This Is How I'd Love You Page 4

  “Hensley,” he says, extending his arm. “This is Humberto Romero. He works for the mine. He’s going to drive us to Hillsboro.”

  Hensley frowns. “Humberto?” she says. “But . . .”

  His eyes harden. There is no acknowledgment that they were in the same women’s restroom moments earlier. Hensley turns her head to see the door, to make certain she hadn’t accidentally been in the men’s bathroom. Perhaps she is confused. Perhaps this dry heat has affected her eyesight.

  Humberto reaches out his hand and shakes hers, gripping it harder than necessary. “Welcome.”

  Hensley looks closely at this face, its eyebrows gracefully arched, its lips smooth and full. Humberto could easily be a girl of profound beauty, but his eyes are so dark and fierce and her grip so strong that Hensley says only, “Thank you,” and follows her father and Humberto to the truck parked in the lot behind the station.

  • • •

  They sit in a row on the bench seat, her father sandwiched between them. Humberto handles the truck confidently on the paved roads of El Paso and soon enough they are traveling a well-groomed dirt road, supposedly headed northwest. Her father doesn’t say much, but he leans forward, his hands on his knees, as though in a theater, afraid to miss a single line of dialogue.

  “This is New Mexico,” Humberto says eventually, lifting a hand from the wheel and motioning to the land in front of them, though there is no obvious change in the scenery.

  Her father echoes Humberto’s words, in case Hensley has not heard. “New Mexico,” he says, gesturing out Hensley’s window.

  “Got it.” Hensley inventories the terrain: scrub, scrub, rock, tree, dirt, scrub. She wonders how anyone could ever locate herself in such a never-ending, wide-open landscape. There is no uptown, downtown; no east river, west river. No storefronts or street signs. No people. Not a single, wretched person is on the road with them. She sees a rabbit in the scant shade of a scraggly bush, watching their truck pass. Her face brightens. There are squirrels in Central Park and rats in the subway tunnels, but she’s never seen a rabbit—the way its front paws hang in front of its chest in prayer. The constantly twitching nose. The oversized teeth and ears.

  “Rabbit,” Hensley says, pointing out the window.

  Humberto laughs a high-pitched giggle. “What? Never seen one?”

  Hensley looks at her father. Surely, he, too, can hear this girlish laughter.

  He only smiles and says, “Rabbits are not the main inhabitants of Manhattan, I’m afraid. The wildlife there is mainly pickpockets and politicians.”

  Hensley looks back at the small creature under the bush. She finds herself composing a letter to it: Dear Little Rabbit under the Bush, You are not as dull as they think you are. You are the first living thing in New Mexico to make me smile. Aptly grateful, Hensley Dench.

  She looks at Humberto’s slender brown hands holding onto the steering wheel. Hensley would like to announce that she’s just composed a letter to the rabbit under the bush. That she already cares more for that rabbit than she does for anyone else she’s met in this vast, dry place. Especially more than she cares for that pretty girl with the long shiny hair in the ladies’ restroom in the El Paso train station. The girl who wouldn’t smile at Hensley. The same girl who Hensley is sure just laughed at her for noticing a plain brown rabbit along the side of the road.

  If she had the courage, Hensley would sabotage this fool’s errand; return to New York and let New Mexico remain a faraway, irrelevant place. Go back to the city that was her home. Tell her father to write whatever the Times said he had to write. The war will go on, whether or not Sacha Dench approves. Whether or not newspapers take their orders from the Committee on Public Information.

  She looks at her father’s eager face, the wrinkles around his eyes speckled with dirt. What would her mother think of their exodus? Hensley closes her eyes, an ache in the back of her throat. The agony of this loss courts her, showing up just often enough so that she does not forget. Her mother’s face is suddenly so close she can touch it, but then it is gone and Hensley has a glimpse of her father’s heartbreak. The awful train that has carried them away from New York, like the black death that carried her mother away. Leaving them in an unknown, empty place where nothing makes sense and neither of them feel whole.

