The Irresistible Henry House (15 page)

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Art Lessons

By the fall of 1961, the muteness that Henry had thought he was feigning had somehow become a real condition. Occasionally—if he was alone in the showers, or walking across an empty part of the campus—Henry would be able to whisper a word or two to himself. But in truth he had almost forgotten how it felt to form words anywhere but in his head, where they appeared, most often, as combinations of letters.

In the absence of expression, what Henry observed became more acute, and the natural world a perpetual crowd scene. Beak-nosed women appeared in cloud formations, and baby faces in dimpled potatoes. A stone kicked up in the road by a passing car revealed the profile of an old man, and, in the lines of cracked river ice, Henry saw a stick figure of himself.

Sometimes, Henry wasn’t sure if he was seeing art in nature or nature in art. A straight but puffy line of clouds in the sky at dusk looked to him as if it had been painted on with a wet brush. The mountains looked sculpted. The pond looked glazed.

Whenever he had time between classes or after meals, he filled his Falk Book with these images, and his best days were the ones on which he had art class.

THE ASSIGNMENT HENRY CARED MOST ABOUT was the multipart one that Charlie announced during the very first class of sophomore year. For what would be counted as the equivalent of a term paper and a final exam, the students were asked to create self-portraits using no fewer than five different perspectives, or “lenses,” as Charlie called them. The obvious approach—the one that would quickly be adopted by most of the students—was to do a front, a back, and two side views, and, for the fifth panel, some less formal pose: playing soccer, say, or walking on a beach. Henry, after hearing the assignment, held up the five fingers of one hand with a questioning look.

“Yes, five,” Charlie said.

Then Henry, to Charlie’s evident delight, held up both hands.

“Yes, you can do ten if you like,” he said.

Then Henry flashed both hands twice.

Charlie, smiling, said, “Why don’t you see what you have time for?”

Henry spent that first class doing a detailed painting of his left eye. In patches of tempera, he laid out the bright fluidity, the orange-specked liveliness, the green serenity. In his next class, he focused on his bangs—the side-swept riot of browns and reds that, magnified on Henry’s canvas, looked more like his closet’s field of grass than it did like a partial self-portrait. So it went. A dozen eyelashes. The corner of his mouth. His eyes again: singly, in tandem.

Back in his room, in his Falk Book, Henry planned and sketched, rearranging the fragments of his self-portrait like the tiles in a sliding number puzzle, ordering and reordering them, trying to find the right sequence. In the studio, his paintings were multiplying much faster than the usual class times would have allowed, and Charlie knew that rules were being broken.

“When’s he doing all this extra work?” Karen asked Charlie one morning when he showed her the pieces of Henry’s self-portrait—at least a dozen of them, by now, propped up along the studio’s back shelf.

“At night, I’m guessing,” Charlie told her.

“You’ll both get in trouble,” Karen said.

Charlie grinned.

“You could get him expelled, you know—if he’s out of bed after curfew.”

“You know he was brought up by only women? Watching his every move and then handing him over again and again?”

He had told this to Karen before, and so she gave him a barely indulgent look.

“I’m not sure you’ll be able to make that up to him, darling,” Karen said.

“He hasn’t spoken to anyone in
years,”
Charlie said.

“I know.”

Charlie held up one of Henry’s paintings—the corner of a mouth.

“He’s used to everyone watching him.”

Charlie showed Karen another panel, no doubt intended as the central one. It showed a circle of faces, an audience of attentive eyes. “I could be the one he talks to,” Charlie said.

More paintings appeared. Two or three nights a week, Henry was sneaking into the darkened art studio, working by a single lamp, making sure to clean his brushes even more thoroughly than he did in class. He loved the quiet, the sense that he was safe in some embryonic way, and he loved the exotic smells of the turpentine and paints, which forever after would fill him with a sense of freedom and hope.

A SOPHOMORE NAMED DAISY FALLOWS was waiting for Henry outside the art studio one night in October, her arms crossed, her red flannel shirt collar turned up, her red hair flying.

