Stella Bain (4 page)

“No.”

“No physician examined you? Looked at your legs or feet?”

“No. My only examination happened shortly after I arrived at the camp.”

“And the deafness?”

“It happened simultaneously with the legs. It also occurs by itself, though, as it did today in the garden.”

Aware that they have been talking in somewhat modulated tones, Stella sits back. Whether consciously or not, Dr. Bridge mimics her posture.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he asks. “I assume there were good doctors in Marne.”

“I would have been sent to England or back to America,” she explains. “Or worse, I would have been stripped of my duties as an ambulance driver. One couldn’t have a driver who might at any moment become disabled.”

“How did you become an ambulance driver?” he asks.

“Though I worked as a nurse’s aide, I was asked to drive an ambulance. I told them I’d done it before.”

“Truly?” he says, surprised.

Why has she added that bit of information? To impress him? To show him she is no ordinary VAD?

“Highly unusual, I should think, Miss Bain,” he adds.

Stella remains silent.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

For one dizzying moment, Stella thinks the honorific incorrect.

After a pause, Dr. Bridge asks, “May I ask you what drew you to Bryanston Square?”

“Is that where I am?” Stella gazes through the window at the green-gold oasis. She wonders once again how much to tell him. “I need to go to the Admiralty. It feels urgent.”

“You’re about an hour away on foot. You must have been in great distress to have come straight from the hospital ship and not bother to first find a place to sleep for the night.”

Heat rises to her face.

Streeter enters and sets down plates. The fish does not look appetizing, and she doubts that it will be warm.

“In the course of my practice of cranial surgery,” Dr. Bridge begins, “I have come upon a number of bizarre physical phenomena. Though I’m a surgeon, I’m intrigued by these odd occurrences and have often sought the advice of other doctors whose knowledge has helped to illuminate a thorny problem of my own.”

“Hence your interest in me?”

“My interest in you is humanitarian. If I may, I should like to make a suggestion.”

She meets his gaze.

“Even though you have improved tremendously, I think you know you are not entirely well. Do you understand that you cannot go back to France until your symptoms subside?”

“I must go back,” she explains. “Otherwise I’ll be written down as absent without leave.”

“I doubt the penalties for American volunteers are as severe as for the English or French soldier, but I’ll investigate.”

“No, please don’t,” she says, then stands. “Thank you for your concern.”

“You must finish your lunch,” the doctor says. “I believe Mrs. Ryan has gone to the trouble of making a pudding.”

Does the doctor imagine she cannot see through his transparent ploy?

The doctor eats in silence, perhaps mindful of the clock. Stella cannot bring herself to touch the fish, the sauce of which has congealed on her plate. After a time, Streeter enters the room to clear the dishes and to bring out a warm bread pudding with custard, a course Stella thinks she can eat.

Dr. Bridge speaks in the voice of a man who has composed his thoughts. “I wish you to stay a few more nights with my wife and me. As you can see, we have plenty of room, and neither I nor Lily would feel comfortable if you left now. In fact, I should feel that I was putting you in harm’s way or worse—that if I let you go, you might injure others should your symptoms overcome you at a critical moment.”

Stella puts a hand up.

“This isn’t to say that you aren’t free to go,” Dr. Bridge continues. “Of course you are. This is merely my recommendation. If you could but think of this as a temporary rest stop, I believe progress can be made. We can certainly get you back on your feet. We can speak further another time.”

He has no idea who I am, she thinks.

I have no idea who I am.

Stella stands. “You think, Dr. Bridge, that my most acute problem at the moment is the physical occurrences you have witnessed. But it’s not. My greatest difficulty is that I can’t remember anything in my life prior to waking in a hospital tent in Marne in March of this year.” She moves toward the door. “I appreciate your concern, but I have places I must go. Please thank your wife again. She has been extremely kind.”

Streeter appears next to Stella with her cloak and satchel.

“Good-bye, Dr. Bridge,” she says.

