'What will you do when -'
'I'm not thinking of that. But it will be a grand six months.'
The young mechanic stayed in a kind of emotional limbo for weeks. He worked without the usual slacking off, believing himself no more animate than the spanners and screwdrivers he handled. When there were passes to be had he gave his to someone else. He slept on an average of four hours a night. This mineral period ended by an accidental meeting with a medical officer one evening in the barracks. Schoenmaker put it as primitively as he felt:
'How can I become a doctor.'
Of course it was idealistic and uncomplex. He wanted only to do something for men like Godolphin, to help prevent a takeover of the profession by its unnatural and traitorous Halidoms. It took ten years of working at his first specialty - mechanic - as well as navvy in a score of markets and warehouses, bill-collector, once administrative assistant to a bootlegging syndicate operating out of Decatur, Illinois. These years of labor were interlarded with night courses and occasional day enrollments, though none more than three semesters in a row (after Decatur, when he could afford it); internship; finally, on the eve of the Great Depression, entrance to the medical freemasonry.
If alignment with the inanimate is the mark of a Bad Guy, Schoenmaker at least made a sympathetic beginning. But at some point along his way there occurred a shift in outlook so subtle that even Profane, who was unusually sensitive that way, probably couldn't have detected it. He was kept going by hatred for Halidom and perhaps a fading love for Godolphin. These had given rise to what is called a 'sense of mission' - something so tenuous it has to be fed more solid fare than either hatred or love. So it came to be sustained, plausibly enough, by a number of bloodless theories about the 'idea' of the plastic surgeon. Having heard his vocation on the embattled wind, Schoenmaker's dedication was toward repairing the havoc wrought by agencies outside his own sphere of responsibility. Others - politicians and machines - carried on wars; others - perhaps human machines - condemned his patients to the ravages of acquired syphilis; others - on the highways, in the factories - undid the work of nature with automobiles, milling machines, other instruments of civilian disfigurement. What could he do toward eliminating the causes? They existed, formed a body of things-as-they-are; he came to be afflicted with a conservative laziness. It was social awareness of a sort, but with boundaries and interfaces which made it less than the catholic rage filling him that night in the barracks with the M.O. It was, in short, a deterioration of purpose; a decay.
II
Esther met him, oddly enough, through Stencil, who at the time was only a newcomer to the Crew. Stencil, pursuing a different trail, happened for reasons of his own to be interested in Evan Godolphin's history. He'd followed it as far as Meuse-Argonne. Having finally got Schoenmaker's alias from the AEF records, it took Stencil months to trace him to Germantown and the Muzak-filled face hospital. The good doctor denied everything, after every variety of cajolement Stencil knew; it was another dead end.
As is usual after certain frustrations, we react with benevolence. Esther had been languishing ripe and hot-eyed about the Rusty Spoon, hating her figure-6 nose and proving as well as she could the unhappy undergraduate adage: 'All the ugly ones fuck.' The thwarted Stencil, casting about for somebody to take it all out on, glommed on to her despair hopefully - a taking which progressed to sad summer afternoons wandering among parched fountains, sunstruck shop fronts and streets bleeding tar, eventually to a father-daughter agreement casual enough to be cancelled at any time should either of them desire, no post-mortems necessary. It struck him with a fine irony that the nicest sentimental trinket for her would be an introduction to Schoenmaker; accordingly, in September, the contact was made, and Esther without ado went under his knives and kneading fingers.
Collected for her in the anteroom that day were a rogues' gallery of malformed. A bald woman without ears contemplated the gold imp-clock, skin flush and shiny from temples to occiput. Beside her sat a younger girl, whose skull was fissured such that three separate peaks, paraboloid in shape, protruded above the hair, which continued down either side of a densely acned face like a skipper's beard. Across the room, studying a copy of the Reader's Digest, sat an aged gentleman in a moss-green gabardine suit, who possessed three nostrils, no upper lip and an assortment of different-sized teeth which leaned and crowded together like the headstones of a boneyard in tornado country. And off in a corner, looking at nothing, was a sexless being with hereditary syphilis, whose bones had acquired lesions and had partially collapsed, so that the gray face's profile was nearly a straight line, the nose hanging down like a loose flap of skin, nearly covering the mouth; the chin depressed at the side by a large sunken crater containing radial skin-wrinkles; the eyes squeezed shut by the same unnatural gravity that flattened the rest of the profile. Esther, who was still at an impressionable age, identified with them all. It was confirmation of this alien feeling which had driven her to bed with so many of the Whole Sick Crew.
This first day Schoenmaker spent in pre-operative reconnaissance of the terrain: photographing Esther's face and nose from various angles, checking for upper respiratory infections, running a Wassermann. Irving and Trench also assisted him in making two duplicate casts or deathmasks. They gave her two paper straws to breathe through and in her childish way she thought of soda shops, cherry Cokes, True Confessions.
Next day she was back at the once. The two casts were thereon his desk, side by side. 'I'm twins,' she giggled. Schoenmaker reached out and snapped the plaster nose from one of the masks.
'Now,' he smiled; producing like a magician a lump of modeling clay with which he replaced the broken-off nose. 'What sort of nose did you have in mind?'
What else: Irish, she wanted, turned up. Like they all wanted. To none of them did it occur that the retrousse nose, too, is an aesthetic misfit: a Jew nose in reverse, is all. Few had ever asked for a so-called 'perfect' nose, where the roof is straight, the tip untilted and unhooked, the columella (separating the nostrils) meeting the upper lip at 90 degrees. All of which went to support his private thesis that correction - along all dimensions: social, political, emotional - entails retreat to a diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a golden mean.
A few artistic finger-flourishes and wrist-twistings.
'Would that be it?' Eyes aglow, she nodded. 'It has to harmonize with the rest of your face, you see.' It didn't, of course. All that could harmonize with a face, if you were going to be humanistic about it, was obviously what the face was born with.
'But,' he'd been able to rationalize years before, 'there is harmony and harmony.' So, Esther's nose. Identical with an ideal of nasal beauty established by movies, advertisements, magazine illustrations. Cultural harmony, Schoenmaker called it.
'Try next week then.' He gave her the time. Esther was thrilled. It was like waiting to be born, and talking over with God, calm and businesslike, exactly how you wanted to enter the world.
Next week she arrived, punctual: guts tight, skin sensitive. 'Come.' Schoenmaker took her gently by the hand. She felt passive, even (a little?) sexually aroused. She was seated in a dentist's chair, tilted back and prepared by
