Stella Bain (6 page)

The doctor appears to find the question abrupt and surprising. “I am, yes. Quite happy. But…”

“It’s rude of me to ask? Inappropriate?”

“No and yes,” he says. “My personal life should remain outside our discussions, but this is somewhat complicated because you first came to my household and not to me as a doctor. So I think I can answer your question.”

The umbrella he carries serves as a kind of walking stick. She watches as he rhythmically taps it along the path. He has a longer stride than she does, and silently they compromise to reach an even step.

“I fell in love with Lily at a cricket match,” he begins. “I was a spectator, the guest of another party, but I couldn’t help but notice a striking young woman who appeared to be enthralled by the match, sometimes frowning, sometimes laughing to herself. I guessed that she had a husband or a fiancé among the players in order to have such an assiduous interest. None of the other women seemed to be paying the slightest attention to what was happening on the pitch. Even I couldn’t, having other matters on my mind. At the time, I had just started my clinic.”

“When was this?”

“In 1908.”

Stella cannot remember 1908. Or any year but the current one.

“When the match was over, I expected the young woman to greet one of the players, but she didn’t. She joined two people who appeared to be her mother and sister, and after a time, a man, a player in uniform, came and sat with them, but he paid no special attention to Lily. I later learned that he was her brother, Tom, and that Lily enjoyed games of sport and their rules. She had been athletic in her school days and had won many ribbons and prizes, but of course there was no outlet for such activities after she left school. I think she misses extreme exercise, and had I not persuaded her to marry me, she might have become superb at tennis.”

“You married her because she knew the rules of cricket?” Stella says teasingly.

Dr. Bridge laughs. “I married Lily for her beauty, her wit, and her compassion.”

“Why will a man never say what is foremost in his mind when choosing a bride?”

“And what is that?”

“His physical passion.”

“Well, I see that the frank VAD has returned,” he says in an equally teasing tone. “You’ve spent too much time among the French doctors. When men say they marry for beauty, a healthy passion, as you say, is implied. But we should not be talking about me so much. Though I’m a bit of a novice at the talking cure, this much I’m sure of.”

They enter a rose crescent, the canes dormant. Stella bends to a dead bloom as if to inhale the scent. She breathes deeply. Another garden of roses comes to mind. She pops her head up and turns to the doctor.

“I had a garden!” she exclaims. “Yes, I’m sure of it. I know how to deadhead roses and how to prune them.”

“Where was this garden?”

Stella shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“What was in the garden? Think hard.”

Stella shuts her eyes. “Roses,” she says. “Daylilies, yellow. Hydrangeas, poppies, and…and something by a fence that bloomed only once…what’s the name? Big, blowsy flowers, white tending toward pink?
Peonies!
” She opens her eyes, thrilled to have this memory.

Dr. Bridge seems intrigued. “Go on,” he says. “Describe the garden to me.”

“There’s a white fence.” She pauses. “It extends from the corner of a house.”

“One of the houses you drew?”

“No. Another house, but I can’t see it. The garden is a rectangle, and there are blue flowers against one side of it. I don’t know what they are.”

“Who is with you in the garden?”

“No one,” she says. “Well, maybe someone else is there, below eye level—a gardener, perhaps, but I can’t see who it is. But…oh…it’s going. The garden is going….” She reaches out a hand as if she could pull it back. She looks up at Dr. Bridge. “How did that happen? Where has it gone?”

“It may return,” he says.

“Oh,” she cries out again, wrapping an arm around her waist. “It was so close. I could touch it. I could smell it.”

“Let’s sit here a minute,” he suggests, guiding her to a nearby bench. “Can you see it at all?”

She gazes into an abyss. She feels bereft. “I know it only in my head as a recent memory in the same way I remember what I had for dinner last night. The immediacy is gone.”

“Does it feel as if you had imagined it?”

“Not when it happened, but now I’m not so sure.”

Dr. Bridge uses the tip of his umbrella to poke the dirt. “When one has a recollection from childhood,” he explains, “the first few seconds are very real, but then it quickly becomes simply a memory. And this is a good thing,” he adds, “or we should be paralyzed with too many seemingly real moments at once.”

