“It’s something we’ve never talked about. I really haven’t ever thought about it before, except that now—well, if you should go to England—I mean, I’m not asking whether you are, but it does seem possible from all one reads that you will be going there—”
He knew, he knew what was coming.
“Well, suppose you should be sent to England. Would you ever want to see her again? Mary?”
It was the first time in years that anyone had spoken the name aloud to him. Now, in the column of air where the door stood ajar and the hall light intruded upon darkness, suddenly the name took shape and hung there in a curlicued script, colored, he thought, a kind of silvery green. Mary. Mary Fern.
“You know that’s over,” he said softly. “Long before I met you. And now we’re married.” He tightened his arms around her. “Weren’t you once engaged to someone else? I could be jealous of that, couldn’t I?” He didn’t know why he was talking so much. He was prattling and it was absurd.
Hazel said faintly. “Not really. That was different.”
Of course. They both knew it had been.
“We are married,” he repeated with emphasis.
“Yes, we are truly, aren’t we?”
She picked up his hand, laid the palm to her cheek and kissed the palm. So soft! And he was responsible for this soft life! Why did women, good women, and it seemed to Martin that the women he had cared for were all good women, make a man feel as if he held their lives in his hand? He’d better be worthy of this trust! He wanted to, and he would be. He would cause no pain and no tears, ever. No, never, never.
Deep into the night he lay, long after she had fallen asleep, listening to the little puff of her breath, tensing for another cry from their child. The pallid light of his last day at home was already sifting out of the sky before he slept.
Chapter 20
First he put the lamp out, then pulled the blackout curtains aside. The windy autumn night was Elizabethan, Shakes-pearean. He half expected to see the witches of Endor come sailing over the woods, or horsemen in cloaks come clattering up the road.
The outline of the main building was inked against the sky. Once it had been a sanitorium for the nervous diseases of wealthy Englishmen, casualties of the peace. Now it had been turned over to casualties of the war. Martin stood a few minutes listening to the soughing wind, then sighed and went back to his desk to write.
“Dearest Hazel, I’m in the country, about half an hour out of London.” Omit that, the censor won’t allow it. “It’s good to be on dry land after what they say was one of the worst crossings ever. What it could have been like on a smaller ship, I can only imagine. It was bad enough on the Queen Mary.” Omit that, for Heaven’s sake, take everything out after “ever.” “I am a good sailor, I discovered. I was born in a flood and survived. There is an affinity between water and me. One jokes about seasickness but it is no joke, I can tell you.” Poor guys piled high, deck upon deck on bunks stacked one above the other, vomiting their guts out. “There really ought to be some sort of medication for it. I daresay there will be one day.
“For those of us who stayed well, it was an exhilarating experience.” Exhilarating? Without lights we zigged and tagged across the ocean. Dark ship, dark ocean. I went out on deck where the silent watches were posted, hoping for clouds to cover the infernal brilliant moon. Exhilarating!
“I have to tell you a funny story.” Keep it light, keep it cheerful. Besides, it was funny. “I shared a suite, the bridal suite maybe, with two men, one a dermatologist from Des Moines, good-natured, a sort of jokester; the other, a psychiatrist, wasn’t a bad sort either, except for being somewhat pompous and all-knowing.
“Well, the psychiatrist assured us that seasickness is a mental state, that if you don’t want to be sick, you won’t be. You know the sort of talk some of them can go in for. Anyway, on Thanksgiving Day we met the worst of the storm, waves over the topside portholes, ropes up along the corridors. Our psychiatrist, claiming a slight headache, elected not to go to dinner. He looked sallow and faintly green, like the tinge on a cauliflower. My friend from Des Moines thought it would be kind to bring a tray back for him, but when we got to the room, he was flung out on the bed like Raggedy Andy.
“ ‘Look what we’ve brought,’ Des Moines said. ‘Didn’t know whether you liked dark or white, so we got some of both. And a great stuffing—better than Mother used to make, better than my mother’s anyway. Cranberry relish, pumpkin pie with ice cream—why, what’s the matter?’
