The Irresistible Henry House

by Lisa Grunwald

  Instead—and for the first of many times to come—he simply decided to erase the troublesome image from his head. In his mind, he unwrapped a fresh new gray eraser—like the one that had come in his art kit from Betty—and molded it into a ball. Then, having summoned a perfect picture of Daisy as she had looked the night of the fire, he started with the toes of her sassy saddle shoes and worked his way, rubbing furiously, up to the top of her flaming red hair. Several times, in his mind, he paused to blow away the eraser dust and smooth the now-white portion of the page with the side of his hand.

  IN THOSE WARMING SPRING NIGHTS, there was other mental art as well. Henry had swiped a copy of Playboy from Stu Stewart and kept it hidden in his sheets at the foot of his bed. Night after night—after the others had gone to sleep—Henry would turn the pages, learning the considerable pleasures of two-dimensional women. The language of sex seemed to echo with Shop: as a Playboy, apparently, you got hammered or plastered, then you nailed or screwed or drilled a woman who was built, or had a rack.

  The issue of the magazine was more than a year old, and extremely well worn. In addition to the centerfold, with its naked Playmate’s breasts aloft, it offered five Christmas Playmates, four pages of Marilyn Monroe, and a cover of a Playmate in a red, ermine-trimmed leotard. Under his blanket, Henry held the magazine and a flashlight, memorizing each image, so that when, inevitably, he needed at least one hand free, he could put down the flashlight, put down the magazine, close his eyes, and use every power he had to draw and redraw, see and resee, the women in his mind.

  STRANGELY, WHEN STU RECLAIMED his copy of the magazine and Henry tried to re-create one of the women on actual paper, he found the results uniformly awful. He remained, even after nearly two years in Charlie’s class, much better at drawing things that he could actually copy. That was the way he had first drawn the Ray, from purloined drawings of Superman and the Flash. The car in his closet had been copied from an ad, and even his self-portraits had come directly from the mirror before him. He was an extraordinary mimic when it came to art, and as he did with girls, he employed the chameleon gifts he had learned as a practice baby. When they studied Monet, he could paint like Monet. He could copy van Gogh, Picasso. When friends faltered on their daily Falk Book assignments, Henry could whip off sketches for them, reproducing their fledgling styles. It was only when Henry sought a style of his own—or tried to imagine, rather than recall or re-create—that he would start to falter.

  PARTIALLY BECAUSE OF his newfound success with girls, however, spring felt open, free, and unburdened. Summer, inevitably, loomed. While Henry had stayed the extra three months at Humphrey the summer before, and though the school often advised that students who stayed through vacations would fare better, Martha had insisted that Henry come home this June. He felt vaguely intrigued by the prospect of encountering Mary Jane, but a reunion with Martha seemed more consequential.

  “Take me with you instead,” he said to Karen one afternoon in the Falks’ kitchen.

  “Take you with us? Where?”

  “To Spain,” he said. “This summer.”

  She laughed, but then instantly realized that Henry was serious.

  “Oh, Hen,” she said. “I wish we could.”

  “Why can’t you, then?”

  “You’ve got to go home to your mother.”

  “You mean Martha.”

  “I know. Right. To Martha, then.”

  “You know what that means.”

  Karen winced visibly, but mainly as a sign that she sympathized. She had once told Henry, however, that she wasn’t sure she did understand what had been so bad about having all that love.

  “I wish I could meet her,” Karen said. “Why don’t you let her come visit sometime?”

  “Never,” Henry said, with surprising force.

  “Never what?” Charlie said as he walked through the door. He threw his jacket on the kitchen counter, nearly knocking over Karen’s wineglass. Noisily, he pulled out a chair, sat down, and took his pipe from his pocket. He was wearing a green felt hunting hat, on which he had affixed a number of colorful tin bird pins. Every semester, it seemed, he added something to his repertoire to annoy the Humphrey administration. The paint-spattered blue jeans had come the year before.

  “Never let Martha visit,” Henry said.

  “Didn’t Karen tell you? She’s coming next week,” Charlie said, tamping the tobacco into his pipe.

