Stella Bain (8 page)

Stella and Dr. Bridge settle themselves to wait at least an hour, as prearranged. She notices other civilians on benches, one or two of whom appear to be in severe distress. She makes a mental note to stop as she and Dr. Bridge pass by the front gate to hand a coin to a beggar.

She does not know what she is looking for, but hopes she will know it when she finds it. Conversation with Dr. Bridge is all but impossible, not only because she is riveted to each face passing by but also because even whispers can be heard in the echoing chamber. When she and Dr. Bridge are both staring at an individual, that person stares at them in return, which, she supposes, is all right, since the person may recognize Stella before she recognizes him.

When, after an hour, Dr. Bridge’s name is called, he stands. Stella is now confronted with an inescapable fact: her time spent searching for a face is over. An escort comes forward to take them to Tillman’s office. They follow the junior officer, Stella leading, Dr. Bridge behind.

Albion Tillman, an overweight man in his forties, a man who sports a curved gray mustache and many medals, stands when they enter. Dr. Bridge thanks him for seeing them.

“What’s this all about, then?” the officer asks when they are seated and introductions made. “I don’t think you mentioned that Miss Bain would be in uniform still.” He turns to Stella. “Are you returning to France soon?”

“No, sir, I am not. I put it on because I thought that if we encountered anyone else here, I might be taken more seriously.”

Though he is amiable enough with Dr. Bridge, Tillman has a stern visage. Stella worries that the high-ranking officer might say that her being in uniform is unethical. Perhaps there is even a regulation concerning the matter. She finds she is holding her breath.

“Yes, quite right,” Tillman says. “Some of the men here see a civilian woman and assume she’s one of the bereaved who’ve come to ask for our help. And you would be surprised at how much the men who have seen action dislike civilians.”

“I am sorry to have come under false pretenses,” Stella says.

“Have you had any luck?” Tillman asks, looking at both of them.

“I’m afraid not,” Dr. Bridge answers as Stella lowers her head, embarrassed by her odd search and dismayed by the results.

“To lose one’s memory must be as painful as losing a limb,” Tillman says. “More, I should imagine. Are you sure that you will find the person you are looking for here?”

“It is not a certainty.”

The room is smaller than Stella imagined. The combination of a high ceiling and the closeness of the walls makes her feel as though she were caught in a box, and a musty one at that. Or perhaps it is Tillman’s bulk that causes the chamber to lose its scale. The smell of wet wool is pervasive.

“Any sight or sound that helps us is worth following up,” Dr. Bridge comments.

“Yes, just so,” agrees Tillman, who seems as puzzled as he was before Dr. Bridge’s explanation. “I imagine you want to keep this particular meeting as brief as possible. I wish you luck, Miss Bain, in your difficult endeavor. We should all pray for a swift end to this terrible war.” And with that, Tillman abruptly stands again, dismissing them both.

Stella’s steps are slow as they leave the rear admiral’s office with the escort, who has waited for them. The junior officer must think the meeting amazingly brief. Or perhaps such pro forma interviews are common. The escort leaves them at the reception desk.

“I think we should like to sit a minute,” Dr. Bridge explains to the woman in the cubicle. “We have received difficult news today.”

“Of course,” the Wren says, glancing at Stella.

Noticing the heavier foot traffic inside the hall, Dr. Bridge guides Stella to a bench similar to the one they were on before. “I’ll wait with you until you are ready to go.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“Yes.” She pauses. “No. Nothing is normal. How can it be? I don’t yet know who I am. I may discover, when I know my identity, that I’m not a good person at all. I fear that I’m not. I seek my identity, and yet I’m afraid of it. But I’m more afraid of never knowing.”

Stella speculates about how the two of them look to the hallway full of uniformed men and women: a civilian man, well dressed but perhaps betraying his eagerness to leave the building, and a woman in a pristine VAD uniform with her shoulders slumped and her eyes seeming to look more inward than outward.

“Actually, I’m ready to go now,” she says, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“Are you sure?” Dr. Bridge asks.

