This Is How I'd Love You Read online

  What might she say in reply, if he did write?

  Dear Lowe—she imagines the letters on the page—I want to throw myself from the train because of you. I would have given up Wellesley for you. I ought to have known how easily you slid out of your trousers. What spell was I under? Whatever it was has shattered. With kind regards, Hensley.

  And yet, she wonders, as she finishes this composition, is she really so changed? If he walked into this car right now and sat himself beside her, recited Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Tennyson, how many miles would pass before she would allow him to slide his hand beneath her skirts, while she smiled at his audacity and gripped the armrests a little bit tighter? What despicable loneliness this train has churned in her! Certainly his hands should never be trusted again. Knowing that his words are duplicitous, his body opportunistic, his heart—

  What heart? And why should she ascribe feelings to his heart? The heart is a muscle that moves blood through the body. That is all. First-year biology. Has she not more sophistication than that? She pouts at her own reflection in the train’s window. As much as she loathes the caricature she’s become, she cannot change it. What’s passed between them is over. And yet. What does she know, really, of the rhythms of courtship? Perhaps she has it all wrong. Perhaps what has happened, though shameful, is not entirely unique. If the heart is simply a muscle, then what is her desire?

  No matter that, she’s here, on this train. The miles between them growing with each turn of the wheel. Her new life waiting for her somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

  Dear Future, she writes in her head, imagining the strokes of her pen as though it is moving across sand, illuminated every so often by a large searchlight. When I see you, I may not want you, though you’ve been waiting there, pulsing so faithfully. Please help me to want you. Dress yourself up or offer warm soup or a long-lost friend.

  A surprising tear escapes, unannounced, as she imagines Lowe coming to find her. Remorseful and contrite, his arms holding her tight, rocking her along with the rhythm of the train.

  Despite her best efforts, she’s still just a girl whose heart has been broken.

  The ship docks in Bordeaux just after dawn and Charles admires the way the sun glints off the metal roofs along the dock. They board a train to Paris, all of them eager to see the first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. There is a dinner cruise along the Seine and an outing to a club where an American jazz band plays horns that make them all glad to be alive. The next day, they are driven to May-en-Multien outside of Paris, where they will be housed for the next several weeks, given basic training in triage and driving. Their cots are established on the top floor of a picturesque farmhouse. Almost immediately, they are introduced to the fleet of Fords they will be driving. There is some fuss made over the new American volunteers by the staff. The matron who cooks for them greets them that first morning and each successive one by crooning, “Les Americains! Hooray. Les Americains!” Her happiness and gratitude cheer them mightily. The thick pork sausage and jam-filled pastries are as welcome a breakfast as Charles has ever had. He cannot help but feel buoyed by her enthusiasm. As she pours more coffee, he smiles at her and nods. It is just the welcome for which they’d hoped.

  Charles isn’t as boisterous as some of the others, but still, he wants to believe that America will turn the war. Just before he left New York at the end of May, Congress passed the Selective Service Act and there will be American soldiers boarding ships every day now. His own presence, his wits and efforts, he tells himself, will certainly make an important difference. Isn’t that what his privilege demands of him? Not more profits or more property, but a lasting impact upon the world. It seems to him that his parents regarded his education as simply a pastime until he accepted his ultimate occupation of overseeing the family fortune. In fact, when he announced that he was studying science at Harvard in order to prepare for medical school, his father laughed. “Study whatever you want, Charlie. It doesn’t matter one bit.”

  Charles’s grandfather had arrived on Ellis Island from Scotland just before the Civil War began and used his life savings to buy twelve sewing machines. Everyone thought he was crazy, but in a small room near the water in Brooklyn, those machines stuttered along day and night beneath the nimble, aching fingers of Scottish immigrants to produce the textiles required by the regiments of the North. Soon he had built an entire building in which he would oversee the largest textile operation the North had ever seen.

  Under Charles’s father’s stewardship, the company had grown and diversified into steel and oil. There were ships in the harbor that sailed only for him. As soon as Charles turned twenty-one, his father had been eager to train him in the art of being a baron. Medicine was a dirty, humble profession.

  When Charles first sits behind the wheel of the training ambulance and drives it across the empty field covered in early morning dew, he hears his father’s refrain in his ears. It doesn’t matter one bit. He looks in the rearview mirror at the tracks the truck is leaving behind it, two straight lines shaded and flat. The world bursts with all varieties of color on this summer day. Charles turns his gaze to the horizon, a perfect contrast between deep blue and green. As he picks up speed, the fellow sitting next to him straightens his back and puts a hand on the dash. “Easy, man,” he says. “It’s not an airplane.” But Charles can’t resist the urge to push the engine to its limits, to see his effect on this machine. The steering wheel beneath his fingers vibrates its own warning. He heeds nothing but the dark impetus in his gut for a palpable effect of his will, even if it means destruction. The groan of the engine thrills him and the heat coming from the floorboards makes his foot even more intent on its mission. He grips the wheel and narrows his eyes and the ambulance blows past the end of the training track.

  Beside him, Rogerson braces himself more severely between the dashboard and the passenger’s seat. “Whoa, Reid. Are you out of your mind? This is fucking idiocy.”

