The Irresistible Henry House (2 page)

“Who didn’t bring a notebook?” Martha asked. Hands sprang up in unison, as if the girls were here not for a class but for a swearing-in.

NOT EVERYONE WHO STUDIED HOME ECONOMICS at the practice house was completely incompetent, in Martha’s view. But even some of the most basic skills—like sterilizing a pacifier, say, without cloaking the place in the smell of burning rubber—seemed at times to tax the students’ capabilities. Martha had grown up the child of an Army captain, and inefficiency bothered her almost as much as carelessness did. She understood that her growing inability to hide her impatience was the main reason that Dean Swift, the head of the Department of Home Economics, and President Gardner had insisted she take her sabbatical. And that Carla Peabody, the insipid young college nurse, had gotten to run the practice house in her absence. And that Martha had spent most of the previous few weeks trying to eradicate the last traces of her.

Other than the previous year, that had been the only time when the leaders of the college had intruded into Martha’s life. She was determined that they would not do so again, and yet the shameful reality—so completely at odds with her character and the impression she usually gave—was that she was as perfectly vulnerable to their wishes as a baby like Henry was to hers.

AT 12:45, WHILE MARTHA was still demonstrating bottle sterilization and formula preparation, Henry woke up, yelling. Martha had to suppress a smile as she watched the looks of fear pinch and pull at the girls’ faces. Within seconds, both Connie and Betty were on their feet, and Beatrice had dropped her pen again.

“He’s crying!” Ethel said.

“Yes,” Martha replied languidly.

“Shouldn’t we—” Connie began.

“Shouldn’t you what?” Martha said.

“Shouldn’t we go pick him up?” Connie asked, brandishing her paperback Spock. “Spock says—” she began.

Martha squared her shoulders and fingered the gold honor society pin she always wore on a chain beneath her scarf: Omicron Nu, the home economics sisterhood that was the only group to which Martha had ever belonged.

“There is no textbook for this course,” Martha said. “If there were a textbook for this course, it would not be Spock.”

Connie looked contrite, then concerned. “What’s wrong with Spock?” she asked.

“Now. What time did I say his nap would end?” Martha replied.

Henry’s cries were rising in primal rhythms now, and there were gasps between his calls, a forlorn, slightly desperate sound that even Martha, if she were honest, would have to admit she would rather not hear.

“You told us one o’clock,” Beatrice said.

“It’s nearly one!” Connie added.

“If you don’t train him now, you can’t train him later,” Martha replied, and so, for the next thirteen minutes, until precisely one o’clock, seven women stood in the kitchen, listening to Henry House cry, watching the minute hands on their watches crawl toward the refuge of the hour.

“NOW?” CONNIE ASKED at one.

“Now,” Martha said, and, despite herself, she led the way a little too eagerly back into the nursery.

Henry had managed to come unswaddled, and his face was nearly as red as his cotton pajamas. He did not stop crying when Martha picked him up, or when she changed his diaper, or even when she carried him, up on her shoulder, to the rocking chair. Only when she had guided the bottle firmly into his mouth did Henry stop. There was a kind of collective loosening in the room then, like the relief that follows a storm after the lights have been restored.

IT WAS AFTER HIS MEAL—eight ounces of formula exactly, drained to the last drop—and after the lesson in burping—over the shoulder, then over the knee—that Henry House was briefly returned to his crib, his backside naked, and that Ethel took the photograph they would all carry in their wallets. For although these women were present, on this September morning, to begin their education in the science of child rearing and the science of home economics, there was nothing in the least bit scientific about the feelings already engendered in them by this winsome, brown-haired, dark-eyed, sweet-cheeked baby boy.

  2  
Six Different Lullabies

Like the other academic disciplines at Wilton College, the Department of Home Economics required a four-year commitment from its students, and a course load as heavy as that of any department on campus. Despite the assumptions it inevitably provoked, home ec had for decades been a quietly subversive portal to a traditionally male world. In the name of home maintenance, menu planning, and stain removal, students took mandatory courses in physics, chemistry, statistics, bacteriology, biology, nutritional analysis, and electrical circuitry. At the end of one course, called Household Equipment, every girl was required to dismantle and reassemble an entire refrigerator by herself. This was no sorority tea.

