He opened his eyes. “Please don’t. I’m…sorry.” He was saying it for now and for all those years ago. “Clare, I’m sorry.” Maybe even for Stefan and the night in Paris. “Don’t go.” He reached up and touched the knob of my wrist, just once.
Everyone else had left, but I had stayed by his side. And I would, as long as he’d let me.
I turned my hand. Our palms brushed. “I promise.”
—
The mask took me a month to complete. It wasn’t because I wasn’t diligent. No, it took me so much longer because I wanted it to be perfect. It was Luc. I couldn’t give him any less.
I cleaned the negative cast we took of his face. With fresh plaster of Paris, I made a positive and smoothed out any little lumps and divots left behind by the casting process.
“It was a good cast,” Pascalle complained. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No, you followed the procedure,” I said quietly, scraping my knife across the dried plaster. “But this is one I need to do myself.”
She stirred a bowl of wet plaster of Paris. “This will start hardening in a moment. You need to take the next cast.”
“It’s not ready yet.”
I fiddled with smoothing until I’d ruined that bowl of plaster and had to mix another. Pascalle sighed, but she helped me make the second negative. We then filled it with plasticine clay to make a positive “squeeze.” An inelegant name for a piece of sculpture.
I lifted the plaster cast off the gray plasticine. Luc’s ruined face looked up at me from the table and I swallowed back tears.
“Miss Ross.” Mrs. Ladd was suddenly at my elbow. “Miss Bernard told me you’ve been crying.”
“No, I haven’t.” I shot Pascalle a look across the room, but she was studiously involved with a brush and some turpentine. “I’ve been tired.”
She settled into a chair across from me. “You understand why we cannot cry in the studio.”
“The soldiers are sensitive to their appearances,” I said automatically. “They have a difficult enough time with reactions outside of the studio. I know. But…”
“But you’re only crying over a squeeze. Is that what you were going to say?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Ross,” she said, “look at those soldiers sitting over there.”
Though they sat with wine and hearty conversation, there was an alertness about them. A tense watchfulness. They were like deer ready to bolt, waiting for the first sneer or startled look.
“They don’t care that you are only crying down onto a squeeze. In that squeeze, in that other ruined face, they see their own.”
I swallowed, and I nodded.
“Is this the same soldier as the other day?” She reached across and pulled the plasticine closer. “It is a clean cast. He doesn’t appear too bad. You should do well on this one.”
“I hope I can.”
“You always do. Why are you doubting now?”
I ran a finger along the edge of the plasticine face and didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell her how seeing all of the details, being able to touch each and every scar in the clay, made it seem so much more real to me. That, even though I helped soldiers worse off than Luc all the time, helping him meant so much more.
“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.”
