The Irresistible Henry House (7 page)

She knew, as she had never known anything in her life, that she would never be able to let him go.

HIS FAVORITE GAME WAS Where’s Henry? There were several ways to play it. You could hide yourself under a napkin, or behind your hands, or you could put a napkin over Henry’s head and pretend he had disappeared.

Henry didn’t seem to have a preference. He loved the game, no matter how it was played, and no matter who was playing it.

“Where’s Henry?”

Giggles, squeals.

“There he is! Peekaboo!”

Giggles, squeals.

“Again!”

“Where’s Henry?”

Giggles, squeals.

And on it could go, for a very long time.

What was in those beautiful green eyes, Martha believed, was not only need, but hope. She told herself for the first time that to disappoint either one of those might break someone’s spirit, and to disappoint both might break his heart.

The day that Martha decided to take Henry was the day that he began crying when Grace hid under the napkin too long, and then walked out of the room. She was intending it, no doubt, as a joke—just an extended peekaboo for maximum effect. But she stayed out of the room too long, and Henry started screaming, just as he had that fall day when he had looked up to find Ruby instead of Ethel.

“Gray! Gray! Gray! Gray!”

Martha was simply past the point where her feelings about Henry could be disciplined by science—or perhaps by anything. It no longer mattered why Henry was crying. Henry was crying.

Upstairs, the way a tide gradually takes a part of the shore away, Martha’s heart began to erode her reason, and she pulled a suitcase down from her closet and quietly began to pack.

SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE they would go. There were no people to pull her toward one destination or another. No safe harbors or family reunions. Only New York, for some reason, beckoned. Everything Martha had feared about the place now seemed alluring: the crowds, the numbers, the confusion. Maybe in that chaos, she thought, she would find some peace and some order.

And so she went to work. First she stacked clothes on her bed by item—the long-sleeved blouses; the short-sleeved blouses; the scarves, all folded neatly in squares, with their tags lined up in the lower-left-hand corners; the suit jackets; the skirts; the stockings; the girdles. All her clothes rising in tidy piles, a sensible city made from tweed and silk.

Until the previous year, Martha had owned only one small overnight bag. For her leave, she had traded eighteen of her Green Stamps books for two large Hartmann suitcases that were midnight blue with cream trim and dark blue satin linings. She could pack several weeks’ worth of clothing in these and put Henry’s things in the overnight bag. But of course she would have to get trunks for the rest. And cartons or crates for her books, pictures, and knickknacks: her life. She thought about Arthur at the hardware store and felt sure that he would sell, if not give her, the trunks—and that he might even store them for her until she could find a new home.

SHE WOULD NEVER KNOW what changed the president’s mind.

Maybe, when she was downtown at Arthur’s, Ruby had come upstairs and seen the suitcases and the stacks of clothing, and maybe she had told Dean Swift she thought Martha was leaving, and maybe Dean Swift had told President Gardner, and maybe they had decided that Martha was too valuable to lose.

Or maybe, and coincidentally, there had been some secret message from Betty.

Or perhaps President Gardner had simply understood, in the late afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, that he had his own Christmas emptiness to fill.

Whatever the case, when Martha returned to the practice house, she found Ruby waiting for her with an eager, slightly gossipy look—and a message that said Martha should go at once to the president’s house.

Back in his living room, Martha braced herself for dismissal, threats of bad references, anything. Feverishly, her mind plunged into a hallucination of order, and, even as she waited for Dr. Gardner to speak, she began to re-sort her clothing mentally, and then to choose which toys of Henry’s to take. Why would it matter to Dr. Gardner if she raised the boy—as long as she disappeared from his view? Surely he wouldn’t come after her.

“I’m glad that you came, Mrs. Gaines,” Dr. Gardner said.

“Of course,” she answered.

“And I’m sure you’d like to know why I’ve asked you here.”

He never really told her.

