The Irresistible Henry House

by Lisa Grunwald

  Martha realized that Helen House was now twenty years old. That tiny, woebegone infant, around whom an entire academic institution had been started, and a career launched, was now old enough to be a student here herself. Which made Martha—what?—ancient, irrelevant, done.

  IT TOOK A FULL TWO WEEKS to get an appointment set up with Dr. Gardner, but the meeting was finally scheduled for the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, and until then, Martha avoided Irena’s calls as assiduously as the president had seemed to be avoiding hers.

  For the holiday weekend itself, as she almost always had, Martha sent all the practice mothers home and cared for the baby herself.

  The night before Thanksgiving, Martha put Henry to bed and then sat downstairs, listening to Burns and Allen, then to Jack Benny, then the news. A Communist rally in Connecticut had been broken up when a group of veterans started stamping their feet and singing “God Bless America.” And Harry Truman, apparently, had come up with the idea of pardoning a turkey that would otherwise have been served the next day at the White House.

  Martha darned a pair of socks as she listened. The house was quiet in the absence of a practice mother, but this was nothing like the silence that overcame the place when days or weeks went by between House babies. That was a silence of barrenness, of loss, a silence so deep that it made Martha want to move around to fill up empty spaces. This silence—with Henry sleeping just yards away—felt something more like peace.

  Martha sat in the chair till nearly midnight, rehearsing in her mind the conversation she would have with President Gardner after the weekend was over. What she would ask him for. What he would say. How she could keep from ever having to face that other silence.

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG on Thanksgiving afternoon, Martha at first thought she would ignore it. She reasoned that it could only be a wrong number, or someone trying to urge her to participate in some local food drive, or—worst case of all—Irena, with her menacing holiday spirit. On the sixth ring, however, Henry said, “T-t-t-t. T-t-t-t. Tel-lie. Pickee up.” And Martha, following his instruction, was nearly astonished to hear President Gardner saying hello.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “that we might have our chat today.”

  “Today?” Martha repeated. “On Thanksgiving?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you have other plans?”

  “No, it’s just that—well, I’m alone with the baby today. The girls are all home for the holiday.”

  “Why don’t you bring the little fellow along?”

  IT DIDN’T OCCUR TO MARTHA until she was seated on the couch in the president’s house an hour later that, like her, he would be alone today. There were no warm oven and gravy smells wafting from his kitchen, which, in fact, was completely dark. The dining room table—also visible from the living room—had clearly not been the scene of any festive celebrations. But unlike Martha, President Gardner no doubt had been served a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of some faculty member who was trying to curry favor with him.

  “Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” Martha asked him.

  “Very nice, yes, thank you. The Haywoods had me over this year. Very kind of them.”

  “Yes,” Martha said. “Well, Henry and I had a lovely time, too.” Together their eyes fell on the little boy, who was sitting on the floor, zooming his red fire truck over the clean beige carpet, then using his hand to sweep away the parallel tracks left by the wheels. Martha sensed that President Gardner would try as hard as he could to ignore him, but also that Henry was present to be looked over somehow.

  “So,” the president said. “I gather you wanted to see me.”

  “Yes,” Martha began. “I wanted to ask you—I want to ask you—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, first, have you heard anything from Betty?”

  He paused a moment, as if trying to place the name. “Anything like what?” he asked finally.

  “Anything like if she’s coming back.”

  “Coming back,” Dr. Gardner repeated coldly. “Why would she be coming back?”

  Martha looked over at Henry. He had left his truck by the fireplace now and was using his hands to sweep new patterns into the plush of the carpet.

  “Look!” Henry said to Martha, and then he dove forward onto his hands, as if he was plunging into a snowdrift, and giggled with the sheer joy of falling forward.

  “What is he doing?” Dr. Gardner asked Martha drily.

  “You can ask him,” Martha said, but it was immediately evident that Dr. Gardner had no interest in asking him.

  “Tell Dr. Gardner what you’re doing, Henry,” Martha said.

  “Tell a joke!” Henry said proudly.

  “What does he mean?” Dr. Gardner asked, and Martha felt a momentary pang for Betty, having grown up with such a father.

  “He means he thinks it’s funny to do what he’s doing,” Martha explained.

  “Ah,” Dr. Gardner said.

  “Have you been in touch with her?” Martha asked. “Do you have an address for her? May I write to her?”

  “Have her address? Why?” he asked, and Martha regretted that she had asked him three questions at once.

  “Because I’d like to get in touch with her,” Martha said. “There’s something I need to ask her.”

  “She’s not coming back,” President Gardner said. “She’s not coming back, and I know you’ve heard from Irena Stahl that there is a family waiting for this boy.”

  “This boy” is your grandson, Martha thought but didn’t quite have the nerve to say.

  Henry, having temporarily tired of his carpet games, toddled over to the desk and picked up an empty ashtray. Carrying it in both hands, as if it held frankincense or myrrh, he zigzagged toward Martha, more than a little off balance, and handed it to her.

  “And what’s this?” she asked him, suddenly conscious of wanting to show off how adorable he was.