  Back in the heat of July last year, there had been a series of explosions in the middle of the night when the artillery factory on Black Tom Island blew up. Her father had roused her from her bed, leading her into the street with the other neighbors, where they stood shoulder to shoulder, watching the skyline burst and burn. Later, investigators discovered that the fire was set by German saboteurs, but at the time, her father was hopeful that such a display of violence, whatever its cause, would be a warning to Americans that entering the war would be a grave mistake. A few children in their mothers’ arms started to cry, but were soon distracted by the exhilaration of being in the middle of the street in the middle of the night and began games of chase while the adults carried on rowdy conversations amid the fireworks. Nobody knew what had happened, but the blasts soon grew louder and a window shattered on Broadway and this ended the strange block party as people hurried inside, afraid of what might happen next.

  Her father stayed up nearly all night writing a preemptive editorial, trying to turn this brilliant spectacle into a symbol of the destruction that American artillery would cause overseas. He hoped the event would quell the nation’s warmongers, whose voices were growing louder each day. Hensley had curled up on the couch near his desk, shivering beneath a blanket, though the midsummer heat was palpable all night. She dozed on and off, listening to the scratch of his pen against paper. Finally, as the room ever so slightly brightened, he’d noticed her crumpled figure.

  “Hennie?” he said, placing a warm hand against her brow. “You must get some sleep, child. I thought you’d gone to bed.”

  “Daddy,” she said from a place between wakefulness and sleep, “why must you work so much?”

  He stood above her, his hands deep in his pockets. He walked away from her, toward the fireplace. Then he turned and, as though speaking to a room full of colleagues, said, “The disagreements between rich and powerful men should remain just that. But an entire generation of young men is bearing the burden of royal tempers and old grudges. It is immorality of the worst kind. Those with plenty turning their countries into slaughterhouses for the sake of what, I ask?”

  “Is that what you’ve written?” Hensley asked, sitting up.

  “Partly. I won’t bore you with the rest. But it is the only thing I can do. That is why I do it. I must. It is not a choice. It just is.”

  Hensley watched his face, the corners of his mouth twitching with emotion.

  “But if our participation would quicken the end . . .” she began, echoing what she’d heard from classmates and teachers.

  He turned away from her and pounded the mantel, making the mirror beside it tremble. “Where is the absolutism of religion now? Morality is not negotiable, Hensley. Unleashing a war machine in order to end a war? An absurd Olympics of semantic excuses. Ludicrous.”

  Hensley threw the blanket off. “Meanwhile, the slaughter continues,” she said, “while we stand on our very firm moral ground.”

  Had she known that less than a year later she would be lost in her own sea of moral ambiguity, she might have paid closer attention to her father’s certainty. Wrong is wrong.

  Because the first time that Lowell Teagan met her at the theater to look at her sketches and placed his hand on the curve of her waist to inquire about the placement of a seam, she knew it was wrong. They were not family and they were not betrothed. But even more than that, his touch was not demonstrative or inquisitive. It was authoritative. He was begging her to question his authority, to doubt his own morality, but she did not. Instead, she took his hand in her own and placed it slightly lower, just where her
hip bone flowered, and correctly showed him where the pleat would begin. In this way, she became a living mannequin they each manipulated, displaying the way a fabric would drape or taper on her own figure.

  The other girls might have been jealous of this time he spent with her, backstage, placing his own pencil marks on her paper and plying a straight pin from her mouth, his fingers grazing her lips, lingering slightly on her delicate chin, because nearly every girl in the play had developed a wild crush. But he saw the players every day for rehearsals, his attention captivated by each of the girl’s efforts to become her character, to inhabit the skin of a wholly imagined person. His entreaties both terrified and thrilled them. “Nobody wants to see you onstage, Miss Coe. How disappointing. You must become Mr. Johnstone completely. Dispose of all your boring, girlish teenage gestures. I do not want to see you place your hands on your hips while you are on that stage. Get inside Mr. Johnstone. This is your chance, don’t you see? You are allowed to step inside of him, feel his skin, taste his food, move his body. There are not many opportunities in life for that kind of intimacy.”