Henry House ended up staying in the practice house, not because President Gardner would admit that he didn’t want to lose his grandson; not because President Gardner said straight out that Martha could adopt the boy; not because President Gardner was in any way explicit about how long this arrangement might last, or under what set of circumstances it might change. Henry stayed only because President Gardner said to Martha that evening: “You know, I’ve been thinking it over, and I think perhaps you
should
keep the boy for now.”

  1  
Emem

One day late in the summer of 1948, the women Henry House had loved so much and who’d seemed so much to love him showed up together at the practice house carrying gift-wrapped presents and fancy food. They drank pink lemonade, ate chocolate cake, gave Martha and Henry notes and gifts, and snapped endless rounds of photographs. Then they took turns holding Henry, looking sad, and saying goodbye.

Soon after that, a new group of women—with different names and faces, colors and smells—came to take their place, but Henry himself moved upstairs to live with Martha, who now told him to call her Emem (for the two Ms in Mama Martha). Upstairs, in the extra room that was directly above the nursery, Henry now had his own bed, dresser, and shelves; his own sheets and lampshades, which were covered in cowboy fabric; and even his own closet, where he sometimes tried, in vain, to hide.

During the days, it was always Martha who took care of him now. Between and sometimes during her own tasks and duties, Martha went for pretend drives with him in every kind of vehicle, showed him picture books, let him draw and finger paint, or chased him around the furniture, saying, “Emem’s going to get you!” Downstairs, the baby named Herbert occupied all Henry’s favorite places, and drew the attention from the other mothers the way the moon draws the tides.

Henry asked frequently where Connie, Grace, and Ethel were, and Martha always answered by saying how lucky Henry was to have her all to himself now. Whenever he could, though—whenever Martha let him go downstairs with her—he would toddle up to the week’s practice mother with his hopeful, slightly anxious eyes and say, “Can do eet. Want tea?” Then he would reach out a little hand, and before Martha could say anything, he would be pulling the other mother upstairs, in a cloud of hope and charm.

In later years, expounders of attachment theory would suggest that permanent damage could be done to any infant who was denied the chance to form one reliable connection, even in just the first year of life. Eventually, they would examine the approach to children in programs just like Wilton’s and conclude that to be treated like a human baton, continually handed off in the grueling relay of the first hundred weeks of life, was a situation that would have left any child’s heart untrusting and splintered, if not snapped. But three months into Henry’s third year on earth, it certainly hadn’t struck Martha that there was anything odd in the way he was behaving. In fact, never having concerned herself with any children older than the age of two, she had no working model against which she could compare him.

An experienced mother of an older child might have thought it bizarre, for example, that Henry at two showed absolutely no signs of the usual separation anxieties. Far from clinging to Martha when other people were around, he would race down the stairs on Sundays to be with the whole lot of practice house mothers. With Martha all but forgotten, he could spend hours handing out pretend cookies and telling them pretend jokes and, perhaps most strikingly, asking them questions: “How are you today?” “You like singing?” “Which do you want?” No trip to the park with Martha, no special breakfast, no promise of toys or favors could compete with the lineup of multiple visitors below.

“Henry tella joke,” he would say to one practice mother or another.

“What’s the joke, Henry?” she would answer.

“Lion, ROAR!” he would say, and he would follow it with the peals of laughter that inevitably pulled the women’s smiles away from the baby and back toward him.

An experienced mother of an older child might also have found it odd that Henry never looked for Martha when he was in the other women’s company—or rather, that he looked for her no differently than he looked for anyone else. The women would have seemed, to an outside observer, equal and interchangeable parts in the engine that kept Henry going. The spark was his considerable charm. The women held and humored him. They trained their cameras on him. They passed news of his cutest expressions and precocious questions around like rare fruit.

“Drinkee milkee.” “Brushee teeth.” “Are you happy now?” “Do you feel bad?”

