The Irresistible Henry House (24 page)

“Let’s wait for Ethel to get here,” she said.

They waited. They watched Walter Cronkite. Medgar Evers, a black leader, had been assassinated in Mississippi, a day after JFK’s civil rights speech. There had been some sort of attack in British Guiana. And the American Academy of Pediatrics was demanding that children be taught to view smoking cigarettes as immature and silly.

“Toss me a cig, won’t you?” Betty asked.

Sometimes he liked her, despite her childishness. This was one of those times.

The news ended. There was a new show on called
Drawing from Scratch,
and Henry watched it while trying to pretend he didn’t see how nervous Betty was.

Ethel came in just before nine—chaotic as always, her handbag unintentionally open, one of her stockings snagged, and a large package in her hands.

“Hey, kid!” she said. “Happy birthday.”

She reached into her open purse and fished out two packages of slightly smushed Hostess cupcakes and a small box of candles. “Never say I don’t know how to celebrate. And I’ve got a present for you, too. A real one,” she added.

“I’ve got one, too,” Betty said, obviously flustered. “Only I didn’t wrap it.”

She disappeared into her bedroom while Ethel put the four cupcakes on three plates.

“The plate with the two better be for me,” Henry said.

She laughed.

“What’s with Betty?” he asked her.

Ethel shrugged, unconvincingly. “Where
are
you?” she shouted to Betty.

“I’m here,” Betty said, and started singing “Happy Birthday.” In her hands was the practice house journal, and when they were finished with the song, Henry blew out the candle that Ethel had put in one of his cupcakes, and Betty said, “This is for you, Henry. I think it’s time you have it.”

“Thank you,” he said, confused. “What is it, you’ve run out of shelf space? And you want this in my room now?”

“I’m going to Paris,” she blurted out.

“You’re—”

“They’ve offered me a job in the Paris bureau. I can’t turn it down. I think you should go back home to Martha and finish school there. You just have one more year. And then you can go to college. Maybe even back here, at NYU. And Ethel can maybe look out for you—” Betty sank into the dining room chair and gently removed the candle from Henry’s Hostess cupcake.

He stared at her, mute. But this was it. This was all she had left. It was clear that she, too, couldn’t speak another word. Years later, he would remember this as the moment his childhood ended.

HIS BIRTHDAY PRESENT FROM ETHEL had been six ten-dollar bills and a real leather artist’s portfolio. Henry spent long stretches of the hot summer nights filling its plastic sleeves with his drawings. Some of them dated back to Humphrey, others had been done during his recent summer at Wilton; most were products of the Art Instruction Schools lessons. Restlessly, he arranged and rearranged the pages, trying to distract from the imperfection in this landscape with the boldness of that portrait; to group these still lifes, those cartoons.

“Dear Silent One,” he wrote to Mary Jane.

Clearly your lack of communication is intended and has succeeded as

1. a punishment for me pretending I couldn’t speak all that time, and

2. a taste of my own medicine.

So it’s worked. I am now totally serious about trying to make it up to you. I will grovel.

He drew a sketch of himself on his knees, a supplicant at Mary Jane’s feet.

Seriously. New York is now over for me. Betty (I don’t think I’ll be calling her my mother again any time soon) is going to Paris for good and she wants me back with Martha for senior year. There’s no way I’m doing that.

I want to be an artist, and I mean for real, and I’m going to spend the summer earning some money so I can get the hell out of here, and in case this means anything to you at all, I want you to know that you’re the only one I’m telling this to. Partly it’s to PROVE I trust you, and partly it’s because I want you to be part of my plan.

Is that intriguing enough? Write to me!

