At the Edge of Summer (24 page)

“You told me you paint France.”

“The most beautiful place in the world.”

And, as we fell asleep, he sighed, and said, “Not anymore.”

T
hat one desperate, fumbling night was our introduction, and the days after were the belated getting to know each other. He let me draw him with his trouser legs pushed up, over his wooden leg lashed to the smooth stump, and somehow that felt more intimate than any lovemaking could.

Of course,
wrote Grandfather, when I told him of my new friend.
He recognizes what art means to you. He sees how you light up with it. Those who love us don't ask us to mask our true selves.

Finlay became my anchor, the one mooring me to real life. At the School of Art, all was imagination. A woman wasn't just a woman under our brushes; she was a queen, a goddess, a sylph. Of course we learned the basic techniques, those shapes and lines that always made me think of shadows beneath the old chestnut tree, but, after our first years, we were meant to aspire to more. Everyone innovated. They took those lines and curved them, shaded them, twisted them, until they were anything but basic.

In class, I'd use a bold brush. I could take the still lifes, the models, the ordinary things before us, and turn them into a fairy tale. After all, wasn't that how I lived my life? Bright skirts and scarves hiding a core of plain, ordinary loneliness. With slashes and strokes, with words on a page, I'd paint the world beneath the skin of a dream.

But, outside of class, with only Finlay, me, and my pencil, I could draw the world as it really was. Finlay, after hearing that his limb had shrunk further and that he'd need a new prosthesis. Sitting on the bed, head in his cupped hands, exhausted. His trousers rolled up over his knee. The leg all wood rubbed shiny, screws, hinges, leather straps. I didn't leave anything out, not the weary hunch of his shoulders, the fingernails bitten down to nothing. In the dusty sunlight, he slumped, defeated.

Then furious, the prosthesis thrown across the room, scattered on the ground in pieces. His eyes flashed, angry at having to start over again, angry at having to relearn those wobbly steps, at having to go back to being a man stared at.

Then remorse, as he crouched on the floor, dust streaking the trouser knee of his good leg. He felt around, gathered up every last screw and splinter of wood. He sat, his stump splayed out, piecing that wooden leg back together. No matter how much it had betrayed him, he still needed it.

I drew all of that—the weariness, the frustration, the desperation—without any of the artifice or gilt I saw in class. I drew Finlay as he was, finding more beauty in that curve in his stump, in the stark strength on his face, than in a thousand queens.

“Clare, you
are
an artist,” he said, echoing me that first day. “You just have to convince the rest of the world.”

“You can't throw my own words back at me like that,” I teased, but he wasn't having any of it.

“With your pencil, you reveal me. And, in those drawings, you reveal yourself. This is what you were born to do, Clare.”

“My Something Important,” I whispered. Luc said that, the day we stood in the hallway of Mille Mots, tiptoed on the edge of our future. Two words that made me feel more than hopeful; they made me feel invincible.

I went with Finlay to Renfrewshire to be fitted for his new leg. Sitting in the recreation hall of the Princess Louise Hospital, I realized Finlay had it easier than most. Other soldiers, missing too much to be useful, waited, too. Some without a leg, some without two, some without an arm along with the rest. Not all had their prostheses yet. I watched those soldiers slouched in wheelchairs, propped with crutches against gaming tables, or leaning back against the walls, eyes closed, quiet resignation on their faces, and I memorized it all. On the train back to Glasgow, I let myself sketch.

I sketched a lanky soldier, still straight and proud in his uniform despite the folded trouser leg. I sketched a young man in an overlarge suit, his feet tapping out a One-Step, half the beats done with a stockinged foot, the other half with a wooden sole. I sketched a soldier, head bent, stub of an arm curled protectively around a small boy. Not all in the recreation hall were soldiers. I sketched a nurse, a refugee from Belgium, quietly knitting with three leather fingers.

Your Something Important.
All of those soldiers, who'd given so much of themselves on the battlefield that they'd left a piece behind, they'd been out there doing good. Their work was more important than mine. Just a pencil, a few lines of charcoal…how could that compare?

One soldier at Princess Louise had lost a nose. It had been replaced by a clumsy rubber prosthesis, thickly painted. It filled the space, but not much more. What he'd lost, he could never fully recover. Me drawing them, it wasn't enough. To keep those sketches in my book and pity. I needed to share them, to show the world that the dead are not the only ones to be mourned.

Finlay, he understood. “When you picked up that pencil, you gave me dignity on the page.” He stilled my sketching hands as the train rumbled into Queen Street Station. “Clare, other people should see this. You should send these out.”

So I did. With the last of my coal money for the week, I bought heavy sheets of paper and, wrapped in two scarves and an extra sweater against the cold, I copied over my sketches. I packed them carefully between sheets of cardboard and brought them to Fairbridge when I went to visit for Christmas.

