cobham, the name of Charles’s best horse.
She jealously guarded every precious moment, since watchfulness would bring Charles back. Insomnia elongated her waking hours until the sense of the day’s progression was lost, marked only by the changing light on the walls, from palest yellow white to b
rilliant sunlight, lamplight, and darkness.
Downstairs in the wards, the patients were also awake at night, lacking the pollen of sleep, of forgetfulness. Light from their windows striped the black lawn, and the pattern of voices and footsteps made by the orderlies and nurses were faintly audible at all hours.
Over a period of weeks, the signs from Charles multiplied. His calling card slipped from between two books she moved on a shelf. It was Wednesday, the same day of the week he had left to join his regiment. Only Charles would have known the significance of this day.
He spoke to her through music. Two of Charles’s favorite songs were played one after the other on the gramophone set up near a fountain, his spirit guiding someone’s hand to place the needle. She clearly heard the music, but it was an indecipherable code.
ONCE AFTER A HUNT, Charles had entered the house through a back entrance, tossed his hat onto a chair, turned, and smiled at her over his shoulder, revealing black mud from the horses’ hooves spattered up the back of his pink riding jacket. He was a man who filled a room, and his presence was expanded by the frigid air and the fresh odor that surrounded him that afternoon.
Catherine whispered her husband’s name out loud, and at that instant, a lark sang outside, creating a fissure in time, and there was a sudden flash of pink in the distant field, the exact color of Charles’s riding jacket.
Another day, Catherine saw Charles outside, walking past the drawing-room window. He stopped to stare at his reflection and was transformed into Artis, wearing an old jacket that had belonged to her husband. She ran outside, grabbed the surprised boy’s shoulders, and shook him.
A man leaned over the red bridge on the lake, looking into the water. Was he Charles? She willed the man not to move, not to shatter into a stranger. But he shifted his shoulder, and casually, as if he’d thrown down a newspaper, he was revealed as an orderly.
TOMORROW MARKED THE ANNIVERSARY of when Charles had proposed marriage. It would be the day he would return to her. She must be ready. She quickly packed a satchel with precious rationed goods: sugar, butter, silk stockings, matches, and a dozen candles she’d hoarded. She would never be without light.
CATHERINE LAID CHARLES’S clothing on the bed in his room. A fine wool suit and a starched shirt from Budd. Cuff links in gold, once warmed by his wrists. His pocket watch. An antique tobacco caddy of gold-washed silver.
It was evening. She could hardly dress; her blunt fingers fumbled against her clothing. She lay on the bed in an elaborate gown, bound by the silk wrapped around her, secure as carving. When she had been intimate with Charles, there was no sound but his sound, no blood but his blood; his body had absorbed all her senses.
The bedroom door was open so Charles could enter, as he had on other evenings. Other lovers had come to her like this, materializing from darkness into two hands, a mouth, breath. The surprise of pleasure.
The tension of waiting wounded her, as if a vibration, needle fine and sharp, were drawn to the wedding ring on her finger, made a crack in the diamonds finer than the eye could register, and then moved up to pierce her heart.
Catherine jolted awake in the morning. She had slept without disturbing her clothes. Dreams, had there been dreams? Had she missed Charles? Panicked, she raced into Charles’s room. Everything was exactly as she’d left it.
Someone was keeping Charles from her. The doctors and the nurses conspired against them.
THE DOOR to the morning room swung shut behind her, and Catherine waited to be certain she was alone. Moonlight leveled itself across the furniture—the curved seats of the chairs, a smooth metal table, a tray top—irregular shapes floating in darkness, as if the room were filled with black water. She stepped forward slowly, uncertainly, anticipating furniture that had been removed from the room.
Outside, the thick grass of the lawn formed into lines of combed silver, black on the sides hidden from the moonlight. Near a fringe of trees, an unmoving figure—a man in light-colored garments—was intently focused on the window where she stood. He cupped his hands to light a cigarette, and at that moment she recognized Charles.
Catherine didn’t realize she’d cried out, but his head jerked up, and with two strides he vanished into the trees. She pounded her fist against the window. He must hear her.
She ran outside to the place where Charles had lit the cigarette. The trees were an impenetrable screen; the landscape gave her nothing back. Had he made no mark? No footprint on the grass? She spun around.
There. By the trees in the distance. A pale figure. He was waiting for her.
