At the Edge of Summer (29 page)

I cleaned the negative cast we took of his face. With fresh plaster of Paris, I made a positive and smoothed out any little lumps and divots left behind by the casting process.

“It was a good cast,” Pascalle complained. “I didn't do anything wrong.”

“No, you followed the procedure,” I said quietly, scraping my knife across the dried plaster. “But this is one I need to do myself.”

She stirred a bowl of wet plaster of Paris. “This will start hardening in a moment. You need to take the next cast.”

“It's not ready yet.”

I fiddled with smoothing until I'd ruined that bowl of plaster and had to mix another. Pascalle sighed, but she helped me make the second negative. We then filled it with plasticine clay to make a positive “squeeze.” An inelegant name for a piece of sculpture.

I lifted the plaster cast off the gray plasticine. Luc's ruined face looked up at me from the table and I swallowed back tears.

“Miss Ross.” Mrs. Ladd was suddenly at my elbow. “Miss Bernard told me you've been crying.”

“No, I haven't.” I shot Pascalle a look across the room, but she was studiously involved with a brush and some turpentine. “I've been tired.”

She settled into a chair across from me. “You understand why we cannot cry in the studio.”

“The soldiers are sensitive to their appearances,” I said automatically. “They have a difficult enough time with reactions outside of the studio. I know. But…”

“But you're only crying over a squeeze. Is that what you were going to say?”

“Yes.”

“Miss Ross,” she said, “look at those soldiers sitting over there.”

Though they sat with wine and hearty conversation, there was an alertness about them. A tense watchfulness. They were like deer ready to bolt, waiting for the first sneer or startled look.

“They don't care that you are only crying down onto a squeeze. In that squeeze, in that other ruined face, they see their own.”

I swallowed, and I nodded.

“Is this the same soldier as the other day?” She reached across and pulled the plasticine closer. “It is a clean cast. He doesn't appear too bad. You should do well on this one.”

“I hope I can.”

“You always do. Why are you doubting now?”

I ran a finger along the edge of the plasticine face and didn't answer. I couldn't tell her how seeing all of the details, being able to touch each and every scar in the clay, made it seem so much more real to me. That, even though I helped soldiers worse off than Luc all the time, helping
him
meant so much more.

“Would it be better for someone else to work on this one? It doesn't have to be Miss Bernard.” Everyone had seen my frantic run into the studio the other day, when Luc was panicking beneath the wet plaster. I'd dropped the basket of Pascalle's supper. The stairs still bore a dark streak of wine.

“No, please. I can do it.” I looked up. “I'll hold it together.”

She sat quiet for a moment, her hands crossed on the table. Finally she sighed. “Do you think me heartless? Unaffected by what I see in here every day?”

“Of course not, Madame.”

“When I first came to France, before I opened the studio, I went out and toured the hospitals. I needed to see the state of the French soldiers. I even went out closer to the lines—guided, of course—and saw these injuries when they were fresh.”

I held my breath. I couldn't imagine; when their faces were contorted with more than emotional pain.

“I'd come back here, to the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which wasn't yet a studio. It was an empty room. I'd sit here alone and sometimes I was overcome.” Her eyes misted in a quick instant, but she blinked and forced a sunny smile. “We are like the masks. We need to be. Strong metal covering vulnerability. They both exist, mademoiselle.”

“But even the strongest copper can crack.”

She smiled gently. “We don't let it.”

I went back to my squeeze, feeling too fragile to be made of metal but knowing I had to, for Luc's sake. For the sake of all the men in the room. So I ignored the scars, the pits, the ridges, and I concentrated on his eyes.

While taking that first cast, a soldier sat with eyes closed, covered over with thin slips of tissue paper. The plasticine squeeze gave us the chance to open those eyes with a burin and a steady hand. It was a necessary step for those soldiers who needed an eye on their mask to replace one lost. Luc didn't, but I still etched them in. I wanted it to be the Luc I remembered.