Grandfather straightened his glasses on his nose and spread them all out on the empty dining table, scrutinizing until my nerves flickered like electric lights. When he finally slipped off the glasses, his eyes were wet.

“You have something your mother and grandmother never had.” He straightened up the pages. “The courage to capture the world as you really see it.” He packaged them up and sent them to Charles Rennie Mackintosh in London.

Clare, you're in the right place now,
Mr. Mackintosh wrote.
Will you exhibit?

Are they good enough?
I asked. My works were far from what the others at the school were producing. They weren't the sorts of things one hung alongside the bold colors and allegories. All in pencil and soft lines, they faded.

They're haunting, wrenching, honest,
he replied.
I'm reminded of Käthe Kollwitz. Those poor unfortunates in the pictures, they are the ones from whom society looks away. You look straight at them and their souls.

I was unused to praise.
Who wants haunting, wrenching, and honest in the middle of a war?

Those who know it.

But I didn't. I didn't know any of it beyond what I saw in the corridors of the hospital. Those soldiers brought a memory of the trenches home with them, to carry around always.

Clare, I know a gallery, in Paris. The owner is an old friend. May I send one to him?

I thought and, with a hesitant pen, wrote,
Yes.

The first one we sent, it sold right away. “A soldier, recently returned from the Front,” said Monsieur Santi, the gallery owner. The next two sold just as quickly. “You have an admirer,” he said, and asked me to send more.

Checks came to me in Glasgow, checks I held in disbelieving fists, then tucked away in the bottom of my washstand drawer.
Share them with the world,
Finlay had said. I hadn't expected compensation for that.

I wrote to my grandfather at Fairbridge.
I've done it. Like Grandmother, I'm an artist now.

When a letter came for me, it wasn't from Perthshire. This envelope came from Paris. The stationery bore the insignia of the American Red Cross.

Studio for Portrait Masks

70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

Paris

January 1918

Dear Miss Ross,

My name is Anna Coleman Ladd and, under the auspices of the American Red Cross, I am attempting to set up a studio in Paris modeled after Lieutenant Francis Derwent Wood's Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth. I am not sure if you've read about Lt. Wood's work with mutilated English soldiers, though you may have heard of his department, popularly called the “Tin Noses Shop.” Like yourself, Lt. Wood is an artist, and he has lectured at the Glasgow School of Art, so you may be familiar with him. He has pioneered a new and quite astonishing technique of casting thin metal masks that are light, comfortable, and quite lifelike. Not medicine, but rather art.

These masks can cover the whole face, depending on the degree of injury, or can cover only part of the face. Glass eyes can be added with durable lashes made of thin strips of painted metal. For masks that cover one's mouth, an opening can be left for a cigarette. These masks are seamless. It is quite an impressive feat, to make masks delicate and thinner than a lady's visiting card, yet conveying so much humanity in those few ounces of metal.

I have learned his technique and, with the Red Cross, am setting up a studio here in Paris to help French soldiers in similar circumstances (called here
mutilés
). I've made some adjustments to the process—enamel paint offers more lifelike tones of color—but follow Lt. Wood's general method in sketching, casting, sculpting, hammering, and finally electroplating the copper mask.

I have been looking for artists who pay great attention to life detail and who have the compassion to work amongst disfigured soldiers. I have seen your pencil drawings in La Galerie Porte d'Or and, Miss Ross, I believe you have both qualities.

I will be in London next Tuesday. Would you do me the honor of meeting with me? I would like to speak to you more about the opportunity to assist me in my work. Helping these soldiers is such a small thing for us to do, but for them, it is anything but small.

Sincerely, etc.

These days it was hard to feel like art mattered. When men were giving themselves, giving their youth, giving their life, when women were waiting and praying, I was painting. I was sculpting and drawing and creating, as though there wasn't a war, as though my creation could counter all of that destruction. None of what I was doing signified outside of the art school. Anna Coleman Ladd was doing something that did.

I remembered the soldier I used to see waiting in the hospital, self-conscious with his ill-fitting rubber nose. If he'd had the chance to instead wear a work of art, would it change things for him? Would his world seem a fraction less dim?

“You're meant to do this, Clare,” Finlay said. “You're more than an artist. You're a warrior.”

“You're the one who's been to battle,” I pointed out.

“And you're the one who's saved me.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Now, go. Go bring another man back to himself.”

T
he soldier stood in the threshold of the Studio for Portrait Masks. The room was bright, but he kept to the shadows.

