The Irresistible Henry House Part 32

He waited for absolution. Martha didn't give it. She merely closed her eyes, and he watched a faint smile of victory register on her dry lips: Betty Gardner, rejected at last.

"I'm glad you came," Martha said finally. "My baby boy," she said, and squeezed his hand. "Oh, how I loved you."

What pierced and surrounded him, what he could not avoid-riding down in the empty elevator, walking through echoes in the empty halls-was the notion that he might not see her again. He had never felt it so strongly or cared so much. But it was the night, too, he told himself: the late-night feeling in the empty halls.

THE PRACTICE HOUSE was in the process of being transformed into a residence for visiting faculty and alumnae. The bedrooms-all but Martha's-were being redecorated, and the kitchen was being updated as well.

There was still no lock on the front door, so Henry merely let himself in. The house was dark and empty, which of course it had rarely been before. It smelled of plaster and paint. But Henry was too tired to focus or to care. He fell asleep on Martha's bed, and his last waking thought was the memory of her bringing him chicken soup on a tray.

ANOTHER NURSE CALLED IN the morning, and Henry braced himself for the news of Martha's death, but instead she told him that his mother was sitting up and asking to see him.

"Tell her I'm on my way," he said. He showered quickly and raced down the stairs, not stopping to answer the ringing phone.

She was dead by the time he arrived at her room. He did not want to see her dead, but the doctor and nurse seemed to think he would want to, and he gathered that simply declining the chance would seem somehow disloyal. He kept his jaw tight when he stepped into the room, and he made himself look at her. But while to the doctor and nurse he might have seemed to be absorbed in a properly devastated farewell, he was actually fascinated to see that the color of Martha's lips was the exact shade of purple that had been chosen for the four vultures in The Jungle Book. The Jungle Book. And what was rising inside him, even as he looked on, was not grief or regret or even self-pity, but rather a raucous, wildly improper sense of freedom, unlike any he'd known. And what was rising inside him, even as he looked on, was not grief or regret or even self-pity, but rather a raucous, wildly improper sense of freedom, unlike any he'd known.

2.

Peace If Henry had ever been in the Wilton chapel before, he certainly couldn't recall when. He felt he would have remembered the jeweled colors of the three stained-gla.s.s windows that rose into petal-shaped Gothic arches behind a simple wooden cross. The central window depicted Mary with Jesus in her arms.

The organ played. The candle flames s.h.i.+mmered. Henry was startled to find the whole front third of the chapel filling with mourners. It was not a large chapel, but there was nothing Henry had seen in the last few years of Martha's life to make him expect that there would be more than four or five people here. He wondered, sensing the rows filling behind him-people was.h.i.+ng in like subsequent tidemarks on a sh.o.r.e-if Dr. Gardner had issued some sort of ex officio edict to make them come, or if it was standard at Wilton funerals for the whole faculty to turn out, perhaps amid intimations of their own mortality and the rea.s.surance that they, too, would not die unheralded.

Dr. Gardner stood at the pulpit, smoothing a piece of paper and waiting for silence before he spoke. He squinted, and his mouth turned down; he seemed almost near tears, but then he flicked open his reading gla.s.ses with one hand and put them on.

"We are gathered here today to say goodbye to our friend Martha Gaines," he read. "For more than forty years, Wilton College has been at the forefront in the teaching of home economics, and the primary reason for that was Mrs. Gaines. When I was president of this inst.i.tution, we were blessed to have had the leaders.h.i.+p of a strong, intelligent, dedicated woman who spent virtually her entire career studying and teaching the science of child care to generations of young women, some of whom are in this chapel this morning."

Dr. Gardner looked up at the congregation, perhaps trying to locate these women, then back down at his eulogy.

"I'm well aware that Mrs. Gaines was known for being strict-not to say exacting-in her standards, and not only the practice house but the whole college was the better for it. She lacked tolerance for laziness, and she took disorder as a personal insult. I can recall hearing over the years that Mrs. Gaines was nearly absolute in her demands for hospital corners, proper feeding times, and even well-ironed pillowcases."

He looked up again and, satisfied by the expected light chuckles, returned again to his text.

"But anyone who knew Mrs. Gaines well," Dr. Gardner continued, "knew that her dedication to order was, more than anything, a profound affirmation of life. If you don't believe that life has deep value, it doesn't matter whether you keep it polished and dust-free. Mrs. Gaines taught us all to keep it polished and dust-free. She will be missed."

Dr. Gardner folded his piece of paper, removed his reading gla.s.ses, and looked up, as if surprised that what he had said had taken so little time and left so few people moved.

Henry had told Dr. Gardner that he would not speak. He hadn't thought he would have anything to say. But the coolness of his grandfather's remarks unexpectedly bothered him. Henry stood up and walked toward the pulpit, nodding at Dr. Gardner and proceeding to take his place. He looked out at the chapel and found people staring at him expectantly. He recognized the Wilton nurse and one of the groundskeepers. No one else.

"Good morning," he said. "My name is Henry Gaines." Then he stopped, immediately lost. He could not bring himself to say that he had been Martha's son, or that she had been his mother. "Martha Gaines raised me," he said instead.

His eyes moved restlessly over the high tide of visitors before him, scanning their faces, searching for the one that was missing: the one he hadn't expected to expect.