I sat, with burin in hand, my own eyes closed against the reality of the room, and tried to remember his. It wasn't hard. They were the one thing I recognized when he came back to the studio. Brown like almonds, narrow, ringed with thick, dark lashes. Those eyes that startled wide that first morning when I ducked his tennis swing in the front hall, the eyes so intense and watchful as I tasted my first mouthful of ginger preserve, those eyes that shone in the dark the night that Grandfather took me away from Mille Mots. I knew them well.

It was short work to etch them in, but I wasn't satisfied. Turn up a little more at the corner. No, too much. A few more flecks here, where, in my memory, it was darker brown. A gleam, a strength, a surety. I could do my best, but those last, I couldn't etch in.

When Mrs. Ladd was ready to lock the studio, I still sat, curls of clay littering the table. She took the burin from my hand. “Miss Ross. Clare. He's waited this long for a mask. Another day won't matter much.”

But it wasn't just “another day.” I spent three days alone working on the squeeze, until Pascalle was glaring and even Mrs. Ladd looked drawn. Then I cast again with plaster of Paris, one negative and one positive. On this last positive, I built Luc's face.

I worked slowly, carefully, scraping away the plaster grain by grain. I had my sketch right beside me, the sketch that first revealed the battered soldier as my lost childhood love. I worried over every line in the sketch. I doubted my memory.

But I also doubted my doubt. Maybe there was something, some chink in his armor. An honest something to hope for. With each scrape of my knife, with each shower of plaster dust falling onto the table,
maybe, maybe,
said my heart.

At the end of each day, I caught up the dust into my palm. I went to the Square du Vert-Galant and stood with my feet on the point of land. It was the place Luc had mentioned in his letter, the place where he said he always felt the breath of Paris on his face. Now, it was my quiet spot in the city. I let the wind carry away the palmful of dust into the river and I hoped.

That first week, after Luc touched my wrist and asked me to stay, he didn't come to the studio at all. Then one day he appeared in the doorway, shy, hat in hand like a suitor. I blushed to see it.

But he didn't talk to me. He just nodded and went to sit with the other
mutilés
and their checkerboards. Another patient. I bent my head and tried to forget he was right there, watching.

I smoothed out his left cheek, his jaw, the corner of his eye. With my knife, I gave him that angled cheekbone I remembered. That straight jaw that always tightened when he was nervous. That left eye that crinkled at the corner in one of his unexpected laughs. Luc, always so serious. Even as a boy—studying, working, wishing he could do more for the château—he always looked like he carried the world on his shoulders.

That's why his letters surprised me. They weren't at all serious. Hiding behind pen and paper, Luc bantered, joked, teased, in a way that he didn't often do in person. That was the Luc I thought I'd meet again someday. In all of those sunshine daydreams I had of coming back to Paris, of climbing the paths in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont and painting by the Seine, that lighthearted Luc was there by my side. None of the adolescent awkwardness we'd known before. Instead, the comfortableness, the humor, the friendship we'd built through our letters.

But here I was, in Paris at last, with Luc at last, and there were no smiles. His face was drawn and weary. He had no laughter left.

With my knife, I sculpted the Luc of my letters, the Luc of my daydreams. I curved the left side of his mouth upwards in a smile. I quirked an eyebrow in a moment of suppressed mirth. It didn't matter. Mrs. Ladd would make me change it in the end.

To my surprise, she didn't. She paused once at my table, nodded down at the plaster, and said, “That's the face of a man healed.”

Each morning, he'd arrive at nine-thirty in his wrinkled gray suit and secondhand fedora to sit with the
mutilés
and a glass of wine that he'd nurse for hours. Though he always held a book in front of him, I pretended he was watching me over the top of the spine. And then hated myself for wishing. He was waiting for a mask, to allow him to move on, and here I was sighing like a schoolgirl and stretching out my work so he wouldn't have to leave. He'd stay until three o'clock and then, with a quick glance my way, would slip out the door.