  “Very funny,” Henry said, but he was not happy to realize that what to him would have been an unprecedented calamity could provoke amusement in Charlie and Karen.

  “PLEASE TELL ME YOU’LL BE HOME for the summer,” Henry wrote to Mary Jane that night. “I just don’t think I could handle being at Wilton without having you around.”

  “I have a boyfriend,” she wrote back. “So I don’t know how much time I’ll get to spend with you, but I’ll be home.”

  “I don’t care about your boyfriend,” Henry wrote back. “I just don’t want to have to be home every single minute of every single day.”

  “I’ll be working at the Press,” Mary Jane wrote back. “It might not be so bad to see your face.”

  The night Henry received this letter, he drew the first of what would be thirty postcard-size self-portraits—all identical, except for the lines around his mouth and eyes, which changed just perceptibly from day to day, ever so gradually tweaking up the corners of his smile, creasing the corners of his eyes until, when the pages were riffled, it was clear that Henry was smiling, then, inverted over the next many days, frowning again.

  He sent the entire set to Mary Jane. “Here’s my face,” he wrote her. “Where’s yours?”

  6

  The Summer of ‘62

  On the day that Henry left for home, Charlie drove him to the bus station in a red Ford pickup that he had borrowed from the groundskeeper. The sky was nearly a denim blue, and the sun was hot: a June sun, early but strong. Henry felt his throat tighten as he stood beside Charlie and waited for the bus.

  When it pulled up—muddy but silver, like a coin in the dirt—Henry had to look away from Charlie, and then he had to stuff both his hands into his pockets when he felt Charlie’s arm go around his shoulders. Charlie handed him a pocket-size sketch pad.

  “Mini Falk Book,” he said gruffly. “Draw something every day. I’ll be looking for this when you get back.”

  Then the doors of the bus swung open with a hydraulic hiss, and Henry climbed into the relative darkness, his feet making sticking sounds on the rubber-ridged floor, his hands reaching from seat rest to seat rest. He chose a place near the back, where the seats behind and in front of him were empty, and an old woman was sleeping in the seat across the aisle. The bus was hot, but the windows were closed, presumably for air-conditioning, and after only fifteen minutes or so, Henry put his head against the glass, feeling just a hint of air, as if someone was blowing gently on the crest of his forehead.

  The bus trip to Franklin took more than six hours, and Henry slept for nearly four of them. At one point, he dreamed, though when he woke—hard and embarrassed and then relieved to see that he was alone—he could not recall exactly who or what had been in the dream. Some combination of girls, of course. Daisy or Beth or Mary Jane or Sheila or Karen. It didn’t matter.

  MARTHA WAS AT THE BUS STATION. Henry saw her from the window, standing stiff and pale, like one of the columns supporting the old station roof. It was strange to see her in this place, and Henry realized how rarely they had spent time beyond the confines of the practice house. That was another thing for which he blamed her now. Not only the pretense of his past but also the pretense of a normal life.

  Just before the bus doors opened into the sunshine and the dreaded embrace, Henry felt a stab of longing for Charlie and Karen and their own routine. Perhaps it was just as insular a world, but it didn’t feel as frightened. Then Henry stepped off the bus, misjudging the height of the last step and nearly falling onto the pavement, falling back into the smallnes
s of childhood.

  “Oh, Hanky,” Martha said, and even Henry could see how much she had aged. He did not speak to her, naturally, but he did let her hug him hello.

  The lines on her face had deepened, as if what had originally been drawn in pencil had now been traced over in dark charcoal. Her hair had thinned and grayed. She was every bit as heavy, though, still wearing a silk scarf around her neck, still wearing her Omicron Nu gold pin. He could feel the need in her arms, and in the way her chin fell on his shoulder.

  “I can’t believe you’ve gotten so tall,” she said.

  He shrugged guiltily.

  Absurdly, she tried to take the suitcase from the belly of the bus for him, but he grabbed the handle from her.

  “You’ve gotten so strong,” she said.

  They took a taxi to the Wilton campus.