During the days, he worked—thanks to Ethel—as a messenger for
Life,
bicycling down Sixth Avenue or across Central Park in the moist, hot afternoons, sweating off his teenage weight through streets of softening tar. In August, both Ethel and Betty went to cover the March on Washington, and Henry sat in the apartment, watching the television coverage. He saw the massive statue of Lincoln, just one of the many American landmarks he had never seen in person; this huge white statue staring serenely down on the black-and-white world, with Martin Luther King, Jr., flanked by black men wearing white hats, and people in the crowd seemingly frozen in place, seemingly knowing that it was their job to form a black-and-white blanket over the world. He watched commercials for Crest and Barbie and the new Avanti automobile, aware as if for the first time of the hugeness of the world. He drank a screwdriver, then another. After the third one, he vomited and then fell asleep with his clothes on. The last thing he remembered was that the ceiling looked as if it was porcelain clay, spinning on a potter’s wheel. He left in the morning.

LIKE VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER PERSON of his age or close to it, Henry had read
The Catcher in the Rye
not once but several times. Unlike Ben Terry back at Humphrey, who had started calling everything “phony,” or Bryan Enquist, who had started saying, “If you really want to hear about it” at the beginning of every sentence, or even Stu Stewart, who, while exhibiting a healthy immunity to Holden Caulfield’s language, nonetheless embraced his academic, romantic, anarchic stance, Henry looked down on Holden. He thought he could easily have romanced Sally Hayes, not only off the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink but also right out of her famous “butt-twitcher” of a skating dress. Holden had wrecked it with the girl—simply by being too uncertain. Henry would not make the same mistake. He would find Mary Jane at Wilton, and he would take her with him.

HE CALLED HER HOUSE from a pay phone at the station.

“Can I come see you?” he asked her.

“Well, sure,” she said. “Or I’ll swing by your place later.”

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“I’m not going home,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m not here to go home.”

THE TREES OUTSIDE MARY JANE’S HOUSE were dark and heavy with the lateness of summer leaves. No space opened up between them, and the small front lawn before her house was cool and shadowed.

Henry rang the doorbell, and Mary Jane opened the door and then stepped back inside, letting the screen door hiss back against his hands. She stood at the front hall mirror, putting on lipstick that was a light crayon color: something like Carnation Pink.

Her lips formed a smile, but there was a challenge apparent too.

THIS IS WHAT SHE DIDN’T TELL HIM, and what he wouldn’t understand until much later: She still loved him. She loved his hair, the glint of the light in its layered strands, the darkness of his eyebrows next to the mild green of his eyes. She loved the quickness of his insights and humor, and the way that everyone who met him wanted at once to be the one who pleased him, the one he liked best. She loved how people loved him. But she believed, as perhaps no one else could, that he was incapable of rewarding any one person with the gift they sought from him. True, he might someday choose one of them for marriage. But that wouldn’t change what he held back. What they wanted from him—what Mary Jane herself wanted—was the knowledge that they were different to him, providers of treats and provokers of feelings that no one else could provide or provoke. But Henry never asked for anything: never, apparently, needed any help or any one person.

Mary Jane knew that she held the place as his oldest friend. She suspected that, to others, he might even describe her sometimes as his best friend. The labyrinth of their past unwound behind her—not nearly as complicated as the average person meeting them would have assumed. “Oldest friend” and “best friend” were merely phrases that implied intimacy. They did not reveal how Henry’s voice—easy, now that the muteness was over, affable and confident—remained the same no matter what the subject of the conversation, or to whom he was speaking.

Henry’s world, in Mary Jane’s view, was a democracy of charm, interest, humor, and appreciation. Occasionally, she wondered if it was possible that he actually loved everyone—or no one—equally.

“I’m going to California,” he said. “Marry me and come with me.”

The tiniest dots of perspiration had appeared above her upper lip—tiny and sweet as champagne bubbles.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

  2  
California

On a steamy September morning in 1963, at the Walt Disney Studio in Burbank, California, a seventeen-year-old Henry Gaines sat across a cluttered desk from a cheerful man named Phil Morrow and waited, trying not to let the depth of his nervousness betray him. Morrow flipped the pages of Henry’s portfolio as if he were leafing through a magazine in a dentist’s office. The shiny plastic pages caught reflections of the desk light, whipping past, image after image.

