The bus driver was of the normal or placid crosstown type; having fewer traffic lights and stops to cope with than the up-and-downtown drivers, he could afford to be genial. A portable radio hung by his steering wheel, tuned to WQXR. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture flowed syrupy around him and his passengers. As the bus crossed Columbus Avenue, a faceless delinquent heaved a rock at it. Cries in Spanish ascended to it out of the darkness. A report which could have been either a backfire or a gunshot sounded a few blocks downtown. Captured in the score’s black symbols, given life by vibrating air columns and strings, having taken passage through transducers, coils, capacitors and tubes to a shuddering paper cone, the eternal drama of love and death continued to unfold entirely disconnected from this evening and place.
The bus entered the sudden waste country of Central Park. Out there, Esther knew, up and downtown, they would be going at it under bushes; mugging, raping, killing. She, her world, knew nothing of the square confines of the park after sundown. It was reserved as if by covenant for cops, delinquents and all manner of deviates.
Suppose she were telepathic, and could tune in on what was going on out there. She preferred not to think about it. There would be power in telepathy, she thought, but much pain. And someone else might tap your own mind without your knowing. (Had Rachel been listening in on the phone extension?)
She touched the tip of her new nose delicately, in secret: a mannerism she’d developed just recently. Not so much to point it out to whoever might be watching as to make sure it was still there. The bus came out of the park onto the safe, bright East Side, into the lights of Fifth Avenue. They reminded her to go shopping tomorrow for a dress she’d seen, $39.95 at Lord and Taylor, which he would like.
What a brave girl I am, she trilled to herself, coming through so much night and lawlessness to visit My Lover.
She got off at First Avenue and tap-tapped along the sidewalk, facing uptown and perhaps some dream. Soon she turned right, began to fish in her purse for a key. Found the door, opened, stepped inside. The front rooms were all deserted. Beneath the mirror, two golden imps in a clock danced the same unsyncopated tango they’d always danced. Esther felt home. Behind the operating room (a sentimental glance sideways through the open door toward the table on which her face had been altered) was a small chamber, in it a bed. He lay, head and shoulders circled by the intense halo of a paraboloid reading light. His eyes opened to her, her arms to him.
“You are early,” he said.
“I am late,” she answered. Already stepping out of her skirt.
I
Schoenmaker, being conservative, referred to his profession as the art of Tagliacozzi. His own methods, while not as primitive as those of the sixteenth-century Italian, were marked by a certain sentimental inertia, so that Schoenmaker was never quite up to date. He went out of his way to cultivate the Tagliacozzi look: showing his eyebrows thin and semicircular; wearing a bushy mustache, pointed beard, sometimes even a skullcap, his old schoolboy yarmulke.
He’d received his impetus—like the racket itself—from the World War. At seventeen, coeval with the century, he raised a mustache (which he never shaved off), falsified his age and name and wallowed off in a fetid troopship to fly, so he thought, high over the ruined châteaux and scarred fields of France, got up like an earless raccoon to scrimmage with the Hun; a brave Icarus.
Well, the kid never did get up in the air, but they made him a greasemonkey which was more than he’d expected anyway. It was enough. He got to know the guts not only of Breguets, Bristol Fighters and JNs but also of the birdmen who did go up, and whom, of course, he adored. There was always a certain feudal-homosexual element in this division of labor. Schoenmaker felt like a page boy. Since those days as we know democracy has made its inroads and those crude flying-machines have evolved into “weapon systems” of a then undreamed-of complexity; so that the maintenance man today has to be as professional-noble as the flight crew he supports.
But then: it was a pure and abstract passion, directed for Schoenmaker, at least, toward the face. His own mustache may have been partly responsible; he was often mistaken for a pilot. On off hours, infrequently, he would sport a silk kerchief (obtained in Paris) at his throat, by way of imitation.
The war being what it was, certain of the faces—craggy or smooth, with slicked-down hair or bald—never came back. To this the young Schoenmaker responded with all adolescent love’s flexibility: his free-floating affection sad and thwarted for a time till it managed to attach itself to a new face. But in each case, loss was as unspecified as the proposition “love dies.” They flew off and were swallowed in the sky.
