At the Edge of Summer

The soldier stood in the threshold of the Studio for Portrait Masks. The room was bright, but he kept to the shadows.

Mrs. Ladd tried to keep the soldiers at ease and the studio cheerful. The phonograph in the corner, the sun-streaked windows and skylights, the little vases of peonies tucked here and there, warmed the room. Posters and flags were tacked between the windows—a large American flag, for her, and smaller British and French flags, for the rest of us working in the studio. It was a bright spot in an otherwise somber city. Three months after the war ended, Paris was still recovering.

Usually, the soldiers sat in little groups, laughing, smoking, playing checkers and drinking wine. Some were waiting for appointments. Others had nowhere else to go. Since being demobilized, too many lived on the streets. They begged for food, drink, a place to warm up. Here, at least for part of the day, they had all three. But, more than that, here they found people who understood. They found other soldiers just as broken.

This new one, though, he came alone, lurking in the shadows of the hall, not quite stepping into the room. They all did on their first visit. Once fearless in the face of a trench wall, they were now afraid to even step in the light. Light revealed what had become of their dreams of glory.

“May I help you?” I asked in French. Not Parisian French, but the French I’d learned in Africa, tinged with the warm, open sounds of Arabic.

He didn’t answer. The way he kept tugging on the brim of his calot, keeping a hand near his face, the way he kept his head down—he was a man used to shadows.

I couldn’t see his face, but it had to be shattered. Here, they all were. These soldiers who came to the studio, they were missing ears, eyes, parts of their faces. More than that, they were missing parts of their souls.

“Are you here for a mask?” Behind me, sculptors bustled about with plasticine and brushes and tins of enamel paint. A soldier lay back with his head resting on a table as Mrs. Ladd carefully coated his face with white plaster. Another stood in front of the mirror, looking, for the first time, at the copper mask covering the ruined half of his face. “Let me show you our work.” The phonograph played “La Madelon.”

He shook his head. One hand still hovered near his face, but the other, pressed against his leg, had relaxed. In the room behind me, someone had begun singing.

Through the shadows, nothing but horizon blue and the pale oval of a face. So many of the soldiers who came in had worn their injuries for so long they had the old uniforms, those dark blue tunics and bright garance red trousers. France was still trying to live down that mistake. After losing hundreds of thousands of troops in the first months of the war, they thankfully replaced the garance with horizon blue. This soldier, though, he wasn’t in red. He’d been in the war longer than many.

On his left arm, three chevrons bore that up, indicating three years’ service, and on his right, another for each occasion he was wounded. Only one on that arm. Three years faithfully served and then, in return, one injury for him to carry the rest of his days.

“You don’t have to stay, but won’t you please come in? At least for a few moments?” I tightened my shawl, dark and swirling like smoke. I’d traded it for a still-damp watercolor in Algiers. “Warm up with a cup of tea. I can show you my sketches of the other guests we’ve had.”

He cleared his throat. “You sketch?” His eyes shone in the dimness. “Ah, there’s charcoal on your fingertips.”

Something in his voice washed over me, warm like summer. “Spoken like an artist.”

His hand lowered from his face and went behind his back. I wished I could see his fingertips.

“I have an extra drawing pad.” I took a step back. “Stay, please. Stay and sit with me awhile.”

He hesitated for just a moment more. Then he stepped out of the shadows.

He was in a bad way, that was clear. A fragmented shell, maybe. They tore like bread knives. Or a bayonet, swung too near. I was learning to identify what caused each injury. Long scars ran from the side of his jaw upwards. More than scars, though; they sank deep, like the trenches running across the Western Front. The right side of his face was unmarred, but the left, that whole side was a battlefield. I kept my gaze firmly on it, forced myself to look at every ridge, every crater, every shell hole. The map a soldier brought home.

He stood tall, shoulders back, as though daring me to recoil.

But I didn’t. I knew his face was a private hell for him, but I had seen worse cases in the studio. Men missing noses, men without chins, men whose faces sank in on themselves like deflated balloons. One of those poor men sat over at the checkers table right now, waiting for a few final dabs of enamel paint on his false nose. Then he was planning to go home to see his mother for the first time since he was wounded. Though the soldier standing so defiantly in the doorway had it bad, I had seen plenty worse.

So I made sure to look him square in the eye. I made sure to modulate my breathing so he wouldn’t hear an extra hitch in my throat. I made sure he knew that no matter what reactions he met walking down the streets of Paris, he would not find them here. Instead I asked, “How do you take your tea?”

I settled him in at a table and filled a chipped cup. Mrs. Ladd was American and assumed the French thought as much of tea as she did. The few British artists in the studio certainly didn’t mind. While I busied myself with unwrapping my charcoals, sharpening my pencils, squaring up my sketch pad, he took a polite sip. I passed him a pad of his own and then the tea grew cold.