  All the girls hung on his words, longed for his gaze, shrank from his questions. But none of them had felt the weight of his hand on her hip nor the heat of his exhale on her neck, except Hensley. For this she was both ashamed and elated. In the wake of her father’s moral absolutism, she was utterly confused.

  • • •

  The first time he kissed her, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. As though, perhaps, they were both just occupying the same space and their lips had no choice but to touch. It was merely an extension of their work together. He did not place his hands on her, nor try to extend the contact. He simply smiled, which was rare, exposing his one physical flaw—undersized teeth. They appeared shrunken, immature, as though he were still waiting for his adult teeth to arrive. Hensley swallowed hard, trying to decipher the tingling that had begun in her lips but was now traveling across her chest. Was it fear or longing?

  Before she left the theater that night, he placed a hand on her elbow and said only, “Your talent takes my breath away, Hensley. It is difficult for me to contain my admiration. Please forgive me.”

  Hensley merely blushed and let him slide her coat onto her shoulders.

  Walking home with Marie, she smiled the whole way. “What, you, too?” Marie asked as they crossed Broadway.

  “What?”

  “You’ve gone ’round the moon for him, too? We’re such a bunch of sillies. Of course, since I’ve become Old Granny, he’s not that keen on me.”

  Hensley laughed but she wondered about the other girls. They did all adore him. He was undeniably the most interesting man she’d ever met. Of course, she hadn’t met many men except her brother’s Columbia chums, who were the epitome of dull. But she thought of Sara Coe and Lily Benton, with their perfect, shiny hair and melodious voices. It was she, not they, whom he had kissed. It was she, not they, whom he found irresistible. She didn’t dare tell Marie that Mr. Teagan had kissed her. But she wondered, as Marie walked beside her in the fading spring daylight, if that kiss would be the beginning of their love story.

  • • •

  As she and Marie parted ways and she turned onto her block, her lighthearted mood shifted. A newsie called out the headline, “Wilson to ask Congress to declare war!” She could see from the street below that the light in the apartment was lit. Her father would be writing, the sound of his ink stretched across an unending stack of paper.

  “Daddy,” Hensley said as she took off her hat. He was not writing. He was sitting on the sofa, his spectacles in his hands. She sat beside him and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I saw the headline.”

  Her father placed his hand on hers. “I remain appalled but hardly surprised. It’s been a long time coming.”

  “But aren’t you going to keep writing? I mean, surely you can’t just give up. You have to speak your mind.”

  He smiled, then wiped at his eyes, which looked tired. He looked at her anew, as though he hadn’t done so in years. “You are turning into a lady. Right here before my eyes. How are the costumes coming?”

  “Fine, just fine. I met with the director tonight. Lowell Teagan. He really likes my ideas. I’ve a veritable closet of clothes to sew, however.”

  Her father nodded. “Of course. Splendid.”

  “Daddy? Maybe we should go out for dinner. A little distraction this evening might be nice.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve had a slight setback at the paper, Hensley. I’ve been taken off editorial completely. They are putting a noose around my neck. Just about the only thing I can write about is the weather. And the worst part is that they assume it has something to do with my heritage.”

  “That you sympathize with Germany?”

  He stood. “Well, I do. I sympathize with the whole world. But I believe in peace, Hensley. Not one country or another.”

  “Well, just tell them,” Hensley said.

  “I’ve written nearly ten thousand words this month alone, Hensley. They are not listening. Nobody is.”

  At that moment, Hensley wanted more than ever to be back in the theater, behind the dusty red curtain, with the scents of chalk and wood polish and Mr. Teagan’s hands manipulating her body with utter confidence.

  “Well, I don’t know, Daddy. I suppose you’ll have to write about the weather, then.”

  His face conveyed the kind of darkening that a rain cloud does to a blue summer sky. “Like bloody hell I will,” he said. “In fact, the idea of writing about absolutely anything else is rubbish. I’d rather dig ditches than pretend this doesn’t matter—that every ounce of ink in New York shouldn’t be spent on it.”