  “Sa plate,” he said.

  “And what’s on the plate?”

  “Sa cookie!”

  “A cookie? Mmm,” Martha said, pretending to take something from the plate. “Chocolate chip! My favorite! Why don’t you see if Dr. Gardner would care for one?”

  Henry turned toward the president and took three shipboard steps forward. “He wants a cookie?” he asked a bit uncertainly.

  “No, it’s ‘Do you want a cookie?’” Martha said, correcting him.

  “Do you want a cookie?” Henry asked in a perfect imitation.

  The president laughed, no doubt despite himself, and squinted down at Henry, not unkindly.

  “Why, thank you, young man,” he said, and, with a touching kind of purposefulness, he pretended to take a cookie and to pantomime eating it.

  “Cookies!” Henry squealed with delight and went back over to the president’s desk to load up his imaginary plate with more imaginary food.

  “There’s something Betty left with me,” Martha said pointedly. “She told me to take care of it. And I need to know what to do with it now.”

  Dr. Gardner followed both her glance and her meaning.

  “There shouldn’t be any confusion about that,” Dr. Gardner said.

  Martha looked toward the desk, where Henry had readied another plate of pretend cookies and was beginning his next gleeful transverse of the carpet.

  “Sir,” Martha finally said. “Did it occur to you that Henry might—that I might—”

  Never had Martha felt so betrayed by her emotions. Voice quavering, nose reddening, and, she knew, face flushing. Exactly the opposite of the stable, nonerratic, trustworthy person she needed, right now, to be.

  She began again.

  “If I kept Henry,” she said, “you’d still be able to see him, and no one would ever have to know he was your grandson.”

  Dr. Gardner, truly taken aback, sat upright and moved away startled, as if from a sudden shock or flame.

  “You?” he said.

  “No one,” Martha said, her voice gruff with too much emotion
. “No one could be a better mother to this little boy. I know it.”

  Dr. Gardner lit a cigar, keeping his silver lighter at the tip and puffing emphatically. Then he snapped the lighter shut and waved away the little bit of smoke he had made. He pulled an ashtray near and then tapped the cigar against it needlessly.

  Powerless, Martha waited, the balance of her life encompassed somewhere in this man’s mind, the child both hers and a Wilkes-Barre family’s, his future both known to her and forever lost.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Dr. Gardner finally said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, because I think it’s patently unfair to the young lad. How could you want him raised in a practice house—however expertly by you—when he could have his very own family, and two parents, two young, healthy, well-educated parents?”

  “And for another?” Martha asked, her heart in a kind of cramp.

  “Well, for another, Mrs. Gaines, Qui procul ab oculis, procul a limite cordis.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Gardner. I don’t know Latin.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” he said.

  Henry, a yard or so away from Dr. Gardner, stumbled a bit and fell against his knees, where he scrunched down, whether in glee or embarrassment, it was hard to tell. Then he looked up, nearly triumphant, into the president’s face.

  “Tell a joke,” he said and then collapsed into peals of laughter.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Martha walked down the aisles of the orphanage nursery, looking through the prison-bar slats of the cribs, which, at this time of the afternoon, were throwing harsh striped shadows onto the backs and sides of the sleeping babies.

  Staring at a multicolored glass mobile that hung in the window, Martha mused that, if the colors of her life before Henry had been all pastels and beiges, they were now bright blues, greens, and reds. Reds especially, Martha thought. She saw Henry’s cheeks, his fire truck, his fire hat, his rubber ball, his favorite crayon, his lips, his Christmas sweater. The ketchup he called chup and the strawberries he called stawba, and the toy stop sign that he somehow preferred to the toy cars.

  She knew, as she had never known anything in her life, that she would never be able to let him go.

  HIS FAVORITE GAME WAS Where’s Henry? There were several ways to play it. You could hide yourself under a napkin, or behind your hands, or you could put a napkin over Henry’s head and pretend he had disappeared.

  Henry didn’t seem to have a preference. He loved the game, no matter how it was played, and no matter who was playing it.

  “Where’s Henry?”

  Giggles, squeals.

  “There he is! Peekaboo!”

  Giggles, squeals.

  “Again!”

  “Where’s Henry?”

  Giggles, squeals.

  And on it could go, for a very long time.

  What was in those beautiful green eyes, Martha believed, was not only need, but hope. She told herself for the first time that to disappoint either one of those might break someone’s spirit, and to disappoint both might break his heart.

  The day that Martha decided to take Henry was the day that he began crying when Grace hid under the napkin too long, and then walked out of the room. She was intending it, no doubt, as a joke—just an extended peekaboo for maximum effect. But she stayed out of the room too long, and Henry started screaming, just as he had that fall day when he had looked up to find Ruby instead of Ethel.

  “Gray! Gray! Gray! Gray!”

  Martha was simply past the point where her feelings about Henry could be disciplined by science—or perhaps by anything. It no longer mattered why Henry was crying. Henry was crying.

  Upstairs, the way a tide gradually takes a part of the shore away, Martha’s heart began to erode her reason, and she pulled a suitcase down from her closet and quietly began to pack.

  SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE they would go. There were no people to pull her toward one destination or another. No safe harbors or family reunions. Only New York, for some reason, beckoned. Everything Martha had feared about the place now seemed alluring: the crowds, the numbers, the confusion. Maybe in that chaos, she thought, she would find some peace and some order.

  And so she went to work. First she stacked clothes on her bed by item—the long-sleeved blouses; the short-sleeved blouses; the scarves, all folded neatly in squares, with their tags lined up in the lower-left-hand corners; the suit jackets; the skirts; the stockings; the girdles. All her clothes rising in tidy piles, a sensible city made from tweed and silk.

  Until the previous year, Martha had owned only one small overnight bag. For her leave, she had traded eighteen of her Green Stamps books for two large Hartmann suitcases that were midnight blue with cream trim and dark blue satin linings. She could pack several weeks’ worth of clothing in these and put Henry’s things in the overnight bag. But of course she would have to get trunks for the rest. And cartons or crates for her books, pictures, and knickknacks: her life. She thought about Arthur at the hardware store and felt sure that he would sell, if not give her, the trunks—and that he might even store them for her until she could find a new home.

  SHE WOULD NEVER KNOW what changed the president’s mind.

  Maybe, when she was downtown at Arthur’s, Ruby had come upstairs and seen the suitcases and the stacks of clothing, and maybe she had told Dean Swift she thought Martha was leaving, and maybe Dean Swift had told President Gardner, and maybe they had decided that Martha was too valuable to lose.

  Or maybe, and coincidentally, there had been some secret message from Betty.

  Or perhaps President Gardner had simply understood, in the late afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, that he had his own Christmas emptiness to fill.

  Whatever the case, when Martha returned to the practice house, she found Ruby waiting for her with an eager, slightly gossipy look—and a message that said Martha should go at once to the president’s house.

  Back in his living room, Martha braced herself for dismissal, threats of bad references, anything. Feverishly, her mind plunged into a hallucination of order, and, even as she waited for Dr. Gardner to speak, she began to re-sort her clothing mentally, and then to choose which toys of Henry’s to take. Why would it matter to Dr. Gardner if she raised the boy—as long as she disappeared from his view? Surely he wouldn’t come after her.

  “I’m glad that you came, Mrs. Gaines,” Dr. Gardner said.

  “Of course,” she answered.

  “And I’m sure you’d like to know why I’ve asked you here.”

  He never really told her.

  Henry House ended up staying in the practice house, not because President Gardner would admit that he didn’t want to lose his grandson; not because President Gardner said straight out that Martha could adopt the boy; not because President Gardner was in any way explicit about how long this arrangement might last, or under what set of circumstances it might change. Henry stayed only because President Gardner said to Martha that evening: “You know, I’ve been thinking it over, and I think perhaps you should keep the boy for now.”

  1

  Emem

  One day late in the summer of 1948, the women Henry House had loved so much and who’d seemed so much to love him showed up together at the practice house carrying gift-wrapped presents and fancy food. They drank pink lemonade, ate chocolate cake, gave Martha and Henry notes and gifts, and snapped endless rounds of photographs. Then they took turns holding Henry, looking sad, and saying goodbye.

  Soon after that, a new group of women—with different names and faces, colors and smells—came to take their place, but Henry himself moved upstairs to live with Martha, who now told him to call her Emem (for the two Ms in Mama Martha). Upstairs, in the extra room that was directly above the nursery, Henry now had his own bed, dresser, and shelves; his own sheets and lampshades, which were covered in cowboy fabric; and even his own closet, where he sometimes tried, in vain, to hide.

  During the days, it was always Martha who
took care of him now. Between and sometimes during her own tasks and duties, Martha went for pretend drives with him in every kind of vehicle, showed him picture books, let him draw and finger paint, or chased him around the furniture, saying, “Emem’s going to get you!” Downstairs, the baby named Herbert occupied all Henry’s favorite places, and drew the attention from the other mothers the way the moon draws the tides.

  Henry asked frequently where Connie, Grace, and Ethel were, and Martha always answered by saying how lucky Henry was to have her all to himself now. Whenever he could, though—whenever Martha let him go downstairs with her—he would toddle up to the week’s practice mother with his hopeful, slightly anxious eyes and say, “Can do eet. Want tea?” Then he would reach out a little hand, and before Martha could say anything, he would be pulling the other mother upstairs, in a cloud of hope and charm.

  In later years, expounders of attachment theory would suggest that permanent damage could be done to any infant who was denied the chance to form one reliable connection, even in just the first year of life. Eventually, they would examine the approach to children in programs just like Wilton’s and conclude that to be treated like a human baton, continually handed off in the grueling relay of the first hundred weeks of life, was a situation that would have left any child’s heart untrusting and splintered, if not snapped. But three months into Henry’s third year on earth, it certainly hadn’t struck Martha that there was anything odd in the way he was behaving. In fact, never having concerned herself with any children older than the age of two, she had no working model against which she could compare him.