G
usts of wind blow Stella’s skirt about. The clean uniform as well as the decent food she has had to eat lift her spirits. What she needs is a map of London, and she wonders if such things are readily available. In France, a map was a rarity, unless it was a fake. She walks along the street until she sees a boy selling newspapers. She asks if he knows where she can get a map.

“A map of what?”

“Of London. Do you have one for sale?”

“No, miss. Where do you want to go?”

“To the Admiralty.”

The boy raises an eyebrow, whether out of respect or fear she is not sure.

“I can draw you how to get there,” he suggests.

She watches as he grips the pencil he stores behind his ear with an earnestness that charms her. After a time, he hands her a rudimentary but satisfactory-looking map drawn on a piece of newsprint. She can just make out the letters. She takes some coins out of her pocket, but does not know their precise worth. She hands the boy one of the smaller ones.

“Oh, no, miss, you don’t want to give me that. Here’s a truth. The larger the coin, the less it’s worth. Well, usually. This one here’s enough for me.”

Stella drops the coin into his palm. She wants to give him another, perhaps for the way he held the pencil in his fingers. He is just a boy, no older than twelve. She hopes the war will be over before he can lie about his age to enlist.

Stella follows the street names and makes turns where indicated.

Along the way, she comes upon a stationery shop and enters. She asks for two sheets of writing paper, an envelope, and several pencils. She further inquires if the gentleman behind the counter will sharpen them for her. She is certain that he will do this; her uniform carries weight wherever she goes.

On the map, the boy drew an
X
at her destination, and from what she can tell, after she has walked another fifteen minutes, she has reached it. She gazes up at a large building.

The Admiralty means nothing to Stella. What did she expect? A tower with pinnacles? Surely not this squat piece of masonry. Magnificent—imposing, even—but not the stuff of myth.

Near the entrance, one-legged men stand, leaning on straight sticks. Others have pinned-up sleeves. Still others sit in wheelchairs, two trousered stumps for legs. Have they come as she has to this building, not knowing why?

After a few minutes, she understands that they are beggars, hardly any of them making a sound. Those in uniform stand or sit with dignity. Some have mothers or sons by their sides. Stella watches as passersby tuck coins into their hands and pockets, a way of saying, “I am sorry; my son came home intact.” Or “With these coins, I bargain; my child is still in France.” Do fathers give coins for daughters? A thousand daughters are losing their souls and sometimes their lives abroad. Does anyone think of them? Has she lost her soul? Is that what is missing, what has been taken from her? Is that why she cannot remember?

The noise of the city grates on her nerves. Motorcars and omnibuses, cries for help, orders given, the click of gates. She approaches a guard, and by the way he watches her, she knows that her few steps are too many in his direction. He holds up his hand in the halt position.

“Is it possible to go inside?” she asks.

“Do you have a letter?”

“A letter?”

“Of introduction.”

She has no letter of introduction. She does not even have a name. For what reason might a person want to enter the Admiralty? She feels certain that if she could get inside, a name would occur to her, a face would appear.

“What is your business here?” he asks.

She cannot answer his question. What is her business? A chill surrounds them, the air wet and cold.

“I’m sorry,” she says and leaves the man, aware that a dozen pairs of eyes are upon her. Even the crippled know not to approach the guard.

Fog from the river rolls in as men wearing greatcoats emerge from the building and put their collars up. The light dims, an oily film settling over Stella’s eyes. The wounded leave with their takings—enough to live on for another day? Gates open to let the motorcars out while some men walk. “Sister,” someone calls to her.

His head is shrouded in a woolen scarf; perhaps the man comes out only in the fog. She can see one eye, a lipless mouth, two small orifices for a nose. Reaching into her pocket, she studies the coins in her palm and tucks several of them into the hand of the faceless man. Always look a patient in the eye.

When the man slips away, Stella strains to see if the uniformed officers are still walking or getting into their motorcars. But either they have gone or they are now swallowed up by the mist.

Reluctantly, Stella turns from the Admiralty into a brown opaque fog. Even in France, the mist was not this bad. She can hear a horse in the street but cannot see it. She takes out the map the newsboy drew; she will have to follow it in reverse. The question is no longer whether she will return to the Bridges in Bryanston Square, but whether she can find them.

