The Crimson Portrait

by Jody Shields

  Then the teacher had directed her imagination inside her body to the shape formed by her tongue, her ribs, the tightness of her diaphragm. Her vibrating throat. His hands had swooped and fluttered. The singing lesson was intense and intimate. Their eyes had never released each other.

  Her singing voice came from the resonance of her entire being, every muscle and bone. Her body became a bell of sound. McCleary had been astounded by the emotion that poured through her. Afterward, when he had held her face in his own hands, it seemed sacrilegious to kiss the lips that sang.

  Half a lifetime later, McCleary acknowledged that singing lesson. “First you must cultivate an awareness of your body,” he would tell his patients, his eyes never leaving their face. “Imagine your body is like a lantern, then pull the light inside yourself. Examine yourself. Find the injured place. Even if painful.”

  Chapter Eight

  CATHERINE TURNED HER head and focused on the strange detail of a gold button on a sleeve, then it was replaced by colors, blue and silver in a jagged moiré pattern. She recognized the familiar wallpaper in the corridor and became conscious of her arm, awkwardly bent over the edge of a folding cot.

  “Where is Charles?”

  “She’s awake,” a man’s voice said. “Call a nurse to take her upstairs. You know who she is?”

  “Why am I here? Charles? Charles?” She called his name again and again, struggling to move the blanket off her shoulders.

  A nurse crouched next to her cot. “Let’s not move too quickly, ma’am.”

  “I will not move until the doctor arrives.”

  The stout nurse avoided Catherine’s glare. “Very well,” she said sourly, and firmly tucked the blanket around her.

  A few minutes later, McCleary anxiously hovered over her, and momentarily didn’t recognize the woman of the house. Catherine. A mourning widow. Strain ebbed into his eyes. He slipped his stethoscope into a pocket and helped her from the cot. “The room next door is quiet. We can speak in there.”

  “No. Tell me now.” Her words were ready, loud, accusing. “Where is my husband?”

  McCleary propelled her down the corridor, her arm trembling, her narrow skirt abbreviating her steps, into a side room. After he had closed the door behind them, the ordinariness of light through the windows restored his equilibrium. He gestured at a chair, indicating she should sit down.

  Catherine remained standing, watching his face, her fingers nervously tracing a carved detail on the mantelpiece. “I saw Charles outside, but he wouldn’t come into the house. He wouldn’t speak to me.”

  “Please sit down, ma’am.” He waited until she had moved to the sofa to speak again. His voice shifted into a slower pattern, his unconscious technique for postponing a terrible announcement. “I’m afraid you are mistaken.”

  “You don’t want me to see him.”

  “The man you saw wasn’t your husband. I’m truly sorry. Trust me.” McCleary felt defensive, his white jacket stiffening around him like armor.

  Her wild stare burned over him. This man had taken Charles. “You lie. Everyone has lied to me.”

  “You must listen.”

  His words were a weapon aimed at her.

  “But no one saw Charles fall on the battlefield. There were no witnesses. Surely he was saved, hidden. I’ve had signs, many signs from him.” Her hands were curved, beseeching.

  “You have imagined this. Only your mind has put him here. Your husband will never return,” he said gently, his expression final and infinitely regretful.

  Her body responded as if his words had the force of a weight, doubling over on the sofa.

  A STRING OF FINE hunting horses was housed in the estate’s stables, but shortly before the war started a few had been replaced by Charles’s motorcars. The able young motor servant, occasionally called the chauffeur, had driven the Lancaster touring motorcar and the Royal Daimler as proudly as if they were his own, and had threatened to dismantle and bury the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost should the military attempt to requisition it.

  Catherine locked the smaller valuables in her rooms and had an orderly bring the Wolseley motorcar out. She drove recklessly on the untarred country roads, raising dust, the motorcar’s speed exaggerating the cold of the wind pressing against her leather goggles and the blanket over her lap.

