The Irresistible Henry House (22 page)

“It’s all right,” he heard himself say. “You can’t pick a baby up every time he cries.”

Karen laughed, and Charlie smiled, and Henry felt rage.

“I’m serious,” Henry said.

Small circles of darkness had appeared on Karen’s shirt. She looked down and grinned, embarrassed but pleased.

“Thanks for the cake, sweetie,” she said to Henry, and slipped out of the room.

Charlie managed, with apparent difficulty, not to follow her.

“Great cake,” he said, and the artist in Henry suddenly wondered what it was about Charlie’s face that gave away his insincerity. Something about the eyes, Henry thought: The look had been too fast to capture, but Henry sensed that Charlie’s eyes had narrowed, and his whole face had jutted forward as if to compensate for an actual lack of interest.

“Listen,” Henry said. “This may be the only thing I actually have had more experience with than you, and if you don’t train the baby now, you can’t train her later.”

Charlie stopped smiling. “Are you kidding?” he asked.

“No.”

“Train her? What would we train her to do?”

“Everything,” Henry said. “Anything.”

“Listen to me, pal,” Charlie said. “I’m going to go in there now, so this probably isn’t the time to talk. But it seems to me that when a doorbell rings, you answer it, and when a baby cries, you pick her up.”

“Then that’s what she’ll always expect,” Henry said, marveling at the realization that his saying this would be, if Martha could only hear it, the best gift he’d ever given her.

“Then that’s what she’ll always get,” Charlie said.

AT FIRST, BEING ALONE WITH MABEL was an extraordinarily heady experience. For all his time in the practice house helping out with the practice babies, Henry could count on only one hand the times he had been left completely in charge of an infant, without Martha or a practice mother nearby. Mabel, in any case, was smaller than any baby Henry had ever held—smaller than any baby he had ever imagined. When Henry held her, even with his hand behind her neck for support, he could feel the shifting fragility of her, the fragmented mobility, of a body that seemed still to be in the process of being formed, not yet knit together.

Despite what Henry had told the Falks, he picked her up every time she cried. It was not out of sympathy, empathy, or respect for the Falks’ views but rather because experience quickly taught him that the girls in Reynolds West would descend from all corners at even the faintest hint of the baby’s distress. He didn’t want interruptions. He wanted to be the one in charge.

In a moment, Mabel’s face could turn primal, wrathful, purple, murderous—her tiny mouth stretched into an ageless anguish. A moment later, the comfort of Henry’s arms or the rhythm of his walk or the chant of his voice could wipe all traces of pain away. Mabel looked up at him, her eyelids as pink as the inside of a shell, her tiny lashes like an insect’s legs. He had never in his whole life been more aware or more afraid of the harm that he could do.

THE FALKS CAME BACK FROM a staff meeting at eleven o’clock on a morning in February, shaking the snow from their hats and boots, laughing at something, happy and eager.

“Where’s that little girl?” Charlie said. Even his cheeks—usually so pale—were tipped red with the cold. The shoulders of his winter coat were mottled with melting snow, and he held at least five logs in his arms.

“What’s the wood for?” Henry asked.

“I’m building a boat,” Charlie said. “What do you think the wood’s for?”

Karen, smiling, took off her coat, and Charlie carried the wood into the living room, where he dropped it before the fireplace. At the sound, Mabel woke and started to cry. Without apparent hesitation, fatigue, or even annoyance—with an expression that instead suggested eagerness—Karen strode into the bedroom to pick the baby up.

Charlie, meanwhile, took off his coat, and Henry stared into the fireplace, where the bricks he had painted with logs and flames had long since been taken for granted as a quirky fixture in a quirky place.

“Why don’t you get us some kindling?” Charlie asked.

“Kindling?”

“Kindling. You know. Small sticks that make the bigger sticks burn?”

Henry said nothing.

“Tell me that, in the vast expanse of your home economics training, you were never taught how to build a fire.”

Henry knew that Charlie had meant this to sound affectionate, but to Henry it just sounded mean.