  “How are your classes?” she asked him, and “Who are your friends?” and “Are you hungry?” and “What shall I make you for dinner?” as if she’d forgotten why he had had to go away in the first place.

  “Not even a hello?” she whispered to him. “A hello for Emem?”

  He felt sad enough for her that he almost wanted to speak. But then her eyes filled with tears: glassy, deep, and dangerous, and ever so slightly, he leaned back away from her, watching the campus come into view and feeling his mouth grow tighter.

  EVEN AGAINST THE still-June-blue sky, the practice house looked gray. The paint on the siding in front was peeling. Some of the green shutters looked unhinged. “I haven’t had the help,” Martha said in answer to Henry’s unasked question. “You know, I used to have girls who could have painted this house in a weekend. But really. What a bunch! The one who’s on this week showed up last fall with a broken arm. Honestly. I need to tell this group to come in out of the rain. I—”

  At that moment, the front door was opened by the contradictorily helpful hand of one of the practice mothers.

  “Ah, Lila,” Martha said, obviously flustered, perhaps hoping the girl hadn’t heard. “How nice of you to get the door for us. Lila, this is my son, Henry. Henry, this is Lila Watkins. She is one of our practice mothers.”

  No. The practice mothers in Henry’s memory had, of course, all been adults. But the person to whom Martha was now introducing Henry was a nineteen-year-old blond girl wearing pale yellow Levi’s, penny loafers, and a short, sleeveless yellow shirt with a large white daisy across the chest. Her eyes were blue, but not as blue as Mary Jane’s.

  Lila smiled as if Henry was a second helping of something.

  “What’s happening?” she asked him softly as they stepped inside.

  He smiled back at her.

  “Henry doesn’t talk,” Martha said quickly.

  “Doesn’t talk?” Lila repeated.

  Henry shook his head no, an ambiguous gesture that could have been either a contradiction or a confirmation of what Martha had just said.

  “Your room’s exactly the way you left it,” Martha told him.

  To his great relief, she didn’t follow him upstairs.

  THE BLANDNESS OF THE ROOM shocked him. Apart from the cowboy lampshades and cowboy bedspread, there was no source of color in the room at all. The walls were not only beige but dingy and cracked. Henry was startled, and almost embarrassed for Martha, to see that along the baseboards there was an unmistakable line of dust.

  He tipped his suitcase over with one foot, unzipped it in order to unpack, but then, overcome by exhaustion, threw himself onto the bed instead.

  In addition to being colorless, everything in the room seemed shrunken. Henry tried to remember what it had been like to do his homework at this desk, to sit in that spindle-backed chair, to pin things on this bulletin board. Even the window frames seemed small, keeping the world outside in check.

  From his bed, Henry stared at the closet while listening to the downstairs sounds—so familiar and yet so unexpected—of Huck, the practice baby: the crying and soothing, the kettle boiling, the lilt and singing, and then the silence. Finally, after nearly an hour, Henry fought off his inertia, stood up, and opened the closet door. It was clear that Martha had been here at some point: Most of the clothes Henry had left—and doubtless outgrown—were gone, as well as his old shoes and boots. But if Martha had been tempted to question—or conceal—his drawings and paintings, she had overcome the impulses. Like frescoes, they remained intact, their vividness slightly faded, as if the beigeness of the house had seeped in and paled the colors he’d left behind.

  GROWING UP IN THE PRACTICE HOUSE, Henry had already absorbed a great deal of hands-on knowledge about the care and keeping of a household. Even at ten or eleven, he had been perfectly capable of cooking a meal, scrubbing a bathroom, helping to drape a curtain. He had helped Martha polish furniture, clean ovens, and rewire lamps. He had never plastered and painted a room, but after all the work in Charlie’s class, he had gained a deeper confidence about what his own hands could do.

  At dinner, as he watched Martha go from prattling questions to seething silence, he pondered the state of the walls behind her, the baseboards below, the ceilings above. He thought about the Falks’ rooms, with their artist-palette walls, and he tried to decide, even as Martha kept talking—telling him campus news, telling him how she’d missed him, telling him about the conference she had to attend the following week—what colors would work best in each of the practice house rooms. Each image was nearly subversive, with the power to push out against the ancient, stifling blandness around him.

