Ventail

Ventail

           When anyone asked him about his nose shield, Charles would chuckle, “I’m a step ahead of the pandemic requirement to wear masks.” The nose shield was a little flap that attached to his glasses’ bridge between the two lenses and hung down over his nose. “A trend setter I am,” claimed Charles, “a man who can see the future.”

           Donna, his wife, moaned. At least his bragging happened rarely in her presence, as she, conscious of being in the vulnerable category (seniors), stayed inside except to chat at an appropriate distance across fences with her neighbors. It was not until their daughter's wedding that she understood why he wore the Ventail even after his face was healed.

           He’d started wearing it after he underwent a procedure to remove potentially cancerous growths from his face. It involved rubbing on a cream twice daily that attacked suspicious blemishes. It would basically burn off unhealthy cells, leaving pale, pink skin underneath.

           “You look like you’ve been baked in the oven,” Donna had claimed after the first week of treatment.

           "I do," admitted Charles.

           He was looking in the bathroom mirror, turning his head to the left and then to the right. “Just another week. But I am going to be a sight even afterwards.” Still, he was no more self-conscious about his looks than usual.

            When he first went out for his daily walk with a splotchy red face, though, he worried about sunburn on the tender areas. Given Charles’ Scandinavian genes and a childhood spent outdoors on a farm, his dermatologist had recommended wearing long sleeves and pants in general and in particular a hat with a broad brim. But the regular trips to the park to talk with other veterans was important. He discovered a solution online, the Ventail.

           The name was inspired by the piece of a medieval helmet that protected the lower part of a knight’s face. The modern device, specifically designed to block ultraviolet light, was like a Groucho Marx vaudeville prop, but without the bushy eyebrows and mustache.

           When Donna teased him about becoming a clown, he said it was grander than a costume piece. “This,” he pointed, “is inspired by the noble Don Quixote, suiting up to do good deeds in a world of scoundrels. He was a man who not only looked back to the golden age of chivalry, but anticipated the evils of the Industrial world, those giant windmills.”

           “Is that the kind of soldier you were? A rebel who went out on his own to right wrongs?” Donna teased him. They had met ten years after he got out of the Army.

           All Charles had told her about that phase of his life was that he was one of the military’s millions of clerks. She knew he spent the last year of service at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and that he’d done a tour in Vietnam. But he never talked about it.

           He sniffed: “I kept meticulous records of equipment orders and shipments.”

           As far as she knew, he had kept up with just one friend from the service, Stephen Block of Charleston, South Carolina. They would talk by phone once or twice a year and occasionally send clippings about politics. But the past they shared was a mystery to Donna.

           She did wonder if his part in a war, even if not as a combat soldier, prepared him to endure other hardships. He insisted the challenges they personally endured in the pandemic were minimal. They had a secure retirement income, their house was paid for, their lifestyle simple.         

           When their daughter Linda became engaged, though, Donna lamented to friends, “He wants to go shopping for a wedding dress with us, that thing on his face. For all I know he'll wear it to the ceremony."

           At The New Olde Bridal Shoppe, Charles advised Linda, “The sleeves should lie comfortably about the elbows.”

           “The elbows?” wondered both Donna and Linda.

           Their son Franklin, in his rebellious teenage stage, wore mismatched socks, let his pants hang in the back to reveal brightly colored underwear, and sported a scraggly, patchy beard. He intended to wear his signature outfit rather than a tuxedo for his sister’s wedding.

           Charles moaned. "It’s like someone threw clothes at you from a bin of random seconds. Apparel should be connected, if not unified.”

           Franklin countered that Charles should add a codpiece to his attire, a flap of material that attaches to the front of a man’s trousers and covers the genital area. “If you like Don Quixote, why not imitate him further? In Cervantes’ time codpieces were quite popular. They've even made a resurgence with metal rock bands." He raised an eyebrow, “With, that is, the leather subculture.”

           Charles raised an eyebrow himself. “Well, no danger of sunburn there.”

           He had other quirks regarding his appearance. When visits to barber shops were off limits, he asked Donna to give him a haircut but insisted on directing her and measuring the results.

           “Where is a three-way mirror when you need one?” Charles complained, turning the hand mirror which showed him from the back in the full-length hallway mirror. “Maybe I need to use modern technology.”

           Thus began a series of goofy experiments involving his iPhone on a tripod, his laptop on the kitchen counter (where there were adjustable lights set in the ceiling), and a security camera mounted in the corner.

`          “I hope you’re only examining your head when you do that,” Donna cautioned. “If you want . . . um . . . other inaccessible parts looked at, please ask me.”