One day when he arrived, it was to a sketchbook and pencil waiting at his usual seat. He blinked, and I smiled to see him so startled. He looked up, questioningly. I nodded. That whole morning, as I pressed the sheet of copper against my plaster sculpture, as I traced each line and curve until it held the imprint of Luc's face, he warily regarded the sketchbook. I trimmed away the extra copper and the right half of the face; he had no need to cover that. As I smoothed down the raw edges, Luc finally picked up the pencil. Arm held stiff, he began to draw.

After he left, when I was cleaning up, I opened the book. He'd roughed in a soldier, a poilu in a dented helmet and greatcoat. Though the soldier's shape was blurred, his face was full of careful detail. Weary lines, a grim line of a mouth, yet eyes boyish wide. It wasn't anyone I recognized, but it was someone Luc knew well.

The next day, when I put the copper into the electroplating bath, he wasn't alone. A few other
mutilés
had pulled chairs nearby and were watching Luc work. He didn't say a word, but they kept his wine refilled. He'd added two other soldiers to the sketch, both facing away. One leaned on a rifle, the other was praying. By midday there was a fourth soldier, sitting with his head hanging between his knees.

On the third day, Luc tore sheets from the back of his book. There was now a tableful of
mutilés
with paper and pencil, sketching away at trees and houses and airplanes. Every once in a while he'd look up from his own drawing to offer a quiet suggestion or two. Meanwhile he added a parapet and row of sandbags behind his penciled poilus.

The next morning, when I took the gleaming half mask from its bath, Luc finally approached. He didn't even glance down at the drying mask, waiting to be painted. He only looked at me.

“Thank you,” was all he said. “You knew what I needed.”

When I looked at his sketch later, the young soldier in the middle held a sword, a great sword with a twisted pommel. In the midst of war, he looked invulnerable.

You knew what I needed.

T
he day the mask was ready, I was as nervous as Christmas morning.

I'd spent months hiding—behind my scarf, behind my guilt, behind my excuses. At Mabel's insistence, I went reluctantly that first time to Mrs. Ladd's studio. I knew I was going to another mask, albeit one more tangible than the regret I'd been wearing. I didn't expect more than a more polite way to hide my memories. I didn't expect to be fixed.

Then I met Clare. There'd never been façades between us, even when we had nothing but letters. She'd put on a falsely cheerful front for her grandfather, as I had with Maman, but we didn't with each other. Our words, our pictures, our ink-smudged fingerprints in the margins, all were honest. With Clare in the studio, my defenses slowly began crumbling. They wouldn't have mattered to her anyway.

I'd held her hand while she sponged plaster off my cheeks. I'd watched her across the room while she spent far too long making the mask. These past weeks, my heart made me more vulnerable than my ruined face ever had.

But here she was, as nervous as I was, fingers tapping the underside of the table, waiting to pull the cloth from yet another mask. She'd seen me bare, and yet was handing me something to cover all that again.

“I did the best I could,” she said right away. “Well, are you ready?”

I was freezing cold all of a sudden, and no, I wasn't ready, but I swallowed and I nodded. She pulled up the cloth.

Despite her doubts, Clare had done it. That curve of my brow, the shape of my lips, the angle of my cheek. She'd taken half of a ruined face, a handful of memories, and she'd made me. No one else could have done it.

“Magnifique.”
I reached for it, almost. “Of course it is.” What was I imagining? Something as stiff and distant as the plaster casts lining the walls? Something that wasn't me? “Mademoiselle…Clare…can I have a moment, please?”

She opened her mouth as though to protest, she bit her lip, she nodded. After a moment of withheld breath and withheld words, she retreated to the other side of the room.

I was left alone with my own face.

As perfect as it was, it was unsettling. To see half of my own face, too shiny, a single gaping hole for my eye, staring up from the table. Half of a carefully stubbled cheek, a half a mouth caught up in an almost-smile, a look I hadn't worn in far too long. Too perfect. It could have been a painting, a sculpture, something hanging from the wall of a gallery. It was vivid and lifelike, but it wasn't real.

Was this my choice, then? To be a gargoyle or, instead, to be a work of art? I touched the metal with my index finger. Perhaps these days I was as cold to the touch.