  The city had been curiously bled of color. In St. James’s Park, the familiar banks of scarlet geraniums had been replaced with rows of cabbages by order of the Office of Works. On the north side of Piccadilly, the fashionable walk during the season, the women wore mostly blue or black clothing. Men were in khaki uniforms or dressed in convalescent suits of dark wool, some with empty sleeves pinned to their jackets.

  There was less traffic on the streets, as many wheeled vehicles—even omnibuses and taxicabs—had been commandeered for war. However, the air was thick with fumes, and when Catherine removed her hat, a fine black powder had stippled its decoration of green velvet leaves like sinister pollen.

  She walked through the streets of the West End, surprised to find the grand residences were still fitted with window boxes, the pansies blooming under the severe precision of striped awnings, creating the effect that this frail gaiety needed protection.

  On the corner, a newsboy loudly repeated the headline of the paper in his hand: Battle Rages Across the Channel. Column after column in the newspaper contained names of the dead and news of the war, an unrelieved grayness that affected the entire street. Pedestrians slowed their steps, eyes trapped by this barricade, the evidence of death. The tense black telephone wires strung on poles overhead vibrated ominously, as if also conveying evil news.

  IN THE LOBBY of the Empress Club, a guest gripped Catherine’s arm, whispering, “One widow can sense another widow,” and urged Catherine to consult a spiritualist medium. “She communicated with my husband. She described heaven to me. Can you imagine the comfort I had?” The bereaved woman wept, unable to pronounce the medium’s name, and shakily scrawled it on a visiting card. Mrs. Kennedy, Spiritualist Advisor.

  Catherine stepped up into an omnibus, bracing herself against the railing as the vehicle swerved like a ship, and a stout woman in a uniform swayed down the aisle. Catherine stared in disbelief at the conductor selling tickets. A woman.

  The signs in the windows along Oxford Street promised palm reading, crystal gazing, tarot cards. Catherine left the omnibus to walk, and two women gestured the direction to Fleet Street. On Devereux Court, she found Mrs. Kennedy’s name on a small brass plaque by the door, pressed the bell, and entered. A door unlatched with a faint click upstairs.

  “You must walk up,” called a woman’s faint voice. “Take your time, dearie.”

  A door opened on the dim landing, loosening a trapezoid of light from a room with a worn carpet and chipped paint of no clear color on the walls. A diminutive figure glided forward and invited Catherine to enter. Her coat was lifted from her shoulders by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Kennedy.

  “I’m pleased you’ve come to visit, ma’am. I sense it is precisely the right time. Sit across from me at the table. Pay before we start.”

  Catherine’s fingers shook above the coins striking the bare table.

  “Is this the first time you’ve contacted your loved one?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman’s braid slipped from its coil as she grasped Catherine’s hand.

  When Catherine pulled away, Mrs. Kennedy insisted the contact was necessary to perform her work with the spirits. “Let us sit quietly together. Picture your loved one. You wish news of a soldier, yes? Yes?”

  Catherine was unable to remember Charles. Suddenly she had an image of the bedroom, and his silhouette at the window.

  Mrs. Kennedy’s eyes closed and her head fell back. Her breath deepened into a loud, regular rhythm. “He has been trying to reach you.” Her lips moved silently, as if language were useless, then she stuttered, “He s-s-says you won’t listen.

  “Shhh. Wait. Now I see him among trea
sures. Among fine things, many paintings. A handsome man.” The woman’s voice softened, her head dropped to one side as she intently listened to the silence.

  Catherine heard nothing, but watched Mrs. Kennedy with horror, unable to look away, memorizing every detail of the woman’s face. “But where, where is he? Tell him he must show himself to me.”

  “Ah. He is happy with the spirits. He says . . .”

  “He isn’t dead,” Catherine shouted, shoving the table forward. “He’s in the house. He’s home. You stupid woman.” She grabbed the woman’s shoulders, pulling the flimsy scarf at her neck. The room tilted until Catherine steadied herself against the table. She yanked her coat off the chair.

  The spiritualist’s shouts followed her down the staircase. “He’s lost to you. Do you hear me? Lost.”

  Catherine heard only the pounding of her feet on the stairs.

