This Is How I'd Love You (28 page)

W
hen Charles returns to New York, his father brings the car to the station. Neither of them acknowledges the cane in Charles’s grip, nor the slow pace used to navigate their way out of the station. They drive directly to his father’s club, where they dine in a corner booth. The steak arrives so thick and rare, Charles has a hard time eating even half of it.

“You must get your appetite back,” his father says, passing him the front page of the evening newspaper. “I’m sure the food was awful over there.”

Charles takes the paper from his father, nodding. He doesn’t really care about anything he reads. He is thinking only of finding Hensley. The strange silver goblet is wrapped in newspaper in his luggage along with an address on West Seventy-second.

He has written to Rogerson about his encounter in Hillsboro.
You can imagine my surprise when the man transformed before my eyes into a woman, a beauty. The Wild West is as wild as anything, my friend. I know this one anecdote will keep your dirty mind occupied for many days.

Several times on the train he began a letter to Hensley, but he cannot bring himself to tell her of the severity of his injury. Of course, he must. It is all that matters now. Will she care to be courted by a crippled, handicapped man? A veteran who has not come back stronger but who has, in fact, come back a shell of his former self. Of course, if one can survive with a quarter less of himself, perhaps that does make him stronger than those who remain whole. But as long as the question remains unanswered, everything remains possible. And so he’s thrown every attempt into the trash.

At home, he stands in front of the large mirror centered over the dark mahogany bureau. In the falsely lit night, he unbuckles his belt and lets his pants fall to the floor. Then, loosening his prosthetic, he leans it up against the chest of drawers. There in the glass, he can see the butchery of his stump. He has felt its wide, uneven scar with his fingers and imagined how it must look, but he has never had this view.

Its bluntness is animal and indelicate, like the sole of an elephant’s foot. He can lift the stump with his thigh muscles, but the absence of a knee joint or the slender slope into ankle and foot makes the job seem ridiculous. He is acutely aware that he will never appear whole again. This is the way his body will remain. There is no recovery, no therapy.

He sits on the bed to remove his tie and shirt, so that he is completely naked. With the support of his cane, he then stands and lets the full image of this new identity sink in.

His own unforgiving eyes avoid looking at the left side of his body. He turns slightly, hiding his lack. His body is still young, the skin full and buoyant across his torso and biceps. From this side, he is a whole man, virile and healthy, his buttocks the strong beginning of a long, solid leg. But he turns back, letting his full figure show in the mirror. He looks unfinished, deformed, and, worse, he cannot cross the room without strapping on the wooden leg that waits against the bureau. He hangs his head and throws his cane at the lamp to extinguish it.

 • • • 

T
he next morning, he travels uptown in a taxi and stands in front of the building that matches the address Teresa wrote down for him. Will he know her if she’s on the street? Will she be anything like what he imagines? He looks carefully at the women who pass him, their languorous strides and wide-brimmed hats revealing nothing.

The apartment is just a block from Central Park. He stands beneath the awning and peers into the lobby with its small, upholstered settee cradled between the two curving staircases. The doorman greets him with a sorry look on his face. “Can I help you, sir?” Charles detests this look of sympathy. He shakes his head and walks on past.

Later, as he sits in the parlor having a drink with his parents, he loosens the strap from around his stump so that the prosthetic falls away, leaving his pant leg flat against the chair. His mother’s face fills with horror. He’d only wanted to massage his aching stump, but instead he folds his hands in his lap, allowing his mother some peace in her own house. “Excuse me, Mother,” he says finally, reaching for the wooden leg. “I didn’t realize . . .”

“Good God, Charles,” she says, pulling a handkerchief from between the cushions of the sofa. “Have you lost your mind, as well?”

She stands and leaves the room, her eyes clouded by tears, leaving Charles to reassemble himself.

When his father enters moments later, the newspaper tucked under his arm and an umbrella in his hand, he says merely, “Good evening, son.”

Charles nods a greeting and swallows the last of his drink.

“Are we smoking?” his father says, offering him a cigarette from his case.

“Love to,” Charles says.

His father fixes himself a straight glass of whiskey and refills Charles’s glass. He sits across from Charles with the newspaper on his lap, reading the headlines. Without looking up, he says, “Don’t let your mother trouble you. She is sentimental. Still thinks of you as her own flesh.”

Charles nods.

“When you’re up to it, I’d like for you to come into the office with me. Nobody there will give a damn about your leg. You’re a Reid—that’s all that matters.”

Instead of telling his father that he still wants nothing to do with the business and that he will continue to pursue medicine, he says, “There’s a girl. She wrote me letters. First her father did. We played chess. And then she chimed in. She’s remarkable.”

His father looks up from the paper, smiling briefly. “A pen pal, you mean?” He takes a sip of his drink.

Charles nods and reaches for the ashtray beside him. Holding it under his cigarette, he says, “Yes. You might say that.”

“Well, where is she, this girl?”

Charles swallows. “Here.”

“Manhattan, you mean?”

“Indeed,” Charles says, letting the burn of the nicotine swell against the back of his throat.

His father grunts. “Let’s meet her. Bring her for dinner one night. Just give your mother some notice so that they can prepare an extra plate in the kitchen.”

