The Crimson Portrait

by Jody Shields

  McCleary quietly withdrew.

  AS IF THE NEWS of Masefield’s successful discharge had filled a cup, Hunt, the orderly, and two patients decided to slip away from the estate to celebrate.

  “We could drink in the village.”

  “Why not? Man’s got a right.”

  Enthusiastic as poachers, the men hiked to a secluded spot and helped one another clumsily climb the iron fence, the injured men careful to keep their raw faces level. The doctors had forbidden them to incline their heads at certain angles, as pressure could damage their healing injuries.

  Hunt could rarely encounter an object without interfering with it, and his stick slashed at the tall grass beside the road. A density of yellow butterflies reformed on the horse dung behind him. “I’ve heard the petrol tractors can drive thirty miles an hour over the battlefield.”

  “When they can figure out which way is forward.”

  “And if the land hasn’t been shelled into craters.”

  They passed a lopsided lych-gate before an ancient church. The yard alongside was resolutely uneven; its tangled waves of long dark grasses seemed to billow and swell around the worn gravestones.

  The second stories of the half-timbered buildings in the village overhung the street, creating the impression that they were unstable, thickly stacked blocks that cut off most of the early-evening light below. The high street was scarcely wide enough for a vehicle, and the men from the estate fell into line, proceeding in single file as cautiously as hunters. Invisible hands twitched curtains aside, and unidentifiable faces, pale ovals hung in the black squares of the windows, surfaced and then withdrew into the deep pool of the interior. A dog’s angry outburst sounded from a passageway.

  A villager carrying a parcel labored up the slanting street toward them, his boots bold on the cobblestones. He halted in front of the strangers, looking past Hunt’s defiant glare at the silent men, their faces jagged with lines and shapeless with bandages. The villager’s expression stiffened into fear, he stumbled backward, turned, and his running footsteps were an echoing judgment.

  “Bloody fool.”

  The men from the estate stood spellbound, solid as the stones beneath their feet. Hunt began to whistle, tentatively at first, then increasingly loudly.

  “Company, forward! Right foot, left foot!” The men marched to Hunt’s loud commands, altering the scene by their passage, as if they were carriers of misfortune.

  At the end of the street, a child thumped a ball on the ground as her mother watched. The woman’s skirt swayed around her ankles as she twisted toward the approaching men, her mouth shaped into silent dismay. She pulled the crying child into the house.

  “It’s dark as the trenches here.”

  “More light. More light,” they chanted.

  A window slammed open, freeing a man’s harsh voice. “You’re not welcome here. You’re bad luck, all of you. Leave this place.” The window violently shut.

  Every window swung closed, linked by sound all along the street.

  Peter, the slightest man among them, was hoisted onto the other patient’s shoulders, making a peculiar statue. Peter’s head—blunt and misshapen—bobbed above them, the black opening that was his mouth twisting, spitting out a wild guttural sound, his chest moving like an instrument, a bellows. They were grimly pleased by his angry, strangled cries, repeated again and again.

  Something struck the cobblestones near Hunt’s feet. Astonished, no one moved. The short patient with a wild thatch of hair furiously shook his fist at the blank windows. Small objects—stones, an apple, a child’s wooden block—fell around them. Something struck Peter’s forehead, and blood wobbled down his face. With a roar, Hunt scooped up a fistful of rocks, hurled them through the dark at the windows. Glass shattered.

  “It’s our street. Our sky,” yelled the dark-haired patient. “No one keeps us away.”

  “Our legs are strong as any man’s legs. Our arms strong as any arms. Hear?”

  The quiet that followed was weighed and watchful, a force held by the unseen villagers, and the men fought it with slow, mournful whistling as they strode through the deserted streets, surveying the territory they’d conquered.

  MCCLEARY WAS UNEXPECTEDLY called out of his office by the matron. He let his irritation slip away when he saw her worried expression. “Two men and a woman have come from the village,” she said. “They wish to meet with you.”