She was extremely small, and Henry had grown even taller since his freshman year, so it wasn’t until she came up close to him that he really could see her eyes, which, it turned out, were flashing and filled with fun. She tilted her lips up just perceptibly, but he had absolutely no doubt what she wanted, and so he kissed her, feeling for the first time in his life the soft tumble of another person’s tongue in his mouth.

It was more or less exactly the way he had imagined it would be, except for one surprise, which was Daisy taking his face in her scratchy gloved hands and saying, “I figured you were the safest, Henry, because I can trust you.” Then she looked back over her shoulder and giggled. “I mean, after all, it’s not like you’re going to
talk.”

IT WAS CLEAR TO HENRY that Charlie knew he was spending extra time in the art studio. Sometimes, Henry would find a box of Lorna Doones or a bag of potato chips. It was also clear that these gifts must not be acknowledged, but, in a completely surprising way, it now seemed to Henry that someone neither intrusive nor possessive was watching over him.

Nothing in Henry’s upbringing had prepared him for the kindnesses that both Charlie and Karen Falk now regularly bestowed on him. To Henry, who was first invited to Reynolds West to have tea and to look at their prized Matisse lithograph, it had never seemed possible that home could be a place where one felt free.

Like the dorm parents in the other houses, the Falks had three small rooms on the first floor: living room, bedroom, and kitchen with dining alcove. To Henry, the apartment seemed palatial, partly because the Falks had emptied it of all the stodgy, traditional furniture that was standard in the other houses, and had instead surrounded themselves in a Bohemian blend of blond modern wood and light avocado fabrics, stacks and shelves of books and records, and different colors on every wall: black, brown, purple, and navy in the living room; red, orange, yellow, and rust in the kitchen; lavender, pink, mint, and robin’s egg blue in the bedroom. To Henry, being in the Falks’ home was like being inside his art box.

The traditional decoration was limited to just two objects. In the kitchen, there was an enormous campaign poster of John F. Kennedy that was red, white, and blue, under a black-and-white photo of Kennedy’s face. Sometimes, when Henry sat in the kitchen with Charlie and Karen, he would stare up at the photograph, with Kennedy’s white-white smile and his side part and poufy dark hair; and the face would splinter into shapes and planes and lines, until Kennedy became not a man but a collection of parts to draw.

The other piece of art in the Falks’ apartment was the Matisse lithograph: a wedding gift from some wealthy relative and clearly, without any doubt, their prized possession. It was not a large picture, not even a foot high and not even two feet wide, and it was not particularly colorful—at least not compared to the rest of the rooms and to Matisse prints that Henry had seen in Charlie’s art books. This one had only two colors: the mustard yellow of the flat background and the black of the lithographed lines depicting fourteen large-petaled blossoms floating abstractly behind a robed woman who sat with a child on her lap. Apart from the fact that neither the woman nor the child had any facial features at all, what made the image unusual was that the child was holding its handless arms stretched out to either side.

The Matisse held the place of honor above the living room fireplace, in which the Falks, one autumn Sunday, were letting Henry help them paint a fire.

“It’s called
La Vierge et L’Enfant”
Charlie said, gesturing up to the lithograph.

“That means ‘The Virgin and Child,’” Karen chimed in, helpfully.

Henry blushed slightly at the word
virgin
and looked at the floor.

“Virgin, you idiot, like the Virgin Mary,” Karen said.

Henry pantomimed the Christ figure.

“Exactly,” Karen said. “That’s why the baby is shaped like that.”

Henry stared at the lithograph, then went back to painting the fire, making flames of red, orange, yellow, and purple, licking up at the back and sides of the brick.

ONE MONTH LATER, on a frigid November night, in the back corner of the art studio, Daisy Fallows took a pack of Viceroys from the waistband of her pink denim slacks and gave Henry his first cigarette. Pretending he had smoked before, he nonetheless reeled from the assault on his throat and lungs, but he managed neither to cough nor to vomit, and instead concealed his imbalance by kissing Daisy and sliding a shaking hand under her sweater.