Stella sighs. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“When you and I first walked in the garden, a nanny and three children entered. You were remarkably calm.”

“Was I?”

“What struck me most was your aura of complete serenity. It was in your face, in the relaxation of your body.”

She thinks a long moment.

“Try and see the nanny and children now,” he directs.

Again, she shuts her eyes to do so. After a while, she begins to shake her head. “I can see them as a memory, but I can’t re-create the feelings I had then.”

Dr. Bridge stands and waits for her to join him. When they resume their walk, Stella glances back at the roses, hoping her garden will come alive again. She is reluctant to leave the area.

“The last drawing you showed me,” he says. “Did that man in the bed hurt you?”

“I don’t know.”

“But the drawing made you extremely uncomfortable.”

“Yes,” she admits.

“Did you hurt him?”

“What an extraordinary question.”

“Yes, it is. But you mentioned earlier that you felt a great guilt, that maybe you had done something terribly wrong. I wondered if the drawing came to you because it was a clue to that experience.”

Stella has a sudden and intense desire to flee, but she cannot run away from the man beside her. Instead, she freezes rigid on the spot, unable to move a limb, unable to make sense of anything happening around her. She reaches for the back of her neck, certain that someone or something is about to grab her.

After a time, and she cannot say how long, her limbs loosen and she begins to wobble. A man holds her arm.

“Stella?”

Slowly, she turns her head. She recognizes the man beside her; his name is Dr. Bridge. But she cannot remember how it is that she knows him.

“What happened to you?” he asks.

She shakes her head. She does not understand. “I was afraid,” she says.

“Of whom? Of what?”

“Something was behind me, and I knew that I had to get away. But I understood I couldn’t get away. It felt as if I were frozen.”

“I think you had a kind of seizure,” the doctor says quietly. “There was no one behind you.”

“How long did it last?”

“Almost ninety seconds by my watch.”

“Ninety seconds!” Stella cries. Ninety incomprehensible seconds. “You have to help me,” she pleads, turning to face him. “You have to help me fix this.”

“I’ll try. But right now I think we should get you home.”

“Home,” she repeats. “I have no home.”

“You have one temporarily,” he says.

“Am I getting worse?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he answers.

A
man wrestles with Stella, a man of ferocious strength. He pins her arms up beside her face on the pillow. She pushes as hard as she can with her legs, throwing off her blanket. She kicks the man in the stomach, and he makes a sound of pain. He is going to hurt her, she knows it. She tries to scream.

“Stella!” a man says in a firm voice. “Stella!”

She opens her eyes. Illuminated by the crack of light coming through the open bedroom door are the stern features of a man she knows, and for a second, she is not sure if he means to harm her or not.

“Stella,” he says again.

Dr. Bridge gradually lessens the pressure on her wrists, as if testing whether or not she will strike out.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, breathing fast.

He lets go of her wrists and steps away from the bed. A wildness moves through her. She reaches down for her covers.

“A cry woke me,” he explains, and she notices that he is in his dressing gown, colorless in the dim light. “At first I couldn’t tell whether it was inside the house, but when I heard it again, I knew it was coming from upstairs. You were thrashing about and making frightened sounds.” He gazes at her. “Awful sounds, as if you were being attacked. I was afraid you would hurt yourself, so I tried to wake you up.”

Her body is shaking.

Dr. Bridge’s hair is mussed and has drawn itself into a peak.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Do you recall your dream? It must have been a nightmare.”

“All I can remember is that a man was going to hurt me.”

“You thought I was he when I tried to wake you.”

Stella remembers the kick in the stomach. “I kicked you, didn’t I?”

“Let’s just say you gave it your all,” he says and smiles. “I’ll find Iris to bring you hot tea and clean sheets.”

Stella does not protest.

“This man,” Dr. Bridge asks. “Did you think he was going to kill you?”

Once again, she tries to recall. “I’m not sure. The man was on top of me. He meant to overpower me.”

“I’m sorry you had to experience that,” he says as Lily appears at his side. Lily moves toward the bed. She pours a glass of water from the pitcher at Stella’s bedside.

