A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [12]
Agnes had never written a short story before, despite having taught both English and history. The writing was a secret. She hadn’t even told Jim. Perhaps one day, if she finished the story, she would send it to him.
Mrs. Fraser lingered for a moment in the doorway of the room she had assigned to Innes, as if impressing his face and form to her memory, as if the man might vanish as quickly as he had come. Mrs. Fraser had two daughters, and young men of good appearance produced in her a double-pronged anxiety: her daughters currently had no husbands, and the Frasers had no sons. Mrs. Fraser announced that dinner would be at 8:00. At Innes’s school, the students had dressed for dinner, trailing whiffs of formaldehyde to the dining room. At home, his family had dressed only on Sundays. The place where dinner was called “supper” seemed very far away now, farther even than the distance that five years of medical school and a war had put between them.
His brother, Martin, was in France; Innes was in Halifax. Innes had imperfect feet and a childhood asthma that inexplicably had disappeared in the months after he had failed his military physical. He thought often of trying again. It was said they didn’t care about the feet now. But his professors had insisted that he could better serve his country by honing his surgical skills. Soldiers were taking shrapnel to the eyes. A man’s sight might be saved. If the war was still on when he finished his training (though dear God let’s hope not), Innes could go abroad and do some good.
Innes was twenty-seven, late to his vocation.
He touched a small stain on the marble top of a dresser and wondered whose room he had usurped. The mirror above the bureau tilted in its frame, and Innes adjusted it so that he could see himself. Years of studying and northern light had left his skin pale, his hair dark. His eyes were a Prussian blue that seemed genetically wrong in such an unremarkable face. Looking at him, one was reminded of coming upon the ocean in the middle of the winter. Though the color had leached itself from the landscape, the blue of the water was just as vivid as in July.
He set his books upon the marble dresser top. Inside were all the words he had had to study. He brushed his palm against the pebbled leather. The books were well-made. A thousand times they’d been opened, and yet the spines still held.
The texts had taught him some of what he had to know. The rest he had learned during his clinical studies. He now understood, for example, how a man was likely to react to the news that he would be blind for the rest of his life. First there would be the facial paralysis, descending to the body, an eerie immobility that could last for minutes. Then there would be the shock that blotted out physical and emotional pain, a kind of merciful interlude. Innes had hardly ever heard a patient cry out immediately. Instead the mind created images and scenes of how it would be to live without one’s sight, to be forever blind, trying it on like a suit of clothes. And then, finally, the weakened limbs, the need to put a hand to a chair for support. Even the youngest and strongest of them walked away as if bludgeoned.
Innes had gravitated to surgery and to ophthalmology in particular because his mother had begun to go blind when Innes was thirteen. This caused him to think about eyes all the time and, as he grew older, to try to invent ingenious methods to help his mother to see. Once he fashioned a kind of metal corona that she was to wear around her face so as to trap more light. Another time, he went to a druggist to learn how to grind a pair of lenses. The lenses were so heavy, however, that his mother couldn’t keep the spectacles on the bridge of her nose. She finally told him to stop: it was enough, she said, that Innes himself had perfect vision.
Innes went south to Maine to medical school, but now he had come home. Not to the fishing village in Cape Breton where his mother and sister made nets and