Free Stella Bain by Anita Shreve Page A

Sometimes, for their “meetings,” they do not meet with Tillman at all, but rather sit with the junior officer in an anteroom. Once, a Wren makes them tea and puts them in a waiting area. On each day that they go, Dr. Bridge and Stella wait in the hall an hour at lunchtime and then spend a few minutes back on a bench before they leave. Stella knows she cannot ask Dr. Bridge to waste any more time at this charade. He has been exceptionally generous, given that he does not believe she will be successful here.
    “This has been a fool’s errand,” Stella insists at the end of the fifth visit. “It has been extremely kind of you to have arranged these meetings. But I thought, when I realized how our request must have appeared to that poor exhausted Wren, that I was addled in my thinking. Not only that, but being in uniform again and being in this place has given me the idea that I should return to France.”
    “Nonsense!” Dr. Bridge exclaims. Heads turn. In a lower voice, he adds that they will talk about this when they get back to Bryanston Square.
    Stella stands. She turns her head away from the passing crowd, the constant murmuring of voices. Yes, she must return to France. What possible good is she doing here in London? Dr. Bridge will disapprove. VADs are needed at home, too, he will tell her—as someone once told him about doctors.
    As they near the double doors, Dr. Bridge steps forward to open one. Behind her, Stella can hear the smart rap of boots on marble.
    “Etna?”
    Stella stops and gentles herself into a still posture. She considers the name.
    “Etna Bliss?”
    Stella half turns toward the voice. A ginger-haired officer has spoken to her. She sways slightly. Dr. Bridge guides her to a bench. She has a memory. She knows the man’s name.
    “Samuel.”
    As Dr. Bridge makes her sit, Stella feels each new memory as an electric shock.
    The officer, in Canadian uniform, kneels directly in front of Stella.
    “Etna,” he says again. “Etna Bliss.”
    The name no longer a question.
    She digs her fingernails into Dr. Bridge’s wrist.
    “What is it?” he asks, bewildered by the exchange.
    “I have children,” she says.

A n abandoned house, once white with pride, left alone to age. A man sets a blanket on the grass. He is older than she, thirty to her twenty.
    “My astrophysicist,” she wants to say aloud, laughing at herself. What does she know of lunar distances, solar flares, orbiting planets, colliding bodies?
    She sits, then lies, upon the blanket. He tilts his head, a sentry alert to toneless insects, noisy sparrows. Hard knots of thread press against the back of her cotton dress. His arm is rusty with fine red hairs.
    He is engaged to another.
    She is engaged to another.
    In a different century, they would be stoned to death.
    He kisses her face, his skin skimming the surface of hers. Her body floats upward into his.
    He says he has never been so happy. When he tells her of his love, she says that hers is greater. They laugh, and delirium presses them together.
    A partial undressing, a milky gleam upon a thigh, this mundane place unique. She cannot do again what she is doing for the first time.
     
    She runs through the streets of town, mad with disbelief. She squanders everything she has of character to confront her lover. Houses laugh at her, or smirk.
    Breathless, she arrives at the forbidding family facade from which she will soon be barred. She stands in the foyer and cannot believe in the mask that has fallen over her lover’s face. From a corner, a mother appears and watches.
    “I go to Toronto tomorrow to be married,” her lover says, his eyes and face unknown to her. She wants to beg, go down on her knees, but she catches sight of a brother, younger and impressionable, who gazes at her with wonder from another room.
    When her lover shuts the family door behind her, she stands on the wooden steps. The houses are smug now, politely looking aside.
     
    Years later, passion merely a faded