“Luc.” Clare was suddenly at my elbow.

She stood by me, so shining and hopeful. I thought of all her patience and persistence, when I'd given her nothing but bitterness in return. She didn't demand, just said, “Please.”

I picked up the mask. Clare was right. She did make a thing of beauty. I put it on.

For a moment everything went dim. She fussed and adjusted, her fingers light as pearls. I blinked and, through the narrow left eyehole, I saw her stop and press a hand to her mouth. So quickly, I wondered if I was wrong. I wondered what she saw.

It rubbed at the edges, the way a new pair of shoes did. The weight of the metal pushed against my scars and made me feel every ridge. It was cold and smooth as ice, but Clare had done well. The mask skimmed my face like a second skin.

She finished fiddling with it and asked, “Would you like to see the mirror?”

“Take me outside,” I said, drawing a deep breath. “That's all the mirror I need.”

She waited a moment, but nodded. “Good,” she said. Again that quick hand to her mouth. “I can see how the colors hold in the sunlight.”

I let Clare lead me down the stairs and out into the light of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

Between the sun and the opening for my left eye, I couldn't see much. It was like a single horse blinder. My cheek sweated beneath the metal, then itched. I reached up to scratch underneath, but she pulled my hand down. I stumbled on the cobbles.

“Stop worrying,” she whispered. “You're counting your steps.”

“It's like being in a cave. I can't see the sky on that side.” My arm tensed beneath her fingers.

“Then tip your head up.”

And so I did. I stopped, and turned my face up to the sky. Cool air dipped beneath the mask. Above me, clear blue.

“Luc,” she said softly, “look.”

The narrow streets of the Left Bank were busy with people coming home from work or the day's shopping. Smartly dressed shopgirls, women in long striped aprons and wooden sabots, students in faded black jackets, vendors in dark smocks. Women in flowered straw hats, some with books or music cases tucked under their arms, brushed past shabbily dressed men with ink on their fingertips. Everyone was so brisk and sure. But, most important, they didn't give me a second glance.

What would they see if they did? Smooth metal and a false smile hiding a man with shaking knees, who clung desperately to the woman next to him. A perfect face on an imperfect man.

I scrabbled at the edges of the mask. The metal bit into the pads of my fingers.

“No, no, Luc!”

“I can't see,” I said, though my mind was still filled with blue sky. “I can't breathe anymore.”

“You can.” She took my hands, took my whole weight as I sagged. “Remember…remember when we'd pick grapes down near the pasture? We found a beehive and you were stung twice.” She was trying to do what she'd done that day in the studio, when she held my hands and brought me back to Mille Mots with her. When she tried to make me forget my fears. “And remember when you'd bring me bread and jam from the kitchen when Marthe wasn't looking?” My breathing had slowed. It almost matched the rhythm in hers. “You'd spread your jacket out on the lawn and arrange the treats just so, like a little picnic only for me.”

It was only for her. Always.

“And remember when I followed you to the caves? We ate so many oranges the air smelled like happiness. I ducked into the cave and you waited right outside for me, worrying the whole time. You know, that day was the first time I wished you'd kiss me.”

I let go of her hands. “Stop trying to make me remember.” I stumbled backwards into the street. “Stop trying to make me hope.”

“Hope?” She straightened. “If nothing else, I wished to give you hope.”

I ran a finger beneath the edge of the mask to wipe away sweat. “I thought you wanted to give me a future.”

“Exactly,” she said, her eyes too bright. “With a mask, think of what you could do.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Remember the pamphlet I mentioned? The Institut National?”

“You think I can just pick a new future from a pamphlet?”

“See it as a new beginning.” Through the narrow eyehole, I could see her, standing straight and cold on the pavement. She'd forgotten her jacket. “Whatever skill you want, whatever job you're hoping for, you can have it.”

“Men like me, we take what we're offered. We can't afford to expect anything more.” I touched my metal cheek. “A man like me can't hope.”

Arms wrapped around myself, I left her standing on the pavement in her sweater.

W
hen I got back to the apartment, I needed to wash away Clare.