  “Strange. Did they explain the reason for their visit?” She shook her head, and he instructed that they should wait in a small room off the Main Hall, which was impressively decorated with carved gilt paneling. He decided to remain in operating uniform, a ready-made excuse to extricate himself if the situation became unpleasant.

  McCleary’s cordial greeting did little to change the visitors’ belligerent mood, alter the angry lines on their faces.

  “It’s not a pleasant matter we have to discuss,” the younger man said, and he drew a deep breath to continue. “Your patients came into the village.”

  “Yes. I understand some of the men had a walking expedition.”

  “They broke my window,” the woman cried.

  “I apologize. We will see that you’re compensated —”

  The younger man loudly interrupted McCleary. “We don’t want the patients in the village.”

  “They mean no harm. The behavior of a few . . .”

  The stout man, who had remained silent, stepped in front of the others. “It’s their looks.”

  “The patients frighten the children,” the woman whispered.

  “Keep your patients out of the village. Lock them up so they can’t come walking around again.” The stout man folded his arms across his wide waistcoat.

  “If a soldier—a veteran—had a broken arm or leg, would you treat him the same way? Forbid him your streets?” McCleary stared down the villagers as if they represented the world that would judge his patients. The wall of critical, fearful eyes in their future.

  The younger man stared at the floor to hide his discomfort, infecting the others with his uneasiness.

  “My two boys are soldiers.” The woman wrung her hands.

  The visitors relented after a lengthy discussion, conceding that the patients could enter the village under certain conditions. First, half a mile outside the village, they must begin to whistle “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” which would enable parents to bring their children indoors. The patients were restricted to one area of the green, where several benches would be painted red and reserved exclusively for their use. This would eliminate any unexpected encounters between the villagers and the unwelcome outsiders.

  The villagers took their leave of McCleary, proud of the sacrifice they’d made for the war.

  AFTER THIS INTRUSION from the outside world, the medical staff gathered for a hastily convened meeting in the Blue Drawing Room. They reluctantly agreed that the most badly injured men would be issued masks to ease them back into society.

  McCleary was pleased to have their support, having previously laid out this plan in confidence to Kazanjian. He explained that this undertaking would start with a mask for a single patient. But McCleary’s anger simmered as Pickerill spun out the debate, forcing them to cater to his unrelenting skepticism.

  “Why such caution?” asked Pickerill. “Surely there’s a better chance of success if masks are made for several men?”

  “The first mask is only a test and it will be kept strictly secret between us. If the mask doesn’t work, there’s no need to alarm the patients. Hardly reassuring for them to know they might need to hide their faces.”

  “Let sleeping dogs lie,” said the matron loudly, and crossed her arms over her chest in the back of the room. She had spoken.

  “Amen,” echoed another voice.

  McCleary assured Pickerill that all the patients would be reviewed and a suitable volunteer selected. A disfigured man who had no further surgical options and could be trusted to keep the mask project secret.

 
; Time, it was only a matter of time until surgical techniques would be perfected. Every case carried in on a stretcher increased the surgeons’ knowledge. The masks were only a stopgap measure. So they told themselves.

  Kazanjian quietly suggested that Mrs. Coleman should fabricate the masks, as she was experienced with metalwork and paint. He would assist her with technical advice and casting.

  “Excellent idea,” McCleary said. “Tell Mrs. Coleman that after the first patient is selected, we’ll have his photograph sent to her.”

  “Photograph?”

  “Obviously, the patient’s face will have been radically transformed by his injuries. Mrs. Coleman will model the mask from the man’s original face, as he appears in an old portrait. At the least, he should look passably like himself.”

  Pickerill acquiesced on this point. “I don’t mind assigning a woman to the task. But will Mrs. Coleman be able to stand such close contact with the patients’ faces without becoming ill or reacting badly?” Pickerill had stated what they all thought: A woman has less competence.

  Except Kazanjian. “Her eye doesn’t judge.” He confidently smoothed the fine leather book in his hands that had been overlooked on a shelf.