Outside, he walked around to the back of the dorm. The snow was already melting, and his feet were wet within minutes. What was the point of gathering sticks if they were soft and wet?

Nevertheless he found a few fallen branches on the path that were not entirely soaked, and a dozen more by the apple trees. He brought them back inside.

Charlie was kneeling by the fireplace, his mustard-colored corduroys perfectly matching the background in the Matisse. He had already used some bricks to form makeshift andirons, and he was rolling up newspapers and wedging them between and around the logs.

Henry dropped his armful of kindling, then sat in the armchair beside the growing fire.

AN HOUR PASSED IN SILENCE, an hour in which Karen nursed the baby and Charlie and Henry stared into the fire. No one asked Henry a question. No one acknowledged that he was there.

A space had formed between the bottom log and the ashes below it, a space that was a long, down-turning arc filled in by embers, an orange frown. Flames rose between that log and the two or three in back, drawn upward by the draft from the flue—yellow with brown and blue licks.

While Mabel dozed, the Falks sat by the fire, alternately entranced by it and by her. Henry stood up and took a step back from the tableau, then another, then another—daring the Falks to notice that he’d left their charmed circle. But it was not until he opened the door, and the cold wind blew onto Charlie’s and Karen’s backs, that they noticed where Henry was standing.

“What the hell are you doing?” Charlie asked.

“Henry! The baby!” Karen said, holding Mabel closer, as if the wind was a weapon.

“I’m leaving,” Henry said, in answer to Charlie’s question.

“Well, you might consider putting your coat and scarf on first,” Charlie said.

“No, I mean I’m leaving,” Henry said.

“To go where?” Karen asked.

“To New York. To be with my mother.”

For a moment, they both looked at him, their warm threesome temporarily frozen.

“You are not,” Karen said.

“Trust me,” Henry said.

Charlie stood up, almost wearily, and took a step toward Henry.

“I thought you were going to be my family,” Henry said.

IN SOME PLACES, the snow was turned up and bumpy, the texture like a stucco wall’s. In others, where it had been flattened and raked, it looked like the sides of the cake that Henry had made for the Falks, the white icing he had spread so artfully, using the edge of the serrated knife.

On the way to the bus station, Henry walked through the snow, leaving footprints he imagined as a dotted line that Karen and Charlie could trace, if they wanted to follow or find him. A lone brown mitten was fitted over an icy fence post, some passerby’s helpful gesture but an apparently unnoticed one.

He caught the bus to Hartford at two o’clock, the whiteness of the world for once seeming not like a canvas on which he could paint things but rather like a heavy curtain obliterating all color and most life.

On the bus, Henry drew with his finger in the fog of the window, making lucid paths through the sheet of white. First he drew a random line, then its parallel, then its perpendicular. Circles, diagonals, triangles. Charlie had taught him once that if he lacked inspiration, he should start with simple shapes, then close his eyes and open them and try again.

He closed his eyes and saw only the drawing of the Matisse baby: the drawing he had saved from the fire, then copied so lovingly onto a cake for the parents in the house that had never been his and now, unmistakably, never would.

HENRY KNEW BETTY’S ADDRESS, and he knew that she worked for
Time
magazine, which he rarely if ever read, though Karen and Charlie did subscribe to it. Occasionally he had consoled himself by finding Betty’s name on the masthead, knowing that as long as her name was there, he would be able to find her. The last he had heard from her had been just after Thanksgiving, when she’d sent him a postcard from some ski place in Vermont. She’d written that she was researching a story about the new trend in college vacations. Nothing personal. Nothing promising. But she had remembered to write to him—and that still meant something to him.

The train from Hartford to New York left at four-thirty, and it was not until Henry was sitting onboard that he truly realized what he had done. Somehow the train—straining forward into the deepening darkness, the last winter light sinking around it—made a sound that wasn’t the clickety-clack he had always read about but rather a high-pitched, incessant, frightened whine.

  1  
New York

Exhausted from the week’s closing, tight from the martinis she’d had with Greg and a few other editors and researchers, Betty came home just after one in the morning, climbed the five flights to the apartment, stepped into her entryway, and found Henry, literally, lying at her doorstep.