Mrs. Ladd tried to keep the soldiers at ease and the studio cheerful. The phonograph in the corner, the sun-streaked windows and skylights, the little vases of peonies tucked here and there, warmed the room. Posters and flags were tacked between the windows—a large American flag, for her, and smaller British and French flags, for the rest of us working in the studio. It was a bright spot in an otherwise somber city. Three months after the war ended, Paris was still recovering.

Usually, the soldiers sat in little groups, laughing, smoking, playing checkers and drinking wine. Some were waiting for appointments. Others had nowhere else to go. Since being demobilized, too many lived on the streets. They begged for food, drink, a place to warm up. Here, at least for part of the day, they had all three. But, more than that, here they found people who understood. They found other soldiers just as broken.

This new one, though, he came alone, lurking in the shadows of the hall, not quite stepping into the room. They all did on their first visit. Once fearless in the face of a trench wall, they were now afraid to even step in the light. Light revealed what had become of their dreams of glory.

“May I help you?” I asked in French. Not Parisian French, but the French I'd learned in Africa, tinged with the warm, open sounds of Arabic.

He didn't answer. The way he kept tugging on the brim of his
calot,
keeping a hand near his face, the way he kept his head down—he was a man used to shadows.

I couldn't see his face, but it had to be shattered. Here, they all were. These soldiers who came to the studio, they were missing ears, eyes, parts of their faces. More than that, they were missing parts of their souls.

“Are you here for a mask?” Behind me, sculptors bustled about with plasticine and brushes and tins of enamel paint. A soldier lay back with his head resting on a table as Mrs. Ladd carefully coated his face with white plaster. Another stood in front of the mirror, looking, for the first time, at the copper mask covering the ruined half of his face. “Let me show you our work.” The phonograph played “La Madelon.”

He shook his head. One hand still hovered near his face, but the other, pressed against his leg, had relaxed. In the room behind me, someone had begun singing.

Through the shadows, nothing but horizon blue and the pale oval of a face. So many of the soldiers who came in had worn their injuries for so long they had the old uniforms, those dark blue tunics and bright
garance
red trousers. France was still trying to live down that mistake. After losing hundreds of thousands of troops in the first months of the war, they thankfully replaced the
garance
with horizon blue. This soldier, though, he wasn't in red. He'd been in the war longer than many.

On his left arm, three chevrons bore that up, indicating three years' service, and on his right, another for each occasion he was wounded. Only one on that arm. Three years faithfully served and then, in return, one injury for him to carry the rest of his days.

“You don't have to stay, but won't you please come in? At least for a few moments?” I tightened my shawl, dark and swirling like smoke. I'd traded it for a still-damp watercolor in Algiers. “Warm up with a cup of tea. I can show you my sketches of the other guests we've had.”

He cleared his throat. “You sketch?” His eyes shone in the dimness. “Ah, there's charcoal on your fingertips.”

Something in his voice washed over me, warm like summer. “Spoken like an artist.”

His hand lowered from his face and went behind his back. I wished I could see his fingertips.

“I have an extra drawing pad.” I took a step back. “Stay, please. Stay and sit with me awhile.”

He hesitated for just a moment more. Then he stepped out of the shadows.

He was in a bad way, that was clear. A fragmented shell, maybe. They tore like bread knives. Or a bayonet, swung too near. I was learning to identify what caused each injury. Long scars ran from the side of his jaw upwards. More than scars, though; they sank deep, like the trenches running across the Western Front. The right side of his face was unmarred, but the left, that whole side was a battlefield. I kept my gaze firmly on it, forced myself to look at every ridge, every crater, every shell hole. The map a soldier brought home.

He stood tall, shoulders back, as though daring me to recoil.

But I didn't. I knew his face was a private hell for him, but I had seen worse cases in the studio. Men missing noses, men without chins, men whose faces sank in on themselves like deflated balloons. One of those poor men sat over at the checkers table right now, waiting for a few final dabs of enamel paint on his false nose. Then he was planning to go home to see his mother for the first time since he was wounded. Though the soldier standing so defiantly in the doorway had it bad, I had seen plenty worse.

So I made sure to look him square in the eye. I made sure to modulate my breathing so he wouldn't hear an extra hitch in my throat. I made sure he knew that no matter what reactions he met walking down the streets of Paris, he would not find them here. Instead I asked, “How do you take your tea?”

I settled him in at a table and filled a chipped cup. Mrs. Ladd was American and assumed the French thought as much of tea as she did. The few British artists in the studio certainly didn't mind. While I busied myself with unwrapping my charcoals, sharpening my pencils, squaring up my sketch pad, he took a polite sip. I passed him a pad of his own and then the tea grew cold.

At first he didn't do much, just stared down at the paper as though he didn't know what to do with it. I wondered if I was wrong. But then he picked up a pencil and rolled it between his fingers. “These are the pencils my father always used to prefer.”

“They've always been my favorites.” I took one of my own.