Jealously, Martha frowned on and tried to shorten these encounters, claiming to be worried that the new baby, Herbert, wasn’t getting the attention he deserved. Privately, she blamed the practice house mothers for luring Henry, not Henry for luring the mothers. Martha was besotted enough to be nearly overwhelmed by the novelty and the magnitude of what might come next in his life, and by the hope—growing tentatively into faith—that she would have the chance to see it. It was as if, all her life, she had been served the same first course of the same meal, and now she was finally being given a chance to sample the rest. She had no intention of sharing, even as she had no ability to discern what it was that she wanted to devour.

“WANNA GO DOWN,” Henry said to Martha one afternoon in September, as she tied the shoelace on his left Buster Brown for the third or fourth time that day. The autumn sun was just finding its way through the upstairs windows and varnishing the floor.

“No, not now, Henry,” Martha said. “Baby’s trying to take his nap.”

On the radio, the Andrews Sisters were singing their latest hit:

You call everybody Darlin’,
And everybody calls you Darlin’ too

“Wanna go down,” Henry said again.

“No, Henry, Emem said no,” Martha said.

“Wanna see Sally,” Henry said.

“It’s not even Sally’s week downstairs today,” Martha said, though Henry was sure he had heard Sally’s voice just before.

If you call everybody Darlin’,
Then love won’t come a-knockin’ at your door…

“Wanna see Sally,” Henry said again, with a sad, strained look on his small face, and, after stepping on and once more untying his shoelace, he slowly began to move toward the door.

“Henry,” Martha said in a warning voice. “Stay here.”

“Can do eet,” he said. “Wanna see Sally.”

And as the years go by,
You’ll sit and wonder why
Nobody calls you Darlin’ anymore.

“Henry,” Martha said again, following him quickly out to the landing.

“Can do eet,” he said one more time, and then he fell down the stairs.

He fell with his limbs splayed in all directions, as if he was an armload of firewood tossed down from the landing.

HE WAS STILL FOR ONLY a moment or two—just long enough for Sally to come running from the nursery and for Martha to fly down the stairs. It seemed unlikely for a two-year-old not to have been killed by such a fall. And yet, with the exception of the mushroom cap-shaped bump that rose immediately on his forehead, he seemed to be unharmed.

“Want Sally!” he cried, and he refused to look at Martha, even when she picked him up like a baby and cradled him in her arms.

He strained toward Sally—a nineteen-year-old farm girl who was as embarrassed by Henry’s preference for her as Martha was wounded by it.

Trying her hardest to seem impassive, Martha handed Henry to Sally and began her examination: feeling his ankles, wrists, elbows, knees—and then, once she was satisfied that his bones had not been broken, staring deeply into his eyes.

“What are you looking for?” Sally asked her.

“Signs of concussion,” Martha said.

“And what are they?” Sally asked ruefully, trying to give back the upper hand.

“Several,” Martha said distractedly, but she seemed to be searching Henry’s eyes for something less clinical.

From the nursery, they could all hear the sounds of the baby, Herbert, crying as he woke from his nap.

Sally started to hand Henry back to Martha.

“Sally! Sally!” he cried, and so, with barely convincing nonchalance, Martha said, “Well, dear, I think you should go on holding Henry for now. I’ll just go see to Herbert myself.”

  2  
Nursery School

Two years later—almost two years to the day—a four-year-old Henry ran down the stairs as soon as Martha answered the ringing telephone at her desk. His still-chubby fingers barely touched the banister, and he jumped over the last step. Then he slipped into the nursery, and, for the first of many times to come, he climbed up into the crib where the newest House baby was sleeping. Her name was Hazel, and Henry called her Hazy.

Both Elsa, that week’s practice mother, and Martha appeared in the doorway just seconds after Henry landed beside Hazy.

“Henry! No!” Martha shouted, and before he could even touch the baby, Martha had snatched Henry out of the crib.

It was September of 1950, the end of a peak polio summer, a time in American life when every child, no matter his or her age or background, was seen—in equal shades of terror—as being both a potential victim and a potential threat. No one had yet discovered the cause of polio, let alone its cure, so children were kept apart from each other whenever possible, in case proximity increased the risk.

