Paris in the Dark

by Robert Olen Butler

  I noted our turn north. I moved my eyes to the window of the fiacre. We negotiated our way through a large intersection and, shortly thereafter, a smaller one. The hospital wasn’t far now. Then we passed a line of road-roughed recent refugees that stretched across the front of a homely, Gothic-revival Protestant church, through the churchyard, and into a heavy canvas shelter tent next door.

  Henri bent near in my head and repeated himself. The Barbarians. They are among us.

  And the thought occurred to me: This is how.

  Unarmed, bedraggled, seeming to flee the carnage, anyone could enter the city and vanish and then reappear in the dark with a bomb, the Nieuports above powerless.

  And then there were the others who were coming to Paris from the carnage. An hour later I stood before such a man. Only his eyes were visible. A poilu. The rest of his face was hidden beneath bandages. What face there might have been.

  He lay in one of the dozens of nine-bed wards at the American Hospital, in a space built as a classroom. To the “American Warriors of Mercy”—I was phrasemaking already in my head for my readers in Chicago and across the country on the newswires—to these volunteer Americans, the French government had turned over a newly finished but still unoccupied school building, the Lycée Pasteur. A massive four-story French Renaissance quadrangle of red brick and white stone facings built around a courtyard. The doctors and presiding ward-nurses were from American university medical schools. The nurse “auxiliaries” were young women with guts and independence and, among the ones who stuck it out, strong stomachs for hospital dirty work. Assorted women. They were actresses and typists and shopgirls, tenement girls and society girls. One was even Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo’s daughter.

  At my side was a Harvard doctor, talking with a tinge of compulsion about head and face and foot wounds from the trenches. About compound fractures from collapsing buildings. And about the shrapnel wounds. On these he paused, as if searching for a word, and then said, “These are hard to describe, in their terrible variety.”

  I turned to the wrapped face before us. The eyes were shut.

  “The random tumble of metal through torsos,” the doctor said. “Parts of faces blown away.”

  The eyes opened and moved to the doctor.

  The doctor did not notice. His tone wasn’t clinical. But neither was it empathetic. Perhaps it was ironic. He was middle-aged and until a few months ago had been a university teaching-doctor for American Brahmins. The shrapnel tumbled through him, as well, a hundred times a day, with the savage irony of his dealing with these shards of war in a school building. His detached tone was a wrap of bandages around him.

  I returned to the poilu and he’d shut his eyes again. Had he understood the English?

  “Ah, Louise,” the doctor said.

  I looked toward the door.

  She was all in white linen. Her nurse’s cap had a black stripe across it, near the crown. She was pale as her linen but her eyes were gray as shrapnel and they were sorrowful as a pup’s. The cap stripe signified a senior rank, though she was young, this Louise.

  “Nurse,” the doctor said to her, with a corrective stress on the word as if his use of her name had been a breach of protocol.

  She arrived.

  She nodded at the doctor.

  On this morning, she still smelled of lilac water, not yet of wound-drain and carbolic acid. Touching, really, given the professionally hardened look in her lovely large eyes, given her senior status in a tough trade, touching to me that she would splash this parlor-and-parasol smell onto her body before a day of wounds and death.

  She nodded at me. And she let her gaze fix unwaveringly on mine as the doctor spoke my name, fully, Christopher Marlowe Cobb, and hers, Supervising Nurse Louise Pickering.

  I offered my hand.

  She took it with a man’s grip. A smallish, bookish man perhaps, but a meet-you-more-than-halfway man. I’d known a few suffragettes pretty well and was increasingly fine with that.

  She seemed willing to shake a moment or two more, but I let go.

  “The American newsman I spoke of,” the doctor said to her.

  “I assumed,” she said, directly to him, and then she turned and assessed me for a few moments as if I’d just been carried in from the back of an ambulance.

  The doctor excused himself. “I leave you in the capable hands of Nurse Pickering,” he said.

  We watched him go.

  I said, “So he’s a Harvard man, the doctor.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you?”