An hour after that kiss began, an hour during which they had explored, it seemed to Henry, every possible variation in the choreography of kissing, Daisy looked at her wristwatch and let out a little shriek when she saw that it was nearly two. Then she retied the shoelaces on her saddle shoes and went skipping out into the night, a burst of cold air rushing in behind her. Moments after that, a cigarette butt rolled into a puddle of turpentine, and a small excitement of flames leapt up toward a roll of canvas.

At least three minutes too late, Henry grabbed the first object he could find to try to smother the burning canvas, but what he found was a roll of newsprint, and that went up too.

EVEN AS HENRY WATCHED IN FEAR, he could not help noticing the extraordinary profusion of colors that the fire created. At each new cluster of supplies, there would be a hissing and popping, and then bright yellows, greens, and magentas would emerge from the flames, like overblown flowers. Then came the moment—Henry later would remember its details precisely—when he went from thinking that the path of the fire would stop to understanding that there was no way it could.

It was the moment when he realized that there were choices to be made. On the far counter of the room, and on the wall and shelves behind it, were most of the class’s finished artwork: pinch pots left out, ironically, to dry; canvases not yet hung; the Falks’ Matisse, surrounded by the copies and variations that Charlie had asked the class to make just this morning; panels of Henry’s and his classmates’ self-portraits, three months’ worth of fragments not yet assembled in any permanent way.

Transfixed, Henry looked before him at the shelves of paints, Cray-Pas, and palettes; the glass-paned cabinets holding the empty pineapple juice cans with their bouquets of brushes; the rows of articulated figures, seeming to bow their heads now as the flames blackened their wooden backs.

He could feel the heat—not frightening, really, but strangely inviting. It occurred to him, passingly, not to fight it. He had a thought of being subsumed in all the colors. If he escaped the fire, he would have to face Charlie and Karen. And the guys. And no doubt be expelled. And be sent back to Martha. The eyes of the women in his central drawing stared at him from the back wall, daring him to become unwitnessed. Instead, he took a deep, smoky breath, grabbed what he could from the far wall and shelf, and then ran back toward the door. Out in the snow, he tried to say the word:
fire.
The sound didn’t even catch in his throat. There really was no sound. But Henry knew he was the only possible siren. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the nearest dorm wasn’t near enough for sleeping people to be awakened by smells of smoke or sounds of fire or sights of a palette, however surprising, of brilliantly colored flames. Then Henry dropped what he’d rescued on one of the benches in the yard, ran to Reynolds West, and pounded on the door. There was no response. Finally, what began as a whisper broke into an audible croak.

“Fire.”

He said it again.

“Fire.”

He said it loudly. “Fire!”

Charlie started running as soon as he understood the word. Karen, with Charlie’s winter coat in hand, loped after him awkwardly, trying to fling the coat over his shoulders while the slippers she was wearing made her slide in the snow.

By the time they arrived at the studio, the heat was too intense for them to get near the place. They ran to Reynolds East to call the fire department, and from then on, it was merely a question of waiting and watching while the red town fire truck, reminding Henry unavoidably of the one he and Martha had played with when he was little, rushed in on the usually off-limits campus lanes.

The hoses were taken out even before the truck had come to a stop. But it was clear there would be no chance of salvage. Even as the front side of the studio began to resemble the alligatored skin of a log near embers, Henry again noticed the incredible profusion of colors and saw that the sky behind the studio looked yellow and green. As the right corner of the roof caved in, he couldn’t help thinking that the building, still burning, looked as if its top corner was being erased.

Gradually, students and teachers began to gather, tumbling out of their dorms, pulling their bathrobe belts tight against the cold. Some wore slippers, others boots; some had thrown sweaters over their pajamas; a few were fully dressed. They formed a semicircle, no different from the ones they’d formed on the bonfire nights in the early fall, when they’d all roasted hot dogs, sung school songs, and put on skits.

By the time Daisy appeared in the circle, it seemed to Henry that it had been weeks or months since he had seen her last. Later, she would complain to him that his look was first angry, then blank, and he would pretend to be sorry for both, but in truth he would want to get as far away from her as he could. It would take him years to figure out that the intimacy of sharing a secret guilt was more than he could bear.