So she chose a pale blue taffeta dress the color of an afternoon sky that Madame Girard had worn in Paris to an engagement party for one of the doctor’s cousins. It was chic and fashionable without being too much. The doctor left the room so Ettie could try it on. She stared at herself in the full-length mirror. She was no longer the rabbi’s daughter, but even in this glorious dress she was still the sister of a girl who had died in a yellow field. That was the one true part of her that remained. Nothing could hide that.
She went to the hallway, where the doctor was waiting, nervous again. He was slightly taken aback by her sudden intense beauty, but he smiled when she spun around. He remembered that night in Paris with Sarah. How cold it had been as they walked to the party, how he’d kept his arm under her coat so that he could feel her heart beating.
“It’s perfect,” Ettie said.
“One thing is missing.”
They went back into the bedroom and Girard took out a pair of black heels. Ettie, however, had taken note of a pair of red shoes at the rear of the closet. They were exquisite, highly polished leather. “Perhaps these.”
“Ah.” The doctor nodded. “Her favorites.”
The shoes were tight at the toes, but they would do. Ettie practiced walking in them out in the barn until, at last, she didn’t stumble.
All the rest of the night, the doctor thought about the red shoes. He couldn’t sleep, and sat up thinking about Sarah. He had felt her tumor when he held her breast, but he told himself he was wrong. He had been wrong before, so why not now? But in truth he was a good diagnostician, and he had gone outside to be alone that night after his wife fell asleep. He walked in the woods and wept. He knew he was right, and yet he, who had told patients the state of their health time and time again, even when the news was bad, couldn’t bring himself to tell her.
In the end she was the one to come to him. She had felt the lump while bathing.
“It’s like a stone,” she told him.
He brought her to the hospital in Lyon, where they removed her breast and a good deal of tissue surrounding it, down to her ribs. Sarah was in terrible pain after the surgery, but said nothing. She wouldn’t look at him after that, or let him see her. She locked herself in the bedroom, filled with shame. He had been her husband for nearly fifteen years, but there were things that were impossible to share with a husband, even after all that time. Her savaged beautiful body was now kept secret from him.
There were rumbles of the war during her illness, but he didn’t hear them, he only heard her crying. She made him sleep on the couch because she couldn’t bear to have him near and not be intimate. He was a doctor, he had seen the worst wounds, the most horrible tumors, but this was different. He made up a bed on the couch in the library, but he didn’t sleep. He continued to see patients for a while, but he couldn’t stand to hear their complaints, and in time, he sent them away, to another doctor in Lyon, though it was farther for his neighbors who had so relied upon him. He could not focus and he feared his preoccupation with Sarah’s illness might cause him to make some terrible error in handling their care. He would not be able to live with himself if he made a mistake because he was more concerned with his wife than with any of them, men, women, and children alike. All the same, people from the village brought cakes and bread and stews. They left the covered platters of homemade food on the doorstep. They came at dusk so he wouldn’t see them and feel he must politely engage them. It was clear they felt there was no need for him to thank them. That was when he understood that his wife was dying.
Finally, Sarah gave in and let him come back to their bedroom to sleep beside her. When he held her in the dark, he could feel another lump in her other breast, and another under her arm. He didn’t have to tell her. She knew. That was why she had allowed him