  Charles hears the panic in Rogerson’s voice, but he feels completely in control and ignores his plea. Their speed seems an antidote to the doubt that descended upon him in the darkened room last night. Charles wants to be fearless and this is the first time he’s felt so.

  Just short of the lake at the edge of the farm, Charles removes his foot from the gas and transfers it, with just as much conviction, to the brake. The truck hisses and whines and stops with a sudden, violent lurch. Smoke escapes from the hood, matching the steam coming off the water in front of them. Charles lets his grip loosen and his forehead fall against the wheel.

  “Okay,” he finally says to Rogerson and himself, as he raises his head. “Okay.”

  “Really?” Rogerson asks, his voice rising with anger. He reaches across the seat and grips Charles’s jaw in his hand. His fingers dig into the meaty corners, leaving Charles immobilized. He cannot even complain.

  “What the hell were you thinking? Are you a total lunatic? I didn’t come here to be killed in a lousy motorcar by some reckless rich kid.”

  Charles can’t answer. He tries to swallow the saliva gathering in the back of his throat. The tendons in his jaw throb with pain. He shakes his head. With no effect, he pulls at Rogerson’s arm with both of his hands. Rogerson gives him a deep, final squeeze and then lets go.

  Charles gasps, opening and shutting his jaw slowly, letting the saliva drip out of his open mouth and dampen his trousers.

  “Never again,” Rogerson says, quietly. “You got it? Never again.”

  Charles nods, but as the floorboards continue to heat the soles of his boots, he smiles. “I might’ve taken us for a swim.”

  “More likely a dive,” Rogerson says, his anger fading slightly.

  Charles laughs, his hands sore from the exertion. When he was a boy, his father’s overly firm grip used to leave his hand aching and lame. He can’t remember when he’d outgrown the pain, but when his father shook his hand last, on the evening before he l
eft America, he felt nothing.

  “Shall I turn it around?” Charles asks, blowing into his palms.

  “You better. Whatever damage has been done is your take, not mine. You might owe the Crown a new truck.”

  Charles nods, replacing his foot on the gas and letting the wheels move slowly across the thick grass.

  “The King George has a lot more left in it than you think,” Charles says, christening their vehicle as it trudges back toward the main building, the kitchen chimney smoking cheerily and the royal blue shutters welcoming them back to the hued world.

  They’ve changed trains in Chicago. A new day begun on a new train. Hensley’s father has his nose buried in the morning’s newspapers, a pot of tea on the table between them. As the buoyant, golden fields of grain blur into a single, endless rectangle against the Midwestern sky, Hensley closes her eyes. Neither geography nor topography captures her imagination. Very little can prevent her from filling the endless hours with thoughts of the recent past.

  She remembers the day she met Lowe with searing precision. It was a Thursday. Tryouts were to be held at the school at five o’clock. The senior play was the culmination of every year, written and performed by the girls of the graduating class. At four thirty, her father came home from his job at the Times as he did every Thursday, drew the curtains, pulled the chessboard from its homemade felt envelope, and placed it on the mahogany dining table. From a separate felt bag that her mother had also sewn for him one Christmas before she died, he pulled the dull black and white pieces. He arranged them mindlessly on the board and asked Hensley if she would please fetch the sack of walnuts he’d bought for the occasion. She went to the kitchen and removed the sterling nutcracker that her parents had received as a wedding gift some twenty years before and noted how tarnished it was. Her mother would not approve. Sighing, she wrapped her hand around it and found the bag of walnuts in her father’s briefcase. Placing both on the dining room table, she kissed her father’s cheek as he set the black queen in her place, and bid him good luck.

  Smiling at her briefly, he took his voice to a faux-formal tone and said, “Thank you, daughter, but there is no such thing in chess.”

  Smiling, she said, “Then, think well, Father.”

  “And you? Will your activity require luck?”

  Hensley thought for a moment, wondering if any other girl was subjected to such a line of questioning. “It’s an audition, Daddy. Yes. I will need a good deal of luck. For it is not an objective endeavor, like your game. The casting of parts is a subjective decision made by the director, of whom I know absolutely nothing. So the soliloquy I’ve prepared may be one that he detests. It may be that his poor heart has been broken and he cannot stand Tennyson.”

  “Which one?”

  “‘If I were loved, as I desire to be.’”

  Her father nodded as he closed his eyes. “‘What is there in the great sphere of the earth / And range of evil between death and birth, / That I should fear,—if I were loved by thee?’”

  “Of course you know it.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “Because you know everything, Daddy. You probably already know whether or not I’ll get the part.”

  He looked amused. “Yes, in fact, I do. With that poem, I’ve never known anyone to be rejected.”

  Hensley raised her eyebrows. “Really? Do tell,” she said as she pulled on her gloves.

  “It was one of your mother’s favorites. One of our favorites.”

  Hensley nodded. She’d known this, of course. It had been her mother who’d first recited it for her when she was just a girl. But she’d wondered if her father remembered. Now she knew.

  “So, wish me luck,” she said, putting on her hat.

  “I will only wish that the director recognizes the bounty of talent you possess.”

