This Is How I'd Love You (2 page)

H
ensley Dench feels the train inside of her. Its wheels turn and its axles move deep in the dark places that no one can see. Its rhythm, its power, its forward motion. It is already the second day of their journey, the twenty-ninth hour: New York is so far away it is a dream. A dirty, shiny scrap of a place that she’s made up in her girlish imagination. Now there is only this sky, a huge cistern of blue that clouds over in the afternoons, turning dark and ominous, like a tragic grand finale to each day. They sleep on their berths, she and her father, as the night sky unfolds itself, dumps huge buckets of rain and then returns in the morning, so blue and optimistic it hurts.

There are pieces of soldiers on this train. Photographs and letters tucked into breast pockets, hidden between carefully folded sweaters; tokens, marbles, flasks. Each passenger is either remotely or intimately connected with a boy bound for the war. Her father keeps a piece of one in his coat pocket. The curving black lines of Mr. Charles Reid’s handwriting reveal that he is unwavering in his convictions. He wants to know if Mr. Dench is a believer and if he is, will he pray for him. Will he pray for the souls of the men who are blown back by guns that remain unseen?

And then, eventually, he reveals his next move. He will move his queen’s pawn two. This is what her father’s been waiting for. He sets up the chessboard like an altar, arranging the pieces exactly as they were when he made his last move, via post, ten days ago.

He places his inkwell beside the board and removes a piece of paper from his satchel. Hensley has her own paper in front of her, sketching dresses she no longer needs. A narrow velvet skirt, perfect for the theater, worn with a silk lampshade tunic and a single strand of long, perfectly black beads. Her own take on the Fortuny tea gown, made from crepe and pleated everywhere except on the front placket, where she’d inlay a silk ruffle. After a time, though, these drawings irk her. She is restless and distracted.

Hensley stands between cars and throws off pieces of the roll she saved from lunch. The bread tumbles quickly down into the ravine on one side of the tracks and it gives her a jolt of adrenaline. If she herself were a soldier, standing between cars on a train somewhere in Europe—Russia or Austria or France or Britain—she would think of following that bread crumb. Or more likely a cigarette tossed away in a masculine gesture of disinterest; useless, now vanquished. Cartwheeling herself off of the thundering, monotonous machine into nature’s terrain where the worms and rodents and wolves and snakes could dismantle her without an audience, without leaving her stench to spread across crowded trenches, into, even, the letters back home.

When her father is asleep, Hensley will read his reply. She will lift Mr. Reid’s letter to her face and try to smell something of a person whose life is not beholden to a parent. A life in which one’s decisions are one’s own. Then she will scan her father’s black scrawl to see what he’s told the boy about belief.

God is and always has been a substitute for true belief. For sacrificing and forsaking ego in the service of real & actual good. God feeds men’s egos, giving them more self-importance than they deserve. If, in fact, there were a God who was almighty and all-knowing, this being would not tolerate humans speaking for him. The fact that religion requires belief above rationality renders it useless to me. God, it seems, is actually the antithesis of thought, which is what I hold sacred. But as I close my eyes and listen to the machinery beneath my feet, I ask for your body and soul to be safe. I know not of whom I ask this, but if my thoughts have any power outside of myself, let us call this God. Take no offense from an old man’s heresy, please.

Be advised that just as you are embarking for Europe, my daughter and I are on our way west. Fortunes demand my relocation, at least temporarily, to Hillsboro, New Mexico. You may write to me there, care of the Ready Pay mine. My next move is my queen’s knight to QB4.

Even for a desperate man, who fears his own eyes will be a soft, easy meal for shit-colored rats as soon as the right bullet finds him, Hensley’s father will not lie. Hensley cannot help being both ashamed and awed by his conviction as she reads. She will have empathy for Mr. Reid because she knows her own eagerness to hear words of comfort from her father. Her own efforts to evoke reassurances, even on this trip, even as they boarded the train in Pennsylvania Station, even as they entered the dark tunnel beneath the Hudson and saw the skyline recede as they emerged, have failed. How she has longed for words of encouragement from her father. She knows nothing more of their destination than what he’s told Mr. Reid. Her idea of New Mexico comes only from the Winnetou novels her brother loved as a child. But surely, she reasons, as she stares at her father’s script, even if they are living in tents among bison and mustangs, it will be better than walking every day past the school, its wide double doors framing the scene of her heartbreak.

