The Irresistible Henry House (10 page)

Henry looked at Mary Jane, with the white bandage on her eye covering a fluffy wad of more white and, beneath that, who knew what, and his own two good eyes filled with tears.

“But I didn’t mean to,” he said.

“Henry didn’t mean to,” Mary Jane said.

“And you need to get some sleep now,” Mrs. Harmon said to Mary Jane. “Mrs. Gaines, I’m sure you can understand. In fact, I thought I’d already made this absolutely clear to you.”

Henry’s face was wet now, and he used the back of his sleeve to wipe his eyes, but somehow that only made him cry more. It reminded Martha exactly of the way Betty had cried in the practice house kitchen, five years before, the day she had told Martha that Henry was her child.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said again, and Mary Jane said, “Henry didn’t mean to, Mommy. He didn’t.”

“I don’t care what he meant to do,” Mrs. Harmon said, and with that she turned to Martha and said something the children were not supposed to hear but did: “Am I going to have to get one of the nurses to show you out?”

They didn’t have time to say goodbye. Martha ushered Henry out into the cold, pointless, empty corridor; the cold, pointless, empty ride home; and the cold, pointless, empty nursery school, to which neither Mary Jane nor Henry would ever return.

  5  
Where’s the Baby Going?

Henry had always asked questions, enchanting most people he met with an interest that seemed solicitous and loving: “What did you do today?” “Do you like apple juice?” “What’s your favorite cookie?”

Some questions, however, were not aimed to charm: questions about God and Santa Claus, sex and death. These required answers that changed as Henry got older, answers that grew and broadened, rings on a tree.

“Where’s the baby going?” was one such question. Henry was four the first time he asked it, and the baby was Herbert. Martha had said, “Baby’s going to find his parents,” which merely left Henry momentarily silent.

The second time, a year later, when Henry found a photo of Herbert, he asked, “Where is this baby?” and Martha had said, “He’s with his parents.”

“Who are his parents?” Henry had asked, but Martha hadn’t answered him.

When Henry was six, the year after nursery school ended, he had come home one afternoon to find Hazel gone, and he had thrown himself facedown on the Oriental rug and cried. “Why couldn’t we keep her?” he’d asked over and over. He had cried hard enough that afternoon to make himself sick. Martha had cleaned him up and cleaned up the rug but hadn’t seemed to understand. Whether practice mothers or practice babies, everyone Henry loved eventually left, and Martha—in a way that it would take Henry years to see—seemed to gain strength from these departures and the role they gave her in his life.

THERE HAD NEVER BEEN REAL VACATIONS, but in August of 1954, Martha took Henry to the New Jersey shore for a belated eighth birthday present. He had never been to the beach. He had never worn a bathing suit. The flat, landlocked campus of Wilton College had provided the sole topography of his early life. Even the colors were exciting to Henry: the blue, green, and beige of the shoreline; the red, yellow, green, and turquoise of the beach balls and umbrellas, and the wild patchwork of blankets and towels that in some places nearly obscured the sand.

Martha spread out two beach towels from the hotel and settled in the sunshine while Henry walked down to the sea.

He had grown into a tall, extraordinarily handsome boy, with hair the color of mahogany and eyes still green with speckles of orange, eyes the color of autumn leaves. But he was skinny and pale, and he was sunburned before the first day was over. Freckles that Martha had never noticed sprang up on his nose and spread over his cheeks as if they’d been sprayed there by the waves.

She insisted he wade no deeper than his waist, a command that, given the fact that he couldn’t swim, he couldn’t really protest. But after he’d been knocked down a few times by the Atlantic, Martha ordered him out of the ocean completely.

Sulking beside her on his towel, Henry looked longingly down the beach at a family of five—a mother and father, two girls, and a boy about his age. They weren’t markedly gleeful or giddy, not happy in any obvious way. But they all—even the mother and father—looked so much alike, as if they’d been carved from the same piece of driftwood, or painted with the same few colors of paint.

“Heidi is going to be gone when we get back, isn’t she?” Henry asked.

Martha was proud of the shrewdness in Henry’s question but equally startled by the accusing tone with which he’d asked it. She hesitated a moment. “Yes, Henry,” she said at last.

“Did Heidi go to find her parents, too?” Henry said. There was real bitterness in his voice, and it was clear to Martha that Henry had changed.

“Yes, Henry,” she said.