  “I should be back by seven. Marie and I will walk together.”

  He nodded, satisfied with this exchange. “But, please, do be quiet as you enter.”

  She knew his opponent, Mr. Wern, would arrive within the half hour, and after a limited conversation, the apartment would become a hushed sanctuary. The sewing machine, the guitar, the sound of her feet crossing the floor were all considered too loud. A chess player’s concentration was a sacred thing, perhaps the only sacred thing in the world.

  And who was she to deny him this respite from his daily work, which increasingly produced a furrowed brow, fraught words, and tense coughs? Her father didn’t trust Wilson, or the rhetoric that had become his foreign policy. He was worried that it was only a matter of time before the United States joined the butchery overseas.

  She had not always been so understanding of his habits. When she was eleven and twelve and thirteen, Hensley had spent most of the time sullen and angry at his archaic inclinations. She would slam doors to accentuate her silent voice. Stomp her feet when he addressed her as “daughter.” She missed her mother and wanted an embrace. A smile. Warmth without humor. Her brother, away at boarding school, had been no help at all. If anything, on his visits home, he highlighted her isolation by going out every night with his own friends.

  On her fourteenth birthday, her father had looked at her earnestly. “Is it a happy birthday?” he’d asked.

  She did not reply. She wanted to scream at him. To ask him why he couldn’t just wish her a happy birthday the way he was supposed to. She wanted to tell him she’d never had a happy birthday, not since Mother died, and that he was a poor, poor substitute. Instead, she was silent. He walked across the living room to the front closet and pulled a large, clumsily wrapped package from it. “See if this makes it a happy birthday.” He carried the parcel across the room and placed it on the low table in front of the sofa.

  Hensley crossed the room, her heeled shoes making loud punctuation marks. “What is it?” she asked, standing beside him.

  “Why, I do believe it is a gift.” He smiled and sat on the sofa.

  “What type?” she replied, unwilling to be placated so easily.

  “Are there types? Tell me the categories and I will attempt to classify it.”

  Hensley stomped her foot. But she caught her reflection in the antique glass beside the fireplace and suddenly, on the occasion of her fourteenth birthday, her juvenile foot stomping looked either ill-mannered or comical. She turned directly to comedy.

  “One: useful but boring. Two: entertaining but useless. Three: perfect.”

  Her father’s face betrayed no acknowledgment of her sudden transformation. “Perhaps the receiver of the gift must apply the category. For it depends, completely, on her. That is the risk of gift giving.”

  “True.” Hensley sat gingerly on the sofa beside her father. His beard and his eyebrows had gone white and she couldn’t say when this had happened.

  He placed a hand lightly on her back. “Go on,” he said. “Let’s see how I’ve fared.”

  The paper was brown and thick and there was a single purple ribbon coiled into a circle and placed on top. She removed this, smoothing it into her lap. When she pulled off the paper, there was a gorgeous black sewing machine. With a formidable hand crank and gleaming metal components. Hensley touched the crank with her fingers. It felt cool and heavy.

  “Daddy,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

  “Aha. Type number three. I couldn’t be happier.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “A little storefront on Broadway. Your mother used to tell me of walking by and admiring their machines.” He took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief.

  The room grew quiet. Noise from the street below filled their silence. Shouts from a newsie selling the evening paper, vendors’ wheels cutting loudly into the cobblestones, engines and horns navigating traffic.

  “So, a happy birthday, Hennie?” her father asked, standing and replacing his glasses on his nose.
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br />   “It is. Thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome. Now, let the sewing begin,” he said and she smiled at him.

  “On an empty stomach?” Hensley asked and her father bowed his head.

  “Such cruelty you endure. Shame. Shall we go out for dinner, the first of your fifteenth year?”

  Hensley stomped her foot again. She liked the way it felt now, like a grown woman imitating her long-gone childhood self. “To Polly’s.”

  He stomped his own foot, mimicking her. “At once.”

  Since then, Hensley had used the Willcox & Gibbs every day, at once losing and finding herself in the cutting, measuring, pinning, pulling, constructing of clothes. And how remarkably different their relationship had become, each of them enjoying the other’s idiosyncrasies with less judgment.

  The night she remembers now, as the train rocks her head back and forth, she wore clothes of her own design, sewn on the Willcox & Gibbs: a black skirt cut close at her hips and flaring in thick pleats around her calves and a linen dress shirt of her father’s refashioned into a pin-tucked blouse that hung in a jaunty, uneven hem around her waist. She wrapped herself into one of her mother’s wool coats adorned with a tuft of fur she’d removed from a sweater she’d outgrown. She found her umbrella and left her father to his game. He said the same thing he said each time she left the apartment: “Be good, Hennie.”

  For a man who spent his days searching for specificity, it was a perfectly obtuse instruction. She hardly even heard it anymore. Though she never intended to be anything but.

  • • •

  Standing on the stage, one by one, each girl recited her monologue while the others waited in the cold passageway outside. Under the bright lights, it was nearly impossible to make out the face of the director, but the gossip in the hall was that he was young and handsome. A relative of one of the school’s trustees with London stage experience.