The Irresistible Henry House (21 page)

“So?” she said to him, a hand on her hip. He looked into her one blue eye, cold and serene and implausibly bright.

“Raise your hand if you’re really going to be glad to see me go,” he said.

Mary Jane smirked, then started to lift her arm, but Henry caught it in midair. He wanted to kiss her but stopped himself. She had closed her eye now, whether flinching from him or hoping for him Henry couldn’t tell, but he didn’t want to risk being wrong. Like her eye patch, her eyelid was a window shade, and Henry knew it would be a while before he would be allowed to see, let alone to share, the world behind it.

  8  
Not Henry’s Anything

The bus trip back to Humphrey was for Henry as joyous and filled with giddy expectation as the trip to Wilton, two and a half months before, had been sleepy and filled with dread. There was no air-conditioning this time, but there was no need of it. The windows were all half open, and the crispness of the air and the sense of expectancy kept Henry wide awake. The bus smelled surprisingly of fresh oranges and spearmint gum. Henry looked up from his reading to see the lawns and houses flying past.

He had imagined that Charlie and Karen might be waiting for him at the bus station. It wasn’t that he had told them when he was coming, or even how. It was just part of his fantasy of absolute belonging. In reality, he saw no one even vaguely familiar when his bus pulled in. The empty road vibrated with silence, car doors slammed, and a bird shrieked. Sheepishly, Henry dragged his suitcase to one of the taxis that sat, indolent and burning, in the late afternoon sun.

Despite his obvious wishes, his first stop on the campus was not Reynolds West but rather the main floor of Canfield, the junior dorm. His intention was merely to drop his bags before going on to Charlie and Karen’s, but the double takes from his classmates proved to be both grand and gratifying. A simple “hi” from Henry, and the reactions ranged from “Say that again” to “Hey, guys, Gaines is talking!” He unpacked, listening while one boy would ask a question and then the others, by force of habit, would try to answer it in Henry’s place.

“Are they going to let you stay?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t they let him stay?”

“Because he’s got his voice back, asshole.”

“Yeah, but they probably don’t know that yet.”

“You know, you can ask me,” Henry said.

“Do they know, Gaines?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So why are they letting you stay?”

“Aw, he’s probably screwed up in other ways.”

IT WAS NEARLY DINNERTIME when Henry finally managed to arrive at the Falks’ doorstep, where they were welcoming a new set of sophomore girls: fluttery in the cool evening, wearing pale pink lipstick and sleeveless shirts, their hairstyles wide, short, and obviously new.

“Henry!” Karen shouted when she saw him, and in a moment she was hugging him while at the same time slapping Charlie’s arm to get his attention.

“Hey!” Charlie said, transferring the slap to Henry’s back. “You look like you’ve grown another foot.”

“You’re nearly as tall as Charlie now,” Karen said, but Henry could tell that she was distracted.

Charlie picked up one end of a girl’s steamer trunk; her father picked up the other.

“You all settled in Canfield?” Charlie asked before disappearing into the house, not awaiting an answer.

Karen must have seen Henry’s face fall.

“We’ll have a good catch-up later,” she whispered. “I gather you’ve got a lot to tell.”

“How do you gather that?” he asked her softly.

“Word travels fast ’round these here parts.”

She smiled—wide and open and ever-embracing—but Henry couldn’t help feeling chilled as he turned to go on to dinner, the sketches in his Mini Falk Book still sheathed in his back blue jeans pocket.

————

THE HUMPHREY DOCTORS were thrilled with Henry and took his apparent progress as proof that their methods—such as they were—had worked to restore his voice. His former three hours a week in Therapy would be reduced to two, they told him.

“Two?” Henry asked, using the somewhat softer voice that instinct told him would help him keep his place in the school while not impeding his social life.

“Well, we’ll need to bring you along slowly,” the older of the two doctors said. “We need to know what’s unlocked this voice so that it doesn’t lock up again. And now that you can talk, you can be a much more active participant in your cure.”

Within the motley company of his fellow classmates, Henry’s improvement now conferred upon him an added status. Marc Forman asked him to shoot hoops with him one day, and Bryan Enquist asked him to wait so they could walk to the science building. The oddest part of this was that none of these activities required much conversation, and rarely included any. But somehow the fact that Henry
could
speak now seemed to make him more approachable.

