The Irresistible Henry House (19 page)

Henry winced more at the word
son
than at the word
mute.

“She hasn’t been well, you know,” Arthur said, and waited for Henry to look up at him before he descended the ladder.

“You didn’t know that, did you? No, you wouldn’t have known that. She’s not the type to burden you with her needs.”

Stung by the accusation, Henry was equally stung by the absurdity of the statement. What had Martha’s treatment of him ever been but a bargain to ease the burden of her needs?

————

WHEN HENRY RETURNED from the hardware store, he lifted the cans of paint into Martha’s view.

“Really?” she asked him gratefully. “Are you really going to paint? The place needs it so badly, and it’s always last on everyone’s list. Of course, I would have done it myself if I’d had the time …”

He walked past her.

“Where will you start?” she asked. “In your bedroom? Oh! In the upstairs parlor? Would you do that? It’s so dingy in there!”

Fine, he thought. Let it not be dingy in there. He carried the cans of paint up the stairs, one on either side of him, like suitcases. It was still not yet noon, and so he began, first pushing the chairs off the carpet, then rolling it up, then pulling the furniture back into a forced grouping in the middle of the room.

Martha’s desk, all pigeonholes and bills and receipts, was surprisingly easy to move, and it took no time at all to take down her pictures and memorabilia. More difficult was the bookcase, which Henry knew he would have to empty before he could try to move it.

He took the books off the shelf by fours and fives, whatever could fit in his grasp: books on household equipment, child rearing, psychology, different editions of Spock and Gesell, Wilton College handbooks, directories of women’s colleges, books about health and hygiene, all coming off the shelves with dust flying—even, ironically, a whole series about cleaning. He carried the baby journals two by two, then stacked them more neatly and carefully, even though the parade of names—Helen, Harold, Hannah, Hope—made him feel something sick and terrible.

Where were they, the other House babies? Did they know how their lives had begun? Had anyone ever told them that they had been laboratory animals? Or had they, by leaving at the age of two or younger, been spared the necessity of that revelation?

Harvey, Holly, Hugh, Harriet—and then Henry stopped stacking the journals, because he had come to a name he knew—Herbert—and then to one that went with a face he vaguely recalled. Hazel. Hazy. The baby he’d been told he’d rescued. Henry looked back a second time. But no, his own journal was missing. Then he looked on, down the rest of the shelf: Heidi, Hollis, Herman, Hardy, Heather. No, his wasn’t there.

HENRY WANTED TO PAINT, but he made himself focus on repairing the walls, pushing spackle into the pockmarks and cracks, leveling the topography.

At five in the afternoon, exhausted, he knew that even the sanding would probably have to wait until the next day, and so he put away his spackle, washed his hands upstairs, and was on his way out to meet Mary Jane when a strange sound from the kitchen made him stop. At first he thought it was the baby, because the sound was fretful and rhythmic, not unlike a baby’s cry. But that was really a trick of his senses, because he had just walked past the living room and seen Lila on the rug with the baby, rolling a ball back and forth, both of them quiet and content.

The sound was of Martha crying. Little gasps and hiccups, little sniffles and whimpers of pain. All that kept Henry rooted to the spot was the knowledge that her crying was real, that she could not have planned it for him, could not have known what time he’d descend to pity and protect her.

He took a breath and stepped into the kitchen. She had actually put her head on her arm, and her chin, which had grown more slack in the two years of his absence, rested loosely on one sweatered forearm.

She looked up when she heard him step in and either was or pretended to be embarrassed by his seeing her.

She fingered the hem of her cotton handkerchief, turning it by the corners, presumably looking for a dry spot.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t mean for you to hear me.”

He sat down across from her, understanding almost without caring that he was the reason for her tears.

“It’s just—” she started. But the thought of whatever it was that was making her sad overcame her, and he watched her face flush from the dark brown spots at the top of her brow to the base of her double chin.

“It’s not you,” she said after she’d composed herself again. “It’s this child-care conference,” she said. “I’ve been to them before. A total waste of time, trust me. Lots of silly women standing around and talking about their theories when the child I’m supposed to care for—” Here she trailed off, because clearly there was a memory attached to this pain, and Henry didn’t know what it was and didn’t care.

“I don’t want to leave,” Martha said. “I haven’t seen my son for two years, and I don’t want to leave you now.”