“When do I get to go find
my
parents?”

The question stabbed Martha. Her answer stabbed him. “I am your parents,” she said.

“Did you carry me in your stomach?” he asked.

“No,” Martha said, feeling, nearly physically, the ache of her ancient loss.

“Then who did?” Henry demanded.

Martha picked up a nearly black mussel shell. The two halves were still joined, and when they were spread out, they made the shape of a heart. Martha dusted the sand from the shell. She said nothing but quietly realized the lie she was about to tell.

“Where is my father?” Henry asked.

“Your father is dead,” Martha said.

“Dead?”

“Yes. He died in a train wreck a long time ago. He was working on the train.”

Henry’s eyes lit up for a moment. “Was he the conductor?” he asked.

Martha smiled at the familiar little-boy logic.

“No, I’m afraid not,” she said. “He was just one of the men who painted the trains.”

“Did you know him?”

Martha thought about the hospital bed, Tom’s green checked shirt, the smell of shaving cream.

“Not very well,” she said.

“What about my mother?” Henry asked.

The mussel shell broke into its two halves, their white-blue linings looking as if they’d been poured in with paint.

“Your mother.”

“Did you know her, too?”

“She was a singer,” Martha said. “She had a beautiful, deep alto voice, and she sang in the Christmas choir. That’s where she met your father.”

Henry squinted into the sunlight.

“Why didn’t she want me?” he asked Martha.

“She
did
want you,” Martha said, remembering what it had felt like to have a life inside her belly, inside her life. “She
did
want you, but she died the night you were born.”

Henry looked down when he asked the next question.

“Did she ever even see me?” he asked.

“No,” Martha said. “I heard that the last thing she said was ‘Please, let me hold the baby.’”

IT WAS JUST OVER A YEAR LATER when Betty came back.

Neither she nor Dr. Gardner had called Martha to arrange this visit. Nor had they told Martha anything about Betty’s intentions regarding Henry. After years of a silence that Martha had only gradually allowed herself to trust, she had received a postcard from Betty just the previous month. The postcard—featuring a cuddly-looking koala bear—said simply that Betty was planning to visit the States in the fall and was looking forward to seeing Henry, as well as to seeing Martha herself.

It had been eight years since Betty had left; seven since Martha had moved Henry upstairs; three since she had first enrolled him at the local public school, where people now knew him as Henry Gaines, never as Henry House.

Now Betty was standing beside her father in the rectangle of the doorway as if expecting a great welcome, and Henry, ever willing but completely uninformed about the significance of Dr. Gardner’s companion, came over to the front door, produced a hand from his khakis pocket, and said, “I’m Henry Gaines. Nice to meet you. Why don’t you come in?”

Thrown off balance, Martha quickly sent the current practice mother and the current practice baby on an unnecessary errand, and then she led the way to the living room. Unusually helpless, she was momentarily tongue-tied, so it was the affable Henry Gaines who remembered to ask the visitors if they cared for coffee or tea.

BETTY, NOW TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, looked shockingly older than she had when Martha had seen her last. It was not just that she had crossed that mysterious but permanent border from girlhood to womanhood, although in truth there was not a trace of innocence left in her face. There was also something desperate and dissolute about her, as if she had cried too much, or drunk too much, or possibly done too much of both.

She had, in any case, brought Henry a present. It was about the size of a
Life
magazine, only about eight times thicker, and it was wrapped in childish balloon wrapping paper that he did his best to ignore.

“This is for you,” Betty said, and thrust the gift into Henry’s hands, seeming nervous in a way that he did not yet understand.

“What do you say, Henry?” Martha asked too quickly.

“I was just about to say it,” he said, looking up from the package. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Martha asked.

Henry looked at Betty. “Should I?” he asked her.

“If you want to.”

“Of course he wants to,” Martha said impatiently. “Why wouldn’t he want to?”

Beneath the silly balloon paper was a fine wooden box the color of Henry’s hair. The box had a leather handle, and it opened like an attache case, with two brass clasps on one side and two brass hinges on the other.

Henry paused, his thumbs on the two clasps.

“Go ahead,” Martha said, as if she wanted to get something over with.