O
n a bright November afternoon, several days after Stella’s visit to the Admiralty, she follows Streeter up the stairs to the top of the house, a glass dome the size of a large room. Stella watches as a shaft of light travels along the rooftops of London, receding as if it were bowing.

“Good afternoon,” Dr. Bridge says. He stands just in front of a faded yellow divan that describes a semicircle along the round room. “When my mother was alive,” he says, gesturing to the potted fruit trees that make up the other semicircle, “these produced a bounty of blossoms and some fruit—a basket of oranges, if we were lucky. Now the trees remain dormant most of the year, though we do get a bit of foliage from time to time. We have always called this the orangery.”

For a moment, Stella feels as though she has reached the roof of heaven. She is not sure she has ever been this high.

“The orangery was built in the last century and can’t be seen from the street below us. Only a chimney sweep could spy on us. It’s a magical place,” Dr. Bridge says. “I’ve been much in love with it since I was a child.”

He runs his hand along the bark of a tree. “My mother had a gardener whose sole task it was to tend to the trees. Personally, I preferred the blossoms to the oranges; the scent would linger in the stairwell. Many was the Sunday I sat in this dome finishing my schoolwork or reading—or, more likely, gazing out at the rooftops through the trees and trying to imagine a future.”

“I like thinking of you as a boy,” Stella says, aware that she is incapable of thinking of herself as a girl.

Dr. Bridge sits at one end of the divan and gestures for Stella to take a seat at the other end, so that they can face each other. “Thank you for seeing me today.” Stella has agreed to the proposal Lily and Dr. Bridge made the day after Stella returned from the Admiralty. Stella would stay with the Bridges for a time while Dr. Bridge tried to diagnose and help her. Stella would work at the settlement house with Lily, and in return Stella would allow Lily to accompany her in the motorcar on her visits to the Admiralty so that she would not compromise her recovery from pneumonia.

She smoothes the skirt of her navy dress. Dr. Bridge has on a suit appropriate to his profession, though she wonders how it can be possible to have a spotless white shirt after having completed a surgery. In France, Stella never saw doctors in suits. They wore either uniforms or white aprons, which were never clean.

“How are you feeling?” Dr. Bridge asks.

“Better. I feel stronger each day. Why do you want to help me?”

The doctor frowns slightly. “During our first lunch together, I learned that you have debilitating pains in your legs, that you sometimes go deaf, and that you have lost your memory. At first I thought your symptoms merely physical, but I have begun to wonder if they don’t in some way represent an injury in your mind. In the time since, I have made several inquiries among psychologists and psychiatrists as to your symptoms, and I have received the same reply each time. The common thought is that you are suffering from hysteria, but no psychologist or psychiatrist in London can take on female patients at this time. All are treating men who have returned from the front, or else they are serving on military medical boards. I am very sorry to have to tell you this.”

Again, Stella is assailed by a powerful feeling that the solution to her problem lies at the Admiralty.

Dr. Bridge puts his hands together. “I may be able to aid you in recovering your memory.”

“How?”

“As one colleague explained it to me, talk therapy has been effective in curing patients of their short-term ailments. We discussed the practice for some time, and he felt you and I might try it.”

“And how would that be?”

“You talk, I listen.”

Stella cannot help but laugh. “It seems awfully self-conscious.”

“Well, yes,” Dr. Bridge says. “But that’s a hurdle we shall have to get beyond.”

A sharp glint of sun lights up Dr. Bridge’s spectacles, and he squints. He moves his head away. “I do believe that talking about what has happened to you may have some benefit. Sometimes it’s necessary to speak of the worst in order to be cured.”

“I wish I could go to your clinic and have my brain repaired.”

“I don’t think that can be what you want.”

“Your job must be terrible at times,” she says.

He shrugs. “It’s my work. I find tremendous satisfaction in making an injured man well. Usually, I do it with a scalpel.”

“I feel as though you are sharpening your scalpel for me.”