At first he didn’t do much, just stared down at the paper as though he didn’t know what to do with it. I wondered if I was wrong. But then he picked up a pencil and rolled it between his fingers. “These are the pencils my father always used to prefer.”

“They’ve always been my favorites.” I took one of my own.

He started drawing.

I began with the outline of his face. “How long have you been in Paris?” In my few months here, I’d learned how to ask questions carefully. A direct “How long ago were you wounded?” would cause that familiar look of anguish to flash through their eyes.

He still flinched at the words. He saw straight through it. “Nineteen seventeen. Bastille Day.”

A year and a half, though, to him, it probably felt like more. “Have you been in Paris all this time?”

He pulled a cigarette case from his jacket pocket but didn’t open it. “Wouldn’t you be?”

I worked on sketching in the good side of his face. A narrow eye, brown like an almond, with long lashes. My pencil loved drawing those in. Thick curved eyebrows. A high, smooth forehead ending in short curls. A sharply angled cheek with a nick of a scar on top. “A work of art,” I murmured.

“I’m sorry?” He looked up from his drawing.

“Works of art.” I stared down at the lines beneath my pencil. “In Paris.”

He watched me.

As though a mirror were down the center of his face, I began copying the features from one side to the other. “What’s your favorite museum in the city?” I drew the curve of his chin in an unbroken line. “And you’re a liar if you say the Louvre.”

He blinked and leaned back in the chair. “Musée Jacquemart-André,” he said without hesitation.

“So intimate, yet so elegant.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Where else could I see Venus Asleep?”

That lip twitch was definitely an attempt at a smile. “I shouldn’t be surprised to find an art lover in a studio.”

“And I shouldn’t be surprised to find one in a soldier.” My pencil smoothed in the lines of his missing cheek. “As a girl, I visited France. It only takes once to fall in love.”

“That it does,” he said with a touch of wistfulness. His pencil scratched softly.

“What are you sketching?” I finally asked.

“Just that.”

“France?”

“Love.”

I didn’t ask to see what was on his page. “There,” I said. I turned the sheet of paper around to him. “Where should I make adjustments?”

He stared for a moment, then quietly offered a few suggestions—eyes a little wider, nose narrower, a tiny divot in his chin.

“Fine,” I said, my pencil already flashing. He waited, watching. And I drew. But something wasn’t right. Everything felt shifted to the left, off-kilter. The angles didn’t match up.

I set down my pencil and wiped my fingers on the sides of my skirt. “I need an accurate portrait of your face before…before now.” His eyes flashed understanding. “Would you allow me?”

Without waiting for his assent, I closed my eyes and reached forward.

My fingers found his face, the one side smooth, the other rough beneath my fingertips. Gently, I traced up along the edges of his face, along his cheekbones and the curves of his eye sockets, down the bridge of his nose. I ignored the scars and the jagged edges for what was beneath. With light fingertips, I felt the lines of his face. I opened my eyes.

He sat motionless, breathless, eyes wide-open and on me.

I flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s the way I learned to create a face.”

His only reply was a deep, ragged inhale.

Mrs. Ladd always said I was too familiar, that I should keep my fingers on the sketchbook. That these soldiers, voluntarily cut off from their families for years, weren’t used to touch. But I wasn’t sure how one could remain true and accurate without feeling the bones of what they were drawing.

“I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He breathed a sigh, then said, “You didn’t. At least not in the way you think.”

Confused, I looked back down to my drawing.

“Please,” he whispered, “what is your name?” He’d spoken in English.

“Ross. Clare Ross.”

He leaned back and swallowed. “Clare Ross,” he repeated. Then straightened. “Mademoiselle Ross, you feel your art.”

“I had an excellent teacher,” I said softly.

Something tensed in his face. “And where is your teacher now?”

“I’d give everything to find out.”

“Please excuse me.” He stood abruptly.

As he walked away, my pencil hurried, filling in adjustments, adding what I’d felt beneath his skin. Wondering if the answer would appear on my paper.

When it did, I froze. Those eyes, they were always so serious. That mouth used to smile when I least expected it. And that little scar on the top of his right cheek, the souvenir of a long-ago tennis match. I traced the lines on the page, smudging them beneath my fingertips until it was as hazy as a dream. These days, that’s all he felt like.

“Mrs. Ladd,” I said, eyes still on the page. “The soldier I was drawing, did he have an appointment? Did he leave a name?”

As she wiped her hands on her smock and went to the book she kept in her desk, I flipped over the sketch that the soldier had left behind. I no longer needed her reply.

On the page he’d left behind was my face. Not the face of the woman I saw each morning in the mirror, but of a fifteen-year-old girl, lonely, scared, leaning out of a tower window wondering if she’d ever be strong enough to fly away.

I didn’t need Mrs. Ladd to tell me his name, because it was on my tongue, tasting like oranges and rain and the scent of roses. Years of memories, tasting like summertime.

Luc.