“The psychiatrist waved us away. His eyes were rolling.
“ ‘Come, come, you’re not seasick. Bring yourself under control, man! It’s all in the mind! Try some creamed onions.’
“I got the basin just in time to save the carpet.
“So here I am, and very busy. We have a first-class hospital with every piece of equipment you can think of and some you can’t. The worst wounded are brought here.” Change that “wounded?” to “cases.” At Oran the Vichy French fought the American landing like tigers. How especially hard to think that the terrible wounds on these boys of ours were inflicted by Frenchmen! Sad and mad. But then the whole business of what men do to one another is and always has been sad and mad.
“Dearest Hazel, I wish I were more articulate. But then they always say doctors are nonverbal people, don’t they? Whether true or not, it’s true of me. You will just have to imagine how it is for me without you and Enoch. And, of course, my Claire.
“You have been so understanding about her. I know there are women who wouldn’t welcome her as you do. Have I told you, have I thanked you enough for it? If not, I do so now. Now I’m going to end this, read your letter again, and go to bed.”
He picked up Hazel’s loving scrawl.
“My darling, You asked me to tell you what kind of big present you should bring me when you come home. ‘When you come home.’ I read those four words over and ever. I’ll tell you: I shall want another child. There’s nothing else I want” She never asked for things. Other men here had already been up in London to spend their pay on earrings, silver tea sets and Lord knows what else.
“Oh my darling, we all miss you so! Enoch gets to look more like you every minute.” He doesn’t. He looks like Hazel. “I have gone back to nursing. You said you wouldn’t mind. I’m on the seven-to-three shift. Josie is still with us, and she’ll get Enoch off to school in the morning after I leave. Then I’ll be with him from three on, so you see, I’m not going to neglect him.
“I do have a good feeling, though, about helping out. The hospitals are so dreadfully shorthanded. Also, I shall be earning money, so we won’t have to dip into savings, and there’ll be a head start for you when you come back.
“Your mother is well. I spoke to her on the telephone, and I won’t forget her birthday.
“I went to hear Ezio Pinza in Boris Godunov. I’m really learning about opera. I do wish they sang all of them in English, though.
“Claire comes every other week or so. We’ve become good friends, I think. But it’s no effort on my part, so don’t thank me. You know, Enoch will do things for her that he won’t do for me? Last week he was sick and I couldn’t make him swallow his medicine, but when Claire arrived, he did it for her. I asked her whether her mother knew how often she stopped here after school, and she said, ‘I don’t tell her, but I’m sure she guesses.’ And then she said, ‘She’d just as soon not hear.’ Imagine such insight at her age! She’s a lot older than her years. Sometimes I almost feel she’s older than I am. Certainly, she’s more determined.”
Smiling to himself, Martin got Claire’s letter out again, and skimmed the pages.
“Dear Daddy, I’ll be going into eighth grade in September! Brearley is a great school, but the science class is very babyish. I don’t mean to say I’m so smart, but one of my friends has a sister in high school, and I can understand her biology book. I’m in a big hurry to be a doctor. Were you like that too?
“Do you ever pass the pla
ce where we lived and the park where I rode my baby bike?
“Aunt Hazel is very nice to me. Of course, that’s only because I’m your daughter and she loves you. I think it’s hard for her, living alone. She says she has trouble balancing the checkbook. If everything wasn’t always so mixed up, I could ask Mother to teach her. Ha! ha!
“Are you staying anywhere near that house in the country that belonged to Aunt Mary Fern, and does she still live there? I still can’t imagine why she’s such a big secret when she’s Mother’s sister.”
Martin put the letter away. That child! Ferreting and probing, persistent and blunt as ever her mother had been.
Someone had left a touring map of the British Isles in a drawer of the desk. Merely out of curiosity, because Claire had asked the question and he had nothing better to do, he unfolded the map. Lamb House was sixty-odd miles away, a long distance over the twisting lanes that in this country passed for roads. Not that it mattered. Long or short, it did not matter. He put the map back and slammed the drawer shut.