Henry flipped open the clasps. Inside the box was a wooden artist’s palette, a curvy rectangle, like a face in profile, with an empty oval eye. Beneath this were three magnificently varied rainbows: fat, fresh metal tubes of paint; short, stubby sticks of Cray-Pas; tall lines of colored pencils. A fourth rainbow—entirely in shades of gray—was made of charcoals and pencils in different thicknesses. There was also a gray eraser wrapped in plastic, a silver pencil sharpener, and five paintbrushes in different sizes.

Henry thought he had never in his whole life seen anything as extraordinary.

Wonderingly, he ran his hands over the pencils, rolling them slightly, then regretting that he had disturbed the perfect alignment of their labels: Burnt Sienna, Red Paprika, Pea Green, Rust.

“I hope you still like to draw,” Betty said.

“I
love
to draw,” he said, wondering how she knew this, wondering why she’d said
still.
“I’m going to be an artist when I grow up.”

“He spends hours,” Martha said, somewhat grudgingly.

“Didn’t I always say?” Betty asked.

“Always?” Henry asked.

Betty looked first at Dr. Gardner, then at Martha, who said: “You knew Mrs. Lodge when you were a baby.”

“It’s not Mrs. Lodge anymore. It’s Miss Gardner again now,” Betty said to Martha.

“Oh,” Henry said brightly to Betty. “Were you one of my mothers?”

The color of Betty’s face changed from Pale Apricot to Wild Rose. “Yes,” she said, in a husky voice. “I was one of your mothers.”

“You’ve seen Mrs. Lodge’s—that is, Miss Gardner’s—photographs in your baby journal, Hanky,” Martha said.

“Henry,” he said.

There was a moment of awkward silence. Then Betty asked: “Could I see some of your drawings?”

“Sure,” Henry said. “They’re upstairs. I’ll show you.”

As Betty stood, Henry reached out a hand for her, far less like a little boy than like an urbane gentleman, asking an unsure woman to dance.

————

“YOU DON’T NEED TO TAKE HER UPSTAIRS,” Martha said quickly. “Why don’t you go up and get your sketchbooks, Hanky?”

Together, then, she and Dr. Gardner and Betty listened to his footsteps as he went, obediently, up the stairs.

“I can’t get over how big he’s gotten,” Betty said.

“Yes. Well,” Martha said.

“I mean, he’s a big, big boy now,” Betty said, amazed. Her eyes filled with tears, and, impulsively, she threw her arms around Martha, who stiffened against the embrace.

“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Gaines,” Betty said. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking such good care of him. Truly. I can’t—” And she started to weep again. “I can’t believe he’s so big.”

“What did you expect, exactly?” Martha said, before she could edit herself.

“My guess is that Bettina didn’t know what to expect,” Dr. Gardner said drily.

“And what were you planning on telling the boy?” Martha asked.

“Nothing for the moment,” Dr. Gardner said. “Bettina is, as far as anyone knows, just my daughter, home for a visit.”

“Father, I’ve told you,” Betty said, sounding exhausted. “I’ve left Fred, and I’m never going back.”

“Bettina,” he said in a warning voice that conveyed every ounce of his parental, institutional, and financial control.

“Here they are!” Henry said as he came into the room, carrying a sketchbook that nearly hid his torso, just as Betty added: “And I’ve come to get my son.”

  6  
That Seems Perfectly Obvious

Martha stayed awake all night long, wondering what, if anything, Henry had heard and what, if anything, she had the power to do about it. At first, stretched out in her bed, she tried her hardest to sleep. But all the usual, comforting guideposts of her own surroundings seemed suspect, as if the entire tangible world was getting ready to turn against her. At one in the morning, resigned to sleeplessness, she switched on the lamp beside her bed, wrapped her chenille bathrobe around her, and walked over to the bookshelves. She took down Henry’s baby book and turned the pages slowly, reading the captions, though she knew them by heart:

Who said I’d like applesauce?

Grace Winslow thinks I have a flair for music.

Lucky boy! Seven Mamas, seven Christmas presents!

Martha studied the few photographs in which Betty appeared, trying to discern if there really was a telltale pain or longing in her face—some sign of the biological parenthood that had then still been her special secret. In one picture, Betty was holding Henry on her lap in his first snowsuit; in another, she was lifting his chubby wrist to wave at the camera; in a third, she was laughing as he clutched the sides of his bath towel. She seemed no more possessive or passionate than the other women in the photos did, though that left plenty of room for both. But then there was the farewell sentence that Betty had written:

Goodbye, baby boy. I will never, ever, forget you.

