The Irresistible Henry House

by Lisa Grunwald

  She could hear Henry fussing downstairs now, as he often did when he was with Connie, who remained the most indulgent and least effective of his mothers. It was heartbreaking to overhear them sometimes, especially his crying, which was the simple result of Connie’s having given in to his crying before. If a child knew that crying would get him attention, the child cried. If a child knew that crying didn’t work, the child stopped crying. She supposed Dr. Spock would say the crying meant he should be picked up. But Martha’s teaching depended on believing that a child was something to manage, not to be managed by. She read:

  Every time you pick your baby up, even if you do it a little awkwardly at first, every time you change him, bathe him, feed him, smile at him, he’s getting a feeling that he belongs to you and that you belong to him.

  Belonging, Martha thought. Since when did belonging matter?

  THE MEETING ROOM AT MATSON was warm and wood-paneled, glittery with old silver and good crystal. Everything was perfect, the tea cakes laid out symmetrically, the doilies fresh, the tablecloths not overly starched. It was exactly what one would expect at a convocation of domestic experts, and the undergraduates who were serving were eager and polite. The mood was festive. Like other areas of American life, academia had found new energy since the end of the war, and in her welcoming speech, the president of the National Association of Child Experts virtually exulted at the convention’s unprecedented number of participants.

  Over the next two days, Martha took part in seminars on toys, influenza, and finger painting. She attended lectures on speech development, toilet training, and genetics. Sitting in a darkened lecture hall, enveloped by the slightly burnt smell of the Kodaslide projector and the wheezes and clicks of the dropped slides, she looked on, utterly engrossed. She felt, at once and all over again, that these subjects and systems mattered. The use of schedules. The maintenance of charts. The parsing of children’s needs and impulses. She glanced down the row of rapt women, whose gold Omicron Nu pins gleamed identically from their necklaces and lapels. The home economics society had never meant more to her, and amid the comfort of note taking, she had to admit to herself that she had allowed Henry to blur her focus. What was the practice house, after all, if it wasn’t a testament to the belief that women could replace the mysteries of child rearing with mastery?

  For a moment, Henry became not the child she had always wanted, or even the one she was trying so hard not to love, but rather the tenth of ten children whom she had started on their way. She conjured a mental picture of the baby journals on her shelves, and the children they represented, raised according to time-tested methods. Methods that women had trusted, long before they’d been set loose by Benjamin Spock to trust themselves.

  RUMORS AND UPDATES of Dr. Spock’s whereabouts preceded his movements around the Matson campus. Wilton had had its share of famous visitors too, but Martha could not remember any who’d been received with such giddy enthusiasm. She did not get to see Spock’s face until late the last afternoon, when, along with the approximately forty heads of child-care programs, she attended the most selective seminar of the weekend.

  Sitting at an enormous conference table just a half dozen seats from the famous doctor, she found it hard to look at him. There was an intense kind of solicitousness about him, as if he was so used to listening to people’s symptoms that he viewed all statements made to him as clues to something else. Martha didn’t want to be analyzed. She didn’t want to be diagnosed.

  “Has that been your experience?” he kept asking when people made their opinions known. There was nothing even slightly nasty in the way he asked the question, but somehow it still seemed to be an accusation.

  Spock was disarmingly modest. He appeared to be almost shyly surprised by the success of his book, whose very “Trust Yourself” message seemed so self-effacing. He was the anti-expert: Some Midwest common sense, some reasonable rules, some sensible behavior, and children would be just fine.

  “So what do you say to Holt and Watson about baby’s schedule of feedings and eliminations?” one woman asked.

  “Well, different things may work for different types of children,” the doctor answered congenially. “In my experience, it causes more harm than good to try to keep children to strict schedules.”

  “Is there anything, then, that you disapprove of in an infant?” another woman asked.

  Spock smiled benignly. “Well, let me ask you this,” he said. “What infant behaviors do you find objectionable?”

  “Thumb sucking,” Martha said. She hadn’t realized she was going to speak until the words were out of her mouth. The women at the table all turned in her direction, like the members of a choir looking for their cue.