  “You would tell me, if I happened to be the one speaking in such hyperbole, that dramatics are not a sound debate tool.”

  Her father started to speak and then did not. He replaced his glasses and looked back at the papers on his desk. He nodded. “There is no turning back. Wilson will get his vote and our boys will be sent away before summer.”

  “Harold?” Hensley said, thinking of her brother, the freckles that stretched across his cheeks and rimmed the tops of his ears.

  Her father shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  Hensley reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief she’d tucked there and wiped her eyes. Her father glanced at her gesture and then looked away. “If not your brother, somebody else’s brother. They do not recruit soldiers from some reserve of the unloved and unattached.”

  In her mind, Hensley imagined an emporium, like the large fabric store she liked to browse on Forty-second Street, filled entirely with lonely, solitary men holding their lunch pails, waiting to be given a uniform and a weapon.

  “I don’t want Harold to go.”

  “That will be up to him, Hensley. Or the Congress.”

  “Well, you’ll have to tell him he can’t.”

  “Your brother has never taken my instruction well, Hennie.”

  “And what about us? What will you do?”

  “I am looking into other ventures. Your mother’s cousin, Thomas Wright, has asked me to look after a mining interest of his.”

  Hensley didn’t hear anything more he said. Would Mr. Teagan sign up? she wondered. Would his long fingers and piercing eyes soon be in France or Belgium? Would every good and strong boy be sleeping in the trenches far, far away?

  “I’d better get to work,” she said, standing and holding her sketches close to her chest. “I’m sorry, Daddy. About Wilson and the paper and all of it.”

  He nodded but was already sitting at his desk again, dipping his pen into the inkwell.

  Hensley stood in her room in front of the glass, examining herself. She liked the way her bosom looked in the tunic and the way her newly bobbed hair just skimmed her jawbone. Her nose was too long and her eyes a little too wide, but altogether, she thought she was a striking gi
rl, whose refinement was underappreciated by boys her own age, who only thought about whiskey and sports. She looked closely at her lips, startled that they’d been so recently touched by Mr. Teagan’s. But she also decided, as she moved her own finger across their soft expanse, that there was no better use for them. There in front of her own reflection, she became grateful for his audacity, enamored of his disregard for politesse, and terrified that he would be lost to the war.

  When Charles’s post is handed to him, the envelope from Mr. Dench is markedly different. Drawn on the back of this envelope is a small green tree with a little owl peering out of its branches. In a speech bubble, it says, “Hoot.” This is unlike anything Mr. Dench has ever done before. Charles wonders momentarily if the censors have added it. But it is too whimsical and delightful for that. Slowly, he pulls at the paper, careful to preserve the strange little drawing.

  In the margins of Mr. Dench’s reply, there are faint scribbles in a hand he does not recognize. For some reason, this small act of mystery sends a jolt of life down Charles’s spine. It is unexpected, refreshing, wholly strange. It jars him from his hardened, protective armor of practicality.

  Mr. Dench’s daughter has pirated his reply and placed her own mark upon it. Her ink across the thin onionskin paper seems to wink at him with its audacity. Quickly, before Rogerson has finished reading his own dispatch from his mother, Charles shoves the letter into his jacket pocket. He is afraid, already, of discovering that it’s a mirage—something the monotony of war has constructed in his mind. But he knows his own mind. This could not be his own invention. It is outside his idea of what is possible.

  Usually, the two of them share all correspondence. It is one of the small rituals they’ve settled upon without speaking of it. But this night, Charles doesn’t take the letter from Rogerson. “Keep it, man. I’ve got nothing. Mr. Dench botched it. Sent an empty envelope.”

  Rogerson looks at him hard. He and his mother and sister live on a vast farm in Minnesota along the Canadian border. Their isolation has bred an instinctual skepticism. “You two having a love affair?” He punches him gently on the shoulder. “I saw you reading something, chap. Hand it over.”