“Hello,” he calls, and he comes toward the car intending to help her down. But when he gets there, she has already climbed from the running board and is walking toward him, smiling, holding out her hand.
“Welcome,” he says. He takes her hand between both of his.
“Hello, Mr. Steichen,” she says.
“I am so glad you’ve come,” he says. “We’ve all been looking forward to your visit a great deal.”
“Well, you should be honored,” she says, smiling. “My parents are traveling in Russia this summer and invited me to accompany them.”
“Russia! That would be novel and exciting.”
“Yes, it would, but instead I decided to come here so I could paint and visit with you. Where is Clara?” Behind her the car purrs, creaking as it cools.
“She is upstairs. She was feeling … she was feeling a little unwell this morning.” Marion looks at him and he feels he’s being seen straight through.
“I love the new motorcar,” he says.
“It isn’t mine, I’m afraid. It is only borrowed for the month. Arthur and Mercy have said they will drive it back to Paris for me when they leave, and so I’ll have to take the boring old train back to the city.”
“Well, you must let me try driving it sometime while you are here. Hold on and I’ll get François to bring your bags inside.”
“Oh, not necessary,” she says. “I’m sure I can manage them just fine.”
“Well, I will help at least.”
She has her hair pulled up under a straw hat that ties beneath her chin, and a few strands have come loose and fall across her face. She pushes them aside, impatiently, as they walk around to get her bags from the back of the car, and he thinks how she has changed since he first met her as the awkward, precocious girl sent to Paris for the summer to learn painting. She has grown into her self-possession, and grown into her looks, too. Her body has become more graceful, and her hair has darkened from carrot-orange to auburn; the strands that keep falling out of her hat now, despite her attempts to tuck them back under it, are the color of maple syrup. She pulls two carpetbags from the trunk of the car, and he stops her and tries to take one from her.
“I can’t let you carry both of these,” he says. “Allow me to keep some of my dignity as a host.”
“Well, all right,” she says. “You may have the privilege of taking this one,” and she hands him the heavier and larger of the two. “Unless you want François to do it.” Her eyes, which are laughing as she passes him the case, are green, but in the sunlight he can see that their centers are flecked with gold. She starts toward the house, carrying the smaller carpetbag.
“Do you think Clara is well enough to see me?” Marion calls back to him.
At some point in the last few years she has become beautiful. Not in the fine, delicate way that Clara is, though. It comes from how she moves and smiles, the intersection of her voice, her bearing—even her conversation is part of it. He realizes this as he watches her stride toward the house with confident, even steps, push open the door and step inside, calling “Hello?” up into the darkness of the house. The ingredients of this beauty have been with her all along, but somehow they have never suited her until now, as if she wasn’t ready to assume them, to admit that they belonged to her. But here she is, and Edward, who for his whole life has prided himself on being able to find that which is dignified, lovely and aligned in people—it is after all what he does for a living—has not noticed until this very moment. This surprises him so much that he half-lowers, half-drops the case he has gripped in his right hand onto the ground.
It is her colors: he must capture them, he decides. He has wanted for some time to do more work with the Lumière autochrome plates, to refine the clumsy color prints he had produced with Alfred the previous summer. But he hasn’t had the right subject, until now. He will take her portrait. He will use her as his experiment in color. With this resolved, he feels suddenly happy, lighter; the grimness of the morning lifts off him a little. He picks up the case and follows her up to the house.
MARION PUTS HER bags down in the hall and peers up the stairs. The house looks just as she remembers it; it smells of the rose petals that Clara puts in a bowl on the front hall table. Recollections from her visit here last summer come into her mind as vividly as though she’d never left. She loves this place, and she is delighted to be here, to see her friends. But she is also recalling already those divided feelings she experiences whenever she is around the Steichens: Clara is unwell and she knows that this is Edward’s evasive way of saying that she is upset because they have argued.
When he comes in the front door carrying her suitcase, she asks: “Is she sleeping?”
“I don’t know,” Edward says. He also looks up toward the darkened second story, and in his face she sees an expression of sad bewilderment. He really does not understand his wife and it causes him pain time and again. Marion knows that he will have been surprised by Clara’s anger, that he will not have seen it coming, will have been oblivious to his part in causing it. This is how their pattern unfolds; she has watched them repeat it now for a little over ten years. She reaches out and touches his shoulder.
“I’ll go up and see.”
“Yes, please do. I know she will be happy to see you,” he says, and she hears, as clearly as though he had actually spoken it, the ending he has omitted from the sentence: even if she would not be happy to see me.
Marion climbs the stairs and knocks at the door to Clara and Edward’s bedroom. She hears a stirring inside, and Clara’s voice: “Who is it?”
“Clara, dear. It’s me, Marion.”
There are footsteps and the sound of the bolt sliding back, and then Clara’s face at the door. She’s smiling, although it is clear that she has been crying just a little while before. She opens the door and embraces Marion on the threshold of the room. She begins to cry again silently; Marion can feel her sobs, one rising out of another as she holds her in her arms.
