A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [78]
For three days, Innes worked in the operating theater. Supplies were brought by rail from other parts of Canada. Boston sent a hospital train. Thousands of homeless sought shelter in makeshift camps from the blizzard and the cold, while others searched morgues and hospitals for the dead and injured. When Innes had a few minutes, he studied the lists of casualties in the newspapers. #221. Female about twenty-five years. Blond hair, blue eyes. French underwear. Rose-colored stockings. #574. Charred remains of adult. #371. Male. Age about five years. Face disfigured. Brown striped sweater, white underwear. Envelope found on body addressed to “Mr. William Finn, 45 Buckingham Street, Toronto.” Innes read these descriptions carefully, looking for mention of a peach-colored silk blouse, a ring of small diamonds. He believed that Dr. and Mrs. Fraser were dead, though only the body of the latter had been recovered and identified. Innes did not believe in Hazel’s death. He thought often about where she might have been at the exact moment of the blast. Was she still at the dining table? If so, it was unlikely she would have survived the shattering glass from those four arched windows. But if she’d been in an interior hallway, she might have been able to dig herself out of the wreckage.
At the hospital, Innes acquired a reputation as an excellent surgeon, rising through the ranks more quickly than he would have as an apprentice to Dr. Fraser. There were no apprenticeships now. The days and hours for Innes were a kind of exhausted blur. He lived at the hospital, sleeping and eating there because he, like many of the staff, had nowhere else to go. An entire city was homeless, bereaved.
Innes was appalled by the suffering of the city. He began to conceive the notion of a malevolent God. How else to explain the capricious deaths of children, the suffering of the mothers? Intact families were rare, worthy of comment. Innes could make sense of small moments only—of this moment, he could say, yes, this happened, or no, that did not happen—but he could not comprehend the whole. He no longer thought about music or art or even the war in Europe. Life was reduced to work and food and sleep. He operated by day and read the casualty lists at night. He told himself he was doing it for Louise. Day after day, he checked the lists. #83. Female. About twenty-five years old. Brown hair. Ivory linen blouse. Insole of boot reads PARIS. Wedding ring was found upon the body and may be claimed at Camp Hill Hospital. Previous pitting and scarring on right side of face. Cesarean scar on abdomen.
During his breaks, Innes visited Louise, who had been moved to the third floor with the most improved of the wounded. Louise cried and reached out for him. Though she had been told that her mother had died, she still called out for her. She repeatedly panicked at the thought of her future. How would she survive if she was blind? She begged Innes for a cure, believing that medicine would save her. The irony was brutal: the daughter of a famous eye surgeon blinded.
Louise had no memory of the blast. Innes quizzed her, asking where she’d been at the moment of the explosion. Louise couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t say, either, where Hazel had been, whether she was still in the dining room or elsewhere. Innes learned it was the same for many of the wounded. The few moments leading up to the blast had been obliterated from their minds.
On the fifth day, Innes arrived at the ward to find Louise in an agitated state. She had knocked over her water pitcher, and an orderly was cleaning up the mess.
“Louise,” Innes said when he had reached her. “What’s wrong?”
“She was here!” Louise cried. “And I told her that now she had everything. I told her that I was the more beautiful, but now I have nothing. No home. No husband. No children.”
“Who was here, Louise?” Innes asked, sitting on the bed. He rubbed her arm to try to soothe her.
“I told her, she can see, she can walk. It is too unfair. She can see, she can walk, and I can’t. I will never get a husband now. Who