She didn’t exactly scream, but she shouted.

She had no idea that it was Henry. There was simply a large, sleeping bum before her. But even as she shouted, she registered that there was a bunch of flowers, wrapped in florist’s paper and wilting across the bum’s lap, and she knew—the way you could know when a song was ending, even if you’d never heard the song before—that finally the past had caught up with her.

It had been seven years since Betty had been in the same room with Henry. The tone of her letters and postcards during that time had changed from eager and preparatory to something more formal and far less concrete. Promises and plans had faded and then dwindled. The once-monthly letters now were sent out once a season, more focused on the present than on a blurry past or a vivid future.

Henry had remembered Betty as a beautiful, petite blonde, a grown-up version of Mary Jane, with a sunny, open face. The reality of seeing her was somewhat shocking. Betty was, for one thing, a lot older. What had been in Henry’s memory a warm, quick smile now seemed a kind of twisted reflex, a squiggly line, like the type cartoonists draw to portray confusion, intoxication, or dizziness.

For Betty, the shock was greater. The boy she had last seen was the well-groomed nine-year-old, hands in khakis pockets, all tucked in and polished. Now she was facing a teenager who looked as if he had been stuffed, somewhat hastily, into his own skin. Everything about him seemed somehow ready to burst. Even his lips seemed too full somehow. His pants looked too short, or his feet too big; though his shirt was tucked in, it was coming undone. He was still extraordinarily handsome, but there was a large, painful-looking pimple on his forehead. Only his eyes—greenish gold, almost orange, she thought—were truly familiar to her: the warm, soft, eager eyes that she remembered. She tried to focus on them, even as the martinis she’d had were keeping her fuzzy, at best.

“Oh my God” was all she could say, and she repeated it several times.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, with just enough irony to make her smile. He pretended to brandish the flowers, like a magician pulling them from a sleeve. “These are for you,” he said.

Awkwardly, they embraced. He smelled of sweat and Aqua Velva. She fumbled with her keys, her eyes filling with tears, until he took the keys from her, gently, and opened the door for her. How had he learned that grace, she wondered, at a school for mental cases?

“Why didn’t you ring the bell?” she asked him.

“I did. No one answered,” Henry said, and then, foggily, Betty remembered that Ethel was overseas this week, shooting some coronation for
Life.

Betty stepped into the apartment first, but it was Henry who turned on the lights and led the way into the living room. His calmness overwhelmed her.

“Henry,” she said. “My God, I thought I was having a heart attack.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I wanted to surprise you,” he said.

“Does Mrs. Gaines know you’re here?” she asked him.

“She thinks I’m still at Humphrey.”

“And why aren’t you still at Humphrey?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” he said. “But one thing. I’m not going back.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Trust me. They won’t believe I’m gone until morning,” he said. “I promise I’ll tell you the whole thing. But not right now. You look tired.”

“I was going to say the same to you.”

She was equally touched and mystified by the way he seemed to want to take control of the situation. Could he be only sixteen? He seemed much older, as if he was ready to take charge not only of his life but of hers.

NEVERTHELESS, SHE WAS THE MOTHER. This was the chance she had always said she wanted, and after she set Henry up in Ethel’s room, she stretched out on her own bed, too scared, excited, and tipsy to sleep. She tried to think. She was used to thinking from deadline to deadline—a week or two ahead at best. How long was Henry going to stay? Was this an episode or was it supposed to be a life? Betty got up to look at her checkbook. No surprise there: She had almost nothing to show for her seven years in New York. Had she been so extravagant? Would someone else have done better? At what point, she wondered, had she stopped feeling the urgency of getting Henry back, or stopped believing she could?

Betty dropped the checkbook into her purse and climbed back into bed. Having Henry here would mean more problems than just the money. She would have to break things off with Greg. She would have to go back on the wagon. She would have to start cooking real meals. She would have to find her own apartment, or hope Ethel wouldn’t mind sharing this one—or maybe just staying away for a while. First and foremost, however, Betty would have to find Henry a school, so that no one—not her father, not Martha, not any official whom they might call—would be able to say that she wasn’t being a good and responsible parent. Betty fell asleep fully dressed, as if some part of her was expecting to be needed during the night.