Martha returned the journal to the shelf. She and two dozen practice mothers had filled four other books—for four different practice house babies—during the years that had passed since Henry had come upstairs to live with her. There had been Herbert, then Hazel, then Heidi, then Hollis—and they had all been loved and patted and guided through their large and little milestones. But Martha knew she would find no comfort in looking at their photographs. She knew she would only be looking for glimpses of Henry.

Martha walked into his bedroom, not exactly on tiptoe, because if Henry had awakened, she wouldn’t have minded in the least reaching over to him and hugging him. She knew that he didn’t like her to do that so often in public anymore, but he would still allow it sometimes when he was sleepy, or sick, or otherwise unfettered by the thoughts of those boys and girls at school.

In truth, Martha longed to hold him now, but Henry, it seemed, was fast asleep, his face turned away from the door.

AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, Martha tiptoed downstairs and, careful not to wake the practice mother and baby, brought the iron and ironing board back up to her room. Her weekly ironing was still two days away, but the task seemed to promise her some relief.

Not surprisingly, given her years of experience, Martha had always been skilled with an iron—now, with the new Sunbeam she had bought at Hamilton’s, she was practically a virtuoso. She was not so much aware of as offended by wrinkles, and she leaned her considerable weight into every crease, trying to tame the unstructured world into something tidy and recognizable.

As she ironed, Martha thought about the night eight years before when she had stacked her clothes, ready to take Henry away with her if Dr. Gardner insisted he be sent back to the orphanage. She had felt then, emphatically, that no one who wasn’t Henry’s flesh and blood would ever have a better claim to him than she did. Now, unimaginably, his flesh and blood had come to take him, but to Martha it seemed entirely clear that Betty had become the stranger. Plus, the girl had given him up. No matter the pressure placed on her and how difficult that had made things for her. She’d chosen to give him up. The small towns of this country were filled with other girls who’d gotten into trouble and made that decision, and then gone on with their lives. Of course, as Martha knew well from her dealings with the orphanage, all those girls had signed papers in which they’d made their choices official. Maybe that was the reason that Martha had never heard of one changing her mind.

“DR. GARDNER,” she said out loud, trying to rehearse what her best argument would be. “Dr. Gardner,” she repeated, but when she imagined what it would be like, standing before this man and trying to plead for his understanding—let alone for his grandson—she found herself choking and crying on the words. “Dr. Gardner,” she began again. “Dr. Gardner.”

Beyond the sweeping windows, she could just see a promise of morning.

“Dr. Gardner,” she said out loud one more time, and through her tears she misjudged the geometry of the collar she was folding back, and she burned the part of her hand between her thumb and forefinger. It was a bad burn, she knew that immediately, but she was not entirely sorry it had happened. It snapped her back from her reverie into actual, present pain.

IN THE MORNING, when Martha asked him what he wanted for breakfast, Henry did not respond.

“Pancakes? Waffles? Frosted Flakes?” Martha asked. “You were so cute, the way you used to say that! ‘Emem, they’re g-r-r-reat!’”

And Martha chugged on and on—like a train conductor who doesn’t know that the city he is steaming by has recently been fire-bombed.

“Don’t you feel well?” she finally asked Henry when she’d realized he hadn’t said anything.

He merely stared at her, speechless, his eyes momentarily more gray than green. Then the practice mother shouted for Martha to come, and so, while Martha had her back turned, Henry slipped out the door and disappeared, like a morning shadow.

MARTHA KNEW THAT she had to confront Dr. Gardner. In the end, she reasoned, it would not be Betty but her father who would make the decision about Henry’s future. Betty was still, after all, an unwed mother. If Henry were younger, no doubt Betty could have moved with him to another town and told people that he had grown up in Australia, the child of a failed marriage. Divorce, while hardly smiled upon, didn’t come with the stigma a bastard did. But Henry, thank God, was old enough to tell the tale of his upbringing all by himself. And even in 1955, unmarried middle-class women who had never worked a day in their lives did not live as single mothers unless their parents, for some reason, wanted them to. And good parents never wanted them to.

Martha sat at the kitchen table and took a sip of tea. Her sleepless night had left a foul taste in her mouth, but despite a few extra teaspoons of honey, the tea didn’t help. It was bitter. She was sour. Her hand hurt. She was exhausted. She knew that she needed to compose herself, to arrange herself, but what she knew best had nothing to do with asking, let alone pleading, let alone threatening, to get what she wanted. What Martha knew best had to do with the tricks and illusions of self-sufficiency: with organization, planning, tidy corners, and well-followed rules.

