The Crimson Portrait

by Jody Shields

  His apologetic tone surprised her. “It was my choice.”

  “I’m very grateful for your company.” He still didn’t look at her.

  He could concentrate anywhere, had tolerated the grim conditions at the base hospital without complaint. In the time they’d worked together, she had seen his breaking point only once.

  Kazanjian had lost a patient, a very young man. The funeral service was held on a raw day, and the wind tore at the chapel tent, shaking the ropes and canvas. Even the primitive white-painted wooden cross over the rough altar trembled. Afterward, Anna had found Kazanjian behind the tent, and the face he turned to her was naked with grief. He quickly put on his spectacles, and she walked away, leaving him alone.

  “Only the wounded truly suffer,” he’d once told Anna. Simple words that she kept like a talisman, uncertain she understood them as he had intended.

  It was dark when they arrived at the estate, and as their motorcar smoothly curved up the long drive, the huge silhouette of the house swung into sight, all the windows heavy with light, as if guests attended a fete inside.

  Chapter Seven

  TWO DOZEN SQUAT-LEGGED chairs, their backs the exact height of the bolection molding, had once stood below rows of double-hung paintings in the Picture Gallery, leaving the center of the vast room empty. The chandeliers remained in place, illuminating the newly installed hospital beds in irregular patches, as if still bound by the ghostly imprint of the original furnishings.

  The lather boys progressed from bed to bed, sitting by each patient with a basin of warm water, a beaver bristle shaving brush, a wooden bowl of hard soap, and a straight razor. Some patients’ faces were so fragile and contorted by their injuries that the operation of shaving could take more than an hour. Artis excelled at this task, interpreting the slightest shift of the men’s eyes to gauge their comfort or distress as he wielded the razor.

  Patients with severe mouth injuries required a painstaking system of care, as they were troubled by a constant flow of saliva, which wet the cloth bibs draped around their necks. Every hour, the nurses irrigated their mouths with a warm salt solution, 5 percent Eusol, or dichloramine-T disinfectant, prized because its slight oiliness adhered to damaged tissues. At night, the men were awakened every two hours for the same treatment.

  Delivering nourishment by syringe and tube into the body was another process that required constant supervision from the nurses. The men’s diet was entirely liquid, based on scarce, costly raw eggs and cream, and supplemented with purees. When ground meat was added, their mood was considerably improved.

  Many men managed to continue smoking, dampening their lips with water or coffee to secure the cigarette in place. More grievously wounded smokers stuck the cigarette in a wetted nostril. At night, those who couldn’t sleep revealed themselves by the ruby-tipped glow of their cigarettes. McCleary never considered depriving them of this pleasure, as their mouths were the center of their existence.

  Early in the morning and at the end of the day, McCleary’s tall figure moved between the patients’ beds, slow and serene as a ship, gently adjusting a pillow or the feeding tubes rigged above their beds. Suspended in a state between waking and dreaming, some men acknowledged the doctor, while others, cocooned in bandages, were unable to move or even speak. McCleary calmed them with a reassuring touch, first deciphering the man’s expression or the attitude of his body to be certain this intimacy would be granted.

  There was a strange precariousness associated with an expedition through the wards, and sometimes McCleary was aware that he was surrounded by men who were forbidden to touch their faces, as if halos of barbed wire circled their heads. On good days, there was a buoyant silence in the rooms that the doctor imagined as faith, a silvery presence that indicated the tick of healing.

  In reading Mondeville, he had noted the author’s belief that the world was filled with powerful agents of transformation that could aid or harm healing. Even color had power. If a patient suffered from uncontrollable bleeding, Mondeville directed, “We must keep away any red things, whether paintings, coverlets, or any similar things, because like is attracted to like.”

  Although he didn’t follow Mondeville’s theory that red could draw blood from a body, McCleary did believe that like was attracted to like. He knew that his face, his voice, and his gestures gave hope, healed, were his virtues. His colors.

