She took a few uncertain steps toward it, and then she got in.
“Have some tea,” he said. “It’ll settle your stomach.”
“I’m okay, Henry,” she said.
She reached for the teacup, her fingers embracing it from the bottom, like the green base of a flower.
She slept. At ten o’clock, he called the disco and told them he wouldn’t be coming in. Then he felt her forehead and left to find her some chicken soup.
SHE WASN’T IN BED WHEN HE RETURNED, and his first thought was that she was sick again. He waited for her, putting the soup on the stove and turning on the radio, so that the music could fill the silence. After five or ten minutes, though, he began to worry about her and walked up to the still-closed bathroom door.
“Peace?” he said.
There was silence.
“Peace?”
Silence again.
He knocked, waited, asked, called, pounded, and finally opened. The bathroom was empty, and the only sign of Peace was the toothbrush she’d left on the side of the sink, along with an empty box of false eyelashes and a dark mascara brush.
Henry worried, sensing she’d gone somewhere in an untamed state, unthinking and in pain. He put his coat on, wrapped the scarf she had made him twice around his neck, and went back outside.
She had not been to the drugstore two blocks down, nor to the market a block beyond that. Neither shopkeeper had seen her.
For an hour or so, Henry made his way through the neighborhood, passing the dry cleaners, the pubs, the head shop, the used-book store. At a side entrance of the small church six blocks away, he finally saw a familiar short red coat and white boots, breath clouds wisping out from the arched doorway into the gray-white day.
Henry’s step quickened. Only at the last moment did he see the broom at the woman’s feet, the broom handle in her gloved hands, the scraggly red hair, and the middle-aged face.
“Lost something, sweetie?” she asked him.
Henry, speechless, shook his head no.
Someone, he thought as he walked away.
HE WENT BACK HOME with one last hope that he would find Peace there. His worry grew into annoyance, then anger. When it was too big a feeling to confine to the apartment, he took it back outside. It would be rage by the time he reached the theater.
Snow was coming down, and Henry walked through the streets toward Piccadilly, remembering the tracks he had made in the snow the day he left Humphrey and ran away to find Betty. Betty, who had never even written to him after Martha’s death and who, as far he knew, was still working for Time in Paris, just the English Channel and a lifetime away. He thought about what it had been like to have Betty as an unknown, a promise in his future. His future now seemed to lack so specific a hope.
The Shaftesbury was an old theater, with a castlelike turret on top. In the snow, it could have been a Disney backdrop except for the huge banner hanging across its famous corner entrance: HAIR: THE AMERICAN TRIBAL LOVE-ROCK MUSICAL. Henry had come to hate the poster and everything it stood for. What it stood for, to him, was Peace’s absence.
Henry knocked at the stage door, and after a few minutes it was opened by a guy he recognized as one of the Tribe.
“I’m looking for Peace,” Henry said.
“Who isn’t?” the guy said.
“Jacobs,” Henry added.
“Who isn’t?” the guy said, smiling.
“Well, okay, is she here?” Henry asked.
“Try the rehearsal rooms. Look around. Hey, have you got any food? I’ve got to get something to eat,” he said.
The ancient wooden walls of the backstage corridor were covered almost entirely with framed photographs and vintage posters. But the current actors—it was hard to know whether they were in costume or their regular clothes—left little doubt about the decade. Henry walked down the corridor smelling marijuana, coffee, stale flowers, perfume, and sweat. He could hear laughter, music, arguments, curses. He felt like a stick of wood being borne along a river.
Peace was sitting on the floor of a rehearsal room cross-legged, wearing an old leather aviator helmet. A guy was lying beside her with his head in her lap, and she was stroking his face intently, with both hands, as if she was curing him. She was saying something to him, or singing, and every few minutes she bent down at an impossible angle, gently kissing him. Only when an actress came over and swiped the hat from her head did Peace look up. Then she saw Henry.
Later, he would play and replay the moment and realize that her face had been remarkable not for the expression it held when she saw him but rather for what it lacked. There was no shock, no guilt, no regret, no anger. The look on Peace’s face was perfectly open, perfectly welcoming. Henry might have been anyone. He might have come in to deliver food, or mop the floor, or anything.
“I want that back!” Peace shouted playfully to the girl who had taken the helmet.
“We’ll see!” the girl called over her shoulder.
The guy on Peace’s lap reached back up for her.
“Hi,” she said to Henry.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“What are you doing here?”
She blinked. She shook her hair out and smoothed it down.
He realized in that moment that he was staring into a mirror. He had been blind to it—as incapable of sight as he had once been incapable of speech. Henry was looking at Peace and finally seeing the unaffected indifference, the strident autonomy, the inability to trust in one person; seeing, unavoidably, the absolute worst in himself.
THERE WAS A CLOAKROOM OFF THE CORRIDOR, and after a few minutes, Henry managed to steer Peace into it. In her bell-bottom jeans and flea-market cardigan, she looked like the schoolgirl she should still have been.
“What is it?” she said to Henry.
“Why aren’t you home?” he asked her.
