At the Edge of Summer

I couldn’t much smile anymore. Not that I had a reason to. Months from that night in the rain-dripped cellar, and my torn face still ached. Months from that night when Bauer turned my own bayonet on Chaffre, and my torn soul was still numb.

After Martel dragged me, bleeding, to the poste de secours, I didn’t remember much. I was bandaged and loaded into an ambulance and jolted farther and farther back along the line, from dressing station to dressing station, hospital to hospital. It passed in a fog of morphine and needles and cold bandages. Something stinging was poured into my wounds. I was stitched. I slept wrapped in agony. I remember throwing a bedpan late one night. Someone in the ward was screaming. I didn’t know if it was me.

I knew I was slipping towards the edge. Out on the battlefield, I was determined. But here, in these crowded, desperate hospital wards, in this haze of pain and regret, I was willing to go. It certainly was better than remembering.

When I arrived at Royaumont, I was scorched with a fever. They carried me on a stretcher and I felt every bump. Sticky rain fell on my face. Inside, it was bright lights, soft hands, murmurs. I swore I heard the sound of singing, like angels. They gave me something bitter in a cup, something that made me shudder and retch. And then I slept.

I woke to the sound of Scottish voices. Women teasing, scolding, reassuring. Before I opened my eyes, I was weeping.

One of those voices bent near and a cool hand cupped the side of my forehead. “Monsieur, tu as de la douleur? Pouvez-vous me dire où se faire mal?” Her fingers trailed my left cheek. “Ah, his fever is down.”

“Please, I speak English.” I opened my eyes. Not Clare, of course not, but her lilt made me feel a sudden peace. The nurse was young, dressed all in gray. “You look like a dove.”

She smiled ruefully. “A partridge. Little gray partridges are what they call us.”

“No, a dove.”

“You won’t think as kindly of me in a moment.” She carefully lifted bandages from my cheek. “You had an infection in your wounds. I’m sorry, but we had to cut your stitches open to drain them. We may have to remove more tissue.” She touched my ruined faced gently, from my nose down to my jaw. “Both your shoulder and your nose are coming along nicely, but I think there is still debris in your cheek, right here.” I winced. “Will you mind if I clean it?”

“As long as you keep talking, you can do whatever you like to me.”

Her name was Mabel and she was my savior. She brought me back from the edge and kept me from slipping too close again. She held my hand while they restitched me, like a worn pair of trousers, and sponged off the mud of the trenches. She spooned broth into my aching jaw. She helped me with my buttons, with my socks, with all of the little things I couldn’t do with my shoulder the way it was. She told me about a lazy childhood in Kirkcaldy, until her words washed me clean.

But then I was patched up and was left with the waiting and the healing.

The hospital at Royaumont was built in a medieval abbey. The Scottish hospital unit that had moved onto the grounds had added electric lights and running water, had assembled rows of beds, dragged in grass-stuffed mattresses, scrubbed up operating theaters, yet traces of the old abbey remained. Vaulted ceilings, wide windows overlooking a courtyard, the ghosts of hymns in the stones. The doctors and gray-uniformed nurses and orderlies—all Scottish, all women—moved between the beds, quietly checking dressings, administering medicine, smoothing red blankets. In that peace, we recovered.

But the peace only lasted so long. Eventually, in the quiet, my thoughts returned. I was restless, yet had no energy to move. I didn’t eat, at least not often. Some broth, soft eggs, bread soaked in milk. I slept, far too many hours, because it was easier than lying awake, thinking. That last conversation with Bauer, the narrowing of his eyes as he pushed the bayonet in, the final kick as they all left me there on the floor, played in my head again and again. His comment about Clare and Paris echoed. The glint of his eyes as I realized what he’d probably done and what she’d kept from me all those years. How he’d hurt two people I cared about. One night, I dreamed about Chaffre, about the press of his lips to my knuckles, about the smell of blood and wet wool in that little cellar. The nightmares came more often after that.

