The Irresistible Henry House (12 page)

  9  
Eastern Standard Time

Only five days later, Betty Gardner boarded a train heading east, to New York City, where her father had decided that her unfortunate past might be less objectionable, or at least less noticed.

With the help of a former Wilton professor, Dr. Gardner had arranged to have Betty try out as a researcher at
Time
magazine. It would be a new start, he told her, insisting that she be grateful for the opportunity.

Until the moment Betty left, Martha felt as if she was virtually incapable of any emotion but fear. And even after Betty’s departure, Martha couldn’t help feeling that the visit had left a pall, a layer of emotional ash that had changed forever the way that Henry was going to look at things. Martha blamed this largely on Betty and even, to some extent, on Betty’s father. It did not occur to her that there was any other blame to be assigned.

IN 1955, PASSENGERS ARRIVING at New York’s Penn Station walked off their trains, up to the glorious concourse, and into a reality that rarely fell short of whatever superlatives they had heard in advance. The celestial ceiling, with its vaulted arches and its web of wrought-iron window frames, was churchlike and dizzying, fearsome and immense. Hanging in the smoky air between the ceiling and floor—like a man-made sun—was the famous clock, with its heavy Roman numerals, precisely squared-off minute marks, and, in capital letters, its nonnegotiable message: EASTERN STANDARD TIME. From tall white poles around the vast room, modern loudspeakers hung in clusters like giant, incongruous lilies of the valley. Thousands upon thousands of people strode through the concourse without hesitation or apparent fear.

Her two suitcases on either side of her, Betty stood for at least ten minutes, taking the whole panorama in. It occurred to her that she had not felt this much like a child since she had first arrived in Australia and gone looking for Fred’s address at the Melbourne post office. Thank God she was not a child now, she thought: A few moments later, she had gathered her bags and taken a seat in an all-but-empty bar called Brown’s.

An exhausted-looking waitress came over to take her order.

“Gin and tonic,” Betty said.

“Any particular kind of gin?”

Despite her fear, her fatigue, and even her sadness, there was something to be said, Betty thought, for a city in which even a tired-looking waitress asked you what kind of gin you wanted.

SHE HAD LEARNED to drink gin in Australia. She had learned to drink everything there, discovering the sweet and sharp contradictions of booze: the cushiony insulation and the flat, hard taste. She had needed both the softness and the hardness for dealing with Fred, who drank even more than she did and with far less apparent consolation. Neither of them had had a clue about how to build a marriage, let alone a life. It became clear after a while that they would each protect their own secrets and garner more. What little they’d had in common before the war had long since been outgrown. Betty had become a mother and Fred a soldier, and both had been deserters. Yet neither of them could acknowledge just how useless with shame their hearts had grown.

“First time here?” the waitress asked as she brought Betty’s drink.

Betty nodded and stirred the gin and tonic with a heavy plastic brown swizzle stick.

“Where’re you from?” the waitress asked, apparently grateful to have some company.

Betty took a sip and welcomed the coldness and warmth, flowing simultaneously.

“I’m from Australia,” Betty said.

“Australia? Well, you couldn’t have taken the train from there.”

Betty smiled. “No, I was visiting my son. In Pennsylvania.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Damned if I know,” Betty said, and drained her glass, feeling the ice cubes kiss her top lip. “Bring me another, okay?”

She studied the cocktail napkin, ate some peanuts, tried to get one more taste of gin from the still-large ice cubes. She thought for the first time about what she would say when people in New York asked her about her past. It struck her that she could lie and that there was almost no reason not to lie. But with this waitress, for some reason, it seemed even more tempting, almost exotic, to tell the truth. Looking into those tired, pale eyes, Betty had an instant and grateful understanding of the freedom that would be granted her by the anonymous city.

“He came from a one-night stand, my son,” Betty said after a long sip from the fresh drink.

The waitress looked over her shoulder carelessly, then sat down. “And they made you give him up?” she asked.

Betty nodded. “When he was just a year old,” she said.

“You weren’t married?” the waitress asked.

“I was. But not to the father.”

“Oh.”