Yet in the buzz of postwar enthusiasm, as the Baby Boom began in the reclaimed bedrooms of three million couples, the cooking, cleaning, and household maintenance seemed to take a backseat to the child-care course. It was the practice house, with its tiny, living embodiment of a great American future, that seemed to draw from the students the most somber sense of purpose. When Connie came for the first day of her first week as practice mother, her shiny red shoes were the only suggestion that she would ever bring anything light or fun—anything but grave ambition and patriotic intensity—to the tasks involved in helping to raise a fine young American.

Martha did nothing to perk up the mood. In her nineteen years as head of the practice house, she had trained more than fifty student mothers. But she had yet to find one who didn’t need sober reminding that the joys of tending a child should never be separated from the risks.

With Connie, Martha did what she had always done for a novice on day one. She commented on the weather, took the girl’s jacket, gave her an encouraging smile, thrust the baby into her arms, and said she had something to attend to upstairs.

It was a necessary initiation. The deep end of the pool, the rudder of the sailboat, the wheel of the car. All those situations that ultimately had to be handled by one person alone. There could never be any true preparation. Just defeat or survival.

Of course in this case it was Henry’s survival that was the initial concern. Henry, who had tightened his tiny fist around Martha’s index finger this morning and brought it directly into his mouth, as if it were his own thumb. Maybe it was his size—so much smaller than the usual practice babies—that made him seem more vulnerable. But in all the years she been running the practice house, Martha had lost only one baby, and that one had been her own: a tiny, awful, unbeautiful thing, born dead and bloody and premature, a hundred seasons ago, on a winter night when she’d still been loved.

Martha saw herself in the mirror at the top of the stairs and readjusted her scarf, forcing the memory out of her mind. Once a day. She allowed herself to think about that only once a day.

Like the first floor, the second floor of the practice house featured one small and one large bedroom, as well as an ample parlor. The rooms upstairs were as personal and crowded as the main floor’s were generic and pristine. Martha had not yet found places for the souvenirs of her semesters away: pale pink shells and bleached white coral from Bermuda, a woven blanket and a clay bowl from Mexico, the inevitable Statue of Liberty from New York. She surveyed them now with mixed feelings. It was true that she had seen many wondrous sights she would never have seen unless Dean Swift and Dr. Gardner had insisted she go. It was also true that those sights had made her miss the practice house more deeply, made her feel the peculiar imbalance of having a home in which one lived only at the pleasure of an institution.

The many photographs framed on the walls upstairs were not of family, exactly, but rather of families formed and dissolved every few years: classes of women with House babies, babies long since returned to the orphanage, long since adopted, long since renamed. On the rare occasions when their adoptive families brought them back to visit, they never remembered Martha anyway.

“Mrs. Gaines?” Martha heard Connie call. “I think he may be—”

May be what, Martha thought, already fighting the same impatience that had led to her recent exile. There were really only a few options with a four-month-old baby. He could be hungry. Tired. Dirty. Hot. Cold. Sick. In pain. And that was all.

Martha checked her watch. It had been only ten minutes. She would give Connie five minutes more.

“I’m sure he’s fine, dear,” Martha called, and then she sat at her desk and waited, ready to move only at the sound of a life-threatening disaster.

MARTHA GAINES IN HER TWENTIES had never once looked into a mirror with apprehension or dismay. She hadn’t been striking, but she’d been pretty, her features a warm invitation: hazel eyes, ascendant cheekbones, upturned nose—all broad and Irish. It hadn’t yet crossed her mind that she wouldn’t find love, a husband, children, and, someday, a house of her own.