“She had a nightmare,” Dr. Bridge explains to his wife. “She was screaming.”

“Oh, my poor dear,” Lily murmurs as Stella takes a sip. Lily replaces the glass. “Here, let me just feel your forehead. No fever. Would you like me to return after you’ve changed and sit just outside the door while you sleep?”

“I’m really fine now,” she says. “You should both go back to bed.” In the light from the hallway, she can just make out Dr. Bridge’s sleepy features.

G
ood morning,” Dr. Bridge chirps as he reaches the top of the stairs a week after the incident in the night. It is mid-December, two weeks before Christmas. “You seem happy.”

“Not as happy as you must be,” Stella says, teasing him.

“Ah, then Lily told you,” he says, taking a seat on the yellow divan.

“I asked. Otherwise I should have had to alert you to Lily’s illness.”

“Is she sick in the mornings?”

“She is. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

“I’m up and out the door at least an hour before she wakes,” he says. “Iris and Streeter must know as well.”

“And Mrs. Ryan.”

“Yes.”

“They see the full, untouched breakfast trays. Lily must not have wanted to alarm you.”

“Is it very bad?”

“She says it is when she first wakes, but after that she’s fine, apart from a dull headache around five o’clock in the afternoon. Perhaps she is resting even now.”

“Poor thing,” he says.

“It’s a joyous thing,” Stella reminds him.

“Yes. Of course it is.”

“I have new drawings.”

“Have you?” he asks. “May I sit next to you?”

“Yes.”

Stella slips the drawings from a paper packet. The first depicts a corner of the garden and its fence abutting yet another corner, that of a clapboard house. She has gone up the clapboards as far as she can go, at which point the lines become less distinct. With its irises in full bloom, the corner of the garden has been drawn with a more definite hand.

“Does the fact that the garden is more detailed than the house mean that you remember the garden better than the house?” Dr. Bridge asks.

“Yes,” she answers. “I tried to see upward or over to a window, but when I attempted that, I knew my hand was just making it up. This morning I thought of another addition to the garden, so I may in time be able to draw the house.”

“If you could draw the house with a window,” he suggests, “perhaps you would be able to see inside. You might see a face or a piece of furniture or a clock.”

“Possibly.”

“You’re quite sure this isn’t the house you describe as your oasis or the house beside which you laid a blanket?”

“Quite sure.”

The doctor’s presence, with his scent of laundry starch and soap, reminds Stella of the incident in the night. She does not know how else to refer to it. She was screaming. He came in to wake her. That was all.

“Might this be a house you’ve drawn before?” he asks.

“I can’t see its exterior.”

The second drawing is again of the garden, but portrayed from a different angle. To one side of the path, a bed of flowers has been trampled upon.

“In another’s hand,” Dr. Bridge says, “this drawing might have had a fetching prettiness to it. In your hand, however, there is beauty, certainly, but it seems to hover inches from its opposite. Even the irises this time appear to be deep wounds of the flesh.”

Stella is silent.

“There’s no sign of a gardener or the person you thought was below you working.”

“No,” she says. “I can feel activity when I think about the garden, but when I draw it, there’s no one there. I look for him, but I can’t see him.”

“Why are these flowers trampled?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps this is from memory, or it suggests that something bad happened there. I did have a fleeting thought of soldiers trampling over gardens and fields as they marched.”

“When you look at your garden drawings, what are you thinking?”

“My thoughts are complex,” she answers. “I take pleasure in the garden itself, in bringing it to life, in remembering
something,
but there’s frustration as well, because there’s so much more to know. At what point did I have this garden—as a child or as an adult? To whose house was it attached? I can’t make the pencil answer these questions. And I suppose there’s also a feeling of pride in having discovered an ability to do this.”

“I should hope so.”

At their next session, Stella presents Dr. Bridge with a drawing of a face. A young man, with only some of his features depicted, looks straight at the viewer. One eye is vividly represented, but little of the right eye or indeed the face below it shows. The side of a nose as well as a half lip and a half chin have been completed. “Is this someone you saw in France?” he asks.