“Yes, quite sure.”

The two repeat the exercise several times in the early weeks of 1917. On each occasion, Dr. Bridge telephones Albion Tillman in advance to make the request. Sometimes, for their “meetings,” they do not meet with Tillman at all, but rather sit with the junior officer in an anteroom. Once, a Wren makes them tea and puts them in a waiting area. On each day that they go, Dr. Bridge and Stella wait in the hall an hour at lunchtime and then spend a few minutes back on a bench before they leave. Stella knows she cannot ask Dr. Bridge to waste any more time at this charade. He has been exceptionally generous, given that he does not believe she will be successful here.

“This has been a fool’s errand,” Stella insists at the end of the fifth visit. “It has been extremely kind of you to have arranged these meetings. But I thought, when I realized how our request must have appeared to that poor exhausted Wren, that I was addled in my thinking. Not only that, but being in uniform again and being in this place has given me the idea that I should return to France.”

“Nonsense!” Dr. Bridge exclaims. Heads turn. In a lower voice, he adds that they will talk about this when they get back to Bryanston Square.

Stella stands. She turns her head away from the passing crowd, the constant murmuring of voices. Yes, she must return to France. What possible good is she doing here in London? Dr. Bridge will disapprove. VADs are needed at home, too, he will tell her—as someone once told him about doctors.

As they near the double doors, Dr. Bridge steps forward to open one. Behind her, Stella can hear the smart rap of boots on marble.

“Etna?”

Stella stops and gentles herself into a still posture. She considers the name.

“Etna Bliss?”

Stella half turns toward the voice. A ginger-haired officer has spoken to her. She sways slightly. Dr. Bridge guides her to a bench. She has a memory. She knows the man’s name.

“Samuel.”

As Dr. Bridge makes her sit, Stella feels each new memory as an electric shock.

The officer, in Canadian uniform, kneels directly in front of Stella.

“Etna,” he says again. “Etna Bliss.”

The name no longer a question.

She digs her fingernails into Dr. Bridge’s wrist.

“What is it?” he asks, bewildered by the exchange.

“I have children,” she says.

Thrupp, New Hampshire, 1896–1915

A
n abandoned house, once white with pride, left alone to age. A man sets a blanket on the grass. He is older than she, thirty to her twenty.

“My astrophysicist,” she wants to say aloud, laughing at herself. What does she know of lunar distances, solar flares, orbiting planets, colliding bodies?

She sits, then lies, upon the blanket. He tilts his head, a sentry alert to toneless insects, noisy sparrows. Hard knots of thread press against the back of her cotton dress. His arm is rusty with fine red hairs.

He is engaged to another.

She is engaged to another.

In a different century, they would be stoned to death.

He kisses her face, his skin skimming the surface of hers. Her body floats upward into his.

He says he has never been so happy. When he tells her of his love, she says that hers is greater. They laugh, and delirium presses them together.

A partial undressing, a milky gleam upon a thigh, this mundane place unique. She cannot do again what she is doing for the first time.

She runs through the streets of town, mad with disbelief. She squanders everything she has of character to confront her lover. Houses laugh at her, or smirk.

Breathless, she arrives at the forbidding family facade from which she will soon be barred. She stands in the foyer and cannot believe in the mask that has fallen over her lover’s face. From a corner, a mother appears and watches.

“I go to Toronto tomorrow to be married,” her lover says, his eyes and face unknown to her. She wants to beg, go down on her knees, but she catches sight of a brother, younger and impressionable, who gazes at her with wonder from another room.

When her lover shuts the family door behind her, she stands on the wooden steps. The houses are smug now, politely looking aside.

Years later, passion merely a faded photograph, she faces another man in another room, a stolid Dutchman she will never love. But pity blossoms and ensnares her and causes her to make a grave mistake. She has failed to count the nights of her future. She has never known the anguish of an unhappy marriage bed. She has not imagined that a house can become a fortress, a prison.

