The Irresistible Henry House (27 page)

Henry left the Animation Building and wandered over the studio grounds. He found himself hoping to see Annie. He didn’t find her, nor did he find Cindy when he stopped at the coffee shop. Lots of people had gone home already. The front gate was deserted. There was a hush over the whole place, as if a director had just called “Action!” But the only actions were listening, and crying, and comforting.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG THAT NIGHT, Henry knew that it would be Martha, but for some reason it didn’t bother him.

“Oh, Hanky,” he heard her say.

“Hi, Emem.”

It had to have been years since he had called her that.

“Isn’t it awful?” she said.

“How’s everyone taking it there?”

“Oh, well, you know. These girls. Who knows what they think about?”

“They weren’t upset?”

“Well, only one of them was around when it happened, and she hightailed it out of here pretty fast.”

“So it’s just been you and the baby?”

“The baby. Yes,” Martha said.

To Henry, she sounded almost unbearably old. An old woman, sitting almost alone in an old, almost empty house.

“Is there something else, Emem?” he asked her.

There was a brief silence, which Henry knew could mean either surprise or calculation.

“I’m losing my job,” she said.

“You’re what?”

“I’m losing my job.”

“My grandfather
fired
you?” Henry asked, incredulous.

“No.”

“What then?”

“He’s retiring. Well, no,” she said bitterly. “He’s being made to retire.”

“What does that have to do with you?”

“The new president,” Martha said. “She doesn’t
believe
in home economics. She’s one of
those
women.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“She says I’m old-fashioned, and out of touch. As if it will ever be old-fashioned to know how to care for a baby!”

Henry had a mental image of the line of practice house baby journals, their pages of photographs fading.

Mildred Fairfax made me this hat!

He sank into one of the two chairs by the table, took a pad and paper, and started to sketch. As he listened to Martha, he drew simple shapes. Circles and squares, triangles and rectangles. A round hat. A rectangular crib.

“If only you could come home for Thanksgiving,” Martha said.

He drew the Bird Woman from
Mary Poppins,
sitting on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, feeding the birds. The Bird Woman was Martha.

Listen, listen, she’s calling to you.

CLOUDS CAME AND WENT, and on Saturday the wind blew up. Henry walked to the food market. Plants and shrubs bent and twisted and tried to dance, but the palm trees remained stoic. Behind every open door and window was a working radio or television. Several bags filled with old newspapers had tumbled over on one of the side streets, and beside them were a discarded, seatless chair and an old electric fan, whose blades rotated with furious fake life.

Like almost everyone else in the country, Henry spent the rest of the day, and the next day, watching television. The world had altered. Reporters kept speaking about Mrs. Kennedy’s pink suit; the green, grassy knoll; the red roses; the blue sky; the blood. But the world once again was in black and white. There was the black of the two-inch-high newspaper headlines: KENNEDY SLAIN, KENNEDY DEAD, and, bizarrely, in the
Los Angeles Times:
ASSASSINATE KENNEDY. There was the black and white and gray of television, broadcasting continuously, with all entertainment programs canceled. Cameras showed crowds standing across the street from the Dallas County Jail, shades of gray under a gray sign for a restaurant speciously called Victoria’s Purple Orchid.
Life
magazine published an issue with its famous red logo printed in black.

The assassin’s name was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald, like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was Walt Disney’s first cartoon character, a forerunner of Mickey Mouse himself. Henry wondered where Walt was now, what he was thinking about his wonderful world. No one had seen him the day of the shooting; he was supposedly in Florida, checking out land for some new project.

On Sunday, Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald on television. Kennedy was laid in state, saluted, prayed for, and walked to his grave with a skittish, riderless horse. On Monday, stores were closed, and businesses only limped back to life as the week went on. On Wednesday, Henry used approximately half of everything he’d ever saved to buy a plane ticket home.

