The Irresistible Henry House

by Lisa Grunwald

  Henry, on the blanket, had been laughing with Ethel and had tumbled over, falling mirthfully in his red pajamas into a soft blue silk throw pillow. When he finally crept forward on his elbows and managed to raise his head back up, he found Ethel gone and Ruby in her place. For a moment, he stared the way grown people do at a magic act, right before they applaud. Then he started screaming.

  He made pained, puncturing sounds, the kind that animals make, the kind that scream emergency, outrage, catastrophe. Ruby, reaching down for him; and Ethel, on her way to his baby journal; even Martha, who knew better than to be alarmed—all stopped as if ordered to do so. Then they converged on Henry.

  “What did you do?” Martha asked Ruby.

  Ruby looked just as startled, and nearly as tearful, as Henry. “I don’t know!” she cried. “I don’t think I did anything!”

  “You must have done something,” Ethel said.

  “I just bent down to pick him up.”

  Henry’s screams had risen beyond the beastly and transformed themselves into something almost mechanical—a siren, an alarm, constant and unstoppable.

  Martha regained her composure, mortified by the thought that she’d been shaken, however briefly, by this outburst from a baby. Every child-care expert she respected believed that it was wrong to indulge such behavior. Every House baby she’d cared for had had to be broken at some point. And, far from damaging them in any way, the process seemed to calm the babies down, at least eventually.

  “Oh, Mrs. Gaines,” Ruby began, making a move toward Henry.

  “Don’t even think,” Martha said, “of picking up that child.”

  Ruby looked to Ethel, as if for a reprieve. Ethel, for her part, looked to Martha, who turned with military precision and walked toward the living room. The baby screamed. The girls sagged and stared.

  A MOMENT LATER, Martha was sitting in the living room, serene and expectant, her legs crossed at the ankles, a book already open to the page she wanted.

  “Have a seat,” she told Ethel and Ruby, above Henry’s cries and the girls’ bewilderment.

  “Mrs. Gaines,” Ruby began again.

  “You’ve all just been handling him too much,” Martha said, and then she read from her favorite child-care book, the one by John B. Watson:

  “‘The mother picks the infant up, kisses and hugs it, rocks it, pets it and calls it “mother’s little lamb,” until the child is unhappy and miserable whenever away from actual physical contact with the mother.

  “‘When you are tempted to pet your child,’” Martha read, “‘remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound.’”

  In the nursery, Henry was asleep, a patch of spit-up milk darkening the front of his red pajamas, his face slick, drained of all color, and, in slumber, seemingly without life.

  IN THE FIRST WEEK OF DECEMBER, during her second tour as practice mother, Beatrice let Henry nap with the windows wide open, then took him out for his afternoon walk without a sweater or hat. The cold he caught was a lulu, and though caring for a sick baby was an inevitable part of the lesson plan, Beatrice proved no more adept in her nursing than she had been in her regular ministrations. She slept through one of Henry’s doses of eardrops, and she was so awkward with the nasal syringe that Martha had to take pity on the baby and do the job herself.

  She was, as it happened, sitting with Henry in the bathroom, hoping the steam from the shower would unclog his chest and nose, when Beatrice pounded on the door.

  “There’s a visitor,” she called.

  “A visitor,” Martha said to Henry, mimicking Beatrice’s awed tone of voice.

  Beatrice pounded again, and Martha turned off the shower, just as Henry began to cry.

  “Just a moment,” Martha called.

  Beatrice opened the door. The steam instantly engulfed her, and she looked terrified.

  Martha took a tissue and wiped the streams of mucus from Henry’s nose and mouth. She stepped past Beatrice and then saw President Gardner standing at the end of the hallway, framed like a guard in a tower.

  He was a stout man with bushy eyebrows and a beaked nose and, in Martha’s experience, an always slightly irritated air, as if he had spent his whole life waiting to hear something just a little more brilliant than whatever anyone said. As far as Martha could remember, he had never set foot in the practice house.

  “Mrs. Gaines,” he intoned above Henry’s whimpers. His voice was a low and elegant hum.