  THAT EVENING, A WOMAN Catherine had met in the tearoom at the Empress Club invited her to a party at the Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street.

  In the noisy, crowded hotel suite, Catherine was oblivious to everyone but the soldiers in uniform, wearing the familiar-colored jackets that belted and buttoned their bodies into identical silhouettes. For an instant, a fair-haired lieutenant standing with his back to her appeared to be Charles, then he shook his head, disagreeing with someone, and with that small gesture he was betrayed as a stranger.

  Catherine turned away from the soldiers to study the women, tenderly identifying several of them as widows. Her sisters in mourning. Did they also feel hollow? Sleepwalking, numb, fixed to an empty core? Had grief changed the sense of their weight upon the earth? That’s why it was important to keep moving. To feel alive.

  She passed through the throng as if floating, invisible; no one jostled her. A line of spiky white orchids in vases marked the center of a long bare table, and she idly broke off a flower and tucked it into the chignon at the nape of her neck. A man handed her a glass of vodka. “Try this. It’s new. Been imported from abroad,” he said. The stuff was tasteless. She quickly finished it and asked for a second drink. Catherine was slightly dizzy, and the patch of a headache pressured her scalp. She didn’t wish to eat, dance, talk. Nothing interested her.

  A very drunk young man in khaki loudly demanded more champagne. Mrs. Lewis, the hotel’s proprietress, shouted that someone had already been sent downstairs to fetch the bottles. Mrs. Lewis was gradually depleting the private cellars in the Cavendish with the full knowledge of the hotel’s management. They didn’t object, figuring the wine collectors would never survive the war and return to their prized vintages. It was anticipated that a direct bomb hit on the hotel would destroy the wine cellar regardless.

  The fresh bottles of champagne arrived, were uncorked and triumphantly passed around. Quantities were spilled. Mrs. Lewis called for quiet, and everyone solemnly repeated a toast to the unwitting donor of the champagne, Lord So-and-So. To his health. To his return, God willing. To the Tommies in the trenches. To the king.

  As the revelers drank, a disheveled young man in white tie grabbed Catherine’s hand and pulled her up the stairs, laughing drunkenly in protest, followed by the boisterous party. The door slammed open onto the rooftop, suddenly revealing a dark landscape of spires and chimneys. At their feet, weak lines of light squeezed around the edges of the oiled tarp spread over the skylight.

  “Look! Look!”

  A huge oblong shape hovered above the violet horizon, only faintly visible until struck by the needle-fine white lines of the searchlights. The zeppelin escaped the lights and flew closer, a silent monolith, an eye poised over the black map of the city.

  Catherine watched the zeppelin’s hypnotic, slow-floating progress. She felt herself soar into empty space, moving higher than the zeppelin, and with great clarity, she observed in the distance a shining channel of water, calm as a painted line. Beyond it was another landscape patterned with the bald scars of violence. The battlefield. Escape was futile.

  Enraged, she pulled a mirror from her handbag and stumbled across the roof, waving it wildly at the sky, a flash in her hand.

  “See me!” she screamed. “Here! Here!”

  A man angrily knocked the mirror from her hand. “Are you crazy?”

  The crowd of partygoers watching Catherine laughed. What did it matter? Every evening held an incident of extreme behavior, soon forgotten. They defiantly jeered the approaching zeppelin, “Live now, for tomorrow we die.”

  CATHERINE LEANED BACK against the seat of the motorcar, gripping the steering wheel with one hand as she drove. Arched branches plunged together overhead, a blur of moving leaves, as if the world had reversed and a flowing green stream covered her.

  An excited orderly watched as Catherine stopped the motorcar near the stable. The cavalry was here! he shouted. A unit had taken all the horses, unannounced. There was no point asking why the man hadn’t tried to hide the best hunters from them. The animals had been shipped to the front, where they would pick their way around gaping craters and tracks left by machines of war.

  On the steps of the house, Catherine spun around and flung her keys onto the darkness of the great lawn. What did it matter? The doors were always open, and there were never trespassers, only strangers.