Charles puts out his cigarette. “Yeah, it’s a bit complicated.”

His father wrinkles his brow. “How so?”

“She doesn’t know about this,” he says, motioning to his leg. “She doesn’t know.”

His father looks back at the newspaper. “Says here they are putting a woman in jail who was speeding and refused to pay the fine.”

Charles sighs.

“And it looks like that little Pitcairn Island received their first mail from America.”

The room goes quiet except for the occasional rustle as his father turns the pages. Charles uses his cane to stand and cross the room, removing another cigarette from the silver box. He opens the window slightly, letting the warm, noisy air of the street enter the parlor. As he lights his cigarette, his father says, “What I mean is, you cannot let this defeat you. If this girl doesn’t want you, another will. But get on with it, Charles. You lost the leg honorably. Shame is ugly.”

Charles watches the leaves of the oak tree turn ever so slightly in a breeze he cannot feel. “You’ve not seen it,” he says quietly.

His father shrugs. He refills his whiskey and joins Charles by the window.

“I will always be this way. Always,” Charles says.

They stand side by side, watching the world go by.

“Bravo,” his father finally says, clinking his glass against the windowpane.

I
n the hours before she dresses for her wedding, Hensley walks alone through the already busy streets of New York. Her shadow stretches in front of her, darkening her own path. She is walking west, toward the river, away from the noise of Broadway. The sun swathes her back, heating her freshly washed hair and neck, while the bare skin on her face stings with the lingering coolness of dawn.

She is following no route, simply walking. Looking for a reason to believe that something about today might surprise her. When vows concerning the length of love and honor in the face of sickness or death are spoken, surely the chemistry between two people changes. Surely they will no longer be the disappointments to one another that they’ve been. Surely, if anything, the air between them will be suffused with solemnity. They will transform, like the work of the very best illusionist, into kinder, more beautiful partners.

She watches a young boy hurl trash onto a growing pile in the gutter, his pants too short and his hair too long. He nods his head at her. “Mornin’, ma’am.”

She smiles and continues toward the water. The baby turns and stretches somewhere deep inside.

Hensley would like to know how this life will unfold; how the unimaginable future will actually turn out. The fact that a child can be made without love or intention still startles her. She wonders about the destiny of such a world. She wonders if her own parents ever imagined that she would face a morning like this. What choice will her own child face, twenty years from now, that she cannot imagine?

As she comes upon the next block, the shimmer of sunlight on the black Hudson blazes white. Hensley thinks of the heavy pan Teresa had offered her in Hillsboro. It was a gamble, a chance that had seemed foolish. But what is it that she’s doing now? Will it feel as though she’s found a small speck of gold in the bottom of a black pan later today when she promises her life to Lowell Teagan?

She imagines Mr. Reid walking beside her, this same sun warming his own neck and shoulders. They could stand here, gazing at the barge moving coal up the Hudson and into the unimaginable future, and it would be thrilling. It would be theirs. As far as she can tell, solidarity is life’s one comfort.

The barge blows its loud, flat horn.
Even now,
Hensley says to herself as she turns her head uptown,
you are a simplistic fool.
Have you learned nothing of the mirage of romance?
A horse pulling a cart up Riverside Drive whinnies gruffly, as if in answer. Hensley nods as she watches the creature bow its head, straining slightly as the incline gradually rises.
Forget your hypothetical life. This is your wedding day.

She puts her back to the water and begins the return to Broadway. Now the sun is on her face and she looks down at her own feet to avoid squinting. She hears the young voice call to her again. “You lost, ma’am?”

Hensley holds her hand up against the sun, looking the boy in the eye. He is now stocking a cart in front of the store with buckets of carnations and roses. She stops, admiring the blossoms. They are white and pink and yellow and red, with fat drops of water clinging to their petals.

“Wanna buy a flower? Three stems for a half-dollar,” he says, wiping his hands on his pants.

Hensley smiles. “I like the small roses. What do you call those?” She bends over to smell the pink buds.

“The spray roses. Ain’t no cheaper, though. Still three stems for a half-dollar.”

Hensley smiles. His voice is unexpectedly firm.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll take three of the pink spray, please.”

As he wraps her flowers in a sheet of newspaper, Hensley wonders about the circumstances of this boy’s conception. It might have been utterly romantic or ruthless, ordinary or remarkable. Just around the corner, up against a brick wall in the darkness of a summer night, or halfway around the world in a refugee camp amid gunfire and bitter cold. Does it matter? Did his mother ever imagine that the slight stirring deep inside her body would one day be selling flowers on a bright fall morning, counting out change carefully, in need of a haircut and a new pair of trousers, sparking this moment of imagination in another soon-to-be mother?

He places the small bundle in Hensley’s arms and smiles at her. “Have a nice day, ma’am,” he says and returns to his chores.

Hensley holds the roses to her nose. They smell of warm days and tall grass, burned sugar and small hands. “Thank you.”

The boy nods, calling out to another woman passing, hoping she, too, might want a stem or two.

 • • • 

H
arold stands in the small, wood-paneled room looking more like her father than she’s ever realized. His hands are buried in his pockets, a look of serious contemplation on his face.