Occasionally, one panicked. How many years might this war not go on? One had a confusion of emotions as the wounded were brought in: thankfulness that one was not lying destroyed on a stretcher, and then shame that one was not. Argue as you might, and it was true that you had no choice (a neurosurgeon belonged behind the lines, not aiming a gun at Rommel, the Desert Fox), the shame was there. Even Tom, a first lieutenant in the South Pacific, was facing danger under fire, while he, Martin, was safe in this first-class place, not very far from the Eisenhower headquarters at Bushy Park. Also, guilt was there. Out of the suffering of the maimed, he was being educated, increasing his skills. And this disturbed him most of all.
Under a shrapnel wound he discovered a proliferating prior growth, which, without the wound, would have gone undiscovered. Having written about this oddity for a professional journal back home, he received a flood of letters and some publicity, which had not been his intent. He was deeply, perhaps unreasonably, troubled about things like that.
He spent long hours with his patients, hours when he could have been eating or sleeping. Some of them touched him so that he thought they would live inside him for the rest of his life.
A boy from a tobacco farm in North Carolina, a chubby kid no more than nineteen, told him, “You know, Doc, I was sure I was going to be killed in this war. I never thought about anything like this.”
“This” was a shattered arm and a ruined face. Martin had been more successful with the arm than the plastic surgeons had been with the face, although it was no fault of theirs. Their repairs were masterly, but still they were repairs. On the left side the patched cheek had the tight, immovable gloss of patent leather, while out of a raw socket glared a glass eye fixed in its glitter, the right side crinkled with speech and its eye could still weep tears.
“Tell me, Doc, will people be—well, will they know me when I get home? Tell me the truth, Doc, please?”
Martin said what he could. “I didn’t know you before, but they’ve done a splendid job. And of course, it will improve as it heals.”
“Do you think—this is probably a dumb question, but—well, if you were a girl—I mean, do you think that girls will—”
Girls will shudder and pretend and be very, very tactful, at least most of them will, I hope.
“Sure, sure. Why not? You’re a kind of hero, son, and don’t you forget it.”
Could he tell these young men the truth of what he felt, that their wounds were a personal affront to him? An out rage? We are outraged when vandals destroy a painting, but this?
Sometimes men weep. They turn away so that I will not see. And sometimes they don’t turn away. I pat a hand or a shoulder. I’m awkward. “I know,” I murmur, “I know.” But I don’t know. How can I, whose turn hasn’t come? How can I really understand a twenty-five-year-old man whose genitals have been shot off?
There is a kinship of pain so worldwide now, Martin thought, that it has almost become a part of the natural order of things.
A few months more, and he would have been here a year. His life had evolved into a routine, a continuing order, as if he were a bank clerk or an insurance salesman, except that his work was to mend the dreadful wreckage of the war. When the working day was over he would wash his hands and go to dinner or, now and then, up to London for a night out. It was absurd, surrealistic. The only remedy was not to think about it much. Just go ahead, he supposed, and do what you can and take your promotions. He was a full colonel now, as if he were on a battlefield, where, in a certain sense, he really was.
Long afterward, Martin couldn’t recall where he had been going, only that he had been hurrying down a London street, and then, suddenly looking up, had seen in a gallery window a watercolor on an easel: three red birds sat on a wire fence. He stood quite still.
It’s not the same, he thought, collecting himself. That other had a background of snow, and this picture was dark green, full summer. Yet the resemblance was unmistakable.
He went inside. A genteel elderly lady came forward and he asked about the picture.
“It’s a nice piece, isn’t it? Rather better than most of them here.” And seeing that he seemed surprised, she explained, “We’ve turned the gallery over for the month to an amateur exhibit and sale. It’s part of the war effort, the proceeds going to needy children. Would you be interested in that one?”