As she reads her father’s letter, she will not be able to stop herself from scribbling her own empty words of sunny optimism, tucked into her father’s wide margins.
You will come home soon, stronger and wiser. You’re fighting for all of us. Your pen pal is a rabid pacifist with a dead wife, an estranged son, and a deviant daughter; pay him no attention. What you must do is believe with all your heart that you can come home and when you do, all the horror that surrounds you now will recede into a past that you can leave behind as simply as a train leaves a depot.

As she lets the air whip at her cheeks, she thinks of what her brother has told her he knows of the atrocities at the front. Silent gas attacks that leave the trenches full of blinded, gasping soldiers; conditions so wet and filthy that boys’ feet begin to rot inside of their boots; engorged French rats who scurry at night across sleeping soldiers’ hands. She imagines what those creatures must think of their sudden change of fortune. What tremendous luck! Humanity’s brutality like a lottery for these rodents, who, for generations, scrounge only nuts and rotten fruit, the occasional dead lizard or fallen baby bird, and now this: a bounty so outrageous, so warm and fresh, so plentiful and gorgeous it could make even a rat believe in God.

The conductor finds her in between cars, half a dinner roll becoming sticky in her palm.

“Are you ill, miss?” he shouts above the noise of the train.

She shakes her head. “Just taking some air.”

“Passengers should remain inside one of the cars. Can I help you back to your berth? Would you care for some seltzer from the dining car?”

Hensley nods again. He extends his arm, waiting for her to take it. The wind is at her back, throwing her hair into her face, where it clings to her lips. She pictures the glass, the train’s silhouette etched into it, the bubbles from the seltzer fizzing over the rim.

She turns away from the conductor, putting her face into the wind, shutting her eyes, and letting the world go black. She feels him move closer to her. He is worried. Is her heartache so apparent that he thinks she might actually jump? That he might have to watch her tumble down the embankment at dreadful angles and terrible speed, her skirt ripping, her face aghast? And the momentum of the train a near impossible thing to stop, here in the middle of, where? Kansas? Illinois? To have to jog through the cars—his brow sweating, his heart galloping, his fingers numb—all the way to the engineer so that they can heave the heavy metal wheels to a stop and send out the crew to reclaim her body.

The passengers would wonder what had happened. Indignant, they’d complain about delays and incompetence. Then a rumor would spread quickly from car to car. Their faces would press against the glass, their hearts both eager and afraid. A glimpse of dark color in the grass would elicit small gasps from every woman. But they’d all disembark at their final destinations with a story to tell, an unanswered question, and the relief that it was not them, or one of their own.

Hensley opens her eyes and the conductor’s hand is on her shoulder. “Miss,” he says again, his voice now close to her ear. She opens her fingers and lets the roll go. She turns her face toward his.

“I just needed the air.” The warmth of his hand makes her throat feel tight, her skin hot.

He smiles. She threads her arm through his and he yanks hard on the lever to open the door. “Thank you,” she says, as he ushers her through the train car, like a groom retreating from the altar, newly married. When they’ve reached her place, he lets her go.

A waiter brings the seltzer to her. She has pulled her feet out of her shoes and tucked them underneath her. Holding the glass near her face, she lets the bubbles jump and cling to her nose and chin. Hensley closes her eyes, tired. She thinks of her school friends, choosing bathing costumes and readying their trunks for summer travel. Swim caps and unsanctioned novels stuffed into little hollows between skirts and shoes. To the shore, to the lake, to anyplace where there are waves and ice cream and umbrellas. She thinks of Lowe, who is surely already in Maine, already riding his bike barefooted, unashamed of his civilian status. Spreading blankets for some other girl under ancient branches and handing her a peach, a handkerchief, a flask.

“Brooding?” her father says.

She does not open her eyes. “Emphatically.”

She feels him lean across her and open the window, filling their area with the noise and heat of the prairie rushing by outside. She tastes grass and dirt and metal in the back of her throat and brings the water to her lips to wash it away, but it lingers.

“I prefer it closed,” she says.

Her father sighs. She can tell he has already settled back in front of the chessboard, trying to predict the future. Before he’s even handed the letter off to be posted at the next stop, he’s already imagining all the possible moves the boy on his way to the front has open to him, moves he may never get to make.

He stands anyway and closes the window for her.

Hensley thinks of the letters Lowell had said they would write to each other. They were backstage, before the final curtain. His breath warmed her ear even as he said nothing. She’d turned her face to his, smelling the pomade from his hair.
You will write, won’t you? When I’m in New Mexico?
She’d understood the way his eyes narrowed, the way they seemed to swallow her own words as an affirmative answer.

That was before. She knew better than to expect a letter now. But, still, she hoped.

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.

T
he 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.