This Is How I'd Love You (4 page)

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.

 • • • 

S
tanding 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.

When Hensley finished her soliloquy, he said merely, “Well done. I suppose Tennyson is a favorite of every starry-eyed seventeen-year-old girl.”

Hensley blushed brightly. “Oh. I’m sorry. Has there been an awful lot of it today?”

The theater was quiet. For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then, with his deep, articulated voice, he said, “Only yours.”

 • • • 

T
he final cast list contained no surprises. Hensley shrugged as she read over the names. Her own disappointment at not seeing her own was lessened almost immediately by the image of Lily Benton dressed as a man, her golden curls slicked back and tucked beneath a top hat. It was a girls’ school, after all, and since the play had been penned by one of their own, it was, inevitably, a romance, and the semblance of men would be required.

Despite her fair complexion and slim figure, Hensley would be relegated to being a stagehand, producing the program, or acting as an usher. Her friend Marie, who was soft-spoken and hadn’t even wanted to audition for a speaking role, was cast as the disapproving grandmother. She was mortified. “Please come with me. I’ve got to get out of it. Maybe he’ll let us switch places. You’re a much better choice anyway.”

Hensley acquiesced. And it was then that she was first able to properly assess Lowell Teagan.

He entered the theater wearing a black hat and a beautiful black overcoat, cut slim and flattering for his tall frame. He walked past Hensley and she looked down at her feet, ashamed of the way she wanted to reach out and touch his coat just to feel it. She raised her eyes after he passed, studying his back.

Suddenly he stopped and turned and looked directly at her as though he could read her mind. “Hensley?” he asked and walked back toward her. He lifted his hat off his head. “I hardly recognized you without that dreamy look in your eye.”

Hensley felt herself capable of nothing but blushing hotly when he spoke to her. His face was pale and accentuated with straight black eyebrows and a thick crop of black hair. His amber eyes darted energetically about as he spoke, and then they settled, unnervingly, upon her as he spoke the last word of his sentence.

“And Marie, is it? Our dear Granny. What can I do for you girls?”

With a slight nudge from Hensley, Marie asked, politely, if he might assign the Old Granny to Hensley. As she spoke, Hensley watched Lowell’s eyes move quickly around the theater and then, when Marie was silent, he looked again at Hensley.

“You want to be the Old Granny?”

Hensley mumbled. “I’m amenable to anything.”

“Yes, well, though that is a nice quality for a lapdog, it will not do for an actress. Marie remains our Granny. But you, Hensley, have a talent you did not share at the audition.”

Hensley, with newly permanent crimson cheeks, did not reply.

“You sew, I’m told. You will be our costume designer. I will need to consult with you before tomorrow’s rehearsal. Come here directly after class. Thank you, ladies,” he said and fixed his eyes toward the stage, upon which he leaped moments later, throwing his hat into the empty front row.

 • • • 

S
he decided she hated him. Anybody who could make her so perpetually flush irked her. Even as she sewed a new velvet band for her hair that night, she fumed at his condescending attitude. She intended to walk into the theater at the appointed time the next afternoon and stonewall him and his larger-than-life ego.

And she had, in fact, stood in the aisle with her hands straight at her sides, her mother’s owl brooch pinned to her coat, and told him that if he wanted her talent, she would require total creative control. He must give her final say on all designs. She would not answer to any of the cast, nor to him.

He was sitting with his feet propped up against the row of seats in front of him. He held her gaze and she promised herself, no matter how rude his reply, she would not blush.

He let the noise from the hallway, the afterschool banter, fill the space between them. When he finally spoke, he said only, “Splendid.”

Hensley had been prepared to argue, or to turn and walk away without allowing him to have the final word. Instead, she smiled.

“Really?” she said.

His eyes traveled from her face, across her torso, and ever so subtly to the skirt that hung tightly around her hips and fell into a puddle of pleats at the floor. “I’d be a fool to decline,” he said finally and, despite her best efforts, she blushed. “You are obviously the most fashionable girl here, or in half of Manhattan, for that matter. Did you make these clothes you’re wearing?” he asked, motioning to the full expanse of her body with his long-fingered hand.

Hensley nodded. She felt slightly hollow, as though with that motion of his hand he had rearranged her most essential internal parts, making space, creating turmoil. “Made or adapted,” she said quietly, unable to conjure the typical force of her voice. “Sometimes I use my father’s shirts or some of my mother’s things that are still in the closets.”

He seemed to be studying the seams of her blouse and she was afraid he would notice a place where they were not quite perfect. “We will need all the pieces for final alterations at least a week before the first dress rehearsal. This is no small task,” he said, returning his gaze to her eyes.

Hensley nodded. “Thank you,” she said. As she turned to walk away, her body strangely weightless, he spoke again.