  “It’s a dreadful habit,” Martha continued, “and apart from the fact that it’s unsightly and unsanitary, it can do permanent damage to the teeth and the jawline.”

  “Is it safe to assume, then, that you subscribe to traditional methods to deter this?” Dr. Spock asked.

  “Yes,” Martha said.

  “And may I ask which of them you have found to be most effective?”

  “Well, it varies from child to child,” Martha said, aware that several of the women were now looking at her exactly as they would if she had just stepped onto a train track at the commuter hour. Her hand moved nervously to adjust her scarf and necklace, but she overcame the impulse. “Sometimes,” she continued, “I’ve found it effective to be vigilant about offering a toy as a distraction. Sometimes I’ll combine that with bandaging the thumb, or putting on a scratchy mitten. In the most extreme cases, I’ve employed a celluloid cuff.”

  She watched some of the participants look down, as if in pity.

  “And please don’t all of you pretend you haven’t done the same,” Martha said. “This has been the accepted practice among educated child-care providers for the last forty years. Surely you’ll acknowledge that, Dr. Spock,” Martha said.

  “Of course,” he answered quickly, with a twinkly, avuncular smile that made Martha cringe. “But in my experience, restraining a baby physically only frustrates him.”

  “Of course it frustrates him,” Martha said sharply. “How can any habit be broken without it causing some frustration?”

  Spock nodded his agreement and then, as if offering a perfectly made, neatly trimmed tea sandwich, laid out his belief: that thumb sucking, like so much else in infant behavior, was the reflection not of habit or will but rather of simple need.

  “A baby sucks because it needs to suck,” Dr. Spock said.

  “I wasn’t suggesting, Dr. Spock,” Martha said archly, “that a baby sucks because it is one of Satan’s minions.”

  That brought a much-needed laugh from around the table.

  “I don’t have much patience for people who soften at the slightest sign of resistance,” Martha continued. “Of course it’s disturbing to upset an infant, but I always tell my students that if they think about the long-term benefits, they’ll be able to withstand the feelings of the moment.”

  “And do you have children of your own?” Dr. Spock asked.

  “That’s not the point,” Martha answered, perhaps a bit too sharply.

  “I wasn’t trying to make a point,” the doctor said. “I was just curious.”

  “I have helped raise ten babies over twenty years in the home economics program at Wilton College,” Martha said, finally adjusting the scarf around her neck, fingering the Omicron Nu pin beneath it.

  “I just wondered whether you yourself had ever experienced these kinds of emotions,” Spock said.

  “What emotions are those?”

  “The emotions of being a mother.”

  “Have you?” Martha said. And apart from whatever facts and figures they took away from the conference, the impertinence of this moment was what most of the participants would long remember, and what Martha, in her fervor, would think about with pride.

  But the liberation inherent in Spock’s message, which in essence was love over la
w, was for Martha as inescapable as it was secretly welcome.

  7

  The Center of the World

  All the way back from Matson on the bus, Martha savored her moment. Martha Gaines and Benjamin Spock. She had told him what she thought. She had stood up for the program she was going back to reclaim. The summer world slipped by, alive with flowering bushes and flowered hats, children playing on swing sets and running through the rainbow spray of sprinklers. There was something cool and comforting in the act of passing these lives by: not at all unlike the role she had played for all those practice house children. They existed, in her memories, as if on a series of front lawns, waving at Martha as she rode by. There had been many. There would be more.

  But the clear, impartial, professional path became instantly muddied, and nearly obscured, as soon as Martha walked back into the practice house that afternoon. Ethel was lying, fully prone, on the living room rug, a camera in her hands as usual. Henry, wearing only a diaper, was standing against the couch: beautiful, hopeful, and irresistible. He was looking at Ethel, wobbling a bit, and seemingly unsure about what to do.

  “Come on, Hanky-Panky,” Ethel was saying, oblivious to Martha’s presence. “Come on, Hanky-Panky. You can do it. Walk to Mama Ethel’s camera. Walk the way you just did.”