  “Dr. Gardner,” she said. “This is—How nice to see you.”

  Beatrice, her hair even more electric than usual because of the steam, started off toward the kitchen.

  “Beatrice,” Martha said sternly. She handed Henry to her, despite his wailing, his filthy face, his fever, her love.

  “What was wrong with the little fellow?” Dr. Gardner asked, after Beatrice had wafted away down the hall.

  “A terrible cold,” Martha said. “I’m afraid he needed a little extra attention from me.”

  “A cold?” Dr. Gardner said. “Isn’t he rather young for a cold?”

  It was a stupid question, but that didn’t startle Martha. The few men she’d known had always asked stupid questions about babies.

  “Babies are always susceptible to colds if they’re not being breastfed,” she said matter-of-factly, and watched, with some vague satisfaction, as a flush of embarrassment crossed Dr. Gardner’s face.

  SHE OFFERED HIM TEA, which he declined. Instead, he lit a cigar and settled by the fireplace in one of the living room chairs. He chatted about the Nuremberg trials, and about the board of trustees, which had just announced its plans to endow a chair in the Department of Psychology. The whole time, Martha’s mind raced with possible scenarios. He had come to tell her she was being fired. She was being tenured. He had come to ask her to give a presentation to the trustees. To alter her curriculum. Her methods. Her décor.

  When, after fifteen minutes, he stood up and walked down the hall toward the nursery, Martha was reminded of Betty on her first day in the practice house: those exact same strides, that same odor of entitlement.

  “Dr. Gardner, can I help you with something else?” Martha asked, following him.

  “No, I just want to see where the baby sleeps.”

  “Where he sleeps?”

  “Sleeps. Plays. Crawls. What have you.”

  “You want a tour?” Martha asked, still surprised.

  “Perhaps the student I just met will do the honors,” he said, and it was not a request but a command.

  IT WOULD REMAIN UNCLEAR TO MARTHA for weeks what Dr. Gardner had been looking for, but something told her that it would be unwise to question Beatrice too closely about what, if anything, he had asked her. If the president’s real purpose had been to confirm either new or old accusations about Martha, then she didn’t want her questioning to be construed as insecurity.

  Even two hours after the president left, the smell of his cigar hung thickly in the air.

  ————

  HENRY DIDN’T RECOVER FULLY from his cold until nearly a week later, and it was only then, with an attentive Betty on hand for her second stint in the practice house, that Martha decided it was safe to go into town to do her Christmas errands.

  It was a Tuesday morning, still just the second week in December, but Martha hated to fall behind on tasks that could be done in advance.

  Wearing rubber boots in case of snow, she walked the red-brick streets from the campus into town. The market had the new Green Stamps catalogue, just in time for the holiday season, and Martha picked one up at the counter, then moved on to the Spring Street church, where the annual manger scene filled the front lawn. Martha paused before it, wondering if the sheep and goats had been repainted, or if they just looked more vibrant because of the bright sun. The gold on the wings of the angel caught the light, and even the Baby Jesus seemed to have a pinker pair of lips. Jesus was nearly as big as Henry, his arms and legs chubby and outstretch
ed, and his eyes wide open and smiling. Martha didn’t think any newborn would look like that, but she realized, not for the first time, that she had never seen a newborn. Not any practice house baby. Not even her own.

  Around the corner at the post office, Martha bought a page of Christmas Seals. At Hamilton’s Hardware, two blocks down, she readjusted her scarf when Arthur Hamilton told her he liked its colors, and she ogled the signs for the latest household wonder: a new Hoover that was said to vacuum up twice the dust in less than half the time. At the toy store, Martha stood by the window, admiring the new train display; it had grown less elaborate with each Christmas of the war, but now, with peace blooming, it was exuberant with fresh cotton snowdrifts, a well-frosted church, and new fir trees. For a moment, Martha tried to imagine what Henry would be like when he was old enough to play with trains like these, and then she thought again of her stillborn child, and then of her lost marriage, and then, banishing the thoughts from her mind, she needlessly pushed at the vertices between the leather-gloved fingers of first one and then the other hand.