The waitress leaned on her hand, a heavy elbow on the small table. “But you had the baby a whole year?” she asked.

“Well, I wasn’t living with him, but I got to see him a lot.”

“You’re lucky,” the waitress said. “My cousin had to give hers up before her milk was even dry.”

Betty’s impulse to share her story changed almost harshly into the need for her story to be understood.

“Lucky!” Betty said. “One night. One guy. And pregnant like that.”

“Yeah,” the waitress said.

Then Betty told her about Martha, the practice house, and Dr. Gardner. She told her about the long, pale Australian nights and the futility of Fred’s attempts first to get, then to keep, a job.

“And did you ever tell him about your son?”

“No. Yes. No.” Betty laughed at her own confusion. “At the very end I did,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because we’d tried for eight goddamn years to have a baby of our own, and he kept saying I just wasn’t made to be a mother.”

FORTIFIED BY THE DRINKS and emboldened by her confessions, Betty left a large tip for the waitress and dragged her bags out onto the street. It was mild for October, sunny and clear. Graceful cane-shaped streetlamps arched along Fifth Avenue. A billboard several blocks away advertised Knickerbocker beer. Two-toned taxis in every color drove by, and it took Betty a while to realize that when the lozenge-shaped signs on top of them were lit up, that meant they were empty, not full.

The leather seat inside was soft and cool.

“Barbizon Hotel for Women,” Betty said. “One forty East Sixty-third Street.”

“What’s the problem, you don’t like men?” the cabbie asked.

Betty didn’t answer, just sat back in the seat and sensed the energy beyond the window. After all the years of hearing about New York, she knew immediately that she would love the rhythm of the place: the peculiar set of expectations and flashing intensity, the steam coming from the backs of buses, the rounded streetlights, and the sense of power.

“FIRST TIME HERE?”

Now it was the red-haired clerk behind the check-in counter at the Barbizon Hotel.

Betty laughed again.

“I suppose that’s ‘yes,’” the redhead said.

“People keep asking me this,” Betty said. “What is it, do I look that young?”

The redhead shook her head. “Just scared out of your mind,” she said nastily. “Not young.”

THERE WERE TWENTY-THREE FLOORS in the Barbizon Hotel, and on all but the first, no men were allowed. Looking at the clusters of single women in the lobby, and the prim, perfectly dressed elevator girl on the way up to Nine, Betty wondered if she was the only woman in the whole hotel who no longer owned a pair of gloves.

Her room, 903, was small and drab. The walls were pale yellow. A beige desk and a beige dresser stood awkwardly side by side. The beige striped fabric on the narrow bed and the draperies matched, except that the drapes had been faded by the sun. The rug was nondescript and industrial.

Betty unpacked, listening to the traffic noises rising from the street. Cars were honking and a man was cursing, and intermittently she heard what sounded like drilling. From higher up—presumably somewhere in the hotel—came the sound of a singer rehearsing, and from outside, in the hallway, there was occasional laughter and running.

At the bottom of one suitcase was the photograph of Henry that Ethel Neuholzer had taken nearly a decade before, and there was the yellow tin canister holding the roll of film that Betty had managed to take of him just this week.

Henry. The smell of his baby neck came to her, somehow. The nights in the rocking chair.

It was not as if she viewed her right to him as unequivocal.

She knew that she had left him, and under normal circumstances—if she had been like the dozen other girls in the Home, for example—she would have left the hospital a week after his birth and never seen him again. She knew, too, that if she and Fred had managed to have their own baby, she would never have come back—or, probably, ever wanted to.

“But I’ve seen him,” she had said to the waitress at the bar that afternoon. “I know him. I helped take care of him when he was little. And I do know where he is.”

BETTY’S IMMEDIATE GOAL, however, was to land the job at
Time.
Not even the best-educated women—the graduates who came directly from Wellesley or Smith or Cornell—were spared a six-month audition. And Betty—whose lack of formal education had been barely finessed (the former professor had said Betty came “well-recommended from Wilton College”)—was certain to be no exception.