HENRY STOOD MARY JANE UP that evening. He stayed home, watching Martha direct Lila in the kitchen. He watched her using the carpet sweeper, ironing, cooking, climbing the stairs. He saw that she was slower, less accurate—less obvious in her attempts to tame and manage the world.
She hasn’t been well,
Arthur had said, and Henry rehearsed the line in his mind, seeking sympathy in himself, or at least a fear of being alone. He was quite certain that he felt neither.

For the first time in his life, he allowed himself to imagine her dying. He found the thought almost giddily freeing. Her face would be wiped of its redness; her eyes would no longer be pleading, watching, looking for signs of love, or betrayal: whatever it was she expected. He saw himself living with Betty in New York or, better, back with Karen and Charlie, in a real family, in a real house, where he could trust that what people told him one day would still be true the next.

At her funeral, he imagined, he would be dry-eyed and stoic, and then he would stand up at the podium, and, for the first time in years, he would speak so that absolutely everyone could hear what he wanted to say.

  7  
I Know About My Mother

Henry was counting down the days until Martha left for her conference. Lila had rotated off duty and wasn’t expected to return until the middle of the month. In her place there was Susan Steele, who wore striped shirts that made him think of sailors, and Carol something—she lisped her last name—who was remarkably loud and bossy.

By now, he had painted the parlor upstairs, as well as his own bedroom and the bathroom, each with two coats of primer and a coat of white. Martha kept asking him why he didn’t move the furniture back in those rooms, and he had taken to writing her notes on his progress:

One more coat on the baseboards in the parlor.

and

Should be moving things back in a day or two.

He wrote notes more often than he’d had to at Humphrey; in fact, it seemed he was always tearing pages out of his Mini Falk Book, and by now the sheets of paper sometimes popped off, like overripe leaves, because he had pulled out so many before.

Two rooms back to normal by the time you return.

MARTHA LEFT, FORTUNATELY, in the morning, while Henry was still asleep, thus preventing any chance of an embarrassing goodbye scene. Carol was in the kitchen, smoking, when he came downstairs. Huck, nine months old, was in his high chair, kicking his feet, and Henry bent down to look at him.

“Hie!” the baby said.

Henry smiled at Huck, then at Carol, and opened the refrigerator. Martha had left him pancake batter, which he delighted in ignoring. Instead he took out three eggs and some butter and the old heavy black skillet. He stood by the stove, barefooted, in his khaki shorts and T-shirt, cooking. He toasted two slices of Wonder bread, and as he ate, he looked out the window, thinking about Mary Jane, who had been ignoring him, and about Lila, who had been sending him notes by way of Susan and Carol. Then he thought about the color tangerine, which was what he had chosen for the parlor upstairs, and the color maroon, which he had chosen for his bedroom. He had decided to leave the moldings and the ceilings white, at least for now, and the thought of the day stretching in front of him, with a paintbrush in his hand and no interference from Martha, filled him with joy.

“Favor?” he wrote on Falk Book paper, then handed the note to Carol.

“What favor?” she asked suspiciously.

Go to Hamilton’s Hardware and buy me two gallons of paint.

“Buy you? With what money?”

We have an account there.

“Why can’t you do it?” Carol asked him.

Mr. Hamilton always makes me try to talk.

Her eyes softened with the expected sympathy.

“If I go, will you watch the baby?” she asked.

He nodded, and shrugged an “of course.”

“No, I mean
really
watch the baby, because your mother would
kill
me if I let anything happen to him,” she said.

Another page from the Falk Book flaked off gently into Henry’s hand. He wrote:

I know about my mother.

Carol stood up and put out her cigarette. “Okay, well, what color paint do you want?” she asked.

Upstairs, Henry fumbled under drop cloths in his bedroom to retrieve an old set of crayons, and, after several attempts, he drew a sample of each of the colors he wanted and brought them back down to Carol.

“Will Hamilton know what to do with these?” she asked. Henry nodded.

“All right, then. I’ll be back soon.”

She handed Huck to Henry, and, with a wary glance or two backward, she stepped out into the sunshine.

Henry waited until Carol was completely out of sight, and then he lifted the baby high in the air.

“Hey, Bruiser,” he said out loud. They were the first words he’d spoken since the goodbye he had whispered to Charlie.

HENRY CARRIED THE BABY into the living room and carefully leaned down to turn on the old Zenith. For a moment there was silence, and Henry felt a surge of nostalgia and sadness, but then, hesitant and sketchy, the sound began to come through the yellow-gold cloth of the old speaker grille.