  The patients worshipped McCleary, and this distanced him from the rest of the staff. The junior surgeons acknowledged that his dexterity was superior to their own, his hands steady enough to balance a seed on his thumbnail, draw the finest catgut or horsehair, inspect an injury with a precise and fairy-weight touch. It was said—half in jest—in the staff quarters that the doctor’s fingers, shapely and thin skinned, lacked the coarse whorls and ridges that marked other men’s hands.

  Though he was regarded with reverence, McCleary was occasionally overwhelmed during surgery as he struggled to suture skin to skin. It was a delicate and elusive task, as if attempting to fuse two wet surfaces. Or mesh snowflakes. He operated to achieve the best hope of scars, since it became apparent that reconstructing some faces required numerous surgeries and would take years.

  As much of the work was innovative, it was his duty to record surgical techniques and observations for the benefit of others. McCleary’s case notes were faithful and precise, but these dry descriptions were no longer a point of pride, as he was uneasy documenting procedures that had no precedent, nothing to be measured against, and uncertain outcomes.

  The subtle changes to the men’s physiognomy as they healed were impossible to describe accurately, even to another doctor. McCleary tried to hold a visual memory—the color and texture of each individual’s wounds—but the pace of surgery blurred one shattered face into another.

  However, when a graft succeeded, flesh unmistakably flushed with new color. The faintest tint was significant. As wounds healed, they faded. Red to lesser red. The measurement of healing was infinitesimal, the point of a thorn.

  FOLLOWING THE INTENSITY of battle overseas, the wards were overwhelmed with newly arrived patients, and guarding a clipboard held at an aggressive angle, Matron selected those who required urgent treatment. Every doctor was summoned to surgery.

  McCleary had immediately ordered noncritical patients relocated to anterooms, the billiard room, the library, and even the corridors when the wards had been filled.

  He had assigned Artis night duty, and by torchlight the boy calmly directed the new patients to their cots. Afterward, he perched on a stool in the library until dawn, listening to the men’s restless breathing, prepared to summon nurses from the distant infirmary with a handbell in case of emergency.

  At daybreak, the patients opened their eyes and gazed in wonder at the primly painted clouds on the ceiling, tranquil blue and white. One man studied the false sky for hours, claiming he’d sighted the outline of a familiar continent. “But I cannot remember which one,” he muttered continually, quizzing the nurses, anyone who stopped at his bedside.

  When McCleary entered the library, he followed the upward direction of the patients’ eyes. “All hospitals should have glass roofs,” he declared to a startled orderly. “The patients could watch the stars when they couldn’t sleep.” To be surrounded by such regular order was surely joy, he thought.

  McCleary was suddenly aware he was the center of attention as the conversation grew quiet, the younger doctors glancing at him over their clipboards, the nurses self-consciously smoothing their skirts as if they were being judged. As he proceeded through the wards on his rounds, he sensed the patients’ attempts to pierce his slightest expression and gesture for signs of hope or a blessing.

  McCleary felt huge, important, his vision and strength unassailable, divine, as if his shadow had freakishly expanded around him, a sign of his distinction from other men. This was a dangerous fissure.

  Shaken, he left the ward.

  This incident intensified McCleary’s loneliness, so th
at he wished to share the burden of his isolation. Oblivious to the abruptness of his behavior, he buttonholed Dr. Kazanjian, who had just arrived, in the corridor.

  “Should the patients be allowed to see their faces? Do you think my decision to remove the mirrors is correct?” With full concentration, he watched Kazanjian’s face for an answer. Before the other doctor could speak, he added, “Or will the first look at their own faces be too shocking after months of waiting?”

  “I’m not certain if the shock would ever be lessened, no matter when they receive a mirror.”

  “Is it possible they imagine their faces are worse than their actual appearance?”

  “But the patients can see each other. Each man believes he doesn’t look as terrible as the others. You’ve heard them joke.”

  “So they have the illusion of hope.”

  “It is our only weapon. Hope and time.”

