Stella Bain (23 page)

“When I arrived in Camiers,” she says, “I asked everyone I knew if he or she had ever met a man named Phillip Asher, ambulance driver. For months, I had no response. But then one day he came to my tent. It seemed improbable, after what he had been through in America, and what he experienced in France, that he looked so normal, so willing to engage in life. I may have written to you about some of this.”

“Yes.”

“In a moment of madness, I had gone to France. My children were in America. I was working in hellish circumstances. But Phillip’s face, when I first saw it in my tent, was very welcome.”

“Do you really think you were mad, clinically speaking, when you fled?”

“I do. Maybe others would call it a nervous breakdown, an inability to function in reality, to reason. Who would choose to go to the most dangerous place on earth?”

The air is frigid, painful. August wears a hat and muffler. Etna has the collar of her wool coat up around her ears.

“Do you think you unconsciously wanted to commit suicide?” he asks.

“By erasing Etna and becoming Stella? The thought has occurred to me.”

Tomorrow August will have her driven to Richard Parkhurst’s office. They have both agreed that Etna’s chances for a satisfactory outcome, one that will persuade the judge, are better if August is not involved from this point on. On Thursday night, she will go with August to the theater, and they will have a light supper afterward. On Friday morning, they will drive to Kent to see Phillip.

“What did Phillip say when you first spoke with him?” August asks.

“I told him I wanted him to go back with me to America so that Clara would have a chance to recant her accusation, thus allowing him to regain his reputation. But he brushed the offer away. He didn’t live in the past. He had somehow learned to live in the present. We had fun together. We went dancing one night, played tennis one afternoon. Simple, normal activities took on heightened significance, a way of defying all that was around us. A glass of wine at a café was festive.”

August is silent.

“We weren’t lovers,” Etna quickly adds, and she can feel August’s relief in his arm. “If you had been there, you would have understood how it was.”

“I very much wanted to go,” he reminds her.

“Be so glad that you didn’t. No man could have done more for the war effort than you. I was a witness. I saw.”

“I wonder.”

“You’re very dear to me, August. I would hate to think you were somehow disappointed in yourself.”

Approaching another strolling couple—so young, Etna thinks—she and August move to one side.

“So you see, when I saw Phillip that last time, with his face horribly disfigured, I believe I went mad again. I remember running into a field. After that, I have no memory until I woke at Marne. I think it likely I’ll never know how I got from Camiers to Marne.”

“You had to have been driven,” August reasons.

“The head sister at Marne said I was brought in on a cart. She didn’t know by whom.” Etna imagines herself being driven to Marne in a midnight-blue touring car. They enter a sparkling garden. “London is full of these, isn’t it?” she asks, meaning small parks.

“It’s what makes London so easy to walk through. Fortunately most of the gardens in the city are not locked. Just when you start to feel weary, there’s a tucked-away patch of grass and a bench.”

“Do you want to be a psychiatrist?” she asks.

“I believe in talk therapy. I’ve come to believe in the good it does.”

“Did I start that? Did our time together lead to this?”

“Yes, I think so.”

They sit together on a dry stone bench.

“Were you an artist before you became Stella Bain?”

“I drew as a child the way other girls played the piano or crocheted. It was a suitable occupation for a young woman, but nothing more. With little encouragement, it seemed pointless to continue, although I did do some floral studies while I was at the cottage.”

“How amazing that your talent blossomed with Stella and made you so happy.”

“And a good thing, too. Otherwise I don’t know how I’d be able to make a living now. The money allows me to live an independent life.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be happily married?”

“I can’t begin to answer that,” she says. “I can’t connect the word
happy
with marriage.”

“Your desire for independence has always fascinated me.”

“But should it, really? If I were a man, you wouldn’t give it a second thought.”

“I might give it a second thought, but not a third. Marriage is the norm.”

A whole generation is missing its men, she thinks. Will all the “norms” change now?

August puts his hands on his thighs. “Shall we see the Tower or get a cup of tea?”