  ————

  “HE’S GOING TO BE AN ARTIST, I just know it,” Betty said as Martha stepped into the kitchen that afternoon.

  Henry, his hands covered with applesauce, had smeared large circles onto the tray top of the wooden high chair, and he was now busily smacking the centers of them, as if they were rain puddles.

  “An artist!” Martha said, putting her bags on the counter.

  “Picasso! Rembrandt! Look at how he uses his hands!”

  Martha wanted to pick Henry up. She wanted to nuzzle him, to rock him, to feel the perfect fit, the weird completion, in the moment when Henry’s hands found their way to the nape of her neck. Martha wanted to carry him in a perpetual embrace, to have those tiny arms seek and choose her shoulders, her cheeks, her nose. Momentarily frozen by the desire, she stared at Henry, unmoving, until Betty finally looked up and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll clean him up.” Martha nodded. She gathered up her roll of Green Stamps, her new catalogue, and her Christmas Seals. “All six-month-olds use their hands,” she said to Betty. “That’s the main thing six-month-olds do.”

  “Ga!” Henry shouted, and Martha forced herself to go upstairs.

  IN THE EVENING, she sat at her desk, listened to her tabletop Philco, wrote notes on her Christmas cards, and neatly affixed the Christmas Seals. This year, the seals had a bright blue backdrop framing the image of a lamplighter. They were the perfect match for Perry Como’s hit about the old lamplighter who leaves the lamps dark for all the courting couples:

  For he recalls when dreams were new,

  He loved someone who loved him, too…

  Martha’s Christmas card list was not terribly long. Other than two cousins in Santa Anita whom she’d only met once, she had no family. Her father had died a decade before, and her mother a decade before that. There were no siblings, no surviving aunts or uncles. The list was mostly made up of Martha’s fellow faculty members—her colleagues in the home economics program, her neighbors at the Wilton Nursery School, Irena Stahl at the orphanage, and of course Dean Swift and President Gardner. There were a few former students with whom she’d stayed in touch, but if two years passed without them sending cards in return, she would automatically remove their names from her list. Her father had impressed on her years before the sin of wasted effort.

  If Dean Swift and President Gardner had not welcomed her back, Martha thought, how many Christmas cards would she be sending out now? And from what tiny, barren rented room would she be addressing the envelopes? She tried to calm herself by remembering that at forty-eight, she was still not too old to seek a new job. Wilton College, however, was the only place where she’d ever worked.

  The house was so quiet tonight that she could hear Betty turning the pages of her book in the bedroom below. And once, she heard Henry let out a sound, like a laugh, in his sleep. Still at her desk, Martha moved on to the trading stamps, using a sponge to wet them and then pasting them tidily into a book. “Would you throw money away?” she had often asked her students when they grumbled about having to paste in the stamps. She would point proudly to the practice house toaster, the new electric coffeepot, and the brass-tipped fireplace tools by way of showing them what a little time spent pasting could buy.

  Martha paused to look around her room. The wood floor, with its wide, warm boards the color of a cello; the tall windows that framed the campus’s tall trees; the wainscoting on the walls; and the photos, and the mementos—these last, it was true, would come with her if she was ever forced to go. But how—and where—would she ever find any new ones?

  Sometimes—in the rare moments when she had Henry all to her-self—she would let him put his arms around her neck, and she would whisper to him, “Hold tight.” Now, sensing change like a scent in the air, she heard the words in her own mind, just as clearly and firmly as if she were talking to him. Hold tight.

  CHRISTMAS FELL ON a Wednesday. All the girls would be going home for the holiday. So on the Saturday before they took off, they gathered at the practice house for their own practice Christmas.

  Martha gave Henry a red fire truck, her standard gift for practice house boys. Beatrice had knitted him a stocking with an H that sagged dramatically across the top. Ruby had crocheted him a bright red sweater using yarn that had been sheared and dyed on her parents’ farm. The rest of the girls gave presents that suggested their own expectations of Henry, or perhaps their own views of themselves. Betty gave him a set of finger paints and a box of crayons. Connie gave him books. Ethel gave him a silly pull-toy dog on a little string leash. And Grace, who had the most money, gave him a miniature white piano that even Mozart would have been years away from being able to play.