They sit down on the bed and Clara wipes her eyes.
“What a welcome!” she says. “I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t blame you if you turned around and headed right back to Paris.”
“Well of course I’m not going to do that. What happened?”
“Oh, God. It’s so stupid,” Clara says, “but it was just the last little straw.” And she tells Marion about her interrupted hour, Louisa, the unexpected visitors, Edward’s suggestion that she should practice earlier in the morning. “I know it sounds like nothing. I don’t know why it upset me so much.”
“No,” Marion says slowly, “no, it does not sound like nothing.” But she has no idea what else to say, because she does not know how things might be made better. Being a married woman has responsibilities that come with it; the household must be organized; the children must be cared for; and then there is the constant coming and going of visitors from the house, and Edward traveling so much for his work, leaving her to manage on her own. Over the years Marion has seen Clara drawn ever further from the passions that animated her when she was young. This relinquishment was never an explicit choice, only an ebbing away as time and energy were, little by little, siphoned off for other things. It has left Clara with a restlessness, a dissatisfaction, that cannot be assuaged, perhaps because its source has never been faced, never been named.
And Edward does not help. There were his affairs, of course, which did their damage. But that is not all. There is, she thinks, a discord between these two that is more subtle and dispersed. For although he is in principle sympathetic to his wife’s love for music, he does not see how her attention is scattered by the demands placed on it, by the arithmetic lessons and scraped knees and quarrels of children, by the lighting of the stove, the cleaning of linen and dishes which, even with the help that Clara has, cut her day into so many scraps that she herself does not even know why she feels so ragged at the end of it.
This is the bind they are caught in: for all the occasions Marion has felt lonely fo
r the love of a husband or the beauty of children, for those things that Clara has, she knows that she has in their place a single invaluable possession, time, which can be devoted to her painting. And it seems that, unlike Edward, they must choose: they cannot, apparently, have both love and time.
What can be done about it? Marion sighs, and looks at her friend’s face and says the only thing that she can think of that will make any difference: “Well, I will help you get ready for the extra guests. The girls and I will go for a walk when they get home from school, and you will be able to play for a while then.”
“Oh, thank you. But really, you just got here. You shouldn’t …”
“Nonsense. With two of us the chores won’t take so long.” Clara smiles, and Marion thinks, sadly, how little difference this will actually make for Clara and how much it means, this two hours she can now have to herself.
“Come along,” she says, coaxing Clara to her feet. She takes her hand and together they descend the stairs.
A LITTLE LATER in the afternoon, Edward, who had gone back to hiding in his studio, is coming across the kitchen yard when he hears the sound of voices in the kitchen and then laughter. Then silence and the sound of splashing. Then more laughter. What on earth is going on, he wonders. He quickens his pace, eager to see what the source of the mirth is. Through the window he sees Clara standing beside the sink, holding what looks like a ladle upside down but then suddenly she disappears from view and he hears again shrieks of giggles. He opens the door and sees his wife doubled over, her dress and hair and face covered in streaks of sparkling soap bubbles. Marion is standing on the opposite side of the room, holding herself upright against the larder door. She is also covered in bubbles. By her feet is a bucket of soapy water and she has a fistful of foam grasped in one hand as though it was a snowball. Both of them are laughing so hard that they can’t speak.
Marion finally catches sight of him standing at the door looking at them in amazement. She hesitates for a minute, sizing him up, then raises her arm, winds up and flings a great clump of foam so that it hits him in the chest.
“Hey!” he shouts, wiping it off his shirt. “What is this?”
“We are calling it ‘soap tennis,’” Marion says. “It is great fun, but there isn’t a lot of back-and-forth. Each game only lasts for one volley. Like this,” and she scoops up another fistful of soap and raises her arm again.
“Wait, wait,” Clara protests, putting herself into the line of fire. “That isn’t fair. He is unarmed.”
Marion lowers her arm. “Yes,” she concedes. “I suppose you are right.”
“Well …” Edward says. “That situation is easily rectified.” And he leaps across to the sink and, grabbing two handfuls of soap, hurls one at each of the women, marveling as he does so at how different everything seems from just a few hours ago.
EIGHT
July 3, 1918
THE OTHER NURSE on her shift was assisting the surgeons when three new cases arrived that evening, so Marion said she would go down to the ward, make up their charts and report back to the ward sister. She was just sitting down to eat supper, that grayish potato soup that seemed to be a particular favorite of the cooks, but this wasn’t the first meal she had missed for an emergency and it wouldn’t be the last. Everything was provisional: lunch and holidays and leave and anything else that gave form and order to life beyond the demands of the next instant. A few more gulps of coffee, just a few more, she thought; she got a mouthful of grounds and grimaced at the bitterness, swallowed, stood and brushed the crumbs from her skirt, made her way upstairs.