Until Evan Godolphin. A liaison officer in his middle thirties, TDY with the Americans for reconnaissance missions over the Argonne plateau, Godolphin carried the natural foppishness of the early aviators to extremes which in the time’s hysterical context seemed perfectly normal. Here were no trenches, after all: the air up there was free of any taint of gas or comrades’ decay. Combatants on both sides could afford to break champagne glasses in the majestic fireplaces of commandeered country seats; treat their captives with utmost courtesy, adhere to every point of the duello when it came to a dogfight; in short, practice with finicking care the entire rigmarole of nineteenth-century gentlemen at war. Evan Godolphin wore a Bond Street–tailored flying suit; would often, dashing clumsily across the scars of their makeshift airfield toward his French Spad, stop to pluck a lone poppy, survivor of strafing by autumn and the Germans (naturally aware of the Flanders Fields poem in Punch, three years ago when there’d still been an idealistic tinge to trench warfare), and insert it into one faultless lapel.
Godolphin became Schoenmaker’s hero. Tokens tossed his way—an occasional salute, a “well done” for the preflights which came to be the boy-mechanic’s responsibility, a tense smile—were hoarded fervently. Perhaps he saw an end also to this unrequited love; doesn’t a latent sense of death always heighten the pleasure of such an “involvement”?
The end came soon enough. One rainy afternoon toward the end of the battle of Meuse-Argonne, Godolphin’s crippled plane materialized suddenly out of all that gray, looped feebly, dipped on a wing toward the ground and slid like a kite in an air current toward the runway. It missed the runway by a hundred yards: by the time it impacted corpsmen and stretcher-bearers were already running out toward it. Schoenmaker happened to be nearby and tagged along, having no idea what had happened till he saw the heap of rags and splinters, already soggy in the rain, and from it, limping toward the medics, the worst possible travesty of a human face lolling atop an animate corpse. The top of the nose had been shot away; shrapnel had torn out part of one cheek and shattered half the chin. The eyes, intact, showed nothing.
Schoenmaker must have lost himself. The next he could remember he was back at an aid station, trying to convince the doctors there to take his own cartilage. Godolphin would live, they’d decided. But his face would have to be rebuilt. Life for the young officer would be, otherwise, unthinkable.
Now luckily for some a law of supply and demand had been at work in the field of plastic surgery. Godolphin’s case, by 1918, was hardly unique. Methods had been in existence since the fifth century B.C. for rebuilding noses, Thiersch grafts had been around for forty or so years. During the war new techniques were developed by necessity and were practiced by GPs, eye-ear-nose-and-throat men, even a hastily recruited gynecologist or two. The techniques that worked were adopted and passed on quickly to the younger medics. Those that failed produced a generation of freaks and pariahs who along with those who’d received no restorative surgery at all became a secret and horrible postwar fraternity. No good at all in any of the usual rungs of society, where did they go?
(Profane would see some of them under the street. Others you could meet at any rural crossroads in America. As Profane had: come to a new road, right-angles to his progress, smelled the Die
sel exhaust of a truck long gone—like walking through a ghost—and seen there like a milestone one of them. Whose limp might mean a brocade or bas-relief of scar tissue down one leg—how many women had looked and shied?—; whose cicatrix on the throat would be hidden modestly like a gaudy war decoration; whose tongue, protruding through a hole in the cheek, would never speak secret words with any extra mouth.)
Evan Godolphin proved to be one of them. The doctor was young, he had ideas of his own, which the AEF was no place for. His name was Halidom and he favored allografts: the introduction of inert substances into the living face. It was suspected at the time that the only safe transplants to use were cartilage or skin from the patient’s own body. Schoenmaker, knowing nothing about medicine, offered his cartilage but the gift was rejected; allografting was plausible and Halidom saw no reason for two men being hospitalized when only one had to be.