  When they had all opened their gifts for him, Henry sat on the rug next to the Christmas tree and, ignoring each of the actual presents, chewed merrily on the plastic lid of a box that had held Christmas cookie sprinkles. After a while, Grace sat beside him on the rug and plinked out “White Christmas” on the little piano, and Henry grinned, allowing a mouthful of saliva to drop onto the rug.

  Surrounded by his seven mothers, only one of whom had tried to conceal the wish that her gift—and her arms—would be chosen above all others, Henry sat in his red sweater, plump and passionate, like a tiny Santa Claus himself, and looked from one to another of them, as if trying to figure out what he should give to whom.

  4

  Give Me the Baby, Dear

  Two weeks later, Martha heard the news from Ruby—that Betty had finally received a letter. From the somber tone in Ruby’s voice, Martha could only assume that this would have to be the letter.

  “When did it come?” Martha asked Ruby.

  Henry was in the nursery, taking his nap, and Ruby was helping Martha take down the Christmas tree ornaments.

  “I think it was just this morning,” Ruby said.

  “Did you see Betty yourself?”

  “No. I saw Beatrice in town on our walk,” Ruby said.

  Martha knew it was unkind, but she couldn’t help feeling angry that her whole routine and the house’s routine—and the whole routine of the college, for that matter—would be thrown off by the inevitable bustle and sadness over Betty’s husband’s death. There would be a memorial service, of course. And compulsory condolence visits to Dr. Gardner’s house. Maybe even a plaque or portrait at some point. And there would be Betty herself, whose needs would now come before anyone else’s.

  Martha had seen Betty’s husband only once—about two years before—the week he had come back on leave, when he and Betty had stopped to see her father briefly just before he shipped out again. To Martha, he had looked odd then, like an undernourished Popeye, with a goofy, slightly uneven face. He was still young enough to be wearing—like tiny badges—bits of tissue on the places where he’d cut himself shaving.

  Martha sighed as she took a wrapped ornament from Ruby and tucked it into a corner of the hatbox in which she kept the most del
icate of the Christmas decorations. She wondered why it was that her own husband couldn’t have died valiantly, guaranteeing not only his martyrdom but hers as well. “Poor Martha,” people would have said, the way they had already spent the year saying “Poor Betty.” And everything she did, or tried, would have been construed as courageous. Yes, Betty had lost her young husband. But at least she would have good wishes, sad smiles, and all of her future before her. And she would have her father’s help and protection. That couldn’t hurt much, either.

  The real courage, Martha was starting to believe, was going on when no one cared if you went on or not.

  “Mrs. Gaines?” Ruby was asking from her perch at the top of the stepladder. She was trying to liberate a string of cranberries from the highest branches of the Christmas tree, and the challenge was clearly unnerving her. “Can you give me a hand, Mrs. Gaines?” Ruby asked.

  “We throw the cranberries out with the tree,” Martha said abruptly, her anger surprising them both. “You’ve been studying home economics for more than three months now, Ruby. Surely you would have learned that if you keep berries in a hatbox for a year you can expect them to rot.”

  Stung by Martha’s tone, Ruby let go of the strand and looked down from her tangled heights. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gaines. I was just trying to—”

  “Yes,” Martha said, and, distracted, walked into the kitchen, still carrying a striped crystal bell.

  In the kitchen, she stood by the stove, looked down at the green and white checked linoleum tiles, and tried to govern her feelings. Then, unexpectedly, Betty was at the back door, her face slick with tears and hurt, which made her look even younger than usual.

  “Is he still asleep?” she asked as she barged into the kitchen and jostled Martha. The bell in Martha’s hand dropped and broke, melodically, on the pristine floor.

  With barely a glance at the ground, Betty was already heading down the corridor to Henry’s room, the soles of her brown and white saddle shoes squeaking on the warped wooden floor.