He started drawing.

I began with the outline of his face. “How long have you been in Paris?” In my few months here, I'd learned how to ask questions carefully. A direct “How long ago were you wounded?” would cause that familiar look of anguish to flash through their eyes.

He still flinched at the words. He saw straight through it. “Nineteen seventeen. Bastille Day.”

A year and a half, though, to him, it probably felt like more. “Have you been in Paris all this time?”

He pulled a cigarette case from his jacket pocket but didn't open it. “Wouldn't you be?”

I worked on sketching in the good side of his face. A narrow eye, brown like an almond, with long lashes. My pencil loved drawing those in. Thick curved eyebrows. A high, smooth forehead ending in short curls. A sharply angled cheek with a nick of a scar on top. “A work of art,” I murmured.

“I'm sorry?” He looked up from his drawing.

“Works of art.” I stared down at the lines beneath my pencil. “In Paris.”

He watched me.

As though a mirror were down the center of his face, I began copying the features from one side to the other. “What's your favorite museum in the city?” I drew the curve of his chin in an unbroken line. “And you're a liar if you say the Louvre.”

He blinked and leaned back in the chair. “Musée Jacquemart-André,” he said without hesitation.

“So intimate, yet so elegant.”

“You've been there?”

“Where else could I see
Venus Asleep
?”

That lip twitch was definitely an attempt at a smile. “I shouldn't be surprised to find an art lover in a studio.”

“And I shouldn't be surprised to find one in a soldier.” My pencil smoothed in the lines of his missing cheek. “As a girl, I visited France. It only takes once to fall in love.”

“That it does,” he said with a touch of wistfulness. His pencil scratched softly.

“What are you sketching?” I finally asked.

“Just that.”

“France?”

“Love.”

I didn't ask to see what was on his page. “There,” I said. I turned the sheet of paper around to him. “Where should I make adjustments?”

He stared for a moment, then quietly offered a few suggestions—eyes a little wider, nose narrower, a tiny divot in his chin.

“Fine,” I said, my pencil already flashing. He waited, watching. And I drew. But something wasn't right. Everything felt shifted to the left, off-kilter. The angles didn't match up.

I set down my pencil and wiped my fingers on the sides of my skirt. “I need an accurate portrait of your face before…before now.” His eyes flashed understanding. “Would you allow me?”

Without waiting for his assent, I closed my eyes and reached forward.

My fingers found his face, the one side smooth, the other rough beneath my fingertips. Gently, I traced up along the edges of his face, along his cheekbones and the curves of his eye sockets, down the bridge of his nose. I ignored the scars and the jagged edges for what was beneath. With light fingertips, I felt the lines of his face. I opened my eyes.

He sat motionless, breathless, eyes wide-open and on me.

I flushed. “I'm sorry. It's the way I learned to create a face.”

His only reply was a deep, ragged inhale.

Mrs. Ladd always said I was too familiar, that I should keep my fingers on the sketchbook. That these soldiers, voluntarily cut off from their families for years, weren't used to touch. But I wasn't sure how one could remain true and accurate without feeling the bones of what they were drawing.

“I didn't mean to startle you.”

He breathed a sigh, then said, “You didn't. At least not in the way you think.”

Confused, I looked back down to my drawing.

“Please,” he whispered, “what is your name?” He'd spoken in English.

“Ross. Clare Ross.”

He leaned back and swallowed. “Clare Ross,” he repeated. Then straightened. “Mademoiselle Ross, you feel your art.”

“I had an excellent teacher,” I said softly.

Something tensed in his face. “And where is your teacher now?”

“I'd give everything to find out.”

“Please excuse me.” He stood abruptly.

As he walked away, my pencil hurried, filling in adjustments, adding what I'd felt beneath his skin. Wondering if the answer would appear on my paper.

When it did, I froze. Those eyes, they were always so serious. That mouth used to smile when I least expected it. And that little scar on the top of his right cheek, the souvenir of a long-ago tennis match. I traced the lines on the page, smudging them beneath my fingertips until it was as hazy as a dream. These days, that's all he felt like.

“Mrs. Ladd,” I said, eyes still on the page. “The soldier I was drawing, did he have an appointment? Did he leave a name?”

As she wiped her hands on her smock and went to the book she kept in her desk, I flipped over the sketch that the soldier had left behind. I no longer needed her reply.

On the page he'd left behind was my face. Not the face of the woman I saw each morning in the mirror, but of a fifteen-year-old girl, lonely, scared, leaning out of a tower window wondering if she'd ever be strong enough to fly away.

I didn't need Mrs. Ladd to tell me his name, because it was on my tongue, tasting like oranges and rain and the scent of roses. Years of memories, tasting like summertime.

Luc.