  AFTER THE MEETING had adjourned and their colleagues had taken leave, Kazanjian studied McCleary as he eased himself into one of the remaining wing chairs in the Blue Drawing Room. “What’s wrong?”

  “I have been a practicing surgeon for more than forty years. I should be able to passably remake a face. But when the face is held together by wires, straps, and gauze, I cannot anticipate the arc of healing. I lack vision.”

  “Predictions of healing are never exact.”

  “Unpredictable as clouds.”

  “Diagnosis is like a jigsaw puzzle. There is a moment of confusion when you cannot decipher the picture. Then one piece drops into place and instantly a recognizable image appears.”

  “But some men will require dozens of operations on their face. Success will be measured in millimeters. It will take months, years.”

  McCleary continued to unwind the arguments against himself, unable to stop. “I tell myself it’s too early for conclusions, but when a man must wear a mask to cover what I cannot correct, I have failed. A mask isn’t a cure.”

  Kazanjian gently reminded McCleary that the mask was only a temporary solution, an object of service. A prosthetic. A crutch. “It’s only an intermediate step to help the patients,” he said.

  “Many of the patients will fall into despair because of their damaged faces. Understandably, since their lives have been irreversibly changed. It disturbs me that nerve-shattered soldiers are treated for mental breakdowns at Maghull. But not a word of counsel for our mutilés. All I can give my patients is the illusion of hope.”

  “Look to your own guide. Didn’t you once quote Mondeville to me: ‘The use of falsehood in place of truth is allowable and justified if it helps produce true knowledge.’”

  The neat sound of shears came through the open window, followed by the scent of cut grass. McCleary was relieved by this interruption, since he struggled to speak. “I have no one else to confide in,” he said abruptly, startled by his own words.

  “I am honored.” Kazanjian’s spectacles flashed white, reflecting the afternoon light. “And you are overly critical.”

  McCleary was weightless with relief at Kazanjian’s calm acceptance of his distress.

  MCCLEARY HAD WRITTEN to Macready, the adjutant general, and Sir William Robertson at the War Office, requesting that Artis continue assisting at the hospital to fulfill his military obligation. Exemptions were not unheard of for men toiling in jobs crucial to the war effort. Shipbuilders and shale oil workers were still exempt from service, although it had been reported that factory workers who had formerly been excused had been called up, their places assigned to women. Those who refused to fight on principle became conchies, conscientious objectors, sentenced to labor, exile in camps, or sometimes noncombatant jobs at the front.

  Another group, slightly less resented, were young men with family connections and money, granted desk jobs in lieu of combat. McCleary mourned the loss of many of his oldest friends who could have pulled strings for Artis. It was yet another wearisome proof of his own age and decline.

  IT WAS CRUCIAL not to react to the patient’s appearance. To see without being seen. For caregivers, a neutral expression was as desirable as riches or sleep. Maintaining this was unexpectedly stressful, and everyone working in the hospital wards coped in his or her own way.

  At eight thirty every morning, the nurses knelt and were led in a fifteen-minute prayer by the matron. The stern nurses never wept publicly. Both men and women drank and suffered nightmares. Others walked about with brittle high spirits as if nothing was wrong. These individuals were the most fragile.

  Occasionally, the doctors, nurses, and the boldest orderlies sought oblivion immediately after leaving the operating theater, collapsing in chairs or stretching out on the floor, too exhausted to find beds. Brownlow was once discovered asleep under a fruit tree in the orchard, the stains on his hospital garb nearly obliterated by a blizzard of fallen petals.

  For McCleary, days became indistinguishable from nights as the silver disk of the light in the operating theater served as his sun and harsh moon. After surgery one night, he left the room’s merciless illumination, forgetting to remove his operating clothes, his fingers numb, useless, as if they had been peeled away from his control in a dream.