Thus Godolphin received a nose bridge of ivory, a cheekbone of silver and a paraffin and celluloid chin. A month later Schoenmaker went to visit him in the hospital—the last time he ever saw Godolphin. The reconstruction had been perfect. He was being sent back to London, in some obscure staff position, and spoke with a grim flippancy.
“Take a long look. It won’t be good for more than six months.” Schoenmaker stammered: Godolphin continued: “See him, down the way?” Two cots over lay what would have been a similar casualty except that the skin of the face was whole, shiny. But the skull beneath was misshapen. “Foreign-body reaction, they call it. Sometimes infection, inflammation, sometimes only pain. The paraffin, for instance, doesn’t hold shape. Before you know it, you’re back where you started.” He talked like a man under death sentence. “Perhaps I can pawn my cheekbone. It’s worth a fortune. Before they melted it down it was one of a set of pastoral figurines, eighteenth century—nymphs, shepherdesses—looted from a château the Hun was using for a CP; Lord knows where they’re originally from—”
“Couldn’t—” Schoenmaker’s throat was dry—“couldn’t they fix it, somehow: start over . . .”
“Too rushed. I’m lucky to get what I got. I can’t complain. Think of the devils who haven’t even six months to bash around in.”
“What will you do when—”
“I’m not thinking of that. But it will be a grand six months.”
The young mechanic stayed in a kind of emotional limbo for weeks. He worked without the usual slacking off, believing himself no more animate than the spanners and screwdrivers he handled. When there were passes to be had he gave his to someone else. He slept on an average of four hours a night. This mineral period ended by an accidental meeting with a medical officer one evening in the barracks. Schoenmaker put it as primitively as he felt:
“How can I become a doctor.”
Of course it was idealistic and uncomplex. He wanted only to do something for men like Godolphin, to help prevent a takeover of the profession by its unnatural and traitorous Halidoms. It took ten years of working at his first specialty—mechanic—as well as navvy in a score of markets and warehouses, bill-collector, once administrative assistant to a bootlegging syndicate operating out of Decatur, Illinois. These years of labor were interlarded with night courses and occasional day enrollments, though none more than three semesters in a row (after Decatur, when he could afford it); internship; finally, on the eve of the Great Depression, entrance to the medical freemasonry.
If alignment with the inanimate is the mark of a Bad Guy, Schoenmaker at least made a sympathetic beginning. But at some point along his way there occurred a shift in outlook so subtle that even Profane, who was unusually sensitive that way, probably couldn’t have detected it. He was kept going by hatred for Halidom and perhaps a fading love for Godolphin. These had given rise to what is called a “sense of mission”—something so tenuous it has to be fed more solid fare than either hatred or love. So it came to be sustained, plausibly enough, by a number of bloodless theories about the “idea” of the plastic surgeon. Having heard his vocation on the embattled wind, Schoenmaker’s dedication was toward repairing the havoc wrought by agencies outside his own sphere of responsibility. Others—politicians, and machines—carried on wars; others—perhaps human machines—condemned his patients to the ravages of acquired syphilis; others—on the highways, in the factories—undid the work of nature with automobiles, milling machines, other instruments of civilian disfigurement. What could he do toward eliminating the causes? They existed, formed a body of things-as-they-are; he came to be afflicted with a conservative laziness. It was social awareness of a sort, but with boundaries and interfaces which made it less than the catholic rage filling him that night in the barracks with the M.O. It was in short a deterioration of purpose; a decay.
II
Esther met him, oddly enough, through Stencil, who at the time was only a newcomer to the Crew. Stencil, pursuing a different trail, happened for reasons of his own to be interested in Evan Godolphin’s history. He’d followed it as far as Meuse-Argonne. Having finally got Schoenmaker’s alias from the AEF records, it took Stencil months to trace him to Germantown and the Muzak-filled face hospital. The good doctor denied everything, after every variety of cajolement Stencil knew; it was another dead end.