           “No need,” he countered. “The full-length mirror is satisfactory. And it’s the view from the front that matters.”

           “At least disconnect from the internet when you study yourself,” Donna begged. “I don’t want some government agency to think you’re working on an identity theft program--or planning something kinky.”

           She was allowed to make only a few snips at a time with the scissors. “I don’t want curls showing off my neck. And the top should be even, thin as it is.”

           “You could shave your head,” Donna said.

           He responded with a non-sequitur: “Do you have any AA batteries?”

           “I do. Why?”

           “My electric toothbrush plug-in system seems to be failing, but it can run on batteries.”

           Calling it an “electric toothbrush” was an understatement; it was a computerized apparatus with multiple functions. Charles programmed it to brush for 60 seconds at a time and moved it at the end of each cycle to a different area of his teeth (top left outer, top left inner, etc.). It also included a sonic brush and a water jet. The twice daily operation took over ten minutes.

           He bought replacement bristles every two months—well, he did before the pandemic. Fortunately, he had planned ahead and stockpiled several replacement packages.

           “I told you,” he said to Donna when she saw him pull a new set from the drawer. “I can see the future.”

           When she confessed this to their daughter, Linda wondered if his antics could be signs of approaching dementia. But Donna knew he was too sharp in other respects: working the daily Sudoku with blazing speed and analyzing the daily stock reports in a way that impressed their financial advisors.

           “Why does he brush his teeth that way?” Franklin asked Donna. “Is he panicking about losing his teeth?”

           “I don’t think so,” his mother admitted. “He doesn’t even get cavities. And he has the dentist whiten his teeth every year.”

           Donna felt Charles had never done anything with his appearance to impress people professionally. A data analyst for a national insurance company, he seldom interacted with customers or other staff directly. Reports came to him from regional offices, and he processed the information to produce bar graphs, spread sheets, pie charts, narrative summaries.

           Donna didn’t mind missing office parties because of his reserved manner, but she might have enjoyed some of cruises awarded to top performing personnel (he earned them every year). Still, he was exceptionally kind, attentive, sensitive to others’ needs.

           “Charles seems like a machine from the outside,” she admitted to her own social circle, other (mostly retired) health care workers. “Data in, data out.” She would hesitate. “But, you know, he’s not like that at home.”

           Franklin and Linda agreed. “He’s spontaneous, funny, uninhibited even.”

           “Your dad?” their friends would respond

           “I’ll give you an example. When we were young, he taught us how to spit-shine shoes—the Army way.”

           They would ask, of course, if they had worn that kind of shoe.

           “Oh, no. He loaned us each a pair. But the process turned into a game of fast draw. We’d see who could tie their shoes the fastest. And he seemed so serious—ready, set, tie! His face was set, his eyes boring into the tips of the laces. But when we were done, he’d laugh and laugh.”

           “So, your dad had multiple pairs of leather shoes. Did he have one for each day of the week?”

           Franklin would deny it, though to himself he admitted it might be true. He did know he could see his face in his father’s polished shoes.

           Because of continued Covid restrictions, the wedding party had to be small, and the ceremony was held outside with only immediate family and a few close friends. His old Army friend Stephen Block sent a package that arrived the day before the ceremony. Franklin put it in the dining room with other gifts.

           Donna opened the carefully wrapped box without thinking and found a forty-page booklet tucked under a slow cooker. The cover featured a picture of two soldiers standing in front of a sign, “US Army Mortuary, Da Nang, Vietnam.” One of the men could have been Charles; the other was African American.

           A note was sticking out between the pages. “I know you never liked talking about those days, my friend. Your Midwestern powers of repression are admirable. But, a Southerner, bottling it up for so long, I had to come to terms with what we were asked to do by writing about it. There was a program at the VA.”

           The two men, she read in the preface, were “mortuary affairs specialists,” the equivalent of civilian undertakers. They identified corpses, preserved personal effects, prepared the remains for burial.

           Donna fell back into a chair. Charles had done that? And his efforts to display the body’s beauty were how he coped?

           She knew that in recent wars, reporters were not allowed even to film coffins being unloaded from military aircraft. It was all to be kept from public view in order to avoid adding to anti-war sentiment. These two men were confronted with the reality of death every day and did what they could to ease the grief of families. Were they ever thanked?

           Stephen also wrote: “You were by far the best at what we did—attention to detail, respect for the dead, compassion for the families. I know it took a toll on all of us. Be safe, be well.”

           She decided to hide the book until after the wedding, where she cried as Charles gave their daughter away, Franklin scowled, and Linda pledged, "I do."