The Irresistible Henry House

by Lisa Grunwald

  As she ironed, Martha thought about the night eight years before when she had stacked her clothes, ready to take Henry away with her if Dr. Gardner insisted he be sent back to the orphanage. She had felt then, emphatically, that no one who wasn’t Henry’s flesh and blood would ever have a better claim to him than she did. Now, unimaginably, his flesh and blood had come to take him, but to Martha it seemed entirely clear that Betty had become the stranger. Plus, the girl had given him up. No matter the pressure placed on her and how difficult that had made things for her. She’d chosen to give him up. The small towns of this country were filled with other girls who’d gotten into trouble and made that decision, and then gone on with their lives. Of course, as Martha knew well from her dealings with the orphanage, all those girls had signed papers in which they’d made their choices official. Maybe that was the reason that Martha had never heard of one changing her mind.

  “DR. GARDNER,” she said out loud, trying to rehearse what her best argument would be. “Dr. Gardner,” she repeated, but when she imagined what it would be like, standing before this man and trying to plead for his understanding—let alone for his grandson—she found herself choking and crying on the words. “Dr. Gardner,” she began again. “Dr. Gardner.”

  Beyond the sweeping windows, she could just see a promise of morning.

  “Dr. Gardner,” she said out loud one more time, and through her tears she misjudged the geometry of the collar she was folding back, and she burned the part of her hand between her thumb and forefinger. It was a bad burn, she knew that immediately, but she was not entirely sorry it had happened. It snapped her back from her reverie into actual, present pain.

  IN THE MORNING, when Martha asked him what he wanted for breakfast, Henry did not respond.

  “Pancakes? Waffles? Frosted Flakes?” Martha asked. “You were so cute, the way you used to say that! ‘Emem, they’re g-r-r-reat!’”

  And Martha chugged on and on—like a train conductor who doesn’t know that the city he is steaming by has recently been fire-bombed.

  “Don’t you feel well?” she finally asked Henry when she’d realized he hadn’t said anything.

  He merely stared at her, speechless, his eyes momentarily more gray than green. Then the practice mother shouted for Martha to come, and so, while Martha had her back turned, Henry slipped out the door and disappeared, like a morning shadow.

  MARTHA KNEW THAT she had to confront Dr. Gardner. In the end, she reasoned, it would not be Betty but her father who would make the decision about Henry’s future. Betty was still, after all, an unwed mother. If Henry were younger, no doubt Betty could have moved with him to another town and told people that he had grown up in Australia, the child of a failed marriage. Divorce, while hardly smiled upon, didn’t come with the stigma a bastard did. But Henry, thank God, was old enough to tell the tale of his upbringing all by himself. And even in 1955, unmarried middle-class women who had never worked a day in their lives did not live as single mothers unless their parents, for some reason, wanted them to. And good parents never wanted them to.

  Martha sat at the kitchen table and took a sip of tea. Her sleepless night had left a foul taste in her mouth, but despite a few extra teaspoons of honey, the tea didn’t help. It was bitter. She was sour. Her hand hurt. She was exhausted. She knew that she needed to compose herself, to arrange herself, but what she knew best had nothing to do with asking, let alone pleading, let alone threatening, to get what she wanted. What Martha knew best had to do with the tricks and illusions of self-sufficiency: with organization, planning, tidy corners, and well-followed rules.

  Upstairs, she straightened her seams and swept up her hair and tied on her best silk scarf. But she looked like a woman unhinged, and she knew it, and finally she decided to give up trying to look composed.

  “I need to see him,” she told Dr. Gardner’s secretary on the phone. “He’ll know why.”

  “Will he?”

  “He will,” Martha said, and realized her voice was quavering.

  She was fifty-seven years old, and there was no future for her without Henry. There was only her tiny world, bordered by practice walls and practice floors, and filled with practice people. If Henry left, Martha knew, he would eventually become only the practice son who’d come to give her a practice sense of purpose.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, she was sitting in the anteroom in the president’s office, using the forefinger of her unhurt hand to trace the inner embellishments of the gold Wilton College seal that adorned her black wooden chair. She knew that every form of security she had was tied to that seal, and yet she also knew—perhaps, she thought grandly, the way that heroes know before their last acts—that she would sacrifice it all in a moment in order to keep Henry by her side.

  Inside Dr. Gardner’s office, two other identical chairs stood across from his desk, and he motioned Martha into one of them.

  “Mrs. Gaines,” he said evenly, as if it was the beginning of an annual salary review.

  “Did you know this was going to happen?” she asked him. She was aware that her tone was harsh and accusing, but she was unable to correct it.

  “I beg your pardon?” Dr. Gardner asked.

  “Forgive my informality, but I have to know. Is this why you’ve let me keep the boy all these years? Just in case your daughter came back?”

  Dr. Gardner said nothing, but he seemed surprised by the question. Martha went on. “A real adoptive family would never let him go if his natural mother came back. Is that why you had me keep him instead?”

  “Of course,” Dr. Gardner said, which was both the least expected and the most honest answer Martha could have imagined.