Mabel knew. She’d bring me a warm draught and sit by me until I fell back asleep. Once she said, “You were betrayed by a friend, weren’t you?” I must’ve looked startled, as she laid a hand on my arm. “You talk in your sleep.”

“I was.” I automatically put a hand to my front pocket, though my uniform was in the Vêtement Department and I was in red pajamas. That copy of Tales of Passed Times was gone. “I was just bringing him paper to write to his maman.”

“You should do the same.” She smoothed her apron. “It might help if you had your own mam here.”

“Not now.” I touched my bandaged face. “When I look like a man again.”

Mabel bit her lower lip. Once, while she was changing my dressings, I’d caught an unexpected glimpse of myself reflected in the side of her tin basin. Only half a face left. The rest was all stitches and swells.

“I’ve heard you say that before,” she said. “Is that why you don’t write to her?”

“I have written. I dictated a letter to you, right after I arrived.” I’d been as blithe as always in letters to Maman. “But I didn’t tell her I was writing from a hospital. She doesn’t want to worry.” I remembered that spring afternoon up in Papa’s studio, where she pretended not to cringe over the splinters up and down my back. I remembered her desperate, false front of cheerfulness.

The days stretched. My stitches were removed, leaving behind raw pink scars. My shoulder had mended enough for me to see a masseuse and learn exercises to gain strength. As much as I tried, though, I still couldn’t wield a spoon with that arm, much less a rifle. I was declared unfit for duty.

The pronouncement left me surprisingly adrift. Yesterday I’d been a soldier recovering, yet now I was just a broken man taking up space in an abbey.

Mabel assured me that wasn’t true, but soon she started encouraging me to get up out of bed more often, and dress, and walk. “This will all be good for you, Luc,” she promised. She walked with me to the refectory, where the women ate at long tables. She led me to the courtyard and to the gardens, covered over with the first snowfall. I carried Chaffre’s little Madonna in the pocket of my dressing gown. Around my wrist, I still wore that tattered ribbon. More and more, Mabel left me to struggle alone with my buttons and socks. “Ah, but you can’t stay here forever.”

And I didn’t. There came a day when I put on my uniform again, hating every centimeter of wool. Where I tightened a scarf around my chin to cover as much as I could. Where I left behind all of those Scottish voices and boarded a train to Paris.

Not knowing where else to go, I went to Uncle Jules’s apartment. Véronique had a new paramour, a poet with delicate hands and an unpredictable temper, but she had me wait down across the street while she sent him away for the night.

“You can’t stay, mon petit,” she kept saying as she fluttered around me. “My life is different now. Edgar, I think he will marry me.” But she made me a bath and warmed a bowl of spicy cassoulet.

I ate by the fire in a brocade dressing gown. The heat on my bare toes, the silk sliding on my arms, the curve of the painted bowl, all was almost too comfortable.

Véronique sat by me with a bottle of Château Margaux from Uncle Jules’s secret store. “You look as though you could use a rest.” She poured me wine, which warmed me down to my fingers. I hadn’t had a drink in months. “I wasn’t sure if I’d see you again, Luc.”

The last time I’d seen her had been early in the war, on a rare leave to Paris. I’d been in my uniform and had stopped to bring her a bag of medlars from the trees at Mille Mots. She’d brushed aside the bag of fruit and exclaimed over me instead. Her petit Luc, all grown. She called me “strong” and “brave,” then shut the apartment door tight. For one night she taught me all the things she said a man needed to know.

My skin ached beneath the silk of the borrowed dressing gown and I wondered if she’d do the same again tonight. But she said, “How Jules would fret over you. Does it hurt much?” and I knew she only saw my torn face. While she kept my wineglass refilled, she stayed on the sofa and didn’t invite me up.

I finished eating and dressed. I would rather walk the streets than spend the night on her rug, feeling pitied.