Demetrius whistled “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” so I shushed him. Lysander, ever the fretter, took up my shushing. I poured out a pitcher of water and splashed a handful their way, until they bristled with outraged squawks. Lysander smoothed down his feathers; Demetrius swore in English.

I took off my new mask and scrubbed with icy water until my arms and face were red. I stripped off all my clothes—the outfit I'd picked out with such care that morning for the studio. The pressed suit, the shirt the color of cornflowers, all neat and all new, like I was setting off for a wedding. I changed into a soft pair of old pants. Dripping, shirtless, I stared down at the enameled face on the washstand. I wondered what Clare saw.

But when a knock sounded on the door, my heart gave a funny leap. I threw a towel over the parrots' cage. I fastened my mask over my wet face and pulled a clean shirt from the hook.

It was her.

“What are you doing here?” I nudged open the door, enough to see the pale curve of Clare's face beneath the brim of her red hat. “How did you find me?” Behind the door I buttoned my shirt one-handed.

“Mrs. Ladd gave me your address.” She hesitated. “Are you angry?”

I ran a hand through my damp hair. “No.” A cold drop slid down the back of my neck. “But I've been home for an hour at least.”

“And I've been standing across the street for an hour at least.”

I leaned against the door, waiting, ignoring those funny little leaps in my chest.

“I just…” She twisted the cuff of her jacket. “Luc, you said back there that a man like you can't hope.” She barely breathed the next words. “But you can.”

I hadn't heard her right. “Do you—”

“May I come in?”

I glanced back over my shoulder, at the stained and threadbare rug, the unmade bed, the foul-mouthed parrots, the cracked, dirt-streaked window I kept open because the latch was busted. “No,” I began, but she pushed through anyway. And stopped.

Though my single room was gray and narrow, pale frames hung from each wall, each containing a single pencil drawing. The reasons I lived in this dingy room, why I never had money for the streetcar, why I bought day-old bread. Clare stood in the middle of my room, her open hands straight down at her sides, and spun to see her own drawings.

“I saw them and—” I started, but she cut me off with a chop and a shake of her head.

She'd seen me lying back on that table in the studio, plaster in my eyebrows, my face under the light. Now I was seeing her just as naked.

All of those memories, jumbled up, came back, all of those rare instances of Clare's face as open and unguarded as it was right now. How her eyes shone at the first sight of the Brindeau caves, how they laughed when she saw my childhood portraits, how they stared into mine that moment when she touched my face and I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to again right now.

“I never thought I'd see these again,” she breathed. She stepped to one framed drawing of a man, craggy-faced and harsh, yet holding to him a small boy with such tenderness that you almost didn't notice his withered arm. “He was born the day the war began. The bluest eyes, like his father.”

I cleared my throat. “Your cross-hatching…I thought they were blue.”

“As cobalt.” She turned to a picture of a young soldier balancing a harmonica on two stubbed wrists. “He brightened the hospital with his music.” A woman, pale hair tied beneath a head scarf, sat with elbows on her knees, bared forearms puckered and scarred. Her chin rested on open palms with seven fingers between them. “She's from Belgium, a nurse who I met at the Princess Louise Hospital. Lost everything but her grandmother's knitting needles. She made me this scarf, you know.”

Eyes still on the framed pictures, she unwound the scarf from her neck and passed it to me. It was as soft as new grass.

“So you were the one who bought all of my drawings,” she finally said. “Monsieur Santi said I had a secret admirer.”

“Secret…” I handed back the scarf. “I didn't think you'd want to know it was me.” I wrapped my arms around my chest, suddenly aware that I didn't have a jacket on.

She stopped her perusal of the drawings. Those bright eyes were turned on me. “I don't hear from you for years—not a word—and when I find you, it's to see every drawing I ever sold hanging on your walls.” Her voice lowered, brittle at the edges. “You never even asked what I've been doing these past years.”

“I don't have to. I can see.” I waved a hand around the room at the frames. “You were off capturing life. Like you told me all those years ago, telling a story through art.”