  When McCleary was courted by despair, a passage from The Divine Comedy occasionally came to mind, unbidden. Dante had placed the blasphemers in the seventh circle of Hell, condemned to lie on their backs, faces fixed to Heaven as God’s fire descended upon them, eternally unable to turn away.

  THE CORRIDOR SEEMED to have been wholly altered since McCleary had entered the operating theater. Impossible to calculate the time that had passed. Hours. Days. A lifetime.

  As he strode by a room he heard a muffled noise and guessed that something had fallen or a dog might have been locked inside. The patients were always adopting stray animals as mascots. Patients at Nutley had hidden a small donkey on the grounds for weeks without the medical officers’ knowledge.

  Although he had no desire for conversation or an encounter, he automatically opened the door. The small room was unlit, but after a moment he recognized the crumpled gray shape on the floor as a nurse in uniform. He was about to turn away when he saw she held a towel to her face, and the violence of her muffled sobs shook her shoulders, pulled her uniform into creases. She was a newly arrived nurse.

  Should he disturb her? Sometimes an offer of comfort was intrusive, too intimate. She lifted her head, revealing a dull, swollen face, and he was dimly aware that she was saying something.

  “Doctor, I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone would find me here. I’ll leave right away.” She rose unsteadily to her feet, and he stepped forward to help. Her hand was very cold.

  “What has distressed you, ma’am?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened to me. But the soldier boys.” Her voice rose. “They don’t tease me like the other nurses. They know I’m not comfortable with them. It’s my fault.”

  “The work is difficult. Your skill will develop by and by.”

  “Will it? I . . . I don’t like to look at the patients. I can’t help it. I’m not brave.”

  She knew too much. She must leave. Not unkindly, McCleary told her they could discuss everything in the morning. “Ask the matron to give you something to help you sleep.”

  The young woman practically curtsied as she left the room.

  OUTSIDE THE QUARTERMASTER’S office, two orderlies mocked Artis for not enlisting. “Hey, lily,” they jeered. “If you were in the city, women would hand you a white feather. That’s what they give cowards not in uniform. My cousin lied about his age and fought at Ribecourt. He wasn’t seventeen years old. How about it, old man?”

  Artis prepared to retort when McCleary interrupted, angrily ordering him to get a bottle of collodion. Grateful for the rescue, Artis located the bottle, brought it to McCleary, and waited silently until the doctor looked up.

  “Sir, I wish to work in a hospital. To be a doctor. I can read and write, sir.”

  McCleary put down his pencil and studied the boy’s anxious face. “Come along.”

  In his office, McCleary ran his hand over the worn spines of the books on the shelves until he found Gray’s Anatomy. “This was my book in medical school. All the muscles and bones are identified. Memorize them. It’s also important to keep your eyes open. Observe. You can lend a hand in surgery. I’ll speak to Matron. We’ll see if she will give permission to let you follow on my rounds.”

  Artis didn’t dare look at the book in his hands but blinked his thanks.

  After he had gone, McCleary realized the boy had been plotting for weeks to talk to him alone. He hadn’t noticed.

  SCREENED BY TREES, McCleary watched two patients peer over the railing of the ornamental bridge. At this hour, with the sun at their backs, they would see nothing but the murky shape of their heads, broken by the spikes of yellow pollen floating on the tense surface of the water.

  What would Julian see reflected in clear water? The silhouette of his head and shoulders would be unchanged, but his face would appear to have been altered with the violence of a beheading.

  McCleary found Julian in the kitchen garden, and they walked the perimeter of neatly furrowed earth, thick glass domes protecting the frail young lettuces, their transparent curved sides black speckled where rain had spattered dirt. He was calmed by the symmetry of the space, the brick walls softened by weather. “Isn’t it restful, the order of a garden?”

  “A sanctuary. Green and brown.” Julian hesitated as he pushed aside a branch, bumped against the doctor’s shoulder. “Pardon me.”

  Because of his bandaged eye, he sometimes misjudged distance, becoming slightly unbalanced. Once McCleary had watched Julian pick up a glass and had the impression that he regarded objects as unstable, treacherous. When he entered an unfamiliar room, Julian’s steps were tentative, as if the condition of the floor might change. McCleary was older and could distinctly see the young man losing his physical carelessness. The war had muted him.