“When you’ve settled, you can come for Demetrius and Lysander. Feathers make Edgar sneeze.” She pressed on me one of Edgar’s old suits, a bottle of wine, and Uncle Jules’s wristwatch. It was a Santos-Dumont, something she’d bought him for his fiftieth birthday in a flurry of making him a “man of the age.” My wrists had grown thin, but I tightened the band as best I could and thanked her with a kiss on the cheek. She pushed a handful of change into my pocket. “It isn’t much, but if you come in the morning, after Edgar has left for the café, I can give you more.” For all her shallowness, Véronique was generous.

That night I moved from park to park, from doorway to doorway, drinking straight from my bottle of too-expensive wine. Bleary, cold, I realized halfway through the night that it was my birthday.

The next morning, with head aching, I stood again in front of Véronique’s building, unsure whether her poet friend was still in, unsure whether I wanted her pity. As I paced the distance between pavement and door, Maman found me.

“Véronique said you would be here.”

Maman was a smudge of color in the gray of wartime Paris. She wore pale green. She was the fresh of a meadow. I swallowed down the sudden lump in my throat. “Maman.”

She looked suddenly uncertain standing there on the pavement. “You didn’t tell me you were in Paris. If Véronique hadn’t sent me a telegram last night…” She eyed me up and down, at my civilian clothes, and took a step forward. “You’re not fine, are you? She said you…”

I took a deep breath and unwound the scarf from my face.

At my raw skin, exposed, she flinched.

Inside, so did I.

“Oh.” She turned her head away.

“This is why I didn’t tell you.” Choking back a ragged breath, I wrapped the scarf around again. “I knew it would upset you.” I tied it in a knot, right under my chin.

“Oh no, mon poisson.” She straightened. “I didn’t mean…I’m not upset.”

I didn’t know whether I appreciated the lie or not. I kept the scarf tight across my face; she didn’t ask me to take it off.

“I was attacked,” I said.

She swallowed deeply.

“It was Bastille Day and we had prisoners, German prisoners, that we were guarding.” The rain against the doorway, the narrowing eyes, the blade across my cheek and through my shoulder. “They fought their way out. It was fierce, it was messy, and there wasn’t anything we could do.”

Her face flickered through emotion like a moving picture. Sorrow, fear, anger, finally settling into pity. “At least you are alive, my Luc.”

That dark cellar, that cry lost in the wind. “Not everyone was so lucky.” I closed my eyes.

She reached out and touched my arm.

That touch dissolved me. Standing there on that doorstep, months of tears and memories and regret threatened. I pressed a hand to my mouth.

“Luc.” Her hand tightened on my good arm. “It’s over. It’s past. I’m here to bring you home.”

“To Mille Mots?” I asked, as if there was any other home.

“I have Yvette airing out your bedspread and mattress. We can take tea in the rose garden, the way we always did. Marthe, she’s using the last of the sugar to make you chouquettes. You’ll like that, won’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

“The refugee families staying with me, you’ll hardly notice they are there. They stay in the east wing. The west—your bedroom, the old schoolroom, Claude’s studio, I’ve left that just the way it was. Your tennis racket is restrung, your bookshelf is dusted. You’ll see, it’s as if no time has passed.” She clasped my hand.

It was like when I’d come home from boarding school or from my weeks of study in Paris. Maman never noticed how the years had changed me. She didn’t acknowledge it now. “I’ll never swing a tennis racket again.”

“Don’t say that.” She squeezed my hand. “You might. We’ll try.” I tried to ignore the shining in her eyes. “With you home again, it will be as though nothing has changed.”

No one could go back and erase the past months. No one could undo the deaths I’d seen or the pain I felt or the regret I’d carry with me the rest of my days.

Her fingers brushed the inside of my wrist, where the ribbon was tied. A good Crépet. I pulled from her grasp.

“I love you, but I’m no longer your little Luc.” I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. She smelled, as always, like La Rose Jacqueminot. “I need to find out who I am now.”