There were three clear steps to being hired as a Disney animator. The first was to have your work viewed, reviewed, and approved by Morrow. The second was to draw solutions to animation problems in a tryout book. And the third was a four-week audition, during which you were given modest assignments and schooled in the Disney methods. After that, you would either be dismissed or offered a job.

Morrow’s office was air-conditioned, and Henry was dressed in a light shirt and khakis, but he could still feel the dampness on his back, as if somebody’s hand was there.

“Nice lines,” Morrow said.

“Thank you.”

Henry straightened up in his chair and twisted slightly, hoping to unstick the shirt from his back. He pulled at the short, sparse hairs of the beard he had spent the last month coaxing into being. Everything of value to him was in this man’s hands. Henry studied the wall behind Morrow’s desk: cels and sketches from past Disney films; some drawings of non-cartoon animals; a set of Mickey Mouse ears suspended from a nail, with small models of other cartoon figures filling each ear, like tiny passengers in tiny twin boats.

“Any formal training?” Morrow said. He didn’t look up as he asked the question, so Henry couldn’t tell what answer he was expecting.

“Yes,” Henry said.

“Any formal training not by mail?”

Henry looked down. “No,” he said.

Morrow left the portfolio open on his desk, lit a cigarette, leaned back in his streamlined blue plastic chair, flapped his tie onto the center of his short-sleeved, buttoned shirt, and proceeded to tell Henry that he would never be getting this chance if it weren’t for
Mary Poppins.
For the last decade or so, Morrow explained, Disney’s films had been mostly live-action, and most of the studio’s animators had been working for the Mouseketeers show, for Disneyland, or for the coming World’s Fair.

Morrow took a long puff of his cigarette, then flicked his ash vaguely toward the garbage can beside his desk.

“But Walt’s been trying to land
Mary Poppins
—as it were—for nearly two decades,” he said. “And now he’s finally got it, he wants to do it with live action
and
animation.”

Without a hint of warning, Morrow dropped his cigarette into a frog-shaped ashtray and reached into his top desk drawer for a hard pink rubber ball. Grinning hugely, he bounced it with force and precision on the floor beside Henry, up onto the office’s rear wall, ceiling, and back into his hand.

Henry laughed in wonder. “How did you do that?”

“Years of practice.”

There was a single, loud thud from the other side of the wall.

“And the deep desire to annoy the hell out of my neighbors.”

“Clearly, that’s working,” Henry said.

Morrow repeated the trick gleefully, this time tipping his chair slightly as he reached to catch the ball.

“Right, then,” he said, putting the ball back into his desk drawer. “We’re arranging a tryout class to start in a few weeks. There would be about ten of you. That’s if you get past the tryout book. Are you game?”

Morrow asked the question casually—asked it as if its asking hadn’t just conferred meaning on Henry’s whole past and, equally, hope for his future.

“I made it?” Henry asked.

“You made it so far,” Morrow said.

With a bit of a flourish, and a definite smile, he now reached onto the wall beside him for an old hand puppet of Pluto. From inside the hand puppet, Morrow withdrew a small key and, with it, unlocked a drawer of his oak file cabinet, from which he extracted a small booklet. He closed the drawer, locked it, and returned the key to the puppet with the same seriousness. Then he handed the booklet to Henry.

“The test is in here,” he said. “I’ll need this back before the end of the week.”

“That’s it?” Henry said.

“That’s it.”

“So I leave now?” Henry said.

Morrow shut Henry’s portfolio with a snap and handed it back across the desk.

“You leave now.”

FOR NEARLY TWO HOURS, Henry walked the paths of the studio, nervous but elated. The sky was a flat, almost heavy, blue, as if it had been painted. The sun was strong. He strolled down Mickey Avenue, turned back to Pluto’s Corner, went the full length of Dopey Drive, then looked up at the Mickey Mouse ears on the top of the water tower, and felt that his real life had started.

“You look like the Goof,” an older man said as he walked past Henry, notebook in hand.

Henry kept grinning. He had absolutely no idea what the man had meant, but he sensed it wasn’t an insult, and that to ask would make him feel he was still an outsider. He never wanted to feel like an outsider here again.