He stammered. “It looks like one I’ve seen before. Is the artist perhaps—”
“I can look it up for you. Wait, here it is. Three Red Birds. A Mrs. Lamb. A lovely person; she’s given us quite a few things, as a matter of fact. She works in charcoal, too. This head of a child is hers. Now it, I think you’ll agree, really is rather good.”
That must be Ned, Martin thought. He’d be a young man now, eighteen, fighting for England, no doubt. But here he was only about ten years old, with his chin held between his hands. The hands were poorly drawn. But the eyes had life and spirit; the mouth suggested humor. And Martin stood, holding the sketch and feeling—he didn’t know what he felt.
“It has a certain quality, hasn’t it? It could have been sentimental, but isn’t.” The woman smiled. “It’s the sentimental things the public wants, of course. Although why not, when you come to think about it?”
“Yes, why not?” Martin echoed.
Apparently the woman had a need to fill up silence. “Most of this amateur work is pretty bad. But sometimes you find a person who’s almost got it, whatever ‘it’ is. I’ve dealt in art for thirty years, and usually can tell the real thing when I see it, although for the life of me, I can’t define it! Now, this woman comes very close. She may have it, or she may not, I’m not sure.”
“I’d like to buy it,” Martin said.
“Which? The head?”
“No, the birds.”
“Oh. Well How very nice. The lady will be so pleased. She brought it in from the country just last week.”
On the train returning to the hospital, he had a strange sensation that he was carrying contraband and people were staring at it, staring through the paper. For a moment he thought of leaving the parcel on the seat.
When he got to his room, he propped it against the wall in a corner without unwrapping it. Why the devil had he bought the thing? There it stood, making a disturbance in the room. There were enough disturbances in the world without any more.
It was three days before he took the picture out of its wrapping and held it to the light. In the lower left-hand corner, she had placed her initials: MFL. The bottom of the F turned up in a flourish; the L had a curlicue. Slowly he traced the letters with his fingernail. So she was still living at Lamb House with Alex! But of course, he had expected nothing else. And he wondered whether by now any other man had come into her life, and if so, who and how.
He went outside. The night was still. In the west lay a low streak of hazy, lingering pink. No bombers had gone out yet On most nights at about this time a flight roared overhead from the airbase on
ly ten miles to the north. In early dawn, you heard them again; they never seemed as loud on the homeward flight and you wondered how many had failed to return.
He stood leaning against the cottage wall. The cruelty, the haphazard idiocy of men’s lives! The planet was a ship on an uncharted sea cleaving a way through infinite cold space. At least they said it was infinite. Who really knew what the concept could mean? Perhaps, like a ship heading toward a hidden reef, it was even now careening toward its doom in some unimaginable celestial wreck. All we know is that we are whirled through our short days and our transient delights, so quickly over and lost.
Some three weeks later on a Saturday afternoon, Martin stepped out of a train and walked down a standard village High Street The church, he recalled, was on the left. There one turned into a country lane, and after a short walk, arrived at Lamb House.
No sooner had he arrived there, he wanted to go back. He felt that his presence must announce itself to everyone who saw him, that someone surely must turn to challenge him. He passed a few women carrying market baskets, a Tommy home on furlough and some girls on bicycles. But no one even glanced his way.
The tiny door-gardens had been planted in vegetables. Only one scrap of earth, too small for vegetables, bore any reminder of what life had been before the war. It was a patch of mignonette, like late snow, next to a clump of larkspur.
He ought to go back. But he hadn’t come here to entangle anyone; he had only come to see how she was! What could be wrong with that?
The front lawn had been planted with cabbage. He had taken no more than a few steps up the lane when he saw Mary. Her back was toward him but he knew her, nevertheless. She was hoeing the cabbage. And again he felt a powerful urge to go away. Afterward, he was to ask himself whether he might not truly have done so if she had not happened that moment to see him.
She stood quite still as he approached. She wore a white shirt and a brown skirt. She was sunburned and had a smudge of earth on her cheek.
“I bought your red birds. In a gallery in London,” he said.