  “I’m not a Harvard man.” She said this with no smile, no twinkle. She was either drily witty or contemptuous of newsmen. Or a natural copy editor. I’d spoken ambiguously, after all, though I’d tried for drily witty.

  So just as smileless and twinkleless, I asked, “A Radcliffe man?”

  She paused for a breath or two. I held mine, in sudden regret for proceeding on the assumption she’d been bantering. I didn’t need to banter with her, even if she had wonderful eyes and smelled of lilacs. I had a story to write. I was more interested in the drivers, but she was important for background on this whole operation.

  “Not Radcliffe either,” she said. “My liberal arts were bedpans and sponge baths. Which I studied at Massachusetts General.”

  “You’ve come far,” I said, tentatively relieved.

  “I have,” she said, and whatever playful thing it was that seemed to have begun between us seemed now to have ended.

  And so we had some time together, Nurse Louise and I, and it was all business between the two of us. But inside the wards I encountered the wreckage of men like men I’d encountered before, in Nicaragua and Bulgaria, in Mexico and Turkey. Most of the others I’d been with were in their nakedly wounded state, at the site of the clash of arms. Here the men were washed and drained and reassembled and swathed. Here they were—to a man, among the ones capable of talking to me—calm and bucked up and cheerfully brave in their sunlit rooms. With these who were aware, I made sure to leave each of them with a firm touch. A hand taken up to shake, a shoulder squeezed, from one man who knew war to another.

  Between the wards, as we moved along the hardwood hallways of this intended school, Nurse Louise spoke to me of the hospital’s various new machines, made for X-rays and ultraviolet sterilizing and magnetic removal of shell fragments from wounds. She spoke of four hundred beds soon to become six hundred. She spoke of sepsis and gangrene and tetanus, how infection was the nearly universal state of these men’s wounds when they first emerged from the ambulances, spoke of how it was dealt with.

  And as she spoke through the tour, she rarely looked me in the eyes, in spite of the close scrutiny she’d given me when we first met. Or maybe because of that scrutiny. Perhaps she’d seen all she cared to see. She spoke to me coolly, clinically, even as she offered her own warm asides—toasty greetings and pillow-fluffings and shoulder-pattings—to the men in the beds.

  We ended in the administrative wing, where she stopped me several paces short of the hospital superintendent’s office. Her back was to a high, bright, mullioned window.

  I’d been taking notes all this time. Mostly out of courtesy, because for the story I had in mind, the real stuff was still to come. I put my notebook in my pocket. I offered my hand.

  She began to shake it again.

  Softer this time, it seemed to me. I softened too. Now she was looking at me again, the gray eyes gone nearly black with the backdrop of daylight.

  “Thank you, Supervising Nurse Pickering,” I said.

  She pinched her mouth to the side. I’d certainly intended to needle her just a little with the formality, but I didn’t expect her to do a mouth-pinch.

  Whatever that might mean.

  But it seemed to me that it meant something.

  She kept shaking my hand softly for a moment more and said, “Good luck, Mr. Cobb.”

  “Kit,” I said.

  “Ah,” she said. “As your namesake.”


  “Christopher Marlowe. Yes.”

  She let go of my hand.

  Now that things had softened between us a little, I didn’t want to let go quite yet. I sought more talk, but not clinical, not chilly. She knew her Elizabethan playwrights. I asked, “Were you a theatergoer in Boston?”

  “When I could occasionally afford a narrow place in an upper balcony.”

  “Did you ever see Isabel Cobb?” I didn’t make a practice of invoking my mother in order to small-talk a beautiful woman. But Mother had a salutary effect on certain kinds of beautiful young women. Ones, particularly, who had inner resources enough to shake a man’s hand as an equal and seek out a war.

  Louise briefly cocked her head at me, with narrowed eyes. It was a how-did-you-know look. She said, “As a child I saw her every day.”

  It was my turn to cock my head. As in: Are you pulling my leg?