“I think the tea,” she says.

T
hey do not speak much on the drive to Kent. August and Etna sit in the back while Dodsworth, Mary’s husband, drives. Etna is relieved that he came home from the war safely; perhaps he and Mary have already had a child. She tries to focus on the visit to come. While she is afraid of having to look at Phillip, she knows she needs to see him, to reassure herself that his spirit, at least, is intact.

The stillness between her and August feels much the same as on the first day they went to the Admiralty together.

The Austin moves smartly up to the front door of the convalescent hospital. August helps Etna from the motorcar. It is even colder in the country than in the city, and a fresh breeze stings.

“Meet us back here in two hours,” August instructs Dodsworth.

Etna takes in the well-manicured surroundings. The stones of the building still hold their golden warmth in the pale light, and one cannot help but be impressed. She guesses the “tuition” at this institution to be quite a sum, and she has to remind herself that the estate is a laboratory for physicians as well as a residence for soldiers who have lost their faces in the war.

“What a gracious building,” she says to August.

“Keep in mind that the sights we’re about to see will be difficult at best,” he warns.

“You seem to have forgotten that I saw many ‘difficult’ sights during my time in France.”

“Yes, and one of them caused you to lose your memory.”

It is as if they have stepped into the great hall of a well-tended manor house. Indeed, they are hard-pressed to find an artifact or person who looks even vaguely official. Etna spots a small sign displaying an arrow and the word
Visitors.
She imagines that parents and wives find the grand but welcoming surroundings comforting, as if the man they are about to leave here will be spending a holiday at a country house.

August and Etna locate a well-dressed middle-aged woman who asks if they want tea while they wait for the director to be free. They refuse politely, but the woman (nurse; assistant; receptionist?) insists on taking their coats. She explains that having outerwear on suggests to patients too brief a visit and often makes them anxious. Thus Etna and August enter the pageant that is being played out this day.

The director receives them in good time, and they are led into a space that might be an office but appears to be a gentleman’s library. The room, Etna has no doubt, exists as a place to greet family members and donors, not a place to see the injured.

“We have the capability of caring for sixty patients,” the director says. “We have a staff of eight doctors and over twenty nurses, all of whom live on the premises. Often a single case demands the skills of several surgeons: one to repair a shattered palate, one to build a new jaw, one for bone transplanting, and one to see to the skin grafting and the insertion of wax beneath the skin to make the visage more lifelike. The hospital also has several artists whose sole occupation is to develop templates for tin masks and paint them. A surgeon can repair a bludgeoned face, but an artist is needed to render an aesthetically pleasing result.”

He consults a daily time sheet. “Phillip Asher is with a visitor now,” he informs Etna and August.

“Who is the visitor?” August asks, much surprised.

“Captain Samuel Asher, Phillip’s brother. He arrived unexpectedly an hour ago to say good-bye to his brother. I gather he is returning to Canada.”

For a time, neither August nor Etna speaks. How can she interrupt what may be a last visit between the brothers for some time to come?

“You have traveled so far,” August offers.

“Perhaps we could simply interrupt Captain Asher’s visit, and then he can resume when we leave,” Etna suggests.

“Yes; we can hardly go back to London now.”

“If you are agreed…” says the director.

“We are.”

Etna and August are ushered into a large common room in which men sit in wheelchairs or at tables while others stroll back and forth in front of a massive fireplace. Faces hide, half shrouded in their tin masks. Other visages are in various states of preparation. Etna knows that an expression of normalcy on her part is essential.

Four men sit at a table playing cards. Several more read in rocking chairs. The hush seems strange to Etna. She supposes the patients knocking metal trays to the floor are elsewhere.

A man with thinning red hair raises his arm. In his military uniform, Samuel stands at their approach, but Phillip, with his tin-and-enameled mask, remains seated.