  He stood up and turned slightly away from her, appearing to examine the photographs on his credenza: pictures of him with national leaders, visiting scholars, former students. Pictures of Betty and his late wife, whom Martha had met only two or three times, all of them at Betty’s birthday parties.

  If Betty’s mother had lived, Martha thought, maybe Betty would have had the sense not to marry the first boy who came along, and then get pregnant with someone else, and then give the baby up, and then want the baby back.

  But then, of course, Henry wouldn’t exist, and at the thought, Martha felt herself growing faded and immaterial.

  “If you take him away from me,” she said, “I will leave this institution.”

  “Well. Yes, that seems perfectly obvious,” Dr. Gardner said coldly.

  Martha stood on faltering legs. She could feel a flush spreading across her face, down her neck, her chest, and tingling in her legs. She hoped it didn’t show. In the next minute, she realized she was feeling for the arm of the chair, ever so slightly toppling. It was not exactly faintness, but something more like vertigo, the sensation that the center had just lost its place: like the cylinder of a washing machine when it tries to spin too many heavy clothes.

  The arm of the chair, however, steadied her, and she didn’t lose a step.

  “Well, Dr. Gardner, I suppose if you know that, then you know everything. Including where I’ll be if you have any news to tell me.”

  She inhaled deeply and found that it helped to steady her more. Then she turned, as grandly as she could, to leave.

  “Just a moment, Mrs. Gaines,” Dr. Gardner said, and he waited until she had turned back to him. “I want to ask for your continued professionalism and patience while I resolve this situation. I am planning on discussing everything with Bettina, just as soon as she wakes up.”

  “Wakes up?” Martha said. “She’s sleeping?” She looked at her watch, unnecessarily. Whatever time it was, it was too late in the morning for a grown woman to be sleeping.

  Dr. Gardner nodded gravely, pushed his chair back, and sat up. “Mrs. Gaines,” he said, “in addition to losing her husband in Australia, my daughter gained certain bad habits. Or rather, to be precise about it, failed to break them.”

  “I see,” Martha said, though she didn’t yet, entirely.

  “Ba
d habits,” Dr. Gardner continued, “unfortunately related to the consumption of alcohol. I tell you this because your history of discretion is well proven by now.”

  “I should think,” Martha said drily.

  “In any case, the combination of the circumstances, the long trip from Australia, and far too much wine with dinner have all contrived to keep her in bed this morning. Which has only confirmed my inclination,” he added pointedly. “Because despite what you may think, I believe my daughter has handled her life thus far abominably, and I have absolutely no reason to think that if she took the young fellow with her, she would do anything but ruin his life as well.”

  7

  You Must Want to Know

  In fact, Betty had been awake for most of the night, and the young fellow was already with her. She had been standing by the bus stop when Henry got there, squinting into the morning sun, waiting for the next part of her life to begin.

  Henry could tell that she was nervous, because she fiddled with the gold ring on her left hand.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” she asked him.

  He shrugged.

  “Did you hear what I said to Mrs. Gaines yesterday?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That you’re my son?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I thought you had.”

  Henry tugged on his ear, the one with the extra teddy-bear flap. Betty reached out fondly to touch it, then drew her hand back when Henry recoiled.

  “You are my son, you know,” she said.

  Henry didn’t say anything—just strained to look over her shoulder to see if the school bus was in view.

  “Do you understand that?” she asked him.

  “You’re my mother,” he said, and though he tried to keep his face impassive, he felt something revving or roiling inside.

  “Well, I thought you’d probably want to know why I left,” Betty said.

  No. What he wanted—what he had wanted all night, awake in his bed, feigning sleep when Martha looked in because he had known he could not feign sweetness—was merely for this Betty not to have come yesterday at all.

  “You must want to know why I left,” Betty said.

  Henry pulled on his ear again, and at the exact same time, Betty pulled on her gold ring.

  “Did my father give you that ring and then make you go away with him and did Emem hide me so I couldn’t come too and now are you back to get me?” he asked.

  Despite her worried look, Betty smiled. “Oh, Son,” she said. “That’s too many questions to answer at once.”

  The word Son, uttered with such apparent ease, floated up in the air, sweet and cozy, like a comic-strip thought, but then snaked its way into sibilance and evil. Son, a snake’s hiss. Not even Martha had ever used the word Son as if it were his name.

  “Did my father really die in a train wreck?” Henry asked.

  Betty looked startled. “Who told you that?” she asked.

  “Emem.”

  “Come on, let me take you to school,” Betty said.

  “I ride the bus.”

  “I know you ride the bus.”

  “Grown-ups don’t ride the bus,” Henry said, looking urgently toward the small yellow-orange rectangle, now in view but still blocks away.

  “What if I told you that I rode this very same bus to your very same school when I was your age?”

  So what, Henry thought. So what.

  “I know every stop on the way,” Betty said.

  ON GUNSMOKE JUST THE WEEK BEFORE, Henry had heard Marshal Matt Dillon say straight out to some troublemaker: “All that is your business. I don’t see as how that concerns me.” That was what Henry wanted to say, but his throat felt hot and closed, as if the words would have to fight their way out.

