The Irresistible Henry House
Page 27
“Where’ve you been hiding?” she asked him.
“Behind a bunch of penguins,” Henry said.
“We’ve hardly seen each other.”
“I see you right now,” Henry said.
“You know what I mean. I spent the night with you, Hanky. I’m not just some girl, you know,” she said.
Some girl was exactly what she was, in Henry’s opinion. She was some girl who happened to have been working at the restaurant the day he first stepped in. She was some girl who happened to have been the first girl at Disney he met. She was some girl who happened to have wanted him to want her.
They walked together toward the bicycle racks, then strolled on through the back lots. Side by side, with their bikes between them, they walked past the London rooftops where Bert and the chimney sweeps did their dance; past the park pavements where Mary, Bert, and the children popped into a chalk picture; and onto the set for Cherry Tree Lane. Behind the sweet whitewashed front of the Bankses’ home, there was, of course, no home at all. It seemed as fitting a place as any to try to appease Cindy with a kiss.
“You’re not a nice boy, are you?” she asked him.
“No. I’m not a nice boy,” he said, though of course to Annie that was exactly what he was and was expected to be, and to Fiona—well, he tried not to think of Fiona while he was here with Cindy. And to Mary Jane—well, he tried not to think about Mary Jane at all.
IN ART CLASSES BACK IN HENRY’S DAYS at Humphrey, Charlie had talked a fair amount about how to see things not as symbols but as shapes in relation to one another. Charlie had told the students that whenever they were having trouble getting something right, they should turn the subject upside down. Then they could draw without their eyes tricking their minds into believing things were shaped and sized differently than they really were. Henry was good at this.
Apples were not circles; chair legs were almost never perfectly perpendicular to chair seats; it was the eyes, not the nose, that bisected a human face—and so on.
In this way, Henry eventually came to see the three current women in his California life as well. It was as if he had turned them all upside down, to study how they were in reality. He could see in each the relationship of beauty to personality, neediness to generosity, humor to brains, silliness to insecurity. He could see their mouths and hands, their hair and clothes. He could see their attraction to him, and—understanding every aspect of them individually—he could understand where he found beauty in them. But he never let his eye trick his mind into seeing them whole, as symbols of anything greater than their parts.
ON A LATE FRIDAY MORNING in November, Henry walked through the tunnel to the Nunnery with a small and barely legitimate stack of drawings and, much to his delight, managed to meet Fiona on the other side.
“Come down with me for a minute,” he said to her loudly. “I need your help.”
“We’re fooling no one,” she said as she followed him down the stairs. “And we’re not the first, you know. They do call this the Tunnel of Love.”
“I don’t care,” Henry said.
Henry put the drawings on the top rung of a work ladder and stood close to Fiona, smelling her lemony perfume.
“I do in fact have to get back to the shop,” she said. The way she said it, shop almost rhymed with hope.
“You do in fact have to let me kiss you first,” Henry said.
“They’re going to miss me up there,” she said. “It’s not even raining out.” Not sounded like note.
“Say shop again.”
“Shope.”
“Say not.”
“Note.”
He kissed her at length, moving a hand gingerly from the back of her head to the back of her neck, then across her shoulder and down to her breast, where he let it linger, as if he was nervous to do more.
The tunnel was cooler than usual somehow, emptier than usual, quieter than usual.
After a long time, Henry cupped Fiona’s breast and pressed against her, kissing her, his other hand high on the cool wall.
“What do you suppose is the longest time anyone’s ever stayed down here?” Fiona asked him.
“Not long enough,” Henry said.
“Odd that no one’s come through, though,” Fiona said.
“Yes. Quite,” Henry said, trying to mimic her accent. “Odd indeed. You sound exactly like Julie Andrews.”
“Have you met her?”
“Yes. Say ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’”
“Say goodbye for now,” Fiona told him.
The corridor echoed with her laughter, and with the promise of more silent moments to come.
OF THE NINE OLD MEN, Milt Kahl was the most irascible, and it was commonly understood that around his office in D-Wing, silence was an absolute. So when Henry came back from the tunnel and heard loud radio noises, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would risk inviting Kahl’s wrath.
The noise of the radio, however, quickly resolved itself into words.
Henry heard:
“The shots apparently came from the fifth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, possibly from an automatic-type weapon.”
He heard:
“Police were looking for a young white man dressed in a white shirt, with Levi’s …”
Chris ran over to him, all pretense of coolness gone.
“He’s been shot. Kennedy’s been shot.”
Chris pulled Henry toward the desk of an in-betweener who had a radio.
Into the utter blankness of Henry’s mind there rose a single image: the black-and-white campaign poster from Charlie and Karen’s kitchen. The promising eyes, the white teeth, the straw layers of hair.
Henry looked around the bullpen for a face—any face—that wasn’t contorted in pain, shock, or grim concentration.
“Just a moment, just a moment. We have a bulletin coming in. We now switch you directly to Parkland Hospital.”