“Why would I be home?” she asked. “And why aren’t you working?”
“For the same reason you should be home,” he said. “Because I thought you were sick.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest. It was a petulant, protective gesture.
“Pregnant,” she said.
It was oddly not shocking. Nevertheless, he repeated the word.
“Pregnant,” he said.
“Yup.”
She looked back over her shoulder in a way that made him completely certain he’d had nothing to do with the pregnancy and wanted nothing to do with it.
She took a step back, toward the coats that were hanging, arms intertwined.
He couldn’t help seeing himself again, this time more than ten years before, on the day Betty had come to school, and Mary Jane had pulled him into the coatroom and he’d told her about Martha. He wondered, if he had told her his other big secrets, whether she would still love him the way she had loved him then.
That day, he had been the one stuffing his hands into his pockets, lessening the chance of physical contact. Now it was Peace, folding her arms, looking desperately down and away. Even as Henry’s mind sped along to try to make sense of the new information, he understood for the first time how Mary Jane must have felt when he backed away from her that day. How that must have felt, he thought, as he took a step closer and saw Peace recoil.
“Do you—can we—” he began.
She shook her head emphatically.
“I got the name of a clinic from Cathy,” she said. “It’s legal here, you know.”
“Don’t you want to talk about it?”
She shrugged. “It was just a mistake,” she said.
Someone came by to find her. “Half hour,” he said.
“I’ve got to get into costume,” Peace told him.
He nodded, staring at her. It was impossible to imagine that her schoolgirl self could be pregnant. Of course it had been, as she said, a mistake.
It was not until he was halfway home, trudging back through the canvas-white snow, that Henry thought about Betty
and realized that she had been even younger than Peace was now when she’d chosen to let him be born.
9
The Most Moving Story Ever Told
There were two facing rows of blue bucket seats in the waiting room of the clinic, and a half dozen young women sat there—two with their mothers, four on their own. All of them seemed to be smoking, and all of them stared at Henry when he walked in with Peace. He was the only man.
A chubby receptionist with an unfortunate Twiggy haircut took Peace’s name and told her to have a seat. Henry hung up their coats, and then he sat down beside Peace, the newest members of a wretched, transitory club.
On the table beside Henry there were worn copies of Queen and Rave, Tatler and Woman, Time and Life.
“Want to read something?” Henry asked Peace.
She shook her head. She was trying to look casual, but Henry could tell she was scared.
He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away, just forcefully enough to inspire both the mothers to look at Henry accusingly.
But he didn’t feel guilty. If anything, he felt noble for having come with Peace and quite certain that from the start he had cared too much, not too little, about her.
She fiddled with the strap on her bag. He studied the floor—a threadbare carpet—and studied the heels of Peace’s pink shoes. Who wore pink shoes to an abortion? A girl who wasn’t old enough for anything real, he thought.
Half an hour passed. A nurse appeared in the doorway with a clipboard in her hands.
“Laura?” she asked of the room in general.
Laura put down her copy of Woman, stood up, offered a universal shrug, and followed the nurse out.
The group that remained readjusted. One of the mothers picked up the copy of Woman that Laura had dropped. On the cover was a smiling blond model, one story called “Looking Ahead to Christmas” and another called “My Babies” that was subtitled “The Most Moving Story Ever Told.” For weeks people had been talking about Sheila Thorns, a Birmingham woman who had given birth to sextuplets.
“Six at once,” the woman now reading the magazine said to no one in particular. “Can you imagine?”
“Six at once,” her daughter repeated. “That would be so groovy.”
No one pointed out how odd it was that the girl who thought six was groovy was clearly not as inspired by the prospect of one.
The mother kept up a stream of reactions. “Think of that,” she said. “Poor sod.” “I’d rather walk on coals.”
Henry looked over to see whether Peace was interested, but clearly the sextuplet story had passed her by. She gave him one of her fake, forced grins: the invitation he suddenly found so false and so appalling. For more than a year now, he had watched her slide that inviting expression under the fences surrounding so many people she’d met. She’d done it with the groupies by the theater. The Great Martini. The cast of Hair. Even now, in the waiting room of a woman’s clinic, he could see the invitation in her eyes, the promise of an intimacy she could feign with her body but clearly never feel with her heart.
By the time the nurse came for the next patient (“Suzanne?”), Henry hated Peace the way one can only hate a part of oneself. And by the time it was finally her turn—halfway into the bleak, lifeless afternoon—he was not all that unhappy when the nurse said he couldn’t come in with her.
10
You Don’t Look Anything Like Her
There was slightly more to pack for this move. Though Henry had spent far less time in London than in California, he had gathered more possessions with more pleasure here, and though he was already anxious to leave Peace, he found himself wanting to keep some of their things. On a raw day in February, Henry packed two entire cartons with the sorts of items he had never thought about bringing when he left a place. There was the teapot they’d used for flowers; a half dozen funky, mismatched bowls that he’d bought in an effort to match Peace’s style; a set of Mickey Mouse sheets he had found on Portobello Road. He would have taken some furniture, too, if he hadn’t had to cross the Atlantic. As it was, he pondered what to do with the two boxes. It took him a moment to remember that there was no one at the practice house who would know or care what to do with them. He thought about sending them to Chris at the Tuxedo, but that was, in any case, not where he wanted his things to end up. He wrote to Mary Jane instead:
Dear MJ:
I hope you won’t mind, but I’m sending you a couple of boxes. These are not gifts for you, although I may well bring you some when I get there, which will be in a month or two. I am leaving London, leaving Peace, and coming back to New York. I have just one little side trip to make before I come, and then I’ll want to see you.
