by Hazel Woods
Hensley opened her eyes and her fingers traced the words just beside her. But she finally pushed herself away from the wall and closed the door behind her.
The two girls drove away from Hillsboro. Hensley kept her eyes on the dirt road that brought her here.
Dear Mr. Reid, she began, I wonder how it is that this desolate dirt road is somehow connected to the chaos of Times Square. But then she stopped. She gripped the handkerchief in her hand, willing her mind to be quiet.
She had not written to him again since she’d confessed the truth. And there had been no reply. So, just as she’d suspected, it must be finished. Their short love story had ended with a blank page. Their effort at immortality, in the end, sabotaged not by death, but by life.
What would he do with her letters now that he knew the truth? Perhaps they would be thrown into a rubbish bin in the mess hall, piled on by clumps of that uneaten white mush. Or maybe he and Rogerson would take a match to them, throw them on top of a fire, eliciting some final heat from her words.
Still, she longed to know that he was safe. She’d left her forwarding address only with Teresa, not the postmaster. If a letter from him did arrive, Teresa would send it along, bundled in her own correspondence. Hensley knew she must not imagine that possibility, just as a hungry man must not imagine a roast.
As they drove, flies buzzed against the inside of the windshield. “I’m sorry you’ll have to explain about the wall.”
Teresa shrugged. “I don’t expect he’ll care. I’ll just have to fix it.”
Hensley reached out her hand and laid it on Teresa’s. “You’re a good man.”
They giggled as the heat of the day assaulted the truck.
“Yes. I am Berto Romero with hair on my chest and a cock between my legs and you’re a nice, refined, virginal girl sitting here beside me.”
“Two peas in a pod.”
Their smiles faded gradually. Hensley stuck her hand out into the hot air. Teresa wiped the sweat from her brow with her shirtsleeve.
“Will it be terrible? Marrying this man?” she asked.
Hensley let the question settle into her. She pictured the way he looked when she went to his apartment, his bare feet flimsy and awkward and slightly grotesque. When he acknowledged his deception without flinching, she’d known it was not the first or the last time he would lie to satisfy a desire.
“Perhaps people change.”
Teresa nodded. The journey was long and hot and hostile to cheerful thoughts. By the time they reached El Paso, Hensley didn’t care if she never saw another long-eared jackrabbit or the shadow of a red-tail hawk as it hovered, darkening the desert.
Teresa parked the truck beside the curb while Hensley flagged down a porter. Suddenly their good-bye was imminent and they were in public. There could not be an embrace between a lady and her driver.
Instead, Hensley handed Teresa an envelope. “I saved myself the cost of postage and already wrote you a letter.”
Teresa smiled. She glanced at it and read the sentence written in small script on the outside. Parting advice: If you have hair on your chest and a cock between your legs, you should not use the women’s restroom. She smiled and folded it into her back pocket. She touched the brim of her hat. “Many thanks.”
Hensley watched her move into the crowd, a young hired man entering the station in search of Mr. Thomas Wright.
• • •
Soon enough, another train disembarks and the station is full again with finely dressed men and women walking hurriedly across the marble floor. Into this chaos, a man enters from the street, rolling two large, upright cases. His face is familiar, but Hensley doesn’t know how that could be possible.
At the very moment that she is studying him for clues to his identity, he sees her and approaches.
“Well, hello,” he says in a surprisingly deep voice. “You don’t recognize me in my street clothes. But I never forget a face. Especially not one I might’ve killed.”
“Oh,” Hensley says, excitedly. “From the circus. Of course. Your mustache is not . . . curled.”
“Right you are. Remind me where I had the pleasure of holding you? Was it California?”
Hensley shakes her head. “No. New Mexico. A little mining town in the south.”
His eyebrows vault high up on his forehead. “A long way from home.”
“I was, yes. I’m going home now. Back to New York.”