All summer, Martha had seen the photographs everywhere—in magazines, on newsreels, and even as part of the new health curriculum—of children with the disease who had been consigned to those enormous, coffinlike breathing machines that were known as iron lungs. The terror of Henry ending up in one of those contraptions—or worse, the terror of him dying—was one of the reasons that Martha leapt to take him away from Hazel. Though Irena at the orphanage had assured Martha that there had not been a whisper of polio there, Hazel had been in residence for only two days, and Martha did not want to take any chances.

The other reason, which Martha was less inclined to admit to the practice mothers, was that she thought she saw in Henry growing evidence of jealousy.

“Why is she crying?” he had asked Martha about Hazel the night after her arrival.

“Why do you think she’s crying?”

Darkly, it seemed, he had answered: “She wants to go back where she came from.”

During Hazel’s bath the next evening, Henry appeared just in time to thrust a washcloth onto her face. He was uncharacteristically boisterous around her, especially when she was sleeping. And twice, Henry said he wanted to sleep in the crib with Hazel, a bit of solicitousness that seemed suspiciously enthusiastic.

Realizing she was in an entirely new area of child rearing, Martha furtively consulted the copy of Spock that she had never quite gotten around to discarding after the conference a few years back. She looked in the section called “Jealousy and Rivalry,” and she saw an ink drawing of an apron-clad mother kneeling on the floor, a pot holder beside her, where, presumably, she had dropped it on her way to attend the crisis. In her arms was a fidgety toddler in a striped shirt and saddle shoes; beside him, a crying baby with spidery hair and tears flying like arrows off his face. Spock wrote that a mother might say to a jealous child: “I know how you feel sometimes, Johnny. You wish there weren’t any baby around here for Mother to take care of. But don’t you worry, Mother loves you just the same.”

That night, when she tucked Henry into bed, Martha took a breath and said: “I know how you feel sometimes, Henry. You wish there weren’t any baby around here for Emem to take care of. But don’t you worry, Emem loves you just the same.”

Henry looked at Martha, confused. “I just want Hazy to love me too,” he said.

————

IN FACT, FAR FROM SEEING HAZEL as a threat, Henry saw her—or perhaps simply sensed her—as another potential alternative to the formidable singularity of Martha.

His attentions to Hazel were dramatic enough, however, for Martha to conclude that it would be prudent for Henry to start attending the Wilton Nursery School next door. So, as the Indian summer cooled into fall, Martha prepared Henry—and tried to prepare herself—for the first days of his life beyond the practice house.

A STATE OF MILD BUT MUTUAL condescension existed—and always had—between the nursery school and the practice house. Martha saw the nursery school as a college service, a necessary institution within an institution, like the infirmary, or Buildings and Grounds. The nursery school was at but not of the Department of Home Economics, and though its teachers—a succession of Wilton professors’ wives, whose children had usually been among their “students”—were perfectly well-intentioned, there was nothing remotely pedagogical about the approach they took to the children’s days. They were, in Martha’s view, merely glorified babysitters for the faculty and neighborhood brats.

Not surprisingly, in light of this, the women who ran the nursery school had always tended to look on Martha and her students as unbearably snooty, and it was with no love lost that Edith Donovan greeted Martha on that first September morning.

There were six other children in the Wilton Nursery School in the fall of 1950. Four were toddlers, still taking naps, wearing diapers, and doing things that to Henry were of little or no interest. But the other two were the same age as Henry, and he had watched them across the backyard with increasing curiosity for the last many months. Martha had never let him talk to them for more than a minute or two. “Germs,” she had said, as if referring to the children themselves, and not to the threat they supposedly carried.

This morning, however, on the first day of nursery school, there was no large shadow on the ground beside Henry, no heavy hand on his shoulder hurrying him back to the practice house. Instead, after Martha had introduced him to Mrs. Donovan at the back door, and one of the toddlers had arrived at the front, Martha reluctantly followed Mrs. Donovan inside, leaving Henry in the backyard with the two older children.