  Eventually, Henry would come to see Betty as the logical, nearly inevitable, means for escaping from Martha. For the moment, though, as he listened, his confusion gave way not to hope but to anger.

  She talked her way onto the bus, this woman, and sat with him in the last row, where all the chewed-up gum spotted the floor. Henry studied the patterns of the pale beige splotches while Betty talked. He found two kitten faces and a Christmas tree; a fish, a snake, and a bottle. He tried to concentrate on arranging their shapes, figuring out how to fit them into one scene. A Christmas morning, maybe, with different presents under a tree.

  IT WAS ONLY TEN MINUTES TO SCHOOL, but Henry’s face burned hotter every time the bus made a stop and he had to see in surprise, then hear in giggles, the reactions of his classmates as they came aboard. He was most embarrassed when Mary Jane Harmon climbed onto the bus. She sat next to Henry every day, but her usual look of expectancy was dashed today in an instant of silvery surprise. Though their friendship had been rekindled in the relative protection that school gave them from their still-bitter mothers, they had few opportunities to talk. The currents of nine-year-old boys and girls had swept them into separate pools, and the morning bus was one of the only places where—perhaps just because their classmates were too preoccupied or too sleepy to care—they were free to defy the usual laws of fourth-grade conduct.

  As Mary Jane found a different seat, Betty talked on about how cute Henry had been as a baby and how much she had hated to leave him. Betty was good enough to whisper all this—and in fact the bus noise was so loud that even Henry missed a few of her words. But what he experienced was a rage so deep that it seemed made up of colors, as if, in his mind, someone was riffling through sheaves of construction paper: red, orange, purple, black.

  “So my father didn’t die in a train wreck?” he finally whispered to her.

  “No,” Betty said.

  “So where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he in Austria?”

  “Australia.”

  “Is he in Australia?”

  “No. The man in Australia was my husband. But he’s not your father.”

  They were the last ones to get off the bus at the school. Henry thought about Father and Mother in the Dick and Jane books. Sure, there were times when Mother was in the kitchen without Father, and times when Father was in his basement workshop without Mother. But Father and Mother went together, just the way Dick and Jane did.

  “When you learn about the birds and the bees,” Betty said, “you’ll learn that it’s possible to make a baby without actually being married, and that’s how your father and I made you, and then he disappeared, even before I knew I was expecting you.”

  “You could have told him,” Henry said.

  “No,” Betty said. “I couldn’t. Because I didn’t know where he was.”

  “Why not?” Henry asked. It was almost a shout.

  Betty sighed a little. She said: “He was just a nice guy who I went to the movies with, and I didn’t know who he was, Henry.”

  “What was the movie?” Henry asked.

  “What?”

  “What was the movie?”

  Betty smiled. “It was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” she said.

  “Where’s Brooklyn?” he asked.

  SHE DIDN’T CALL HIM HANKY. That was the only good thing about her, he thought, and, for this moment, the only thing that brought him even close to liking her.

  Before he went into the school, she made him stop on the steps. She took out a camera, and she said, “Smile, Son.” The hissing again. And then she took what seemed to be an entire roll of pictures. On purpose, he did not smile in a single one of them. The cluster of classmates who lined up behind Betty, making goofy faces and trying to get him to laugh, didn’t alter the parade of crazy, furious colors in his mind. Only when Mary Jane stayed after the rest of them were inside—waiting for him, needing to know who this woman was, offering her one blue eye, and the smile he’d always known he could trust—only then did the mad parade come coolly to a stop.

  AT NINE, MARY JANE WAS skinny and quick, both taller and more athletic than Henry. Her black eye patch was like a permanent bruise, a constant reminder of their
long-lost days of nursery school, but she spent every single recess out in the play yard, jumping rope. She could do a can-can kick, a leg over, and a flying cross. As long as she led with her good eye, she could jump into a row of three jumpers, and—even more impressive—she could jump backward to get out again.

  Henry, by social necessity, usually watched these feats from a distance, just as he watched her walk the hallways with her girlfriends, stopping to hitch up her sagging tights or giggling over mysterious things. This morning, however, Mary Jane broke the usual protocol and pulled Henry into the coatroom.

  “Who was that?” she asked him. “Why was she on the bus? Why was she taking pictures of you? Do you know her?”

  “Sort of,” Henry said.

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s President Gardner’s daughter,” Henry said.

  Her eyes widened. “From the college?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Well, what’s she doing here?”

  Henry looked at the floor and tugged on his ear.

  “Henry? Why was she here with you?”

  Rupert Biggs ducked into the coatroom. “You’re going to be late for homeroom,” he said. He tore off his plaid jacket, jammed it onto an already full coat hook, and darted out again. The coat fell immediately to the floor, and Henry, moved by some primordial home economics instinct, bent to retrieve it and hang it up again.

  “Henry,” Mary Jane said again. This time the word was not a plea for an answer but rather a statement about Henry’s ability to trust her with whatever that answer would be.

  “You can’t—you can’t tell anyone,” he said.

  “I never would,” she said, and he believed her utterly, but still hesitated, trying to find the right words.

  She merely looked at him, waiting. He had noticed lately that she could convey with one eye a great deal more than most people could convey with two.