Upstairs, she straightened her seams and swept up her hair and tied on her best silk scarf. But she looked like a woman unhinged, and she knew it, and finally she decided to give up trying to look composed.

“I need to see him,” she told Dr. Gardner’s secretary on the phone. “He’ll know why.”

“Will he?”

“He will,” Martha said, and realized her voice was quavering.

She was fifty-seven years old, and there was no future for her without Henry. There was only her tiny world, bordered by practice walls and practice floors, and filled with practice people. If Henry left, Martha knew, he would eventually become only the practice son who’d come to give her a practice sense of purpose.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, she was sitting in the anteroom in the president’s office, using the forefinger of her unhurt hand to trace the inner embellishments of the gold Wilton College seal that adorned her black wooden chair. She knew that every form of security she had was tied to that seal, and yet she also knew—perhaps, she thought grandly, the way that heroes know before their last acts—that she would sacrifice it all in a moment in order to keep Henry by her side.

Inside Dr. Gardner’s office, two other identical chairs stood across from his desk, and he motioned Martha into one of them.

“Mrs. Gaines,” he said evenly, as if it was the beginning of an annual salary review.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” she asked him. She was aware that her tone was harsh and accusing, but she was unable to correct it.

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Gardner asked.

“Forgive my informality, but I have to know. Is this why you’ve let me keep the boy all these years? Just in case your daughter came back?”

Dr. Gardner said nothing, but he seemed surprised by the question. Martha went on. “A real adoptive family would never let him go if his natural mother came back. Is that why you had
me
keep him instead?”

“Of course,” Dr. Gardner said, which was both the least expected and the most honest answer Martha could have imagined.

He stood up and turned slightly away from her, appearing to examine the photographs on his credenza: pictures of him with national leaders, visiting scholars, former students. Pictures of Betty and his late wife, whom Martha had met only two or three times, all of them at Betty’s birthday parties.

If Betty’s mother had lived, Martha thought, maybe Betty would have had the sense not to marry the first boy who came along, and then get pregnant with someone else, and then give the baby up, and then want the baby back.

But then, of course, Henry wouldn’t exist, and at the thought, Martha felt herself growing faded and immaterial.

“If you take him away from me,” she said, “I will leave this institution.”

“Well. Yes, that seems perfectly obvious,” Dr. Gardner said coldly.

Martha stood on faltering legs. She could feel a flush spreading across her face, down her neck, her chest, and tingling in her legs. She hoped it didn’t show. In the next minute, she realized she was feeling for the arm of the chair, ever so slightly toppling. It was not exactly faintness, but something more like vertigo, the sensation that the center had just lost its place: like the cylinder of a washing machine when it tries to spin too many heavy clothes.

The arm of the chair, however, steadied her, and she didn’t lose a step.

“Well, Dr. Gardner, I suppose if you know that, then you know everything. Including where I’ll be if you have any news to tell me.”

She inhaled deeply and found that it helped to steady her more. Then she turned, as grandly as she could, to leave.

“Just a moment, Mrs. Gaines,” Dr. Gardner said, and he waited until she had turned back to him. “I want to ask for your continued professionalism and patience while I resolve this situation. I am planning on discussing everything with Bettina, just as soon as she wakes up.”

“Wakes up?” Martha said. “She’s sleeping?” She looked at her watch, unnecessarily. Whatever time it was, it was too late in the morning for a grown woman to be sleeping.

Dr. Gardner nodded gravely, pushed his chair back, and sat up. “Mrs. Gaines,” he said, “in addition to losing her husband in Australia, my daughter gained certain bad habits. Or rather, to be precise about it, failed to break them.”

“I see,” Martha said, though she didn’t yet, entirely.

“Bad habits,” Dr. Gardner continued, “unfortunately related to the consumption of alcohol. I tell you this because your history of discretion is well proven by now.”

“I should think,” Martha said drily.

“In any case, the combination of the circumstances, the long trip from Australia, and far too much wine with dinner have all contrived to keep her in bed this morning. Which has only confirmed my inclination,” he added pointedly. “Because despite what you may think, I believe my daughter has handled her life thus far abominably, and I have absolutely no reason to think that if she took the young fellow with her, she would do anything but ruin his life as well.”