She moved blindly forward, the wind striking the blades of grass together, sharpening them to cut her. The pump of her heart magnified until it sounded over the field like an echo, pushed by the explosion of her breath. Someone would hear her, sense her fear. Her perspective became distorted; her shadow reversed itself and soared up from the ground. Wasn’t that how soldiers tracked the enemy? She was a target. She stumbled to her knees and the world spun around her. When it was quiet, she stood up unsteadily. She was isolated, as if everything in the landscape were suddenly colorless and she stood out, the sole living figure, her flesh vibrant, alive, pink with racing blood.
Arched branches, set with thorns like the punctuation of stars in a constellation, guarded a passage between the trees. He couldn’t have passed here.
Hands gripped her arm and jerked her around.
Who are you? A mouth moved in a man’s dim face.
“Charles? Are you Charles?” She fell into the full scent of dry grass, felt its spikes under her hands, then this pressure dissolved.
Chapter Six
ANNA COLEMAN HAD sailed from Boston harbor with her husband, a doctor, disembarking in a port filled with hospital ships. He continued on to join other volunteers in a war casualties hospital funded by the Vanderbilt and Morgan families. They had agreed she would join him at some point in the future, which would be determined by the course of battle. Until that time, the military was entrusted with their communication.
Two hours after arriving at Base Hospital No. 22, Anna was asleep alone in a camion parked in a field. The hospital was one-quarter mile from the Dannes-Camiers railroad depot, a main line that was a target for enemy aeroplanes. The locomotives were painted gray to make them less visible, but the pale tents were visible in sunlight. “No, we certainly aren’t in any danger,” said an officer, gesturing at the red cross painted across the roof of a tent. “The cross is clearly visible, even from a thousand feet up. There can be no mistake.”
“What if the aeroplane’s visibility is limited?”
He had shrugged off Anna’s question. A hospital would never be bombed. It was sacred ground.
During the first weeks there had been few patients and little for Anna to do, so she wrote lengthy letters to her husband and a few of her patrons. When the hospital was expanded, railroad engineers and a construction regiment erected additional tents for surgery, supplies, disinfection, recreation, a chapel, a kitchen, and quarters for the officers, doctors, and nurses. Anna had been puzzled by the “Glory” sign on the largest tent near the morgue until a nurse explained that the wounded who weren’t expected to live would be sheltered there. It was April, and the weather was already hot.
Accustomed to the quiet isolation of her studio, Anna had been unnerved by the constant noise and activity. As a defense against this chaos, she had unpacked her supplies and begun to sketch the surrounding landscape, but it seemed as insubstantial as the canvas tents.
Weeks later, a small group of physicians, surgeons, dentists, and several nurses from Harvard University arrived at the base hospital. The doctors were distinguished by their loose white infirmary coats decorated with gold embroidered Harvard patches on the shoulders.
Anna noticed one of the doctors, a sturdy, dark-haired man with thick spectacles, because of his habit of sketching in a small notebook during meals. This was also her practice. The others usually took their enamel mugs of tea outside, leaving h
im alone in the dining tent. When she heard him speak, his heavy accent didn’t surprise her. Dr. Kazanjian was a foreigner.
Anna realized his sketching was a way to extend his work. Fill every hour. Did he ever sleep? Kazanjian would hurry into the surgical tent before noon and emerge very late at night. His constant activity ensured that nothing—the isolation, the lack of supplies, the approaching threat of battle—would catch up with him.
She asked the chief matron, a plainspoken woman, whether Dr. Kazanjian was a surgeon.
“Not likely,” she answered, indicating that Anna should help refold the blanket draped over her arm. “Mr. Kazanjian is a dentist. I’m not even certain he can properly be called doctor. You’re not a trained nurse?”
“I have no training.” She didn’t mention that her husband was a doctor, which might have changed the matron’s sour expression, her dismissal of Anna’s usefulness at the hospital. She was an artist and didn’t need to be yoked to the rules of aid.
REGIMENTS OF ENGINEERS laid down miles of new railroad track, and supplies and ammunition could rapidly be delivered directly to the front and the base hospital, sometimes arriving within days after leaving Southampton.
This morning, fresh butter and bread were available in the mess tent, and cut flowers in tin cups had been placed on the long tables. Anna sat down next to Kazanjian, and her eye noticed a face drawn with a hatch of lines, its muscles exposed, before his hand covered his sketchbook.
“At last we meet each other properly.”
She gave him her hand. “Anna Coleman.”
“Varaztad Kazanjian.”
“I see you also sketch, madam.”
He indicated her faintly blue thumb and index finger, proof she’d handled a stick of chalk. She laughed.