SHE WOKE IN THE MORNING to a blazing headache and the mild hope that she had been dreaming. But when she walked past Ethel’s bedroom, she saw Henry lying with his back toward her in a tumble of Ethel’s pale pink sheets. Her little boy, she thought, vaguely amused. There was nothing little about him, and almost nothing boyish.

“So does anyone know you’re here?” Betty asked him, then waited while he turned toward the sound of her voice.

He stretched. His hair was tousled, and despite his being a virtual stranger, she felt the instinct to smooth it.

He told her a story. It was not completely a lie. It didn’t include Charlie and Karen, or the child they’d just had. It didn’t include his disappointment, or their new indifference to him, or the depth of the rage that had compelled him to leave. Henry told Betty instead that the doctors said he was cured and so they wanted to send him back to Martha.

“Won’t she expect you to come home?” Betty asked.

“That’s not home,” Henry answered with a coldness that Betty found frightening. He sat up straight for the first time, as if he was being dared.

“So you’re not planning to call her,” Betty said.

“I was thinking you could call her,” Henry said.

“And tell her what?”

“Tell her it’s your turn to have me,” he said. “And be my mother,” he added.

Betty looked at Henry doubtfully.

“If you make me go back there,” Henry said, “I’ll just run away again. And then neither of you will ever know where I am.”

They stared at each other. Betty’s head felt heavy, her stomach empty, her heart suspended.

Henry’s eyes softened again, then flashed with his spark. Orange magic. Fire.

“This is what we’ve wanted, right?” he asked his mother gently.

BETTY HAD NOT SPOKEN once to Martha Gaines since moving to New York City. Apart from Henry’s own letters, Betty’s few updates about him had come not from Martha but from Dr. Gardner, and those had been vague at best. Betty knew that she had to call Martha now, and also that in order to do so, she would need to be well fortified.

“You’ll probably want to freshen up,” she said to Henry.

He looked at her, untrusting, the whole broken past behind them, like a rutted road. But he asked her for a towel, and he said thank you and shut the bathroom door. When she heard the water running, Betty walked into the kitchen and reached for the bottle of vodka that she kept in the cabinet above the stove. She looked at the clock. It was just past nine, and she knew that if the school had called Martha, she would be frantic by now.

Nonetheless, she opened a can of frozen orange juice, spooned out its gummy cylinder, and meditatively watched it dissolve as she stirred it into a pitcher of water. When it looked like orange juice, she poured herself half a glass and filled the rest with vodka, not bothering to stir that. Then she downed most of it in one gulp and reached for the telephone.

HENRY HAD BEEN RIGHT about Humphrey. Martha had only just received the call, saying that he had gone missing.

“I was about to phone you,” she told Betty. “I wanted you to be on the lookout for him. Just in case he decided to come to you. But I realized I didn’t have your number. I called your father to get it, but he didn’t answer. I was going to walk over to his house, but—”

Even through the haze of her own emotions, Betty could hear an added quaver in Martha’s voice, a change not of octave but of tenor, a new kind of hesitation. Betty realized what the difference was. Martha sounded like an old woman.

“He’s here,” Betty finally said flatly. “Henry’s here. He’s already here in New York.” She intentionally didn’t say
here with me,
but she knew it would make no difference. If Martha hadn’t hated Betty before, she would hate her forever now.

Waiting for Martha to speak, Betty remembered the day she had wept in the practice house kitchen after hearing that Fred was alive. She remembered those many cups of tea, the odd lack of sweetness in everything. With a chance, what would she do differently now? What wouldn’t she?

“There?” Martha said. “He’s there? How did he get there?”

“I think he took a train,” Betty said. “He was here late last night when I came home from work.” She added, as if it was consolation: “I didn’t ask him to come.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“He can’t right now,” Betty said.

“Why not? And don’t tell me he’s lost his voice again, because I’m not going to believe you.”