————
HE HAD NOT EXPECTED a lot of emotion from Peace. In a sense, they had already said goodbye the night before the abortion, when she’d admitted that the baby could have been fathered by any of three or four men. That had been enough to draw the line forever between them, and Henry had been thinking of it that way—as if a frame that had previously included them both had now been redrawn to be two frames, with different colored backgrounds or even different landscapes. Peace would stay, perhaps forever, in the psychedelic landscape of 1968 London: an enormous Whitehall mural of go-go boots, comets, patent leather, Indian prints, Hair posters, and maroon lights bouncing off silver microphones.
Henry’s background, by contrast, had already shifted to an imagined New York of Greenwich Village and painting and, above all, Mary Jane.
HE FLEW TO PARIS IN FEBRUARY. The whole way there, he thought about all the things that had been true of Mary Jane and true of no other woman. She was the only one who had known him as a child. The only one he’d hurt who had forgiven him. She was the only one he hadn’t been able to conquer with a kiss. The only one he’d wanted but had never made love to. She was the only one he’d truly been able to trust and, perhaps because of that, the only one who had ever seen him clearly.
Henry sat thinking about her as the airplane drew a bright silver line through the buoyant pale blue clouds. All of the things that were only hads he remembered; all the ones that were only hadn’ts he imagined himself doing.
First, though, there had to be Paris. There had to be a visit to Betty, or at least an attempt at a visit. Despite everything, Henry’s morning in the clinic with Peace had made it impossible for him to imagine going back to the States without seeing the woman who’d given birth to him.
Later he would conclude that she would have ducked him completely if she hadn’t happened to pick up the phone herself when he called her office.
“Gardner,” she’d said in a bored, convincing newsroom style. Older. Scratchier. Deeper than he’d remembered.
“Hi, Betty,” he’d said, and added, “Don’t hang up. I’m calling from London.”
“Who is—” she’d begun, and then there had been a pause. “Henry?” she’d asked, groggily, as if he had just tiptoed into her room in the middle of the night.
THE PARIS BUREAU of Time was in an unremarkable modern office building on the Avenue Matignon near the feathery fountains of the Champs-Elysées. Henry had left his suitcases in a locker at the airport, and so when he walked into the office, his hands were free to stuff into his pockets.
The receptionist at the front desk was speaking on the phone in French.
“Oui?” she said to Henry, seemingly put upon, when she finally hung up.
“I’m here to see Betty Gardner,” Henry said.
She looked him up and down.
“I’m her son,” he added in answer to what he thought was her unasked question.
“Yes, she told us you’d be coming,” she said in a way that made Henry wonder what else Betty had told people. The thought that he existed in her life even when he didn’t know it baffled and surprised him. He felt like a cartoon character, who could be drawn to do things he didn’t want to do.
“Betty?” the receptionist said on the phone. “Oui. Il est ici.”
S
he hung up and turned back to Henry. “You don’t look anything like her, you know.”
BETTY DIDN’T LOOK exactly older than he remembered her looking, just more used. She seemed like a flattened, pinched version of herself, a clay sculpture in the making that was being overhandled. Her shoulders seemed narrower and her hips wider. Her face was flatter, and the smile she forced it to make could as easily have been a frown or a grimace; it was really just a minor change in the angle of her lips.
Henry hugged her, an awkward gesture filled with extra space.
“I’m so glad you called,” she said, and to Henry, no one—not even Peace with a newly shoplifted pair of go-go boots—had ever sounded more false.
“Can we go out somewhere?” he asked her. “Oh, I think we’d better,” she said.
Even in the elevator going back downstairs, Henry knew there had been no point in his making the visit, and he also knew that he’d always be rather pleased with himself for making it.
OF COURSE, SHE KNEW PARIS. She knew French. She knew the brasserie to go to, the right way to order the sandwiches, and the right way to order the wine. But he was really the adult. He was the one with the choices before him and the absolution to bestow.
She could barely look at him until she had had her second glass of wine. She looked instead at the round, white marble tabletop, played with the long, narrow packets of sugar, said a too-eager hello to a pair of colleagues who passed on their way to another café.
“So you were in London,” she finally said.
“Yes.”
“Are they totally Beatles mad?”
“Yes.”
“And the Rolling Stones?”
“Yes.”
“And the sextuplets?”
“Yes,” he said, frustrated.
“What?”
“Betty.”
“What?” she said.
“Mom.”
It was only the second time he had ever used the word out loud. The first had been the night he had run away from Humphrey and gone to New York.
The Irresistible Henry House Page 36