  CATHERINE BARELY ACKNOWLEDGED McCleary as they passed each other in the corridor. His tired face showed only a flicker of surprise, and this angered her, as if her grief didn’t deserve more than a mild reaction. She hadn’t forgiven the words he’d spoken. That Charles was dead. That she had never seen him. Her determination to prove him wrong was carried like hard coins in her pocket.

  The other doctors and nurses were watching her. Now she understood the significance of their conversations, certain looks they’d exchanged. She suspected that they had hidden Charles, swaddled his body in bandages, tempered his mind, and even if he lay in the next room, he would be unrecognizable.

  WHEN SHE WAS very young, Catherine had witnessed the effacing of her mother’s sight, darkening slowly as a fog of tarnish on silver. Her mother described the narrowing world to Catherine, how bodies appeared to be rough silhouettes, heads were featureless, and hands blurred into irregular shapes.

  “But how do you recognize me?” Catherine had tearfully demanded.

  “I know your voice. Don’t be sad,” her mother had answered. “I’m comforted that you remain the same age for me. I will always visualize you as a child.” Then she had turned away from her small daughter without a loving gesture.

  Catherine convinced herself that because her tears were silent and invisible, her mother was unable to see her distress. But my voice, shouldn’t she have recognized the sadness in my voice?

  So the moment had passed, and Catherine ran to the next room into sunlight, a luminous barrier visible only to her.

  Chapter Nine

  AN ORDERLY HAD quickly ushered an unfamiliar woman away from the patient’s ward into an unused anteroom in the east wing, where she paced for more than an hour. Fine, pale brown dust from her boots marred the shining length of the linoleum floor.

  McCleary finally arrived, still half focused on his last patient, and was startled when she briskly swept the hem of her long skirt aside and reached for his hand before he could introduce himself.

  “I’m Mrs. Coleman. Please call me Anna.”

  Remembering his position, McCleary stood up straighter, an elegant gesture that added ceremony to his welcome. He described the hospital routine to her as they walked through the maze of corridors and galleries, their footsteps sharpened against the gray linoleum laid over the parquet floor. “Supper is at five o’clock.” He hesitated, uncertain where an artist should rank in the hospital hierarchy. “You may dine with the medical staff, if you like. The nurses prefer to take their meals together in their suite.”

  “I would prefer to sit down with the medical staff.”

  “Fine. It will be arranged. You’ll also need a place to work. The gardener’s cottage is fully occupied, but the brew house, dairy,
or rooms in the southern lodge might suit your requirements. An orderly will show you around the grounds tomorrow.”

  “And my subjects? The patients?”

  “You’ll meet them in due time. Their wards are on the ground floor. Dr. Kazanjian has briefed you on the job requirements?”

  “Not in great detail.”

  “We plan to use your sketches and plaster models of the patients’ heads and faces as documentation and aids for surgery. And as a prediction. It’s my belief that an artist’s imagination can anticipate the course of healing.”

  “So I will sketch their future faces?”

  His eyes held a sliver of admiration. “Yes.”

  “So we are collaborators.”

  “Don’t expect every surgeon here to agree or express their gratitude. Tell me, how was your journey?”

  She described uniformed soldiers sleeping on the stone floor at the station. The crowds watching the men board the trains for the front had been somber, nearly silent.

  “Times have changed. Not one year ago, bands played as the battalions marched off to war. There were huge, cheering crowds.” Hopelessness has possessed us, he thought.

  “On one of the trains in the country, no one offered their seats to the weary soldiers. The poor boys stood the entire trip.”

  He stopped in the middle of the corridor. “Mrs. Coleman, there is no need to share these sad anecdotes with anyone else in the hospital. Better keep your observations to yourself. The men here have made terrible sacrifices.”

  “Shouldn’t they know the truth?” Her mouth tightened.

  “I make exceptions for the truth at this time.”

  A BATTERED COPY OF Gray’s Anatomy was open on the desk between McCleary and Artis as they discussed the structure of the face. The boy’s finger traced the line of the nose on an illustration in the anatomy book.