He nods approvingly. “The whole troupe will be there next month. Will you come and see us again? Articus McDonald. Everyone calls me Arty.” He takes Hensley’s gloved hand and brings it to his lips.
“Oh, I’d love to. It was a wonderful show.”
“I will curl my mustache for you.”
Hensley smiles. “Then I will recognize you.”
“You don’t seem as happy as most people who are on their way home.”
“Don’t I?” Hensley puts a hand to her throat, trying to ease the lump of emotion that is lodged there.
Arty shrugs his wide shoulders. “The road is my home, so forgive me. I wouldn’t know anything about going home.”
The noise of travelers is receding all around them.
Quietly, Hensley says, “I’m to be married. In New York.”
He nods. “Well, that is a terrifying idea.”
Hensley smiles. “Like being lifted in a chair way up high by somebody you’ve never met before.”
Arty laughs. “Precisely. What did I tell you that night?”
“Um, you told me to hold on tight. That’s all I remember.”
“Well, it’s good advice for marriage, too, I guess.”
Hensley nods. “I suppose it is.”
“I was married once. The holding on is everything. When you get lazy, let go a little bit, that’s when she will find another strong man. Even if he’s a short lion tamer who needs red whips and sedatives to control his creatures. He will know something about captivating a creature who is feeling neglected.”
“That’s a sad story.”
Arty winks. “But it’s mine. And I use it all the time to my advantage.”
Hensley blushes. “Lemonade from lemons, as they say. Right?”
“Load on the sugar,” he says, pushing his carts slowly away from Hensley. “My last bit of advice. Lots and lots of sugar.”
Hensley watches him cross the empty station and wishes she could follow him. If she’d any courage at all, she might just join the circus and swing from the trapeze. Her baby would learn how to juggle and eat fire. They would live in train stations and on wagons, amid midgets and giants. She could write letters to Mr. Reid from every single town and city, hoping in each one that he might make himself known to her. That he would step into the spotlight, surrender his arm to her sweaty, chalky hand. Then they’d reinvent themselves and a whole new act could be developed: the three of them holding tightly to one another while they sailed through the heat of the tent, untethered from any earthly concern.
Six weeks after the crude amputation, Charles sits on the deck of a transport ship with a pair of crutches beside his chair and a stiff blanket covering his lap. His eyes are closed to the sun. The ocean spray makes the blanket damp and heavy across him and he doesn’t move for hours at a time, convinced that if he can just be still long enough his leg might reappear. At times, the sensation is so visceral, so urgent, he is sure that it has. He wiggles his toes on the gone foot and the coarse wool scrapes against his overgrown toenails. The abrasion is as welcome a feeling as he’s ever had.
Slowly, so as not to disturb this miracle, he opens his eyes and lifts the blanket. But beneath it, there is only one leg; where the other should be, the hem of his pants is folded up and pinned nearly to the pocket, redundant. This sight is still an affront to him. A raw feeling that he’s becoming accustomed to rises up from the wound, through his thigh and groin, and
lodges in his chest. Each breath scrapes against this rawness and makes him cringe.
From the hospital bed in Rouen, he dictated letters to his parents, his uncle, and a few friends from college. It became easier after the letter to his parents.
I am safe, but I am not whole. I am sorry for the pain you will feel when you read this, but the tragedies of this war are innumerable. There is no accounting for why I am alive and able to write these words and many thousands of others (boys I picked up myself) have perished. But the truth of the matter is that I will be coming home forever changed. I have lost most of my left leg. The Red Cross has given me a crutch, but they tell me that there are many options for prosthetics.
Even before his father told him he’d arranged for him to see a specialist in Chicago, Charles knew that he would wind up on a train headed west.
He has not revealed to Hensley, however, the totality of his injury because he could not bear to deliver more sad news so soon after her father’s death. Her last letter, the one he vaguely remembers Rogerson reading to him while the pneumonia still gripped him, is strangely missing from his bundle. He’s read each of the others daily during these long weeks of recovery. All he can imagine is that Rogerson kept one for himself. Pocketed it as he drove the King George away from Rouen.