As is usual after certain frustrations, we react with benevolence. Esther had been languishing ripe and hot-eyed about the Rusty Spoon, hating her figure-six nose and proving as well as she could the unhappy undergraduate adage: “All the ugly ones fuck.” The thwarted Stencil, casting about for somebody to take it all out on, glommed on to her despair hopefully—a taking which progressed to sad summer afternoons wandering among parched fountains, sunstruck shop fronts and streets bleeding tar, eventually to a father-daughter agreement casual enough to be canceled at any time should either of them desire, no postmortems necessary. It struck him with a fine irony that the nicest sentimental trinket for her would be an introduction to Schoenmaker; accordingly, in September, the contact was made and Esther without ado went under his knives and kneading fingers.
Collected for her in the anteroom that day were a rogues’ gallery of malformed. A bald woman without ears contemplated the gold imp-clock, skin flush and shiny from temples to occiput. Beside her sat a younger girl, whose skull was fissured such that three separate peaks, paraboloid in shape, protruded above the hair, which continued down either side of a densely acned face like a skipper’s beard. Across the room, studying a copy of the Reader’s Digest, sat an aged gentleman in a moss-green gabardine suit, who possessed three nostrils, no upper lip and an assortment of different-sized teeth which leaned and crowded together like the headstones of a boneyard in tornado country. And off in a corner, looking at nothing, was a sexless being with hereditary syphilis, whose bones had acquired lesions and had partially collapsed so that the gray face’s profile was nearly a straight line, the nose hanging down like a loose flap of skin, nearly covering the mouth; the chin depressed at the side by a large sunken crater containing radial skin-wrinkles; the eyes squeezed shut by the same unnatural gravity that flattened the rest of the profile. Esther, who was still at an impressionable age, identified with them all. It was confirmation of this alien feeling which had driven her to bed with so many of the Whole Sick Crew.
This first day Schoenmaker spent in pre-operative reconnaissance of the terrain: photographing Esther’s face and nose from various angles, checking for upper respiratory infections, running a Wassermann. Irving and Trench also assisted him in making two duplicate casts or death-masks. They gave her two paper straws to breathe through and in her childish way she thought of soda shops, cherry Cokes, True Confessions.
Next day she was back at the office. The two casts were there on his desk, side by side. “I’m twins,” she giggled. Schoenmaker reached out and snapped the plaster nose from one of the masks.
“Now,” he smiled; producing like a magician a lump of modeling clay with which he replaced the broken-off nose. “What sort of n
ose did you have in mind?”
What else: Irish, she wanted, turned up. Like they all wanted. To none of them did it occur that the retroussé nose too is an aesthetic misfit: a Jew nose in reverse, is all. Few had ever asked for a so-called “perfect” nose, where the roof is straight, the tip untilted and unhooked, the columella (separating the nostrils) meeting the upper lip at 90 degrees. All of which went to support his private thesis that correction—along all dimensions: social, political, emotional—entails retreat to a diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a golden mean.
A few artistic finger-flourishes and wrist-twistings.
“Would that be it?” Eyes aglow, she nodded. “It has to harmonize with the rest of your face, you see.” It didn’t, of course. All that could harmonize with a face, if you were going to be humanistic about it, was obviously what the face was born with.
“But,” he’d been able to rationalize years before, “there is harmony and harmony.” So, Esther’s nose. Identical with an ideal of nasal beauty established by movies, advertisements, magazine illustrations. Cultural harmony, Schoenmaker called it.
“Try next week then.” He gave her the time. Esther was thrilled. It was like waiting to be born, and talking over with God, calm and businesslike, exactly how you wanted to enter the world.
Next week she arrived, punctual: guts tight, skin sensitive. “Come.” Schoenmaker took her gently by the hand. She felt passive, even (a little?) sexually aroused. She was seated in a dentist’s chair, tilted back and prepared by Irving, who hovered about her like a handmaiden.
Esther’s face was cleaned in the nasal region with green soap, iodine and alcohol. The hair inside her nostrils was clipped and the vestibules cleaned gently with antiseptics. She was then given Nembutal.
V. Page 11