“My name is Henry,” Henry said to the girl.

“I know that. You live next door,” she said. “In that house,” she added, and she pointed at it, accusingly.

“Where do you live?” Henry asked her.

“In a real house,” she said, although she didn’t say it meanly.

Her name was Mary Jane Harmon, and she was the history chairman’s daughter. She was six months older than Henry and the exact same height. Like Henry, she had pale skin, as if the protection of growing up on a college campus had meant protection from the elements as well. Her hair was wavy and somewhat sparse, but white as vanilla pudding. But her shoes were brand-new, bright red Keds, and her eyes, as Henry saw them, were the same shade of blue as the game piece in the board game Sorry. He loved her immediately.

“I live in a real house, too,” another voice added, and Henry looked from the blueness of Mary Jane’s gaze into the tiny, dark, stuffed-animal eyes of Leo Friedlander. For no apparent reason, Leo jumped down from the back steps, grabbed a fistful of leaves, and threw them at Henry’s face.

Henry bent down to pick up his own bunch of leaves, then thought better of throwing them and tried to make it look as if he had picked them up not to throw but to study. “When do we go inside?” he asked, just as Martha and Mrs. Donovan appeared again at the back door.

“Oh. Dirty,” Mrs. Donovan said to Henry about the leaves in his hand, and Leo smiled.

“Leo did it first,” Mary Jane said quickly, and Leo shoved her, accidentally-on-purpose, as they walked up the stairs.

It didn’t seem to faze her. She looked back over her shoulder at Henry, as if he was the gift she had always wanted, and Henry, following Mary Jane up the stairs, ignored Martha’s long, yearning gaze and merely waved a slightly dusty hand goodbye.

THERE WAS A THIRD SET OF WOMEN in the practice house now, and Henry saw them every day when he came home from nursery school. A woman named Celia gave him grape juice and called him Henny-Penny and liked it when he hugged her. A woman named Mildred saved him the red Life Savers and called him Heinzy. Marilyn always kissed both his cheeks and shouted “Thank you, thank you!” when he kissed both of hers. Vera called him Sweetmeat and gave him cookies. Kitty liked it when he handed her the diaper pin for Hazy and asked if she wanted him to help. Bev didn’t call him anything special, or seem particularly interested, until the day that he asked her how
her
day had been, and after that she hugged him, hard, and called him her special soldier, which he didn’t understand but liked.

Except on Sundays, the women never got the chance to see Henry with one another, and by now he had developed a new habit for the Sunday crowds, which was to avoid lingering too long when everyone was together. Martha hoped this meant he was growing more attached to her, but in truth, without actually knowing it, he was trying to protect what he had with each of the others. He made sure that when more than one of the mothers was around, he never answered questions like what his favorite nickname was, or his favorite color, or his favorite book or card game or food. Stating his favorites, he understood instinctively, could mean making one mother happier with him than the others. It was safer not to admit he liked purple more than orange, or chocolate more than vanilla. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what the real answer would be anyway.

LIKE THE PRACTICE HOUSE, the nursery school was a modest two-story home that had been purchased in 1924, during the college’s first big expansion. Despite Mrs. Donovan’s opening-day admonition, it was neither exceptionally clean nor particularly tidy, and this was one of the reasons that Henry—with wet sneakers, free-roaming juice glasses, and even the occasional indoor game of catch—liked being there.

The days at the nursery school lasted from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon. At the start of each day, the three older children usually played inside, building houses from blocks, or drawing, or stringing beads. Henry liked to draw most of all, and often he would give Mary Jane his drawings, somehow never minding when she asked him “What’s it of?”

When Mrs. Donovan wasn’t too busy with the toddlers, she would sit at the upright piano in the living room and play exuberantly while they all sang and danced. Mrs. Donovan was tall and angular, and when she played, she bent over the keys and rolled her shoulders forward, looking like a question mark.