  “Eh-oh!” Henry shouted, which was as close as he could get to Ethel.

  “Yes, Hanky-Panky. Eh-oh.”

  “Eh-oh!”

  “You can do it, Hanky-Panky. I know you can. Let Eh-oh take your picture.” She lifted her head from the viewfinder and smiled at him. “Then we’ll show all the others.” At this, Henry grinned extravagantly.

  “Ethel!” Martha shouted.

  They both turned, startled, toward Martha. Then Henry plopped to his backside, hard.

  “Boom!” Ethel said—no doubt intending to keep the wailing from Henry to a minimum. Intending to suggest that every boo-boo could be a source of joy.

  “Really!” Martha said, and Henry, somehow, decided not to cry and got up onto his hands and knees and started to crawl toward Martha.

  “Why isn’t he dressed?” Martha asked Ethel, putting her suitcase down so that she could stop Henry from crawling past her.

  “He was,” Ethel began. “That is, I was just getting ready to dress him, and then, son of a gun, Mrs. Gaines, he took a step.”

  “He’s taken steps before,” Martha said drily, picking Henry up.

  “Without holding on to a darned thing,” Ethel added.

  In Martha’s arms now, Henry put his hands on either side of her face and bent his head forward so that his forehead was touching hers.

  “Mah!” he said, which was as close as he could get to Martha. In the tiny tent of intimacy created by their touching foreheads, Henry looked into Martha’s eyes and Martha looked into Henry’s. His eyes were completely enthralling to her—green, with flecks of orange, now—promising love and magic. For a moment, she felt the moist sting of tears coming, and she had to force herself to walk forward, into the living room, and to hand Henry to Ethel.

  “Put some clothes on him,” she said huskily. “I’m going to go unpack.”

  UPSTAIRS, HOWEVER, Martha did not unpack. She did not even bring her suitcase into the bedroom but left it, unopened, on the landing and sank into her parlor chair, beset by the ache and helplessness of being in love.

  Had he really taken his first step without her?

  It was an hour before Martha walked back out onto the landing to retrieve her suitcase. In the mirror at the top of the stairs, the mirror in which she had greeted and calmed herself so often, she now saw the folds of her neck, as copious as the creases in the proscenium curtain she had seen last summer on Broadway.

  They say that falling in love is wonderful.

  She thought of Betty, crooning that song to Henry in the first weeks of his stay. To hell with her, Martha thought. If Henry were Martha’s, she thought, she would never have left him—she could never have left him—no matter what her husband needed, no matter what her father said. If Henry were Martha’s, she thought, his needs would be the only ones that mattered. Perhaps they already were.

  WEEKS PASSED, and the late summer bloomed and smoldered. Henry, for his part, betoddled the world. He understood himself to be an extraordinary being, unlike anyone else. He was the only one of his size, the only one people bent down to greet. He was the only one who seemed to be the center of the world.

  By autumn, after more than a year of coming and going, he knew how to get the most from each mother. With Beatrice, he did his crawling, his walking, his dancing, his jumping; everything giddily physical and bold made her squeal with excitement. Ruby seemed to inspire the longest contemplative times, times spent reading or doing puzzles, side by side, with Henry standing and Ruby kneeling at the coffee table. Sometimes she would loop her arm around his waist, and he would make himself lean against her in a kind of swoon, and when he got a particularly difficult piece in place, he would let her give him a little squeeze and he would say “Wooby!” which reliably made her giggle. Or he would say “Deed it!” with a huge, proud grin.

  With Ethel, at mealtimes, he would look up with his orange-green eyes, full of glee and eager anticipation, and she would swoop a spoonful of applesauce by him, like a tiny plastic B-25, and he would sit up in his high chair and swat a hand at the spoon, like King Kong. Then Ethel would laugh and laugh and give him as much more as he wanted.