  Groggily, he made his way down the corridor. The scene depicted on the wallpaper—a hand-printed Chinese garden by Zuber—was eerily intensified by the new electric bulbs, and his vision filled with this restful landscape, the artist’s perfect dream of green, a color that provided a reliable antidote to the effects of surgery.

  A nurse in a white uniform and starched cap hurried past him carrying a basin of bloody water, and the juxtaposition of red with the green wallpaper was fantastic. His eyes closed tight against it, but he was unable to rid himself of this image.

  A few patients had disobeyed McCleary’s directive and secretly sought their reflections. They were unable to hide their distress from him, and there was nothing he could do but offer them gentle counsel, reassure them that the shocking image of their face was grotesquely distorted. For these poor men, knowledge was a poisoned apple.

  Unconsciously, McCleary also began to seek out reflective surfaces. An inch of golden liquid in a wineglass. The curved face of his pocket watch. A lead glass decanter on a shelf. Near the stables, he noticed a reflective skin of water over paving stones. At the bottom of the cistern, there was a darker transparency, the water blurred by a fine fringe of moss. In winter there would be the presence of ice, soothing gray, a surface too smooth for the searching hook of his eye.

  He daydreamed about the most perfect surface. A cut and polished diamond. Hammered gold. The back of an Amati violin, varnished by the hands of a master.

  McCleary decided skin was the most perfect surface. Minutely jeweled with hairs, pores, imperfections, laced with veins finer than a line made by a needle or knife blade, opaque and simultaneously transparent; its impermanence was intrinsic to its beauty.

  He wished for a perfection of skin for his patients. He imagined squares of skin the size of rose petals that would miraculously float down over the faces of the wounded men and cover their wounds—thick, silent, and painless as a snowfall.

  AN INTERESTING QUESTION. The most perfect skin?” Anna’s hand stopped above the paper, chalk poised at a slanted angle.

  McCleary waited expectantly.

  “A young maidservant painted by Sweerts. Her skin was translucent, yet the texture of the canvas was faintly visible. This paradox is miraculous.”

  “Your description is lovely, but I’m a medical man. My immediate thought was that skin is an optical illusion. Blood in the superficial arteries is red, but a layer of yellow fat in the skin makes it appear blue.”

  “Renoir relied on an optical illusion
for flesh tones. He painted primarily with neutral grays, a bit of red, and the color around the body created the look of lifelike skin. Unfortunately, the patients’ masks won’t have that subtlety. They’ll look like painted metal.”

  “You won’t repeat this to the men, of course.”

  “It would serve no purpose.”

  “Thank you. I’ve always held artists in high esteem. I once knew a woman, a singer, very well.” His thoughts left the room, Anna’s waiting presence, as he was struck by a sliver of memory, a beloved woman’s lips as she sang, the color of her eyes and her dress. McCleary blinked and she vanished. He continued speaking in an uncharacteristic rush, embarrassed by his craving for Anna’s answer. “I believe artists are more perceptive than other people. You know, there is a question that has long puzzled me. Could a man who is unable to smile or frown lose his emotions? Is a smile, a facial expression, necessary to experience, say, happiness?”

  “I don’t know. It would be tragic if it were true. On the other hand, it would be a blessing if your patients couldn’t feel sorrow.”

  “I don’t mean that this would make any man a lesser person, of course.”

  “But perhaps this is your way of comforting yourself.”

  He could tell the smile she gave him was forced, not a true smile. He thanked her and left the studio in somber spirits. He walked around the lake, briefly surfacing from memory of Anna’s conversation to admire the distorted reflection of the red bridge in the water. A leaf weightlessly hovered, then touched the water, breaking the line of the lake’s liquid image. He recollected that the orb of the eye was unchanging, expressionless, set like a static pearl in skin that quivered, twitched, stretched, struggled to communicate emotion. Only muscles created the radiant quickness of expression.

  He had once watched a turtle that had been washed up on land, the creature’s calm eye unable to communicate its bewilderment at the sudden lack of moisture, the intense weight of the dry air.