“No, he’s got his voice,” Betty said. “It’s just that right now he’s in the shower. And he told me he’d rather have me call you.”

There was another, even longer, silence, and Betty knew that Martha was either crying or fighting back her tears. Betty topped off her screwdriver with another shot of vodka.

“Why?” Martha finally asked.

“Why what?”

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He said not to send him back to you, because he’d just run away again.”

Betty could hear, on Martha’s end, a baby crying in the background, and she could see the practice house walls, could smell talcum powder and baby formula, could feel the softness of Henry’s neck, and the moist closeness of him on her shoulder, rocking to sleep at night. She sipped her drink, waiting, then put the cold glass to her forehead.

“Why?” Martha said several times again, and yes, she was crying now. “Why?” she said one final time. “Why would he choose you?”

HENRY TURNED OFF THE SHOWER, and Betty could hear the riffle of the curtain rings as they were swept back along the rod. She chucked the remainder of her drink down the sink, and then, thinking better of it, refilled her glass with orange juice. She filled a second one for Henry. Then she reached one more time for the vodka, adding just one last dash to her juice, which concealed it completely. She would give Henry juice and toast for breakfast. They would get groceries later. She would do the best she could.

Betty opened the stainless-steel bread box, flipping the curved cover back and watching the reflection of her face disappear.

HENRY HAD NEVER LIVED in a place where the buildings were taller than four stories. But Betty’s apartment was in a five-story walk-up, and Haaren High School was actually seven stories tall. It had roughly a thousand students, more than seventy classrooms, a dozen labs, and two gyms. From the start, there was nothing Henry liked about it. The classes were large and noisy, and the students moved together in groups delineated by clothing style, hairstyle, and, most clearly, by background and race.

Ironically, Henry spent his first week at Haaren in virtual silence, moving wordlessly from classroom to classroom as if he was still mute. As he always had, he picked up shreds of important information this way: that math teacher was queer; that classroom was where a kid had been stabbed; that girl had fake tits.

The last piece of wisdom notwithstanding, the girls seemed astonishingly mature and confident to Henry, much more like college than high school students. But he tried not to notice anyone in particular, and he ignored the ones who noticed him. Occasionally, he felt the temptation to flirt. Occasionally, too, he felt a pang of curiosity about Lila, or a pang of regret about Mary Jane. But for now, he felt certain that a girl—any girl—would only make Betty’s getting used to him more difficult. If he’d learned nothing else from his summer at Wilton, it was that a girl could cause complete havoc.

During lunchtimes, instead of playing handball in the courtyard or chatting up the girls on the front steps, Henry would sit in the cafeteria by the gleaming stainless-steel milk machine and sketch. He had nearly reached the end of his Mini Falk Book, which was now bent at the cover corners and held together principally by a number of dirty tan rubber bands. Turning its pages, he could see sketches of his roommates; practice drawings of spheres and cubes; the Humphrey campus and hills at sundown, in the morning, at dawn, in snow. He found the faces of Charlie and Karen: the serious portraits and the caricatures. He wondered if they missed him. He wondered if he missed them. They were receding into the horizon of his mental landscape: smaller and smaller as the city’s buildings, and the city’s people, rose. He wondered if he had ever truly missed anyone, or ever would.

IT TURNED OUT THAT for a grown woman, Betty was a fairly poor housekeeper, a terrible laundress, and a dangerously bad cook. Delighting in his ability to tease her and to win her, Henry quickly took to preparing dinner for both of them in the evenings, doing the laundry on the weekends, and generally tidying the place up.

“And you call yourself a Wilton practice mother,” Henry said, which made them both laugh the first time, then feign laughter every time after that.

He asked her when Ethel was getting back from her assignment. He asked her whether, if he got a job, they would be able to afford their own place. He was the one saying
when will you be home
and making the grocery lists. He enjoyed the surprise on her face when she saw that he could do these things, and somehow the chores that had been chores at Wilton and Humphrey seemed more like talents now. He questioned whether they would win for him a permanent place in Betty’s life, and he waited to be sure it was a place he truly wanted.