  His baby journal was nearly three-quarters full now, and on weekends, the women smoked their cigarettes, sipped Dole pineapple drinks, turned the pages, and argued about who had taken which photograph when, who had been with Henry to crystallize this moment of his milestone-rich life, or that one. The journal was a pointillist painting. A stained-glass window. A fly’s eye. But in any case, an undeniably, terribly fractured thing.

  Goodbye, baby boy. I will never, ever, forget you.

  Betty had scrawled that across the bottom of her last page.

  Henry would forget her, though, Martha thought, and a plan began to form in the least reliable corner of her divided mind.

  8

  He Wants a Cookie

  Irena called from the orphanage on a mild day in early November, her soft, cool, annoying voice coming over the phone like the air from a fan.

  “Are you having a good autumn?” she asked.

  “Very nice, thank you,” Martha said.

  That was it for the small talk. Irena got straight to the point: She had a family, she said, for Henry.

  “A family,” Martha repeated. It was the moment she had been dreading, and it had come too soon.

  “They live in Wilkes-Barre, and she has simply been unable, poor thing, and they very much want a little boy, and your June baby would be just perfect for them.”

  “June baby,” Martha repeated, dully.

  “I’m sorry. What is it you call this one?”

  “Henry,” Martha said, and she found that just saying the baby’s name at that moment was like playing a rich chord, a chord with nearly infinite aspects: images, phrases, feelings, all of which echoed and altered and then resolved.

  “Well, Henry, then,” Irena said, a bit impatiently.

  “It’s too soon,” Martha said. “He’s only seventeen months. I keep the babies until they’re at least two. You know that.”

  “Yes, but you have had this one a bit longer than usual, because we gave him to you at three months,” Irena said.

  Martha instantly saw—as if the image had been projected like one of the slides at the Matson lecture—the photo of Henry in his crib that Ethel had taken of him on that first day.

  “Why does it need to be so soon?” Martha asked. “You know, the students are just about to take their midterm exams. Then it’ll be the holidays—”

  “But that’s just the point,” Irena said, and Martha could hear her exhaling her cigarette smoke and could imagine her sitting at her desk, shuffling her file cards and papers, arranging lives. “This couple, m
ore than anything, wants to have their baby in time for Christmas.”

  Irena said she had not one but two other babies who would be five and six months old, respectively, come January. Either, she said, would make a suitable replacement for Henry.

  “I know how hard it always is for you to juggle the girls’ schedules at Christmastime,” she said, as if what she was saying would be making things easier for Martha. “And this would allow you to have a few days to yourself, for once.”

  Martha imagined the practice house at Christmas, with no baby beneath the tree, no girls circled around it. What would be the point, then, of having a tree?

  “Just think what a lovely Christmas the baby will have, being with his new parents,” Irena said.

  THAT NIGHT, MARTHA STOOD at the bookshelf, where two decades of practice babies’ journals were lined up chronologically, starting with little Helen House in 1928. The books, despite their generations of different bindings, evoked the orderliness and rationality of an encyclopedic world, but instead of alphabet letters, they were labeled by the babies’ names: Helen, Harold, Hannah, Hope, Heloise, Harvey, Holly …

  Martha took down the first book. The photographs, slightly brown and blurry with time, were framed by now-old-fashioned white scalloped borders and had been given captions by an exuberant if haphazard first group of practice mothers.

  What am I doing here?

  Are all these presents really for me?

  Don’t I look nice and clean?

  Mildred Fairfax made me this hat!

  I’m a big girl today!

  Time unfolded behind her, and Martha remembered the excitement with which those first early months had progressed: the frequent talks with Dean Swift, the introduction to President Gardner, the decision to make child rearing a permanent part of the curriculum. She remembered the first trips she had made to the orphanage—run then by a different woman, whose name now escaped her. She remembered offering Helen House, just after her second birthday, back to the orphanage, in exchange for a younger baby—and the thrill of knowing that Helen would be raised by a married couple who would prize an infant launched with all the latest and best methods. Tom Gaines had been courting her then, wooing her, attending her, and the whole world had seemed bright with certainty and safety: a home, a job, a mission, a man.