Whatever conversation there had been beneath the radio now ceased. Henry heard:
“The president of the United States is dead. I have just talked to Father Oscar Hubert of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church. He and another priest tell me that the pair of men have just administered the last rites of the Catholic Church to President Kennedy. I asked the father, ‘Is Mr. Kennedy dead?’ And his quote, ‘He’s dead, all right.’”
Everything stopped. Office doors that were usually closed were opened. Everywhere—outside and in—people stood in clusters. The reason was the need to have proximity to the radios; the effect was the sense that no one could bear to be alone.
HENRY FOUGHT THE URGE to run back into the tunnel, as if that could reverse time. He wanted to talk to someone, but he didn’t know to whom. Charlie and Karen came into his mind, no doubt because of the poster. But then he imagined their shock, and their need to comfort the students around them at Humphrey. He thought about Mary Jane, but in light of her “don’t be ridiculous,” she was the last person with whom he wanted to risk seeming in need.
Henry left the Animation Building and wandered over the studio grounds. He found himself hoping to see Annie. He didn’t find her, nor did he find Cindy when he stopped at the coffee shop. Lots of people had gone home already. The front gate was deserted. There was a hush over the whole place, as if a director had just called “Action!” But the only actions were listening, and crying, and comforting.
WHEN THE PHONE RANG THAT NIGHT, Henry knew that it would be Martha, but for some reason it didn’t bother him.
“Oh, Hanky,” he heard her say.
“Hi, Emem.”
It had to have been years since he had called her that.
“Isn’t it awful?” she said.
“How’s everyone taking it there?”
“Oh, well, you know. These girls. Who knows what they think about?”
“They weren’t upset?”
“Well, only one of them was around when it happened, and she hightailed it out of here pretty fast.”
“So
it’s just been you and the baby?”
“The baby. Yes,” Martha said.
To Henry, she sounded almost unbearably old. An old woman, sitting almost alone in an old, almost empty house.
“Is there something else, Emem?” he asked her.
There was a brief silence, which Henry knew could mean either surprise or calculation.
“I’m losing my job,” she said.
“You’re what?”
“I’m losing my job.”
“My grandfather fired you?” Henry asked, incredulous.
“No.”
“What then?”
“He’s retiring. Well, no,” she said bitterly. “He’s being made to retire.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
“The new president,” Martha said. “She doesn’t believe in home economics. She’s one of those women.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“She says I’m old-fashioned, and out of touch. As if it will ever be old-fashioned to know how to care for a baby!”
Henry had a mental image of the line of practice house baby journals, their pages of photographs fading.
Mildred Fairfax made me this hat!
He sank into one of the two chairs by the table, took a pad and paper, and started to sketch. As he listened to Martha, he drew simple shapes. Circles and squares, triangles and rectangles. A round hat. A rectangular crib.
“If only you could come home for Thanksgiving,” Martha said.
He drew the Bird Woman from Mary Poppins, sitting on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, feeding the birds. The Bird Woman was Martha.
Listen, listen, she’s calling to you.
CLOUDS CAME AND WENT, and on Saturday the wind blew up. Henry walked to the food market. Plants and shrubs bent and twisted and tried to dance, but the palm trees remained stoic. Behind every open door and window was a working radio or television. Several bags filled with old newspapers had tumbled over on one of the side streets, and beside them were a discarded, seatless chair and an old electric fan, whose blades rotated with furious fake life.
Like almost everyone else in the country, Henry spent the rest of the day, and the next day, watching television. The world had altered. Reporters kept speaking about Mrs. Kennedy’s pink suit; the green, grassy knoll; the red roses; the blue sky; the blood. But the world once again was in black and white. There was the black of the two-inch-high newspaper headlines: KENNEDY SLAIN, KENNEDY DEAD, and, bizarrely, in the Los Angeles Times: ASSASSINATE KENNEDY. There was the black and white and gray of television, broadcasting continuously, with all entertainment programs canceled. Cameras showed crowds standing across the street from the Dallas County Jail, shades of gray under a gray sign for a restaurant speciously called Victoria’s Purple Orchid. Life magazine published an issue with its famous red logo printed in black.
The assassin’s name was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald, like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was Walt Disney’s first cartoon character, a forerunner of Mickey Mouse himself. Henry wondered where Walt was now, what he was thinking about his wonderful world. No one had seen him the day of the shooting; he was supposedly in Florida, checking out land for some new project.
On Sunday, Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald on television. Kennedy was laid in state, saluted, prayed for, and walked to his grave with a skittish, riderless horse. On Monday, stores were closed, and businesses only limped back to life as the week went on. On Wednesday, Henry used approximately half of everything he’d ever saved to buy a plane ticket home.