  “I’m well on the mend. It’s only my feet that betray me now.”

  Perhaps it was fortunate that no visitors were allowed, and the wounded could direct the anger of their adjustment at their caretakers. He understood that Julian’s family lived at a considerable distance, and he’d never mentioned a sweetheart. It was better not to ask for an answer from men who would rather forget.

  “At least I still have a face to shave. Or a scrap of face for the lather boy to shave,” Julian said abruptly. “I managed to shave under the worst conditions in the trenches, using a bit of broken mirror. Or sometimes a puddle. It was the only clear surface for miles. I’d peer down at the reflection of my face, wouldn’t even take the cigarette out of my mouth. I longed for a lake. Transparent. Undisturbed. Blue.”

  McCleary waited, anticipating the timing and arc of a question. Julian wanted to know about the future. Sooner or later, some patients found a way to ask.

  “Can you repair my face?”

  He must give a fair answer. “Your bones are good. Thank God. Everything depends on that foundation. As for now, I wish your bandage could be removed, but the skin is slow healing.”

  “How slow?”

  “Forty days for skin and bones to knit. But it’s impossible to set a schedule, as each body obeys its own clock.”

  “Fine. So my face will be restored?”

  Julian’s voice was pitched high with tension, and McCleary felt it transferred to him, a bitterness that expanded into a tightness in his chest. He spoke in a low, measured tone to put the other man at ease, but this emotional control was also to help himself. “Healing is never straightforward.”

  “Not like death.”

  “That’s so.” Without thinking, McCleary had spoken against his own counsel, which was always to give hope. Most men didn’t push for a very specific answer.

  “It must be a relief to rest your eyes from surgery. To see the garden.”

  McCleary was grateful Julian had shifted the conversation away from a painful subject, and with an effort, he relaxed his hands. Rooks called in the distance, and he noticed a viburnum tree, its scent reaching them before its heavy clusters of cream white florets were visible. As they returned to the house, Julian began to speak about his wartime experience as if he were alone, with a mix of apology and pride.

&
nbsp; “I’ll tell you what happened during my last battle. The fighting around a château had shelled it into a ruin. The furniture was tumbled out on the lawn, covered with white powder from pulverized masonry.”

  McCleary listened without interrupting, understanding that this was a process as logical and necessary as surgery.

  “One of the infantry discovered the cellar entrance, and we went down the steps, into the deepest rooms with walls and floors of packed dirt. We found racks of wine bottles, supplies, foodstuffs. We shone our torches into the next room, and the light bounced back, blinding us. We stopped, fearing an enemy trap, but everything was silent. We proceeded slowly and discovered it was a storage room, filled with mirrors and fine furniture from the château. A mortar hit above, and everything that had been brilliant went dark. I wondered if I had died.”

  McCleary imagined the star of Julian’s torch eradicating his reflection from the mirrors, then the light suddenly vanished, eclipsed by the greater explosion above.

  MCCLEARY FREQUENTLY WISHED that each time his eye focused on a patient all the power of his knowledge would converge and healing would be quickened. Didn’t lovers direct their emotion toward each other with their glances? Unveil themselves with their eyes?

  When he was in his early thirties, McCleary had been deeply in love with a singer, a dazzling soprano. He had attended her performances at the Aeolian Hall and Salle Erard on Great Marlborough Street, but he preferred to witness her voice lessons.

  His choice had amused her. “Such devotion,” she had said, laughing. “A lesson isn’t a real performance. I need a costume, an audience, to create the role.”

  He hadn’t known how to answer her, although he sensed her approval.

  In the rehearsal room, he had simply watched and listened as she stood across from her teacher, only a hand span separating their faces. The teacher, a strict and dignified older man, had touched the back of her head, then pressed his thumb by her ear, the suprameatal triangle. Don’t open your jaw so wide. Imagine your tongue is forward. Now, follow me.