The Irresistible Henry House Part 5

"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 you want a cookie?'" Martha said, correcting him. want a cookie?'" Martha said, correcting him.

"Do you you want a cookie?" Henry asked in a perfect imitation. 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 encompa.s.sed 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." 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 gla.s.s 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 chup and the strawberries he called and the strawberries he called stawba, stawba, and the toy stop sign that he somehow preferred to the toy cars. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 circ.u.mstances 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 should keep the boy for now." keep the boy for now."

Part 2 - We Come and Go

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.

An experienced mother of an older child might have thought it bizarre, for example, that Henry at two showed absolutely no signs of the usual separation anxieties. Far from clinging to Martha when other people were around, he would race down the stairs on Sundays to be with the whole lot of practice house mothers. With Martha all but forgotten, he could spend hours handing out pretend cookies and telling them pretend jokes and, perhaps most strikingly, asking them questions: "How are you today?" "You like singing?" "Which do you want?" No trip to the park with Martha, no special breakfast, no promise of toys or favors could compete with the lineup of multiple visitors below.

"Henry tella joke," he would say to one practice mother or another.

"What's the joke, Henry?" she would answer.

"Lion, ROAR!" he would say, and he would follow it with the peals of laughter that inevitably pulled the women's smiles away from the baby and back toward him.

An experienced mother of an older child might also have found it odd that Henry never looked for Martha when he was in the other women's company-or rather, that he looked for her no differently than he looked for anyone else. The women would have seemed, to an outside observer, equal and interchangeable parts in the engine that kept Henry going. The spark was his considerable charm. The women held and humored him. They trained their cameras on him. They pa.s.sed news of his cutest expressions and precocious questions around like rare fruit.

"Drinkee milkee." "Brushee teeth." "Are you happy now?" "Do you feel bad?"

Jealously, Martha frowned on and tried to shorten these encounters, claiming to be worried that the new baby, Herbert, wasn't getting the attention he deserved. Privately, she blamed the practice house mothers for luring Henry, not Henry for luring the mothers. Martha was besotted enough to be nearly overwhelmed by the novelty and the magnitude of what might come next in his life, and by the hope-growing tentatively into faith-that she would have the chance to see it. It was as if, all her life, she had been served the same first course of the same meal, and now she was finally being given a chance to sample the rest. She had no intention of sharing, even as she had no ability to discern what it was that she wanted to devour.

"WANNA GO DOWN," Henry said to Martha one afternoon in September, as she tied the shoelace on his left Buster Brown for the third or fourth time that day. The autumn sun was just finding its way through the upstairs windows and varnishing the floor.

"No, not now, Henry," Martha said. "Baby's trying to take his nap."

On the radio, the Andrews Sisters were singing their latest hit: You call everybody Darlin', And everybody calls you Darlin' too "Wanna go down," Henry said again.

"No, Henry, Emem said no," Martha said.

"Wanna see Sally," Henry said.

"It's not even Sally's week downstairs today," Martha said, though Henry was sure he had heard Sally's voice just before.

If you call everybody Darlin', Then love won't come a-knockin' at your door...

"Wanna see Sally," Henry said again, with a sad, strained look on his small face, and, after stepping on and once more untying his shoelace, he slowly began to move toward the door.

"Henry," Martha said in a warning voice. "Stay here."

"Can do eet," he said. "Wanna see Sally."

And as the years go by, You'll sit and wonder why n.o.body calls you Darlin' anymore.

"Henry," Martha said again, following him quickly out to the landing.

"Can do eet," he said one more time, and then he fell down the stairs.

He fell with his limbs splayed in all directions, as if he was an armload of firewood tossed down from the landing.

HE WAS STILL FOR ONLY a moment or two-just long enough for Sally to come running from the nursery and for Martha to fly down the stairs. It seemed unlikely for a two-year-old not to have been killed by such a fall. And yet, with the exception of the mushroom cap-shaped b.u.mp that rose immediately on his forehead, he seemed to be unharmed.

"Want Sally!" he cried, and he refused to look at Martha, even when she picked him up like a baby and cradled him in her arms.

He strained toward Sally-a nineteen-year-old farm girl who was as embarra.s.sed by Henry's preference for her as Martha was wounded by it.

Trying her hardest to seem impa.s.sive, Martha handed Henry to Sally and began her examination: feeling his ankles, wrists, elbows, knees-and then, once she was satisfied that his bones had not been broken, staring deeply into his eyes.