  “That’s a funny look,” Lila said when Henry brought his dinner dish to the kitchen and rinsed it in the sink.

  He raised an eyebrow in her direction.

  “The way you’re looking around,” she said. “As if you’re planning a getaway.”

  There was something flirty, sexy, and knowing in nearly everything she said, and he resolved that, before the summer was over, he would be making love to her in a room that was every bit as colorful as her clothes.

  MARY JANE’S SUMMER JOB was in the office of the Wilton College Press, which published only the occasional book but distributed articles by faculty members, wrote and printed a monthly newsletter, and sent out whatever announcements the alumnae stirred themselves to write.

  The press building was on the farthest end of the Wilton campus—past even the president’s house, with an impressive view of the large pond, compensation for its lack of proximity to everything else.

  Mary Jane had written to Henry that she would be starting her job the week after graduation, and so, after his first full day back home, Henry walked across the once forbidden campus to meet her. The campus was green and manicured, well dressed from its recent commencement day, but there was the lazy, suspended feeling of work just done. Everyone seemed to be finished with something, and even the people who thought they recognized Henry seemed to turn only slowly toward him, as if the act of recognition itself required more energy than they could spare.

  By six o’clock, Henry was sitting on one of the stone benches overlooking the lake just a few yards from the press building’s front door. Waiting for Mary Jane, Henry pondered the summer months stretching before him, and the silence he would have to impose on himself all over again. He wondered if he should speak to Mary Jane, just as he’d spoken to Karen and Charlie. He knew he could trust her to keep his secret. He didn’t know if he wanted to. A breeze blew up, and the latish sun hit the water, making the surface look like crumpled wax paper. In his mind’s eye, Henry tried different colors on the walls of the practice house, divvying up the rainbow. He thought about Lila Watkins, with the daisy across her chest.

  When, just a little past six, Mary Jane finally emerged, it was almost shocking to see her in three dimensions. At sixteen, she was stunning. Her hair, which had always been so remarkably white-blond, had deepened into a more predictable, but no less beautiful, yellow, and its straightness and length made it seem to move over her shoulders like a well-ironed piece of satin. To paint it, Henry thought instinctively, y
ou would need a kind of watercolor that looked as if it never dried. Her face, like his, was pale, as it always had been; like his, too, it had become more angular.

  She stopped at the foot of the steps, rummaging in a large beige macramé bag. She was wearing white capri pants and an oversize, man-tailored shirt. She looked like a woman, not like a girl. She hadn’t seen him yet, and for a moment, he felt overwhelmed with the sense of coming home.

  When she saw him, she let out a little yelp, leapt from the third to the last step, and rushed toward him, her arms outspread. Awkwardly, he hugged her, and as he did, his cheek brushed against the rim of her eye patch.

  There was nothing awkward about her. She was filled with the same kind of confidence that had led them through so many games of make-believe, so many school-yard negotiations, so many one-sided conversations. Without thinking, he bent down to kiss her, forgetting every girl from Humphrey, forgetting Lila, forgetting, apparently, everything except the need to win her, too. Mary Jane accepted his lips curtly, with a brief, authoritative smack.

  She reached into her bag and took out a white tin box with black writing on it and six unfiltered cigarettes inside, lined up like pieces of chalk. She lit two of them with a single match, expertly extracting one from between her lips and handing it over.

  Henry took the cigarette and, as he did so, noticed a silver ring with embossed hearts on Mary Jane’s right ring finger.

  “George gave it to me,” she said, following Henry’s glance. “George. Remember? My boyfriend? He’s spending most of the summer with his parents on Cape Cod,” she said. “He’s a poet. He wants to be a journalist, like me.” She looked at Henry slyly. “But I think he might just be saying that because he really loves me.”

  Henry studied Mary Jane’s face for signs that she was boasting—or trying to make him jealous. But her tone and face were just neutral enough to make him think she had nothing like that in mind.