She had been twenty-five on the Christmas Eve when Tom Gaines, the baritone who’d been promised all week by the choir director, had loped into the church, late. Tom had been stocky and rugged-looking, with an unexpectedly tidy and debonair side part in his hair. His place among the baritones had been opposite Martha’s among the altos. Their eyes had met three or four times that night, looking up on a hallelujah.

He was a maintenance man for the Pennsylvania Railroad, painting the bodies of locomotives in their signature dark green, maroon, and gold. Martha would have married him no matter what his job had been. He smelled of sweat and shaving cream, and he sang or hummed love songs, sometimes without even knowing it.

She had been so in love with him, and when they married she had taken such joy in practicing all the large and little skills of home economics. She had tried to please him in the other ways too, but unlike cooking or canning or sewing, there had been no lessons in sex. She hadn’t loved it, but she’d loved him, and when she’d gotten pregnant, she’d been proud of herself in a quiet, conventional way. The night the baby was born dead, Martha woke from the ether to see Tom at the foot of her bed.

“Please,” Martha said. “Where’s the baby? Please. Let me hold the baby.”

“Hush, sweetheart,” Tom told her. He climbed into the bed beside her, allowing her to lean against his green checked shirt, allowing her to weep into the taut, clean, smooth, just-shaven crook of his neck.

Only later, after the tales and confessions of his many dalliances had surfaced, would it strike Martha as incriminating that he had been so fragrant and clean-shaven at eight o’clock in the evening.

BACK DOWNSTAIRS NOW in the practice house, Martha found Connie waiting at the foot of the stairs. Henry squirmed in Connie’s arms and made the little bleats that came from behind babies’ motionless mouths, the way that purrs came from cats.

“What does he want?” Connie asked Martha.

“You’re supposed to be the mother,” Martha said, struggling with the impulse to take the baby, lift him high, and make him laugh, as she had this morning.

Martha showed Connie how to fold and pin a diaper, how to clean and powder a bottom. She had Connie put Henry on his back, and he flapped his arms up and down, as if he was making snow angels. He kicked his chubby legs, still curved like parentheses, so that it looked as if he was trying to clap with his feet. His slightly open mouth formed a smiling pyramid, the top lip rising into a little peak. Connie laughed, and, for a moment, Martha felt the old pleasure of watching a student warm to her task. But the third time Connie called the baby Harry, Martha picked him up herself. “It’s not Harry,” Martha said protectively. “The baby’s name is Henry.”

Eventually Martha would learn that Connie had a brother named Harry who had died in the Ardennes Forest. For now, Martha didn’t realize that what she assumed in Connie was carelessness was only lingering numbness. And that like Betty—even like Martha herself, if she’d let herself think about it—Connie had shown up to care for Henry with a willing smile but a missing part.

IN FUTURE DAYS, Henry’s afternoon walk would be an independent activity for Connie, but on the first day for each practice mother, Martha went along. She had found over the years that if she didn’t set the initial course, the mothers would always come back after only ten breathless minutes.

It had seemed, a week before, as if autumn would be a long Indian summer. But for the last three or four days there had been a chill, and many of the leaves, which had seemed so thick and fixed in their bushy green embraces, were now skittering around Martha’s sensible shoes and Connie’s shiny red pumps. The leaves got stuck to the white sides of Henry’s carriage tires, which picked them up and spun them over like passengers on a Ferris wheel.

The campus buzzed with the freshness of fall, and the thrill—still so unaccustomed—of a world no longer reeling from war. Young women in blunt pageboy haircuts and bright-colored lipsticks traversed the grounds, carrying books and satchels, swinging skirts cut full for the first time since before the war. Their laughter and gossip preceded and followed them, but several times rose and then fell to silence when they saw Martha approaching. The leaves went around on the carriage wheels. The brick buildings held the sun.

Passing one threesome, Martha could just catch the words
Gaines
and
baby
coming over them, like the backwash of a tide.

“What have you heard about me?” Martha asked Connie.

“Well, I only just got here a few days ago,” Connie said.

“And—?”

“And, well. They say you took time off.”

“Do they say why?”