When the men first arrived, that was the worst part, the hardest part. The motor ambulances brought them up from the casualty clearing stations in batches of six or eight or a dozen, stacked along the sides of the cabins, like bread in an oven. Stretcher-bearers carried them into the ward, calling to her, Where do you want this one, ma’am, got another for you here, banged up pretty bad this fellow, and then the nurses got to see, unadulterated, what the war had done. That was the time that Marion most wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else just so long as she was away from this, what was left over, the mess of flesh and bone and metal that she came to think of, almost against her will, as the evidence. The evidence of contusions where shrapnel had struck bone and left a delicate spiderweb of fissures running across the exposed surface of the femur. The evidence of gas gangrene in the lower leg, the blackening of the flesh, the stench that meant it would have to come off, the whole thing from the hip down. All this was evidence, because surely, someone must be collecting all these sights and sounds and smells together, so that later, when it was all over, the survivors could figure out who was responsible and call them to account. Because this war couldn’t all be happening for no reason; it must be someone’s fault and they must discover who, and why, and how it was allowed to go on so long, because how else could something like this be prevented from happening again?
At one end of the hospital a room had been set aside for the newly injured. When Marion entered, two orderlies were putting the first casualty into a bed at the far end. The boy on the stretcher shouted out when they tried to lift him, the pain rising to the surface and bursting from him, sudden and unrestrained.
“Go on, son. Clench your teeth and bear up; it’ll be over in a minute,” said the man standing by his head. Then with a nod to his partner they began to lift him again. This time the boy was quiet, only letting a slight groan escape as they laid him on the mattress. From across the room, the orderlies greeted her with a brief, mumbled “Afternoon, Miss Beckett.”
“Is this where you want them?” one of them asked, indicating the beds with a nod.
“Yes, those are free.”
They went back outside to bring in the others, and Marion was left alone with the injured boy. Something wasn’t right about him, she thought, different from the other men who arrived in this same manner every day in a steady stream; something was strange, but she couldn’t tell immediately what it was. She came quickly toward him; he was dressed in a khaki uniform. American, then; he must be American. The dressing on his left side was dark with blood. As she got closer she could see that he was young, in his early twenties at most. His eyes were squeezed shut and his teeth clamped together against the pain. She had that flash of terror that went through her each time she approached a newly filled bed, that prayer to be transported. It lasted only for a moment; she smothered it as soon as it arose. She must be sensible and she must present, for these men who had seen so much worse than this, a countenance of calm. Maintain a cheerful and orderly demeanor at all times, the nurses’ handbook instructed. She’d made fun of its prim, obvious advice, until she was faced with her first room full of gas casualties and understood the need for such admonitions.
She went to the foot of his bed and lifted his chart from the rail. Cundall, she read. Thomas N. Puncture wound from type D ammunition. Possible concussion. He groaned again and she realized why she’d thought there was something wrong when she saw him from across the room. Of course, how silly of her not to understand at once what was different about him and also about the skinny boy they were carrying in now, muttering and cursing under his breath in French while the orderlies rolled their eyes.
She knew what it was now. These men were clean.
—
WHEN SHE FIRST got the news of Clara’s lawsuit, Marion was already in France. She considered returning to New York immediately; perhaps it would be better to go home and face this disaster, rather than postponing it, living in its ghastly shadow. It seemed like the right thing to do; to get the ordeal over and then perhaps be able to move on.
On the other hand, she didn’t want to leave the hospital. It was not that she liked the work she did there; no one could. It was that she never doubted its importance. She had never been completely certain that her painting mattered very much. And since the end of her friendship with Clara Steichen, and the beginning of this terrible war, she had felt adrift, her noti
ons of what was worthwhile, what it meant to be a good person, no longer seeming to tell her much about how to live in this lonely new world. When she began work as a volunteer, serving meals to the troops, she felt the comfort of a clear, straightforward purpose for the first time. She volunteered to train as a nurse, then began work in a hospital for amputees near Arras as soon as she was able.
She thought and thought about whether to stay, trying to reach a final decision, and while she thought, days passed and she was reassigned to the Marne and she realized that she had made a choice by default. She would stay until her term of service was complete. It was a weight off her heart. She came to the Marne and took up her new assignment.
Since arriving there, she had learned how to tell from the shape and angle of a puncture wound whether the projectile had struck point-blank, so that it would be clean and easy to remove, or whether it had ricocheted, and brought dirt and cloth with it. She knew how to administer ether, remove shrapnel from a wound, clean the space where it had been with Carrel-Dakin solution, and finally sew up its torn edges. In peacetime, no nurse would have been given so much authority, but no one worried about such distinctions now. Only if she saw from the swelling that the bullet had struck bone, or if an amputation was necessary, would she alert the physicians. It was a constant balancing act. Of those that needed major surgery, many of them were too far gone by the time they reached the hospital for it to do them any good. She saw men with limbs ripped away, men holding their stomachs to keep them from falling out, men who had lost so much blood that no doctor in the world could help them. Then her job was to administer the morphine, keep the pain away so they could dream that their mothers were beside them, dream that they were home again, call her by the name of their sweetheart, and she would answer, telling them she was whoever would bring them the greatest consolation. Her task was to help them slide quietly from the world without suffering more than they had to and without wasting anyone’s time.
The Last Summer of the World Page 19
