“Would it be better for someone else to work on this one? It doesn’t have to be Miss Bernard.” Everyone had seen my frantic run into the studio the other day, when Luc was panicking beneath the wet plaster. I’d dropped the basket of Pascalle’s supper. The stairs still bore a dark streak of wine.
“No, please. I can do it.” I looked up. “I’ll hold it together.”
She sat quiet for a moment, her hands crossed on the table. Finally she sighed. “Do you think me heartless? Unaffected by what I see in here every day?”
“Of course not, Madame.”
“When I first came to France, before I opened the studio, I went out and toured the hospitals. I needed to see the state of the French soldiers. I even went out closer to the lines—guided, of course—and saw these injuries when they were fresh.”
I held my breath. I couldn’t imagine; when their faces were contorted with more than emotional pain.
“I’d come back here, to the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which wasn’t yet a studio. It was an empty room. I’d sit here alone and sometimes I was overcome.” Her eyes misted in a quick instant, but she blinked and forced a sunny smile. “We are like the masks. We need to be. Strong metal covering vulnerability. They both exist, mademoiselle.”
“But even the strongest copper can crack.”
She smiled gently. “We don’t let it.”
I went back to my squeeze, feeling too fragile to be made of metal but knowing I had to, for Luc’s sake. For the sake of all the men in the room. So I ignored the scars, the pits, the ridges, and I concentrated on his eyes.
While taking that first cast, a soldier sat with eyes closed, covered over with thin slips of tissue paper. The plasticine squeeze gave us the chance to open those eyes with a burin and a steady hand. It was a necessary step for those soldiers who needed an eye on their mask to replace one lost. Luc didn’t, but I still etched them in. I wanted it to be the Luc I remembered.
I sat, with burin in hand, my own eyes closed against the reality of the room, and tried to remember his. It wasn’t hard. They were the one thing I recognized when he came back to the studio. Brown like almonds, narrow, ringed with thick, dark lashes. Those eyes that startled wide that first morning when I ducked his tennis swing in the front hall, the eyes so intense and watchful as I tasted my first mouthful of ginger preserve, those eyes that shone in the dark the night that Grandfather took me away from Mille Mots. I knew them well.
It was short work to etch them in, but I wasn’t satisfied. Turn up a little more at the corner. No, too much. A few more flecks here, where, in my memory, it was darker brown. A gleam, a strength, a surety. I could do my best, but those last, I couldn’t etch in.
When Mrs. Ladd was ready to lock the studio, I still sat, curls of clay littering the table. She took the burin from my hand. “Miss Ross. Clare. He’s waited this long for a mask. Another day won’t matter much.”
But it wasn’t just “another day.” I spent three days alone working on the squeeze, until Pascalle was glaring and even Mrs. Ladd looked drawn. Then I cast again with plaster of Paris, one negative and one positive. On this last positive, I built Luc’s face.
I worked slowly, carefully, scraping away the plaster grain by grain. I had my sketch right beside me, the sketch that first revealed the battered soldier as my lost childhood love. I worried over every line in the sketch. I doubted my memory.
But I also doubted my doubt. Maybe there was something, some chink in his armor. An honest something to hope for. With each scrape of my knife, with each shower of plaster dust falling onto the table, maybe, maybe, said my heart.
At the end of each day, I caught up the dust into my palm. I went to the Square du Vert-Galant and stood with my feet on the point of land. It was the place Luc had mentioned in his letter, the place where he said he always felt the breath of Paris on his face. Now, it was my quiet spot in the city. I let the wind carry away the palmful of dust into the river and I hoped.
That first week, after Luc touched my wrist and asked me to stay, he didn’t come to the studio at all. Then one day he appeared in the doorway, shy, hat in hand like a suitor. I blushed to see it.
But he didn’t talk to me. He just nodded and went to sit with the other mutilés and their checkerboards. Another patient. I bent my head and tried to forget he was right there, watching.
I smoothed out his left cheek, his jaw, the corner of his eye. With my knife, I gave him that angled cheekbone I remembered. That straight jaw that always tightened when he was nervous. That left eye that crinkled at the corner in one of his unexpected laughs. Luc, always so serious. Even as a boy—studying, working, wishing he could do more for the château—he always looked like he carried the world on his shoulders.
That’s why his letters surprised me. They weren’t at all serious. Hiding behind pen and paper, Luc bantered, joked, teased, in a way that he didn’t often do in person. That was the Luc I thought I’d meet again someday. In all of those sunshine daydreams I had of coming back to Paris, of climbing the paths in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont and painting by the Seine, that lighthearted Luc was there by my side. None of the adolescent awkwardness we’d known before. Instead, the comfortableness, the humor, the friendship we’d built through our letters.
But here I was, in Paris at last, with Luc at last, and there were no smiles. His face was drawn and weary. He had no laughter left.
With my knife, I sculpted the Luc of my letters, the Luc of my daydreams. I curved the left side of his mouth upwards in a smile. I quirked an eyebrow in a moment of suppressed mirth. It didn’t matter. Mrs. Ladd would make me change it in the end.
To my surprise, she didn’t. She paused once at my table, nodded down at the plaster, and said, “That’s the face of a man healed.”
Each morning, he’d arrive at nine-thirty in his wrinkled gray suit and secondhand fedora to sit with the mutilés and a glass of wine that he’d nurse for hours. Though he always held a book in front of him, I pretended he was watching me over the top of the spine. And then hated myself for wishing. He was waiting for a mask, to allow him to move on, and here I was sighing like a schoolgirl and stretching out my work so he wouldn’t have to leave. He’d stay until three o’clock and then, with a quick glance my way, would slip out the door.
One day when he arrived, it was to a sketchbook and pencil waiting at his usual seat. He blinked, and I smiled to see him so startled. He looked up, questioningly. I nodded. That whole morning, as I pressed the sheet of copper against my plaster sculpture, as I traced each line and curve until it held the imprint of Luc’s face, he warily regarded the sketchbook. I trimmed away the extra copper and the right half of the face; he had no need to cover that. As I smoothed down the raw edges, Luc finally picked up the pencil. Arm held stiff, he began to draw.
After he left, when I was cleaning up, I opened the book. He’d roughed in a soldier, a poilu in a dented helmet and greatcoat. Though the soldier’s shape was blurred, his face was full of careful detail. Weary lines, a grim line of a mouth, yet eyes boyish wide. It wasn’t anyone I recognized, but it was someone Luc knew well.
The next day, when I put the copper into the electroplating bath, he wasn’t alone. A few other mutilés had pulled chairs nearby and were watching Luc work. He didn’t say a word, but they kept his wine refilled. He’d added two other soldiers to the sketch, both facing away. One leaned on a rifle, the other was praying. By midday there was a fourth soldier, sitting with his head hanging between his knees.
On the third day, Luc tore sheets from the back of his book. There was now a tableful of mutilés with paper and pencil, sketching away at trees and houses and airplanes. Every once in a while he’d look up from his own drawing to offer a quiet suggestion or two. Meanwhile he added a parapet and row of sandbags behind his penciled poilus.