THE MOMENT THAT HENRY SAW MARTHA, he knew that he shouldn’t have come. He understood—from the force of her hug, the moistness in her eyes, the slight tremor in her hands as she brushed nothing from his shoulder—that there was no way to quiet her need. He had flown across the country—a grueling trip—and would have to return after only two days. But this was not a gift; instead it was an excuse, a platform from which she would ask him for more. On the phone, Martha had said
If only you could come home for Thanksgiving,
and the implied end of the sentence had been:
then I would be happy; then I would feel better; then I might have the strength to make things turn out all right.

Instead, the real statement should have been:
If only you could come home for Thanksgiving, then I could show you in person how much I need you.

She went through the motions of trying to treat him like a man. She didn’t flinch when he lit a cigarette. She offered him wine with dinner.

“What’s it like out there?” she asked him, but even that simple question seemed to Henry an imposition, an unexpected and unwanted insinuation of herself into his world. He thought of his palm trees, strong and solitary. He thought of his apartment.

“It’s nice,” he said.

“Do you have a lot of friends?” she asked.

“At work,” he said. “Great bunch of guys.”

“Any special girl?” she asked him, somewhat coquettishly. He thought of Cindy’s breasts, and Fiona’s legs, and Annie’s sweetness.

“No,” he said. “No special girl.”

“Maybe you’ll want to see Mary Jane,” Martha said.

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t realize how much he wanted to until she appeared the next morning at the back door.

SHE HAD GOTTEN SKINNY in the months since she’d called his proposal ridiculous. A pair of bell-bottom jeans sat low on her hips, held up by a wide leather belt. She had her hair in a kerchief.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said ironically.

“Yah.”

“Why’d you come?”

“Martha,” he said.

“Are they canning her?”

“It looks that way.”

“Good boy for coming, then. Are you going to talk to your grandfather?”

“He got canned too,” Henry said. “It won’t make any difference.”

“You should do it anyway,” Mary Jane said.

They stood awkwardly by the old tree swing.

“Where were you when you heard?” she asked him.

He could sense in her the pain that he knew he should have felt more deeply.

“At work,” Henry said. “What about you?”

“I was on my way home.”

“Home? From where?”

“From college.”

“I thought you were going to college here.”

“Why would I go to college here?”

“Well, where are you going to college?”

Mary Jane paused a moment, then quietly said: “Berkeley.”

Henry tried to let this register. He stared into her one eye.

“Berkeley,” he said. “You’ve been in California the whole time I’ve been in California?”

“Well, it’s only been a few months for both of us,” she said.

So it was not just that she hadn’t wanted to marry him, he thought. She hadn’t even wanted to see him, though she had been just a few hours away. Henry’s face must have registered, equally, his hurt and his determination to conquer it.

“I didn’t know how to reach you,” Mary Jane said.

“You could have tried the studio.”

“I didn’t know if you’d gotten a job there.”

That hadn’t stopped Martha, Henry thought, but immediately was embarrassed by thinking it.

He left Mary Jane standing in the yard where they had met in their childhoods: ice blond hair, red Keds, blood, Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse, when there could be only one Miss Fancy.

“Henry,” she called after him. “Let’s talk about it,” she said, but he pretended not to hear her.

MARTHA HAD A PLAN. That fact did not surprise him, but the extent of its impracticality did.

Over turkey dinner that night—brilliantly cooked, he would always give her that—she told Henry that the new president was considering two possible uses for the practice house: a residence for visiting alumnae, and a new fund-raising office. But Martha had a third idea: to turn the place into an art studio.

“We could have a darkroom in the bathroom upstairs,” she told Henry. “The kitchen would be perfect for all the paints and supplies. The light in the living room would be ideal for sketching and painting, and we could turn the baby’s room into a studio for you.”

“For me?” Henry asked.

“Yes. You see, if you ran the whole thing, then maybe we could go on living upstairs.”

HENRY HAD NO MEMORY of his grandfather’s residence. In the few times they had met outside the practice house, the location had always been Dr. Gardner’s office, where the presence of his secretary had perhaps justified the formality of his tone.