Her husband wants to possess her fully, but she holds something in reserve. Something indefinable, her own, that he can never touch.

She has children, beautiful babies. They make a playhouse of the prison. Together, they wait for squirrels beneath the trees; together they shake the bushes, hoping for birds. They plant a garden, the crooked rows soon blistered with colorful blooms. They walk through leaves and snow. They play innocent games of castles and battles, of magic and buried treasure. Their gentle footsteps do not disturb the earth.

She becomes a child with them at dusk, when bat loops make them dizzy. Her children hide with her in tree trunks. They fashion nests in her hair; she makes cakes with sticky frosting. She teaches them their lessons, then sends them off to school. She is happy in that house only when her children are safe within its walls.

A room, a cottage, the plaster chipped in places. Her own, with floral studies on the walls. She is honest in that room, and she can think. She has a sink, a plate of yellow pears. She reads, she sews, she draws. A woven rug covers a scrubbed floor. Her windows are precious jewels that she polishes.

Here she is replenished. The cottage is her secret and her haven.

When it is taken away from her, she empties out to silence.

A party, Champagne bubbles, a flute that slips from her fingers. The younger brother from years ago, her lover’s sibling in another room, now grown but unmistakable. Unwittingly, a rival for a post her academic husband believes is his. The man she married seethes, becomes a twisted creature with a selfish agenda. The younger brother—merely decent, merely kind—wins the post despite his desire to disappear. To her, he offers simple friendship, nothing more. He remembers her face as she stood in that family foyer so many years ago and tells her that it has always been the standard by which he has measured love.

Another bed, and she is frightened. A man has her body laid out upon his own, a piece of cloth on his pattern. She faces outward, staring at the ceiling. The man, her husband, covers her mouth with his hand, the air so hot and wet she has trouble breathing. He tramples over every memory of their marriage, and yet the curtains at the window do not move; the electric lamps still burn. Her husband plays her body with fat fingers. He touches every part of her he thinks he owns. She has children in another room, a letter on a table. She will not wake the children. She will not send the letter.

He tears the cotton of her blouse. Lust, that beautiful hunger, turns ugly in his hands. Love has never been in that house, and he is mad with rage—this violent act unique.

Her husband uses his innocent daughter to destroy the reputation of his rival, that younger brother from years ago, and causes him to risk his life in France. The trenches are awash with a mixture of flesh and muck. Great bursts of shrapnel tear bodies into pieces. The soldiers, with their guns and boots, destroy every living thing. A face is gone, a spine. The limbs pile up in buckets. The man her husband sent to France drives an ambulance, a pacifist at war. She tries to find him to make amends.

If she locates the man her husband sent to France, will he know her face, its features contorted by terror and by guilt?

Wherever she is billeted, she inquires about the man from America. Records are imperfect; they are often lost in shelling. He might be one mile from her or sixty. Sentries stand guard outside the tents, alert to guns and gas. She is covered with blood and worse each morning. Her mind is injured. Whose is not?

Camiers, November 1915

O
n a gray day, the world seems of a piece: a mechanized earthworks that blows bodies into the air, tosses them into the mud, ferries them to the field hospitals, and then deposits them on stretchers in tents, to be cut open by steel scalpels. On sunny days, fleeting memories of past pleasures are pointedly out of sync. Today is such a day, the blue sky and the distant Channel frightening.

A surgeon replaces a portion of a man’s skull with silver plate. Etna Bliss, nurse’s aide, stands at attention, delivering instruments, taking the fouled ones from the nurse to be cleaned and boiled, stepping up when ordered to mop blood from a wound. Dr. Eliot, like many of his colleagues, works in silence, though all around them there is chaos.

Conversation is reduced to nouns—verbs and adjectives having been shelled away. “A thermometer,
if
you please.” “From the front, sir, with blisters.”

Etna has been at Camiers with the Royal Army Medical Corps for ten weeks, from early September, 1915, to this day, which, if they were in America, would be Thanksgiving. There will be no holiday on the French coast.