  She smiled faintly, the first smile she’d shown since I met her. She said, “My father smoked Duke’s Honest Long Cut. He had lithograph cards of Isabel Cobb and Lillian Russell on our mantelpiece for years. His two favorites.”

  “I know her Duke’s card,” I said. “Is she wearing a Welsh-crown hat covered in bird plumes?”

  “Yes. Her eyes are raised. I thought, when I was a child, that her look was sympathetic. Rather regretful. As if she were watching the flight of the plucked bird.”

  I hemmed at this. I did not want to point out how unlike my mother that would be. Isabel Cobb may never in her life have sympathetically noticed a bird, plucked or unplucked. In the look on her face that was stuffed into all those tins of tobacco, there was only a keen consciousness of her own beauty. She kept that same tobacco card on her dressing table for years afterwards, even when her fame far exceeded early-career recognition by Duke’s of Durham.

  I said, “So did you ever see Isabel Cobb in person?” I stressed the surname ever so lightly for her.

  I watched her suddenly fit two things together. She cocked her head again. “Cobb,” she said. “Is she related to you?”

  “She’s my mother.”

  At last the composure of Supervising Nurse Louise faltered a little. She was impressed.

  She actually sighed. “I saw her once. We lived in Gloucester till I went off to become a nurse. During my time in Boston I never had a chance. But my father brought me down to the city once for your mother. When I was sixteen. She played Medea.”

  “She was a good Medea.”

  “Very good.”

  We fell silent, Louise Pickering and I. Not knowing what to say next. Mama had taken over the stage, as she was wont to do. Though, to be fair, it was I who’d spoken her entry line.

  But before I could figure out how to induce my mother to exit stage left, Louise said, “I have to go, Mr. Cobb. Superintendent Pichon is expecting you.”

  “Thank you for your help, Nurse Pickering.”

  I expected her to turn away, but she hesitated a moment more. I watched her eyes upon me, which were intent, as if making a parting assessment. Then she said, “You seemed genuinely to care about them.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “The wounded,” she said.

  She’d noticed that in the wards. Now she’d skipped over the mother-banter to go back to it. I liked this Louise Pickering.

  “I’ve seen a lot of them,” I said.

  “So have I,” she said, very softly, as if it were a secret between us.

  And with this, she turned and walked briskly away.

  3

  At nine o’clock the next morning I stepped out of my hotel on the Rue de Seine to find a massive American automobile sitting at the curb. Even as a beautiful woman passing by might have riveted my attention while a rogue chimney pot plummeted toward my head, I stopped to ogle a maroon-bodied, black-roofed, closed-cabin Model 48 Pierce-Arrow, its famous fender-molded headlights bug-eyeing the street ahead, making this two-ton beauty seem always yearning to rev up and dash off.

  Then the chimney pot.

  A familiar voice. It said, “Kit Cobb.”

  A familiar face. This was framed in the open rear window of the Pierce-Arrow’s passenger vestibule, with a clean-shaven and pugilist-square chin, brilliantined black hair, dark eyes as unwavering as a sharpshooter’s.

  James Polk Trask had come for me.

  Not me. Not the me I came to Paris to be. Came, no doubt, for the agent of his secret service.

  I hesitated.

  He waited.

  Trask’s driver, with a muscleman body straining at his serge suit, popped out of the driver’s compartment and opened the vestibule door.

  I stepped in and sat beside Trask, who said to his man, “Drive along the river.”

  The door thumped shut.

  “Nice automobile,” I said.

  “The Ambassador’s,” he said, and he turned his face to the window beside him.

  I figured he knew what I was going to say next. Which I said: “But I was supposed to be the one to get in touch. When I was ready.”

  He was looking at my modest, newswriter-cozy hotel. He craned his neck to take in its upper floors and said, “We could have done better for you.”

  As if I’d have gone straight back to spy work for the sake of a better hotel room; as if he’d even have sent me to Paris at all instead of Sofia or Baghdad or Pinsk. This declaration came from what I had come to understand as J. P. Trask in a playful mood. His own special brand of playful. Say a pointed thing without a direct transition from what preceded it. Couch it in the commonplace. Let you fill in the skipped steps buried in the subtext.