“THE GOOF,” HENRY WOULD eventually discover, was what the old-timers called Goofy. There would be hundreds of things like that to learn. The language, the pranks, the customs, the routine. Walt’s cough. The goldfish in the watercooler. For now, it was merely enough to try to get a sense of the place. The studio was spread out over fifty acres: part factory, part film set, part playground. Walking through its clean, paved streets, Henry Gaines, with his Wilton upbringing, recognized it instinctively as a college campus. There was the same self-containment, the comfortable scale, the sense of leafy safety, and, quite apart from all the buildings where the movies and art were made, there was a commissary, a theater, a gas station, an infirmary, a softball field, and several restaurants.

Two guys he guessed were about his age hurried past him carrying three or four musical instruments apiece.

“You lost?” one of them shouted genially to Henry.

Henry took a deep breath and exhaled. “Nope,” he said.

HE SLID INTO A BOOTH in the studio café. A waitress with cartoon breasts came to take his order. He had a hard time not staring at her.

“New mouse in town?” she asked him.

“Hope so. I’m doing a tryout.”

“They give you the book?”

He showed it to her.

“You’re not going to do it in here, are you?”

“Why not?”

“Well, don’t order anything that squirts or drips,” she said.

He grinned.

“How old are you?” she asked him.

“Almost twenty,” he said.

“Hah.”

“Not almost twenty?”

“You look like you drew that beard on,” she said, and tapped the eraser of her pencil against his jawline, then back onto her order pad. “What’ll you have?” she asked.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE TRYOUT BOOK was to move a cartoon character from one pose to another. In the first drawing, Donald Duck stood on a pitcher’s mound. In the second, he watched a fly ball soar above his head. There might need to be as many as eight drawings in between, and in fact, the position for which Henry was applying was known as in-betweener. In-betweeners were considered animators, but just barely. They didn’t invent characters or create backgrounds or come up with story points or even bits of business. Their job was merely to fill in: Donald eyes the hitter, then looks over his left shoulder. Donald raises his right leg, then lowers it. Donald torques his body, then releases the ball. Point A to Point B, Point B to Point C. Basic. An in-betweener’s job would put Henry on the bottom of the ladder—just above the lowly inkers and painters who were known as “the girls.”

Henry understood from the moment he picked up his pencil that he would have no problem with this. It took him only till dessert—a slice of warm apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream—to decide on his strategy, and by the time the waitress brought him the check, he had made the first of his sketches and learned that her name was Cindy. Two hours later, he was back in Morrow’s office, basking in Morrow’s surprise at his speed; watching, this time with both pride and terror, as the pages of his work were turned.

“Natural-born Duck Man,” Morrow said.

“I’m going to hope that’s a good thing,” Henry said.

Morrow smiled. “Well, you’ve got your tryout,” he said—and for a moment, Henry thought he could almost see those words, soaring around the ceiling, not unlike a ribbon of Disney bluebirds.

————

HENRY FOUND A ROOM in a hotel apartment complex called the Tuxedo. It was located on the improbably named South Sparkle Street, which was ten long blocks from the studio. By bicycle, it took him fifteen minutes.

The Tuxedo had stucco walls, both inside and out, a number of large potted palm trees drooping slightly in the entryway, a pool that seemed never to be used or skimmed, and a faint but constant odor of raw fish. Henry’s apartment was a poorly lighted studio, a box just thirty feet by thirty feet. It had a full-size bed, a desk chair, a desk, a bureau, and a kitchenette in which every appliance was at most half its customary size. There was one large and terrible landscape painting above the bed, which Henry took down and put at the back of the closet. Even with the bare walls, the dim light, and the briny smell, Henry considered it by far the best place he had ever lived.

Over that first weekend, he shaved his beard, bought ties and short-sleeved, button-down shirts, and the first pots, pans, dishes, towels, and sheets he’d ever gotten to choose for himself.