The tryout took place on the clip desk, which existed so that research files at
Time
could be kept current for the in-house library. Subjects ranged from the obvious—world leaders, movie stars, moguls—to the less predictable—maple syrup, shoemaking, children’s toys. To work at the clip desk, you needed a soft green pencil, a sharp pair of scissors, a rubber date stamp, a stack of folders, and the ability to concentrate long past the hour when words began to fox-trot across the printed page.

Everyone worked hard. The magazine closed its pages in sections, so there was always a deadline looming, and the women—unfailingly cast into supporting roles—did more than their share of the heavy lifting. By her third week on the clip desk, Betty had already gotten the sense that if she was going to be hired full-time and, more important, if she was going to succeed once she was, then she was going to have to fake a lot of knowledge that she didn’t have. Faking a past was the least of her worries. If anyone at the magazine had noticed her yet, they hadn’t had time to let on.

THE RESIDENTS OF THE BARBIZON noticed her from the start. Not since her days at the practice house had Betty known more gossipy women. They rarely referred to each other by name. Whenever they talked about those not present—and that was the main staple of their conversation—they called them by room number.

“Have you seen 202’s new pumps?”

“Who does 784 think she is?”

“I hear 420’s got a new beau.”

They were, for the most part, women in waiting: waiting for better jobs or better men or better clothes or better figures or better options. Most of the women Betty met there in her first few months in New York were working as salesgirls in department stores, or waitresses, or models. Most of them were younger than she: in their early twenties, just starting out. But Betty’s age did not confer status in the Barbizon Hotel. On the contrary, some of the most vicious gossip was reserved for the older women—women in their thirties and forties—who glided through the lobby and restaurants like a ghostly Greek chorus: a future menacing any woman who didn’t find a man.

In the evenings, some of the women who were dateless would gather in the lounge in front of the communal television set and watch the variety shows—Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Martha Raye—with their array of visiting stars: Janis Paige, Ezio Pinza, Marlon Brando, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. From time to time, clusters of girls would start conversations, then be shushed by the others. The proper postures, trim clothing, and tidy language of daytime all went by the boards, and the women lounged and slouched and cursed and chewed gum.

Betty saw all this peripherally. Three months into her trial period at
Time,
she was no more sure than she’d been at the start that she’d end up being hired. So she was the first one at the clip desk in the morning and the last one there at night. She worked harder than she had ever worked—either as a homemaker in Australia or as a student in college or high school.

In the first few weeks, Betty had lived for the two gin and tonics that she had at the end of every day. By the fourth week, her loneliness honing her needs and dreams, she permitted herself only one. By the fifth week, before she let herself have even one sip, Betty would write down on a cocktail napkin the fifty states and their capitals, or the names of the NATO countries, or the members of Eisenhower’s cabinet. Only after that—and only if she had remembered them all correctly—would she permit herself to have the drink, and mentally toast the little boy she was planning to rescue and reclaim.

Sometimes, coming home late from the office, she would pass the television room and see the silhouetted forms of girls who had fallen asleep in their chairs by the irrelevant light and noise of whatever late movie was playing, and she would shudder. Back in her room, she would bathe or shower, then wrap her flannel robe around her, set her alarm clock, turn off her lamp, and say good night to the photo of Henry. A lovely new frame for it, bought on Bendel’s main floor, had been her only indulgence. Made of real red mahogany, it sat on her pale dresser in her pale Barbizon room like a tiny, personal hearth.

  10  
How Could I Not Like You Anymore?

By the spring of 1956, to his fourth-grade teachers, Henry Gaines had started to seem increasingly dull. Whereas once his hand had shot up in response to any question—whether or not he knew the answer, in fact—now he merely stared back, impassive. By midyear, to most of his classmates, Henry had become, to use their various terms, a goof, a nerd, a spaz, a freak.

Only in math class—when the students were routinely asked to come up to the blackboard in order to show, rather than recite, their work—did Henry reveal any willingness to participate. In front of the class, he would wield the white chalk like a conductor’s baton, and he would usually write out the solution to the problem in numbers that were every bit as grand and confident as his personality now seemed small and hidden. Sometimes—especially when Mr. Gilder wasn’t looking—Henry would step aside when he was done and wave his arm with a surprising flourish. And once, when Mr. Gilder left the room, Henry drew a comic-book lightning bolt, like the kind hurled by the Flash, and the lightning bolt, pointed at Mr. Gilder’s desk, was trailed by whooshing lines of speed.