THE MOMENT THAT HENRY SAW MARTHA, he knew that he shouldn’t have come. He understood—from the force of her hug, the moistness in her eyes, the slight tremor in her hands as she brushed nothing from his shoulder—that there was no way to quiet her need. He had flown across the country—a grueling trip—and would have to return after only two days. But this was not a gift; instead it was an excuse, a platform from which she would ask him for more. On the phone, Martha had said If only you could come home for Thanksgiving, and the implied end of the sentence had been: then I would be happy; then I would feel better; then I might have the strength to make things turn out all right.
Instead, the real statement should have been: If only you could come home for Thanksgiving, then I could show you in person how much I need you.
She went through the motions of trying to treat him like a man. She didn’t flinch when he lit a cigarette. She offered him wine with dinner.
“What’s it like out there?” she asked him, but even that simple question seemed to Henry an imposition, an unexpected and unwanted insinuation of herself into his world. He thought of his palm trees, strong and solitary. He thought of his apartment.
“It’s nice,” he said.
“Do you have a lot of friends?” she asked.
“At work,” he said. “Great bunch of guys.”
“Any special girl?” she asked him, somewhat coquettishly. He thought of Cindy’s breasts, and Fiona’s legs, and Annie’s sweetness.
“No,” he said. “No special girl.”
“Maybe you’ll want to see Mary Jane,” Martha said.
“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t realize how much he wanted to until she appeared the next morning at the back door.
SHE HAD GOTTEN SKINNY in the months since she’d called his proposal ridiculous. A pair of bell-bottom jeans sat low on her hips, held up by a wide leather belt. She had her hair in a kerchief.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said ironically.
“Yah.”
“Why’d you come?”
“Martha,” he said.
“Are they canning her?”
“It looks that way.”
“Good boy for coming, then. Are you going to talk to your grandfather?”
“He got canned too,” Henry said. “It won’t make any difference.”
“You should do it anyway,” Mary Jane said.
They stood awkwardly by the old tree swing.
“Where were you when you heard?” she asked him.
He could sense in her the pain that he knew he should have felt more deeply.
“At work,” Henry said. “What about you?”
“I was on my way home.”
“Home? From where?”
“From college.”
“I thought you were going to college here.”
“Why would I go to college here?”
“Well, where are you going to college?”
Mary Jane paused a moment, then quietly said: “Berkeley.”
Henry tried to let this register. He stared into her one eye.
“Berkeley,” he said. “You’ve been in California the whole time I’ve been in California?”
“Well, it’s only been a few months for both of us,” she said.
So it was not just that she hadn’t wanted to marry him, he thought. She hadn’t even wanted to see him, though she had been just a few hours away. Henry’s face must have registered, equally, his hurt and his determination to conquer it.
“I didn’t know how to reach you,” Mary Jane said.
“You could have tried the studio.”
“I didn’t know if you’d gotten a job there.”
That hadn’t stopped Martha, Henry thought, but immediately was embarrassed by thinking it.
He left Mary Jane standing in the yard where they had met in their childhoods: ice blond hair, red Keds, blood, Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse, when there could be only one Miss Fancy.
“Henry,” she called after him. “Let’s talk about it,” she said, but he pretended not to hear her.
MARTHA HAD A PLAN. That fact did not surprise him, but the extent of its impracticality did.
Over turkey dinner that night—brilliantly cooked, he would always give her that—she told Henry that the new president was considering two possible uses for the practice house: a residence for visiting alumnae, and a new fund-raising office. But Martha had a third idea: to turn the place into an art studio.
“For me?” Henry asked.
“Yes. You see, if you ran the whole thing, then maybe we could go on living upstairs.”
HENRY HAD NO MEMORY of his grandfather’s residence. In the few times they had met outside the practice house, the location had always been Dr. Gardner’s office, where the presence of his secretary had perhaps justified the formality of his tone.
Now Henry stood in the living room, unaware that it was the place where he had long ago served up make-believe cookies and drawn patterns in the beige carpet. Dr. Gardner was in the midst of packing his things to move out, however, so the carpet had been rolled up; and the floor, newly uncovered, looked fresher than anything else in the place. The walls were bare and pockmarked; the bookshelves were nearly empty.
He looked old and slightly translucent, but his appearance stirred no emotion in Henry, who had long since lost any hope or interest in following the connection that their bloodlines might have suggested. For his part, Dr. Gardner eyed Henry as he always had: with a strange, awkward mixture of curiosity and fear.
“You’ve come to talk with me about Mrs. Gaines, I assume,” Dr. Gardner said.
“Yes.”
“Have a seat. I’d offer you a cup of coffee, but I’m fairly sure the china has already been packed.”
There were still two upholstered armchairs, one on either side of the fireplace, but neither man sat.
“What’s going to happen to her?” Henry asked.
“You’re concerned?”
“Of course I’m concerned,” Henry said.
“I don’t think you’ve ever expressed your concern before,” Dr. Gardner said.
“She’s never been about to lose her job before,” Henry said.
Dr. Gardner walked over to one of the windows and thoughtfully, almost lovingly, ran a hand down one of the drapes. “I want to ask you a question before I answer yours,” he said.