WORK HAD BEGUN ON
Mary Poppins
long before Henry arrived at Disney, so there was already the bustle and flow of a studio in full swing. Henry loved the way people were always rushing around with items that, juxtaposed in any other context, would have seemed totally perplexing: a cage full of rabbits, a rolling shelf of cymbals and drums, ballet skirts, large sheets of tin, a golf shoe. It was a world in which it seemed that the real purpose of all things was to be transformed into other things.

The live action for
Mary Poppins
was being filmed on every one of the studio’s soundstages. The animation, as usual, was being done on the main floor of the Animation Building, a three-story, double-H-shaped mini-factory that could hold up to nine hundred artists at a time.

The more senior the animator, the closer he sat to a north-facing window and thus to the best available light. The room to which Henry was assigned was a large bullpen and had virtually no natural light at all. But every man had his own desk, complete with a strong lamp, a large wooden drawing board, and a mirror in which to pose the expressions that he was trying to capture. It was not unusual to walk into the room and encounter a row of mirrored faces trying out sadness, levity, shock, awe, confusion, rage: as distinctive and outlandish as a row of Snow White’s dwarfs.

There were nine other men with Henry in this bullpen, and when they were not feigning cartoon emotions, they were trying to conceal their real ones. Some of them had professional experience; others had degrees from three-dimensional art schools; all of them wanted the job, and though they’d been told that in theory all of them might be hired, they understood how unlikely that was. They tried, despite this, to project a sense of calm. Much had been made to them, even on the first day, about the studio’s spirit of collaboration, about how the Old Man couldn’t stand petty politics and had always insisted the artists learn from one another. Henry figured there would be time for happy collaboration later. For now, even if quietly, he sought every advantage.

On his third evening of the tryout, for example, Henry decided to attend the weekly drawing class taught by a Disney veteran named Mark Harburg. The classes were three hours long and were open to all current animators and would-be in-betweeners. They were held in a vast, barnlike room, where easels, huge rolls of paper, and several alarming human skeletons stood in shadow around the periphery, and a model—waiting for the class to begin—stood on a raised, well-lighted platform in the middle, wearing nothing but a man’s cardigan. Artists’ benches, each made of smooth wood, formed a large square around her. Henry scanned the room and tried not to stare at the model for fear of seeming unprofessional. None of the other would-be in-betweeners had come. But he noticed a sort of swagger as the other men took their places; they came into the studio joking loudly, and they swung their legs over the benches, mounting them as if they were steeds.

“Five-minute poses,” Harburg said. “This is Annie. Pencil or charcoal. Go.”

Annie took the cardigan off and tossed it to Harburg. She had a pale, thin, but muscular body whose only apparent imperfection was a disparity in the size of her breasts. She was young, with short, fine auburn hair; blank, gray eyes; and an eerie, Sphinx-like face. Neither shy nor proud, she struck her first pose, putting her left hand on her left shoulder and her right hand on her right hip. Henry spent the first thirty seconds of the pose just trying to fight the enthusiastic chaos of longing that she had provoked in him. He tried to concentrate on her eyes for a moment, and then was flustered to realize that the artists on either side of him were drawing quick sketches of her body, ignoring her face completely.

Harburg, meanwhile, walked slowly around the benches, leaning in over one man’s shoulder to point out something on his pad. His threatened approach only made Henry more nervous. But then Harburg looked at his watch.

“Next pose,” he said, and Henry was relieved to turn to a fresh page.

Annie twisted her torso this time, as if she had just been startled by something behind her. Henry sketched. Four lines. Five. The arc of her back. Henry knew he could draw—as long as someone told him what to draw—and here was the assignment: Draw this woman; make her real. She bent her right knee. There was a dimple on her backside, where the buttock met the thigh. Henry sketched, and the familiar habit took over: the habit of putting one line after another, adding a shadow, shaping a curve, bringing this thing into being; there was the compulsion, once it was started, to finish—and this kept him from feeling intimidated by the other artists. He sketched. She bent over. He sketched. She reached up. It was apparent from this pose that she had a scar just under her left breast; it was a dime-size indentation that even at this distance seemed to radiate pain.