The buzz in the classroom blended awe with nervous worry. But just as Mr. Gilder’s shadow appeared behind the mottled glass in the door’s window panel, Henry used his entire right arm to erase what he had drawn, and then, returning to his seat, he used his left hand to wipe his sleeve.

It was a dazzling performance, by far the most appreciated by Mary Jane, sitting in the third row from the back. She was as careful—and clandestine—in watching Henry’s artistry as he usually was in watching her.

Though they rarely talked now, she seemed to know—without his having to tell her, without, perhaps, his knowing himself—that what had changed was inside him and had nothing to do with her.

DURING RECESS, HENRY READ borrowed comic books:
The Flash, Superman, The Phantom.
Martha told him that studies showed they would poison his mind. In April, he traded his lunch so that he could own one of the books himself, and he brought it home concealed in his loose-leaf binder. Then he carried his illicit prize upstairs and shut his bedroom door.

Martha’s appearance was entirely predictable. She could locate his private moments the way the Flash could find a criminal.

“Hanky?” she called. “Henry? Are you all right?”

Not waiting for an answer, she simply opened the door. There were no locks or latches on any of the doors in the practice house anymore. Years before, Martha had told Henry, he and some baby named Hazel had been locked inside by accident, and Martha had made certain that nothing like that could ever happen again.

Henry did not answer, even with Martha now standing behind him. She was a liar; it was a thought that was a reflex by now. He didn’t have to answer her.

“Henry? Hanky! Why did you close this door?”

Henry did not look up from his desk until Martha had said his name two or three more times.

“Why can’t I close my door?” he asked her.

“Why do you want to close your door?”

He stared at her hard. “Because I want to,” he said.

He saw the redness begin in the tip of her nose, then spread to her cheeks. She pawed nervously at her silk scarf, and in the next moment he was overcome not by sympathy but by an inchoate instinct to forestall the confrontation he sensed he was not yet ready to have.

“Homework” was all he said.

She smiled, at first doubtfully, then with evident relief.

“Oh, Hanky,” she said. “I was starting to think you didn’t like me anymore.”

“Oh, Emem,” he said, though of course he knew the answer. “How could I not like you anymore?”

Tears fell down her flushed cheeks and into a pool of entirely unwarranted relief.

THOUGH MARTHA NOW usually knocked before she opened Henry’s bedroom door, he took to reading his comic books in the closet anyway. It gave him a sense of added protection. But he did not simply read there. Rather, using a step stool as an easel and an overturned shoe rack as a desk, he would snap open the brass clasps on the art set that Betty had given him, and he would bask in the different rainbows, then carefully withdraw pencils, paints, or pastels. He would spend whatever time he could practicing his drawing by copying the pages of the comic books. Day by day, he drew with increasing confidence, mimicking perfectly the lines, shapes, and shadings, the tricks of crosshatched crescents for muscles, white swaths and ribbons for speed and light.

One spring day, by accident, Henry lost his balance somehow and toppled forward slightly, green Cray-Pas in hand, leaving a two-inch mark on the closet’s baseboard that he decided not to clean.

The next day, quite intentionally, he retrieved the green Cray-Pas and drew another mark beside the first one, then another, and then another.

By the end of the evening, Henry had laid aside his copy of
The Flash
and had filled most of the bottom of one closet wall with a lovely, bucolic field of grass. In this field, there were blades of grass made with Cray-Pas, others with colored pencils, and others with paint. There was not a green in the entire art box that Henry didn’t use, and the field that grew in his closet was, as a result, one of almost infinite depth and surprising realism. It was, Henry imagined, a place of deep colors, vast distances, and great possibilities. One day you might be swinging for the fences or digging for worms there, and the next you might be lying under an open sky, having a picnic with a mother who had always been your mother, and a father who wore a cardigan sweater and whose eyes were always twinkling with magic and mirth.