Just how approachable became clear two weeks after the start of school, when Dave Epifano, in a move as shocking as it was brief, reached down and cupped Henry’s ass one morning at the precise moment that Henry put his towel on the hook in the shower room.

“What?” Henry said, as if he’d been asked a question.

“What what?” Epifano said.

Henry looked around as if Epifano’s hand was still there.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Henry said.

“What,” Epifano said, as if nothing at all had happened.

YOU COULD NOT LIVE WITH a pack of adolescent males and not know about this.
Homo, faggot, pansy,
and
queer
were all words that had been bandied about the dorm from the very first day of school two years before. Back in the spring, Henry had also read a long, serious article about it in
Playboy,
and just last month he had heard two of the practice house mothers speculating about whether one of their boyfriends had secret, unfortunate leanings. It was one thing to think about it generally, however, and another to be confronted by it in the humid, slightly mossy environment of the Humphrey School shower stalls.

Mary Jane wrote to tell him that she was applying to boarding schools for the following fall. “I’m not wigged out enough for Humphrey. At least not yet,” she wrote, explaining that she was looking at several places in New England. Pointedly, she mentioned George, the lowercase poet, several times. At the end of the letter, she added, as if she was asking about the weather: “I assume you’ve had fifteen or sixteen new conquests since the summer. Why don’t you tell me about the latest?”

In response, Henry drew a caricature of a lascivious-looking Dave Epifano.

“What can I tell you?” he wrote to Mary Jane. “I’m universally irresistible.”

IT WAS NOT REMOTELY WHAT HENRY WANTED. What he had discovered he liked about girls was how he could make things happen with them. Whether it was sex with Lila, or kisses with Daisy, or even the original nonsexual favors he had extracted from his many practice mothers, what happened had always started with Henry’s decision, Henry’s idea. Then it was his charm and the skill he had: the skill to promise whatever was needed—flattery, interest, humor, apparent love—until the moment, inevitable as morning, when everything he wanted would be apparent in her eyes. The flash and sparkle. The meeting. A shared decision about a kind of adventure. He didn’t know what he liked less—that Epifano was a guy or that Epifano thought
he
could make things happen.

HE HAD JOKED ABOUT IT WITH MARY JANE, but for the next week, Henry sought refuge in Karen and Charlie’s apartment, debating internally whether to tell them what Dave had done, longing to ask for their advice. They seemed, in any case, surprisingly distracted. Perhaps it was the beginning of the term, Henry thought, and the Falks’ usual efforts to make their new girls feel at home in Reynolds West. Perhaps Henry had angered them in some way they hadn’t explained to him. Perhaps even they—despite their modern views and their blue jeans and youth—thought it somehow wrong that he had been kissing a girl at Wilton and had been rumored to have done much more.

Sitting at their kitchen table under the poster of John F. Kennedy, Henry tried to concentrate on his English essay, but as he watched and waited for Karen to start cooking dinner, he couldn’t help noticing that her hips, like the base of a tulip, were rounder than he had remembered.

“Stop looking at my wife’s ass,” Charlie said as he entered the kitchen, pipe in hand.

Karen waved the smoke away, feigning annoyance, then kissed Charlie on the lips.

IT TOOK A LITTLE LONGER than perhaps it should have for Henry to realize what was about to happen. His first reaction was to think of this as something that he and the Falks would share, like the fireplace they had painted together, or the secret they had kept. Only after a day or two did it begin to sink in that of course the Falks’ baby would not be Henry’s anything. Not his brother or sister. Not even his own practice baby. Only perhaps his rival, his replacement.

“When?” he asked Charlie.

“In about four months,” Charlie said.

They were in the new art studio, cleaning brushes in the palms of their hands, making clouds of soapy colors.

“January,” Henry said.

“That’s right,” Charlie said. “January. Karen’s hoping it’s born on New Year’s Day.”

“January first,” Henry said, knowing that his reactions were slow and strange.

Charlie hit the back of Henry’s hand with the paintbrush he had been cleaning. “Wake up,” he said affectionately.

The world, however, had changed again, and when, four months later, Charlie and Karen disappeared one weekend and came home after six days with their newborn baby, Henry knew enough about babies and parents to know that Charlie and Karen would never treat him the same way again.