He doesn’t blame him, really. Or, he wouldn’t if it were not so important to him that he have every word she meant for him to have. He cannot remember many things from the last month. Nearly everything has faded to just a few dark memories, the most vivid of which is Foulsom pulling away the bandage, the cotton sticking slightly to the pus, and exposing his stump. The lucidity of the pain as his wound met the stiff, cool air of that morning is still enough to provoke tears.
Also, he remembers the hymns that the nuns would sing just before dark. Standing in a small circle, the gathering of black robes just beyond the last bed like a holy shadow, their voices called upon God and the Holy Spirit with modest charm. He remembers believing that he would soon be dead and that this was why he could hear their songs, which he’d never heard before on his way to or from the mess hall.
And he remembers Rogerson sitting awkwardly beside his bed on a stool too short for his long legs. He held a letter in his hands, a forced grin glued upon his face. Dear Mr. Reid, he can hear him say in his perfect Midwestern cadence. But nothing more. An aching blankness surrounds that moment. Then again, he thinks, perhaps he has imagined it all. Perhaps there was never another letter from her. But why not?
Either way, as he occupies a small part of a large ship in the middle of the great Atlantic Ocean, Charles feels as insignificant as he ever has. His leg has been blown off, but it will not change the course of the war. For the rest of his life, he will be reminded of his sacrifice and its irrelevance. Even if a million boys each left a limb in the mud, learned to survive with only three-quarters of themselves, it would not matter. The war would go on until there was nobody left to fight.
But he also acutely believes that, despite his insignificance in the world, there is still a girl to whom he matters. Unable to picture her face, he only imagines a figure seen from behind, her shape unremarkable, her bare legs standing in the middle of a slow-moving stream, the sound of her words coaxing him into believing that though the water is cold, it is worth the plunge.
As soon as the train pulls into the station, Hensley scans the platform for Lowell. Her feet feel heavy in her shoes and her fingers tingle. She says the word fiancé in her mind, thinking this is the first step toward acceptance.
When she descends from the car, however, she still has not spotted him. She looks at the large clock over the station door. The train is on time. Many other couples are reuniting on the platform and for a fleeting moment she hopes to see him, standing beside a porter, smoking a cigarette, looking at his pocket watch.
When she has looked all around and lingered for a moment beneath the track sign, she begins to walk on her own. Entering the station, she finds a bench and sets down her valise and her satchel. Just as she did in Chicago, she watches the crowds swell and ebb. Finally, she lugs her valise and her satchel to a phone box and calls Harold.
“He’s not here,” she says when Harold answers.
“Hen? Where are you?”
“At Grand Central. Under the big clock.”
“And Lowell?”
“Not here, as I said.”
“Well, perhaps he’s been delayed. Stay there. I will come directly.”
“Thank you, Harry,” she says, wondering how in the world Lowell will explain himself.
• • •
It is past dinnertime when Harold arrives, his own face flushed with worry. They embrace and then Harold’s eyes glance at her figure, so perfectly hidden by her handmade clothes.
“I can’t believe he’s not here. We spoke last night. He assured me this would be his first priority now. You would be, I mean.”
Hensley sighs. “Well, his assurances are often hollow, aren’t they?”
Harold picks up her valise. “This will not do. Follow me. We’ll find a taxi.”
As they drive through the darkened streets of New York, Hensley looks carefully at the people walking on the sidewalk. Suddenly there is more than her eyes can absorb. She marvels at the hats and heels and bags decorated with sequins and beads and feathers. Though the colors are demure beneath the streetlamps, it is dazzling.
Hensley remembers Berto’s shirt that she’d finally altered for Teresa, its thick collar and manly cuffs. She looks down at her own traveling skirt and fingers a snag Newton made in its loose weave by his insistent claws. She misses the mischievous little cat.