“You could have played Old Granny, or any other part in this play, for that matter.” He put his feet on the floor and stood, walked directly toward her, and then turned sharply toward the stage, his hand just grazing her shoulder as he passed. “That’s the problem,” he continued, addressing the stage, his voice nearly swallowed by its great expanse. Hensley moved closer, to be sure to hear him. But, without warning, he turned back and was suddenly just inches away from her. “I find it’s never good politics, especially in a school like this, to let the obvious star outshine the rest of the players. At its best, theater is an ensemble. That is the lesson I’m charged with teaching. I hope there are no hurt feelings?” His green eyes, which so often looked gold, were studying her own.

Hensley shook her head. “No. Not at all,” she said and implored her feet to carry her out the door.

C
andles adorn each long table, feigning a kind of elegance in the small mess hall. As it melts, the wax smells of the onions they are stored with in the kitchen. After dinner, Charles smokes and studies the chessboard in his mind, occasionally drawing it on his napkin when he must. At first, he longed for an actual board, one of many everyday items he now cherished in its absence. Like an extra pair of socks, soft bread, books, cold beer, chocolate. But now, he is grateful for the utter concentration required to conjure the entire board in his mind. The day’s noise and smoke and brutality are forced into a less prominent place, where they continue to rattle and hum, but do not take over him completely—a respite.

They had been so eager to be assigned to their posts, to be in the thick of it. He grimaces when he thinks of that anticipation of just a month ago. Had they known how life would become a dark, narrow hole in which they would sleep less than they ever thought possible, hardly ever see a horizon without smoke or fire corroding its edges, eat turnips and potatoes that have been boiled into a bitter white mash at nearly every meal, they might have enjoyed even more those empty days that began with overly salted sausage and sweet jam, were filled with long walks across tangled, abandoned vines and beneath thick groves of apple trees, and ended with cognac, a piece of Toblerone, and the BBC on the wireless.

When Charles wrote to his parents, he told them that he and Rogerson, his closest friend there, would both be assigned to Casualty Clearing Station #13 on the western front. Their location probably matters more to his parents than it does to Charles. As far as he can tell, the soldiers who climb over the edge of the trenches at the front, those who he and Rogerson intercept from relay posts and advanced dressing stations and carry into their own resuss or preop tents, don’t care what day it is or what country they’re in.

The officers at the front wait to hand out the daily post until dusk. Since the nights are usually relatively quiet, each front exhausted and requiring replenishment, whoever has survived the day has the possibility of a letter to read by the light of his own cigarette. In solidarity, the CCS #13 abides by the same schedule.

“Geese are early flying north this year,” Rogerson reports as he folds his mother’s letter and hands it to Charles. He’s left his mother and younger sister on their family’s farm, forced to hire itinerant laborers in his absence. His father was French—his mother never questioned his decision to enlist. “She baked an apple cake and took it to the neighbor whose chicks our own hound ate in the night. I say send
us
the damn apple cake.”

The next morning on the drive between CCS #13 and the relay post eighteen kilometers closer to the front, Charles and Rogerson take turns guessing the response the Rogersons’ neighbor would have had to the conciliatory pie.

“I’d offer you some fresh eggs, but . . .”

Rogerson guffaws loudly, his eyes scanning the horizon for bombers. “Yeah, thanks. Pie smells great. Can it be scrambled? Poached?”

Charles puts his boot on the dash. He is laughing so hard it hurts. The two of them have quickly, quietly realized how much funnier everything can be if you think you might die within the hour.

They pass a green field yet to be destroyed by mines. There are yellow daffodils and blue-breasted birds sitting along the wooden fence, oblivious to the carnage just kilometers away.

When they reach their destination, there are three soldiers leaning against the brick wall of the ruined house that is the relay post. They each hold a muddied handkerchief across their nose and mouth.

Before they’ve even stopped the truck, one of the men has his hand on the hood. They are Brits.

“Hey,” he says from behind the cloth, his eyes wild with panic. “We pissed on ’em. Will we be fine, then? It was gas. We got caught in the latrine at the reserve trench without our masks. What do we do? I’m bloody thirsty.”

Rogerson takes the soldier by the arm and escorts him to the back of the King George. Charles follows his lead and grabs the other two soldiers, their handkerchiefs smelling of piss, even though he knows that this is only a short-term remedy to ease the symptoms. The effects of the chlorine gas will asphyxiate them by morning. Until then, they will occupy three beds in their resuss tent, begging for mercy.

Charles hasn’t seen it before, but they were warned at Basic that they should never give them water, nor cut off their clothes without donning their own gas mask. These men will feel that an iron ring has been cinched around their necks and is being slowly tightened, hour after hour, until their last breath.

Charles puts the truck in gear and turns it around. They’ll have to return later for the rest of the wounded. As a precaution, Rogerson hands Charles a gas mask from the box between them and attaches one to his own mouth. There is probably enough residual gas in the space between the soldiers’ clothes and their bodies to kill another man.

Charles affixes the mask and breathes deeply, biting on the valve. It smells of hot plastic and gym socks.

Rogerson turns around in order to address the boys sitting side by side on the floor between the racks of stretchers. He pulls his mask aside for a moment and speaks loudly. “You’re gonna be fine. We’ve got the best docs back at Number Thirteen. You’ll see. First-rate French doctors.”