Henry turned the scratched Bakelite knob away from the classical station until he found the beat he was seeking.

“How’re you doing, Huck?” he asked the baby. “Do you do the Practice House Polka?”

I’m a-walkin’ in the rain.
Tears are fallin’ and I feel the pain …

Henry started dancing, keeping the baby’s chin on his shoulder and singing along at the top of his hoarse, unused voice:

And I wonder
I wa wa wa wa wonder
Why, why why why why why she ran away…

Henry twirled and spun around the living room, the same room in which he had crawled and opened Christmas presents and curled up like a puppy in the sun, the room in which he’d been handed, like an hors d’oeuvre, from mother to mother.

In a scratchy falsetto, Henry sang on. “I wa wa wa wa wonder …” And Huck laughed and said “Wa wa wa!”

Henry was sweating when the song stopped, and he was happy to rest during the next number, a sappy Pat Boone tune. Henry stopped singing, and Huck reached up and grabbed Henry’s bangs.

“Ouch!” Henry said, and that made Huck laugh.

“No, really! Ouch!” Henry said again.

Huck pulled on Henry’s bangs again.

“Cut it out!” Henry said, and he fought the impulse to drop the baby onto the couch—just to get away from those small, grabby hands. How odd, he thought, to have to protect something that he wouldn’t have minded hurting. And what was it, he wondered, that was giving him this self-control?

The glee on Huck’s face turned into fear, and he squirmed, surprising Henry with his strength.

“It’s okay, Bruiser,” Henry said. “It’s okay.”

Huck still looked scared.

“It’s okay,” Henry said again.

Then the music changed, and Henry started to dance again, to the new song on the radio, and it was only after he had made Huck laugh again that he stopped and heard the words of the song:

Well, just because I’m in my teens
And I still go to school
Don’t think that I dream childish dreams
I’m nobody’s fool.
Don’t mother me, that makes me wild
And please don’t treat me like a child.

————

HENRY WAS ON THE TOP STEP of the ladder when the phone rang. It was just before noon. He had caught a tangerine drip with the side of his paintbrush, and he was smoothing it into a downward stroke.

He couldn’t answer the phone. He knew that. A mute couldn’t answer a telephone.

He redipped his paintbrush, and the phone stopped ringing. He loved the hum of the silence, amid the blast of tangerine.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang again.

“Damn,” he whispered to himself. “What the hell does she want from me?”

It had to be Martha, he thought. Who else would be so relentless, so droningly intrusive? And where the hell was Carol?

Ten minutes later, he heard Carol come in, then the sound of her fussing with Huck, and then the downstairs bathtub running.

When the phone started ringing for the third time, he threw the brush onto the newspapers below the ladder.

On the fifth ring, he picked up the telephone and merely waited, expecting to hear Martha’s voice coming through. There was a long silence, though, and then a man’s voice.

“Hello?” the voice said. Silence. “Hello?”

Henry started to hang up, but there was something—possibly just the tone of worry—in the man’s voice that he felt he recognized.

“Don’t hang up,” the man said. “Henry. Is that you?” Silence. “Yes, of course. You don’t speak. Henry, if that’s you, just tap the receiver with your finger.”

Henry did.

“Good. Yes. All right. Well, this is your—This is Dr. Gardner.”

It took Henry a moment or two: Dr. Gardner. The head of the college. Betty’s father. Henry’s grandfather.

“Are you there?”

Henry tapped on the phone again.

“There’s something I need to say to you.”

Henry could hear Dr. Gardner breathing: heavy, moist, old-man breaths.

“It’s your mother. That is, it’s Mrs. Gaines. She’s had some sort of fainting spell. She’s completely fine. But she’s going to stay in Boston at least for the night. Henry? Tap if you understand me.”

Henry tapped.

“Tap if you’re going to be all right there at the practice house.”

Henry tapped.

“I know that Nurse Peabody has been overseeing the practice house students, as usual …”

Hah, Henry thought. Nurse Peabody had apparently run into Carol on her way back from town, asked if she needed anything, and then said:
Fine, call me if you do.
If Henry had cared to make Martha happy, he knew he’d be able to delight her by telling her just how useless Nurse Peabody had been.

“But if you’d feel better with her staying there, just tap the phone.”

Henry let there be silence.

“You’re all right, then?” Dr. Gardner asked.

Henry tapped the phone.

“Good. I’ll see you soon, then,” Dr. Gardner said vaguely, and then he hung up.