Harold’s profile is worried. Hensley reaches for his hand. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding,” she says. “I do have his reply, though. He certainly knew of my arrival.”
“Oh, it’s more complicated than that, Hen.”
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head. “People have complicated needs. It’s exhausting.”
“For example?”
“You need a husband. He doesn’t need a wife.”
Hensley furrows her brow. “Why? Why doesn’t he need a wife? What does he need? I don’t understand.”
Harold nods. “That’s why this is my concern. Don’t worry. We will sort it out.” He looks at her and smiles. “Thankfully, the lady who cleans my place left some potato soup for me. We’ll split it and you can get some rest.”
Hensley smiles. Harold squeezes her hand and she turns her eyes back to the streets of her home that are newly strange and beautiful.
• • •
Hensley spends the next afternoon preparing a dinner for Harold and washing dishes. As she folds and refolds petticoats that still have Hillsboro dust coating their hems, she allows herself to remove the bundle of Mr. Reid’s letters. The heft of them in her hand is familiar and reassuring. Now she curses her decision to leave her forwarding address only with Teresa. How could she be so reckless? What if Teresa, too, leaves Hillsboro? If there was the hope of another letter, she would at least have that to project into the future.
As the afternoon light fills the room, she imagines no greater pleasure than anticipating and reading a new dispatch from Mr. Reid. Even if he chastised her, or despised her for her weak character. From him, she would welcome it. She would at least have one or two fresh letters to add to her bundle. Its increasing weight a buoy to which she could cling throughout any storm.
For now, she unties the ribbon holding them together and the sight of the first envelope—her own name written in his familiar script—sends a thrill through her spine. She sits up straighter, as though he might be able to see her.
Your very name, which now pulses through my head with nearly every footstep, is like a magic wand that can conjure idyllic days in which I stand by your side as you tend to a pot of beans or stroke Newton’s fickle head or kic
k off your shoes and dance with me.
She shoves it back in its envelope and stands up, feeling the urge to see the street below. Looking out the bedroom window, she can see the bustle of the Manhattan afternoon. It is so strange, so different from Main Street in Hillsboro. There are dozens of men walking quickly, hats on their heads and briefcases hanging from their arms, and several women, one pushing a baby carriage, another holding a young girl’s hand.
Hensley realizes with a new sense of urgency that she hasn’t seen a newspaper in weeks. She ties on her hat and ventures down to the street to buy one.
Returning home, the newsprint already blackening her gloves, she settles in with a cup of tea and the news of the day.
She reads carefully about the latest tactical maneuvers overseas, trying to place Mr. Reid among them. The Red Cross has announced it will administer aid even to German soldiers. There are plans for Ford to build tractors in Ireland, a teacher has been fired for refusing to register with Selective Service, the Yankees played fourteen innings and finally defeated the Red Sox, and stocks are surging for no apparent reason. Two workers were killed when the tree they were trying to take down crushed them against a stone wall, Lord Wellesley quietly married his brother’s widow, and a Mr. Moller of Tenafly left thirty-five thousand dollars to his housekeeper and nothing to his wife.
These accounts of events in the world leave her feeling both comforted and vulnerable. We are all stumbling, she thinks. The grass is just as weedy on both sides of the fence.
Then, as she reads the editorials, she finds herself crying. On the very page where her father’s words once appeared so regularly, he is absent. His voice is no longer a part of the world. And the opinions of these other men interest her very little. In fact, it angers her that they exist at all.
On the back page, there is a list of names. They are the men most recently killed in the war. Terrified, Hensley scans the list quickly, her eyes blurred by tears as she looks for any Reids. When she finds none, she wipes her tears and sighs.
Her eyes go back, reading each and every name, knowing that there is no good reason to be relieved. Each of these lost lives will be grieved; somewhere this page will be torn out and added to a maudlin scrapbook of the great war that took everything.