IT’S A GIRL:

Charlie had scrawled the sign in Cray-Pas, along with a hasty but winning drawing of a smiling baby, and taped it to the art studio door. On the morning in January after the Falks’ daughter was born, Henry paused in front of the sign, staring into the simple circles of the baby’s eyes, as if expecting to see a reaction.

On the following Monday, when the Falks were set to bring the baby home, Henry let himself into their apartment, only to find that a small cotillion of sophomores had already had the same idea.

WELCOME HOME, BABY:

They had painted the words in pale pink on a banner that draped from window to window. The letters barely showed up on the beige canvas cloth, a circumstance that annoyed Henry nearly as much as the fact that he’d been usurped in his role as chief decorator and Welcome Wagon. There were fresh flowers in paint cans and vases, and in the crib an assortment of bunnies and bears that would leave little room for the baby and in at least one case would outweigh her.

Most of the girls knew Henry already and were not overly surprised to see him come in. Two younger classmates were hastily informed about his identity.

“So what are you doing here?” one of them asked him flirtatiously.

“Came to bake a birthday cake,” he said, smoothly switching plans. He made his way to the kitchen, leaving a modest trail of amusement, attraction, and skepticism behind him.

He knew, of course, where everything in the kitchen was, and he certainly knew how to bake a cake. In the practice house, he had helped to bake cakes as soon as he could hold a spoon.

“He’s baking a cake.”

“A cake.”

“What’s he doing?”

“He says he’s baking a cake.”

Henry enjoyed the fuss, the little echoed rivulets of female surprise and female condescension. He enjoyed the knowledge that there was actually no chance that any one of them could outbake him, or would fail to be intrigued by his display of skill. The last thing he would ever need from a girl, Henry thought, would be instruction. Certainly not in this; probably not in anything.

With Karen’s radio on, he measured out the flour, the baking powder, the milk. He stirred the batter briskly, holding the bowl down low with his left hand, largely to impress the audience of sophomores watching him from the doorway. And though he had never tried it before, he showily—and successfully—cracked the eggs with one hand, on the rim of the bowl, just the way Martha used to do.

The girls left while the cake was in the oven. Henry was glad to outlast them. He made frosting from butter and confectioners’ sugar, then put portions into smaller bowls to mix with food coloring. He knew exactly how he wanted to decorate the cake, and once it had cooled, he used an assortment of knives and spoons and the one new paintbrush he could find to create an exultant baby in the style of the Falks’ Matisse, dancing ecstatically across the sweet canvas of the cake, its arms—with proper hands—outstretched.

IT WAS NOT AS IF HENRY had forgotten everything about what it meant to have a baby nearby. His first two years at Humphrey had been the only time in his life when he hadn’t lived with one. He had forgotten, however, what it was like when the babies first arrived—the extraordinary focus, the sense that nothing as wonderful, demanding, or frightening had ever happened or was likely to happen ever again. A newborn made it all the more dramatic. The baby fit snugly in the crook of Karen’s arm. It was extraordinary to Henry that anyone so tiny could have so much power.

The girls who had stayed were drawn to the sides of her crib as if by a physical, intractable force. There were five of them that first day, and they each managed to find a place around the little rectangle—their hands on the crib railing, their eyes looking down, identical with wonder, curiosity, delight.

Her name was Mabel. As she slept in the Falks’ bedroom, the last of the girls departed, and Henry followed Charlie and Karen into the kitchen, where they began to unpack the gift baskets they had been sent at the hospital. Henry waited for them to notice his cake, which he had placed on the counter beside the stove. Charlie swung the fridge door open. Karen tossed him apples and pears. Charlie caught them, dropping them carefully into a drawer. There were candies and cookies, dates and figs, chocolate-covered raisins. Shredded green cellophane, like the kind that filled Easter baskets, fell to the floor like cut grass.

“Hungry, sweetheart?” Karen asked Charlie.

“I should be asking you,” Charlie said. “Come to think of it, you should be sitting down. Come to think of it,
I
should be sitting down. Henry, make yourself useful. Finish unpacking,” Charlie said. “You should be taking care of us.”

“You’re so right,” Henry said. He lifted the cake from the counter and placed it before them on the kitchen table.

“Henry!” they both exclaimed, but at the exact moment they did, Mabel let out a cry. It was full-throated, and Karen sprang up automatically, looking both happy and panicked, a combination Henry recognized from the many practice mothers he’d seen.