“Not really,” Connie said.

Of course, Martha thought.
Not really
meant
yes.
She shouldn’t have asked the question; it betrayed self-doubt. She didn’t need reassurance anyway, she told herself. What she needed was for everything to be back in its tidy place, with the girls and the school relying on her to set and enforce the standards.

A chill swirled the leaves at Martha’s feet.

From his carriage, Henry let out another cawing sound, then flapped his arms emphatically and tried to get his hand to his mouth. Instead, he hit his own nose, then looked surprised.

Connie laughed. “Poor little fellow,” she said, just as Henry burst into startled tears. Connie stopped the carriage and bent over the baby.

“What are you doing?” Martha asked.

“I thought I’d pick him up,” Connie said.

“Not necessary,” Martha said. “He’ll be all right.”

“But—”

“You can’t fuss over every little thing.”

IN THAT REGARD, the nights were always the hardest. No matter how many times Martha explained to the girls that babies needed to learn how to get to sleep by themselves, it was always a struggle to enforce the hands-off policy.

On Connie’s first night, Martha lay in bed upstairs, sleeplessly hearing the all-too-familiar sounds of a new practice mother on the job. The restless pacing in the small downstairs bedroom while, in the nursery beside it, the baby cried. The premature trip to the kitchen to warm up the 2:00 A.M. bottle. The murmured endearments as he drank. The creak of the rocking chair. The lullaby: in Connie’s case, as far as Martha could make out, it was “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” The crying as Henry was put back in his crib. And then the pacing again.

Did it matter that, over the course of the next six weeks, six different women would sing Henry House six different lullabies? Or hold him in six different favorite positions? Or nuzzle him close in the pillowy haven of six different perfumes?

A WEEK LATER, during the nighttime feeding, Martha heard Grace sing “It Had to Be You.” Ethel, who it turned out had the best sense of humor, sang “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.” A week after that, Ruby sang “Mairzy Doats.” When it was her turn, Beatrice offered up a surprisingly sweet “All the Pretty Little Horses.” And finally, in the last week of October, on her own first night in the practice house, Betty fed Henry and rocked him, and sang:

They say that falling in love is wonderful

Martha had actually seen the great Ethel Merman sing this song in
Annie Get Your Gun
just this past summer in New York City. She had laughed at Merman’s antics, the way she’d hammed it up through “Anything You Can Do,” but when she sang “They Say It’s Wonderful,” Martha had found herself standing in the darkness, weeping, her arms resting on the smoky-smelling plush red divider at the back of the theater.

To hold a man in your arms
is wonderful…

Downstairs, now, there was a woman crooning this very song about another man who had left. More than a year after V-J Day, the only word from the Army was that Betty’s husband, Fred, had almost certainly died in battle. Of course, unlike Tom Gaines—who had been killed in a train station accident, a paintbrush in his hand and a woman’s phone number in his pocket—Fred was being universally mourned, and Betty universally comforted. There was nothing new to Martha about this injustice, the inequity of competing solitudes. Yet somehow, at two o’clock in the morning, with the first winter air sneaking in like a suspicion through the cracks around the windows, Martha suddenly couldn’t lie still.

Breaking one of her myriad rules, she pulled on her old chenille bathrobe and tiptoed down the stairs.

As she suspected, Henry had long since finished his bottle, and Betty was rocking him unnecessarily, rocking him back to sleep, exactly as she wasn’t supposed to do. There was one small lamp on the oak side table, and by its light, Martha could just recognize the look on Betty’s face as one of depthless longing. The girl nearly leapt when she saw Martha, as if she’d been caught petting with some boy from a nearby school.

Jostled, Henry blinked and started to bleat, then closed his eyes again in sleep.

“What’s wrong?” Betty asked Martha. “Why are you still rocking him?”

“He was—”

“I’ve told you he shouldn’t be rocked back to sleep. All babies wake up for all sorts of little disturbances. This one’s no different, and you can’t interrupt
your
sleep every time.”