Now Henry stood in the living room, unaware that it was the place where he had long ago served up make-believe cookies and drawn patterns in the beige carpet. Dr. Gardner was in the midst of packing his things to move out, however, so the carpet had been rolled up; and the floor, newly uncovered, looked fresher than anything else in the place. The walls were bare and pockmarked; the bookshelves were nearly empty.

He looked old and slightly translucent, but his appearance stirred no emotion in Henry, who had long since lost any hope or interest in following the connection that their bloodlines might have suggested. For his part, Dr. Gardner eyed Henry as he always had: with a strange, awkward mixture of curiosity and fear.

“You’ve come to talk with me about Mrs. Gaines, I assume,” Dr. Gardner said.

“Yes.”

“Have a seat. I’d offer you a cup of coffee, but I’m fairly sure the china has already been packed.”

There were still two upholstered armchairs, one on either side of the fireplace, but neither man sat.

“What’s going to happen to her?” Henry asked.

“You’re concerned?”

“Of course I’m concerned,” Henry said.

“I don’t think you’ve ever expressed your concern before,” Dr. Gardner said.

“She’s never been about to lose her job before,” Henry said.

Dr. Gardner walked over to one of the windows and thoughtfully, almost lovingly, ran a hand down one of the drapes. “I want to ask you a question before I answer yours,” he said.

“What?”

“Are you concerned about Mrs. Gaines because you care about her, or because you don’t want to have to care for her?”

“I want to know what’s going to happen to her.”

“I honestly don’t know,” the president said. “It’s not up to me anymore.”

“You’re telling me you have absolutely no influence on the new administration? You can’t help protect anyone?”

“Not even myself, apparently,” he said with self-pity.

“So Martha is just going to be fired?” Henry asked.

“No one wants a practice house program,” Dr. Gardner said impatiently. “This is 1963. Haven’t you heard? Women want to be liberated from all that.”

“She has this idea that she could go on living there if it became an art studio,” Henry said.

Dr. Gardner shook his head. “That’ll never fly,” he said. “Never. The best I can do is to try to persuade them to let her keep a room upstairs. And I was planning on doing that anyway.”

Dr. Gardner reached into his inside breast pocket for a leather case, from which he extracted a cigar. Henry noticed that his hand was shaking.

“One more thing,” Dr. Gardner said, and Henry turned back to see him scratch at the corner of his mouth with a shaking index finger.

“What is it?” Henry asked.

“Your mother,” he said. “Have you heard anything from your mother?”

“No,” Henry said, immediately debating whether to ask the next question. “Have you?” he finally said.

“No,” Dr. Gardner said, a pained look crossing his face. “I guess she’s given us both up,” he said, which was the closest he had ever come, or ever would, to acknowledging that Henry and he were related.

————

MARY JANE APPEARED on Saturday morning and insisted she drive Henry to the station.

“I’ve got a taxi coming,” he said.

“Oh, Henry. Come on. So I didn’t tell you I was going to Berkeley. Let’s call it even, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “We’re even.”

She looked away, and when she looked back, Henry could see that she was crying. Her nose was red, and tears ran from her good eye. “Does your other eye cry?” Henry asked her.

“What?”

“Does your other eye cry?”

The question was so ridiculous, so inappropriate to the moment, that Mary Jane stared at him, and then they both burst out laughing.

BACK AT THE STUDIO, there was a major push to complete
Mary Poppins.
The opening was supposed to be in August of 1964, and there was still far too much to be done. A new class of in-betweeners had been hired, and both Henry and Chris took deliberate pleasure in watching their relative inexperience. The hours of the working days changed, so that there were weekend and evening shifts as well. In February, Henry was switched from the penguin waiters to Jane’s pink carousel horse, and then, in March, to the bouquet of Mary’s flowers that turned into butterflies.

Throughout the spring, Henry worked longer hours than he ever had and spent less time with the women. Fiona understood, because at the Nunnery, she was equally busy. Annie was hurt, and Cindy was outright angry.

“You’re not the guy I thought you were,” she complained to him on a night in late May when they’d spent the evening in bed and he had gotten dressed to go home.

“I’m not the guy anyone thinks I am,” he said.