“So surprised to see you both,” Samuel says. “But I’m delighted. Etna, when did you arrive?” Samuel shakes hands with August. Across the expanse of a table and two chairs, she meets the captain’s eye. His coloring seems to have faded since she saw him last, as if the war itself had kept him young. She wonders what sort of a home and family he will go to now.

Etna lowers herself into a chair near Phillip’s. Samuel seems excessively buoyant, perhaps trying to make up for Phillip’s rude stare. Etna senses that Phillip feels himself to be a grotesque attraction, such as one might find at a village fair.

There are two halves to his face, one flesh and the other made of tin overlaid with enamel paint. The shadow of the mask on the real face causes a dark line to bisect the visage. The expressions on the two sides of the face are at odds with each other, the false side, paradoxically, the more lively looking. Etna imagines that when Phillip sat for his portrait, he was in a considerably better mood than he is now. Either that or the artist wished a better mood upon him, believing that seeing the good spirits on the one side would create them on the other. Phillip’s working eye is alert but wary, and it takes all of Etna’s concentration not to reach over and touch him.

Samuel and August do much of the talking, as if they are the adults and Etna and Phillip but tongue-tied children. Etna thinks the scenario perverse.

“Mr. Asher,” August asks of Phillip, “do you like it here? Your surroundings are quite beautiful.”

Etna watches for any signs of a response. At first she thinks August will have none, but then Phillip casts his good eye in the doctor’s direction. “I’m sorry, but do I know you?”

Etna realizes that in the initial confusion, Samuel did not introduce August to his brother.

“My apologies,” August says, half rising. “I’m August Bridge, a friend of Etna’s.” The ways in which he knows Etna are too complicated to explain. Etna notes that August did not add the honorific Doctor, doubtless because he did not want Phillip to think he was under observation.

Etna leans forward in Phillip’s direction. She reaches her hand toward him and then withdraws it. “Phillip,” she finally whispers.

He turns to her.

She scans his face without flinching. She studies the surgeries she can see.

Her legs begin to tingle.
God, no.
She holds her breath. She cannot have an episode here—not in front of Phillip, who will think the sight of his face has brought on her distress.

Her hands go to her calves.
Not now,
she pleads.

She should excuse herself immediately before the pains come on full. She waits a minute, both Samuel and Phillip perplexed, while her palms remain where she has placed them.

She waits another minute.

When Etna lets her hands go, they drift upward, as if weightless.

A waiter appears with a tray. The business with the tea covers Etna’s physical relief.

She notices on the tray a glass of tea with a straw. The extent to which Phillip’s life has been diminished dismays her, she who should have been prepared for anything. But she has never been required to imagine what such a life would be like, minute by boring minute.

In London, Etna saw men with similar masks, and somehow, though she always noticed, they failed to provoke the reaction she is having now. What upsets her, she thinks, is the contrast between Phillip’s beauty, more than evident in the half of him that is real, with the ugliness of the replica. Phillip must see that contrast each morning in the mirror, which he has to use to adjust the mask. Some of the men, Etna has noticed, wear spectacles to keep the masks in place, one side of the spectacles embedded into the tin.

Does Etna take milk and sugar? Milk, but not the sugar, she answers Samuel. August, the opposite. Samuel, black. As Etna is handed her cup, she wants to scream. For Phillip, who seems to want nothing more than to be left alone. For herself, who has come to see the man who was so badly hurt. For August, who seems deeply saddened.

“I must speak to Phillip alone,” Etna announces in a low voice.

“Are you sure?” Samuel asks after a few seconds pass.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like both of you to wait for me elsewhere.”

“Etna has come a long way to speak to your brother,” August gently reminds Samuel.

“Yes, of course,” Samuel says.

August turns to the man with the half mask. “Good-bye, Phillip,” he says. “It was a pleasure to meet you, and I wish you well.”

August stands. Samuel tells Phillip that he will be back.

When the men are gone, Etna adjusts her chair and moves the table a bit so that she is sitting across from Phillip. “I’ve been in America gathering my children.”

“Samuel says you lost your memory.”

“I thought my name was Stella Bain.”