  I played it back to him: “Were you waiting long?”

  We pulled away from the curb and he returned his face to me. When we first started working together—what seemed like a long, long time ago but, in fact, was less than two years—he would have continued to show me nothing in his demeanor, even as I joined him in his game. Now he gave me a fleeting smile, the eyes never wavering. “You keep regular hours.”

  He’d been watching me. Of course he had.

  After a brief beat of silence he added, “How’s the story going?”

  “At its own necessary pace,” I said.

  The driver braked and used the Klaxon on something in our way. Neither Trask nor I looked to see what.

  The game now was not to flinch first.

  As if that would decide whether I did my story or worked for him.

  Neither of us was giving in.

  We were accelerating again, though we were still in the tight confines of the Rue de Seine.

  “How are things in Washington?” I said. Back there, Trask had but to lean a little to speak directly into Woodrow Wilson’s ear. Though that privilege was still doing less good than Trask wished. He and I had the same assessment of Woody’s backbone. But at least the president was giving his secret service a more or less free hand to stay involved over here. As long as we did our work quietly.

  Trask replied, “One year from tomorrow, fifteen million men will elect two hundred and eighteen representatives, thirty-five senators, and one president of the United States.”

  “So things are jumpy,” I said.

  “Darwinian,” he said.

  “Can he be beat?”

  “If France and England were voting, no doubt.”

  “As for our fellas?”

  “I don’t know. So far the Republican contenders are just a bunch of favorite sons. But then there’s Teddy.”

  “As a Bull Moose?”

  “His third party only succeeded in giving us Wilson last time. He knows that. There’s talk he’ll come back to the Republicans.”

  “We’d be rough-riding into France the day after his inauguration,” I said.

  “That’s sixteen months away.” He said it almost offhand. Willfully so. A Traskian show of emotion.

  We both fell silent.

  I could hear him thinking: So in the meantime we’ve got our work cut out for us.

  I doubt if he heard me thinking:
Not till I finish my story.

  Outside, the run of building fronts abruptly yielded to a pocket park and then a glimpse of the baroque dome of the Institut de France. Trask followed my gaze, turned to look out the window.

  Our little preliminaries were through. The Pierce-Arrow emerged from the Institut complex. We slowed to tourist speed along the cobbled quais of the Left Bank of the river.

  Trask turned back to me and said, “There was some trouble in your neighborhood last night.”

  “I was at the scene in about ninety seconds,” I said.

  He cocked his head.

  I told him where I was, what I saw.

  He listened without comment, and after I was done he nodded once, slow and deep, as if it confirmed some point he’d previously made. He said, “There’s no hiding from this war.”

  “Which is why I’m trying to get to the front lines to report.”

  “That’s not the war you and I are fighting.”

  My turn to shrug. Which I did.

  Trask said, “In this town the Zeppelins are just theater. It’s all searchlight show and the home-team flying machines. But a bomb in a bistro and body parts on the street are another matter. The boys I know in this government assume last night was just the beginning. They’re seriously concerned about public morale.”

  A legitimate fear. The government boys Trask ran with no doubt had their own morale at stake as well. The French people had a track record in dealing with their failed ruling and managing classes. From the head-chopping of the Revolution to the barricades of the Paris Commune.

  Trask said, “If the Germans can bring the battle to the restaurants and the theaters and the front doors of the Parisians, if they can turn women and children and boulevardiers into bomb fodder, they might make some progress in this war.”

  I wagged my head in disgust, feeling like an old codger living in the past. “War used to be for soldiers.”

  Trask said, “We need the French to hang on, Kit. The Brits are still not ready to wage an effective war. The Germans may not have broken through, but they’ve had a good year in the field. We’re going to get into this scrap one of these days. It’s only a matter of time. We don’t want the German flag flying over Paris when we finally do.”