Lunch, usually around noon, was a daily delight, featuring foods that never took long to make and that Henry had never sampled before. There were Van Camp’s pork and beans from a can, or Ritz crackers with Velveeta cheese. There were sandwiches with the crusts left on, and bread-and-butter pickles, and potato chips. On warm days, there was Kool-Aid to drink, and on cold days, there was Ovaltine. For dessert, there was almost always canned fruit cocktail, served in small Pyrex dishes with different-colored spoons.

After lunch, there was Rest Time, and Mrs. Donovan would open up little cots made of scratchy blue fabric, and the big children would have to lie there and listen to her read. Mrs. Donovan’s reading voice was the exact opposite of her singing voice—hesitant and soft—and she seemed to lose her place a lot and read the same page twice. Still, no one ever came close to sleeping, even if they were bored.

In the afternoons, Mrs. Donovan would usually hold what she called Science Class. Once, she helped the children plant Dixie cups with grass seeds, sand, and soil, and they watched over several days to see them produce their tiny green circles of turf. Another time, she let all of them—including the toddlers—pretend they were planets and act out the solar system, and she chose Henry—wearing a yellow towel, yellow rain boots, and yellow dish gloves—to play the part of the sun. It was Mary Jane who gave him her own yellow rain hat to complete the costume.

Toward the end of the day, the older children played out back, almost always led by Mary Jane. She had the kind of confidence that could start a conversation, invent a game, or demand a secret.

“Let’s pretend you’re a dog and I’m a cat.”

“Let’s pretend you’re the babies and I’m the mother.”

It wasn’t exactly bossiness, not as simple as having to have things her way; it was something more like leadership: the belief that her way would be best for all—that she knew what would be the most fun, or funny. Usually it worked out that way.

“Raise your hand if you like
Amos ’n’
Andy.”

“Raise your hand if you hate broccoli.”

In answer to these directives, Henry almost always raised his hand, and Leo almost never did. “You’re not the boss of me,” Leo would say to Mary Jane, or “You can’t tell me not to!”

Like Mary Jane, Leo had been at the nursery school for several years. He was the son of one of the physical education teachers, and he was tall, strong, and nasty, and, on top of that, a nose picker who used his thumb and forefinger to roll his various extractions into tiny, dry balls, which he would then flick indiscriminately into the middle distance.

Apart from avoiding these small projectiles, Mary Jane and Henry had to cope with the fact that about once every half an hour, Leo would yell “Tag, you’re it!” and chase the two of them through the backyard. If the toddlers were outside, Mrs. Donovan would kneel beside them, closing one skinny, protective arm around them, just like the arm of a padlock.

Sometimes it bothered Henry that Leo spent so much time talking to Mary Jane, even though he mainly insulted her. Leo said she looked like Howdy Doody, an assertion that neither Mary Jane nor Henry could refute, since neither yet owned a TV set.

Henry had no insults for Mary Jane. He thought she was beautiful, especially when she was laughing, or when she was hiding with him from Leo—lips closed tight, eyes wide open—in the space behind the couch. Mary Jane was the first person Henry had ever liked who didn’t make a fuss about what he said or did. Mary Jane didn’t call him cute or darling, or repeat what he said, or write it down. But she made him feel good, and, other than his drawings, he never had to explain anything to her.

On Mary Jane’s birthday, her mother brought homemade cupcakes to the nursery school house and special balloons that had other balloons inside them, shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head. Mary Jane’s was pink; Leo’s was green; Henry’s was blue. The balloons were filled with helium, and they bumped and sprang along the ceiling, nudging each other like puppies as their owners guided them by their strings. Then Leo grabbed a pencil and popped the outer skin of his balloon, leaving the green Mickey inside it to shrink, rather gruesomely. Then he went after Mary Jane’s. She squealed a little, grabbed her string, and raced back through the house. The chase went on for quite a while, several times past Mrs. Donovan and Mary Jane’s mother sipping coffee; past the toddlers at their feet; past Henry, who knew better than to think it was all in fun.