Dear old Grandpa, Henry thought wryly. In truth Henry had never thought of Dr. Gardner as anyone other than a distant, awkward figure of vague and pointless authority.

AT LEAST ONE EXTRA NIGHT without Martha in the house. There was no doubt in Henry’s mind about how he wanted to spend it.

Henry had kissed girls. He had held them, hugged them, smiled into their eyes. He’d tied their shoelaces, fixed their scarves, stroked their hair, and cupped their breasts. But he had not yet scored. Screwed. Nailed. Ridden. Drilled. All those
Playboy
carpenter verbs that confounded him with their apparent contradictions. Apart from his beloved centerfold, the only naked women he’d even seen were in art books.

He knew that Lila would be coming over the next day for the usual weekend baby visit, but he felt certain that he would be able to get her over tonight, especially if she knew that Martha was still away. He thought about asking Carol if she would bring a note to Lila, but he didn’t think it too likely that one girl would want to fetch him another. He dismissed, for obvious reasons, the use of the phone, but then he thought again. What if he called her and simply said nothing? Surely she’d know who was calling.

Still upstairs, at Martha’s desk, he rummaged through her papers until he found her attendance sheet. When she wasn’t taking her turn at the practice house, Lila Watkins lived in a dorm called Stanton. When Henry dialed the number, he expected to hear her voice, and he was actually surprised by the way that her phone kept ringing, unanswered.

Frustrated, he went downstairs, got himself a peach, then came back up to the parlor, where he sat, knees up, on the newspaper-covered floor, leaning against an unpainted wall and surveying his work. He had done only two and a half of the walls and felt suddenly exhausted by the prospect of finishing. He ate his peach, allowing the juice to drip down his arm and mingle with the drips of the tangerine paint.

Vaguely, he wondered why Martha hadn’t called him herself. Once again, he knew what he was supposed to be feeling about her. Worry, concern, fear of her dying. Once again, he felt only relief at her absence. Perhaps she was expecting him to try to track her down, her absence provoking the miraculous recovery of his voice. He wished that he could forgive her. He sucked on his peach pit, wrapping his tongue around it, feeling its hard, porous surface and wanting a softer surface to mine. Lila, he thought. He had to find Lila. Hurriedly, he stood up, pounded the lid back onto the paint can, and twisted his brushes into plastic wrap, the way he’d been taught to do by Charlie. He knew he had to find Lila, and he knew if he couldn’t find Lila, then he would have to find someone else.

————

WHEN HE SAW HER, the sun was still high in the sky, but it was nearly eight. She was walking across the campus with a girl on either side of her and a stack of textbooks in her arms.

“Henry,” she said. “You know Henry, don’t you, Alice? Don’t you, Melissa?”

They shook their heads no.

He nodded, smiling into their eyes, which caught the evening light.

“Oh, come on. He’s famous. Henry Gaines. He’s Mrs. Gaines’s son,” Lila said.

“Oh, wow,” Alice said. “What did you do to deserve that?”

What, indeed,
Henry thought grimly, but he smiled anyway.

“Henry doesn’t talk,” Lila said, and then she grinned. “At least nobody’s heard him yet.” She giggled and reached out to tickle the side of his neck.

He managed not to exclaim, and he caught her hand with his own. He held it tightly, the way he imagined a man would hold a woman’s hand, and he watched with satisfaction as the surprise colored Lila’s face.

“How old is he?” Alice asked.

“I don’t know,” Lila said, looking straight at Henry. “How old is he?”

HE HAD IMAGINED it would be in his bedroom, but as it happened, Lila seemed more inspired by the parlor, despite its mess of paint cans and papers, its smell of paint thinner and plaster.

It was difficult. It was his first time, and though Lila tried to seem older and more experienced, Henry suspected that it was her first time, too. They were on the newspaper-covered floor, but every time he pushed his way into her, she slid a little away from him, and papers flew up around their ankles. He tried gripping her shoulders, but that seemed to make no difference, only made him slide along with her. They were a boat in choppy water, leaving a wake of paint-spotted newsprint. He had always imagined that the girl would be rooted in place, wrapping her legs around him and moving up as he moved down. The action would be vertical—hammer and nail—not diagonal or horizontal, not something slipping, quite literally, out of control. In fact, it was the lack of control—over Lila’s position, her pleasure, his own—that was the biggest surprise of sex. By the end, he had unintentionally steered them up against the closet door, and everything he was feeling escaped from him in sighs and breaths, and, finally, something close to a groan.