"I was the practice baby she kept," Henry said. "Every baby who came to the practice house came there because someone didn't want us. But Martha did. She wanted us all."

Unexpectedly, Henry was moved by what he had said, realizing it was true at the exact moment that he said it. He put his hands in his pockets. He looked down at his neatly tied shoes.

"It is a very, very strange thing to start life as an orphan," he said. "But Martha and the women in the practice house made us feel we were different in a good way. She made us feel more wanted than a lot of people's actual mothers probably ever make them feel."

That was, surprisingly, true as well. Henry looked at Dr. Gardner, Betty's indifference seething in the s.p.a.ce between them.

"Martha gave us a start," Henry said, and once again-as he had in the hospital-he understood how unjust it was that her love hadn't been enough to conquer Betty's absence.

THE MINISTER READ THE SERMON. Henry didn't listen. There was much talk of good works on earth and peace in heaven. He did not focus on the details. He thought instead, without exactly meaning to, about all the sorting and cleaning that he would have to do in Martha's room before he could go back to Burbank. Then he stood and bowed his head for the Lord's Prayer, and he followed along with the hymn, which was named, appropriately enough, "Come, Labor On."

AFTER THE SERVICE, Henry stood with the minister and Dr. Gardner, shaking people's hands and thanking them for coming. One middle-aged couple, darkly dressed, came up with an aura of special mission.

"We're Sam and Laura Jacobs," the woman said. "We wanted to offer our condolences. Your mother was so marvelous."

Just to the left of them, a young woman about Henry's age stood wearing a suede jacket over a Beatles T-s.h.i.+rt emblazoned with the movie logo HELP! Henry guessed she was the Jacobses' daughter.

"Thank you," Henry said as the girl took another step away from them, then bent to comb out the fringes on her brown suede boots.

"How did you know Martha?" Henry asked.

"Well, we only met her a few times," Mrs. Jacobs said.

"We actually tracked her down a few years ago," Mr. Jacobs added. "We wanted to thank her in person for doing such a great job with our daughter."

Henry followed Mr. Jacobs's glance to the girl, who had abandoned the fringe on her boots and was now relooping a hair elastic around the bottom of one long brown braid.

"Was she one of Martha's students?" Henry asked, trying and failing to get the girl's attention, suddenly wondering whether she was hostile, or stupid, or merely stoned.

"One of her students?" Mrs. Jacobs said. "No. Oh, no. She was one of the practice babies. Like you."

There were people moving on the periphery of Henry's sight, a few more of whom he now recognized from the depths of his Wilton past. Vaguely, too, he was aware that Dr. Gardner was walking with the minister to the door of the chapel. But Henry was powerless to acknowledge the people, or to follow his grandfather's exit. He had never seen a practice baby outside the practice house, and he had certainly never met one who was older than an infant. He stared at the girl with the HELP! T-s.h.i.+rt. "Which one were you?" Henry asked her. "Hannah? Harriet? Horatio?"

The girl finally acknowledged Henry and smiled.

He pointed to her T-s.h.i.+rt. "Was it Help?" he asked, and she laughed.

"They called her Hazel," Mrs. Jacobs said.

Hazel. Hazy. The baby he'd famously kept safe in the two minutes that some ditzy practice mother had been locked out of the house.

"Hazel," Henry repeated. "Is that still your name?" he asked her.

"No. It's Peace," she said.

"Wow. Really?"

"Peace Jacobs."

"Cool," Henry said.

Her eyes were almost frightening: so pale green, so lucid, so suddenly fixed on his, so open. It was impossible not to look at her eyes-and not just look at them but look back at them, two dreamy doorways opening into-what?-in any case, a world. Her eyes seemed to promise excitement, humor, a strange sense of discernment, and one other thing Henry couldn't quite place, though it seemed somehow familiar. Immediately he wanted to know if this was the look she gave everyone. Perhaps it was simply her way.

"How would you like," he asked her, "to come see the practice house again?"

PEACE HAD TOLD HIM she might stop by that evening. But it was Mary Jane who arrived first. Her flight from San Francisco had been delayed, and she had missed the funeral. She had arrived at the practice house while Henry was still at the cemetery-the burial mercifully brief, just Dr. Gardner and Henry and a man from the funeral home who seemed unable to suppress his pleasure at the beautiful spring day.

"You missed all the fun," Henry told Mary Jane as he accepted a long, tight embrace from her.

If she was still angry about Alexa, she had decided not to show it.

"Did Betty come?" Mary Jane asked.

"No."

"Did she call?"

"No."

"Telegram?"

"No."

"Unbelievable."

"Believable."

"Do you have to deal with all this c.r.a.p?" She gestured vaguely around Martha's bedroom, the repository of a life in which the limits of age, or perhaps of proportion, had meant an inability to discard anything. It was a mess, but an entirely organized mess, befitting the practice house standards.

"Of course I have to deal with it," Henry said.

"Starting when?" Mary Jane asked, picking up Martha's inlaid enamel hairbrush and immediately putting it back down.

"Starting now, I guess," Henry said.

THEY WALKED TOGETHER to the hardware store, renamed and repainted since Arthur Hamilton's death. They bought tape, garbage bags, and cardboard boxes. Henry was startled by the stillness in the neighborhood. It was a regular Wednesday afternoon, but nothing seemed to be moving. The sky was Los Angeles blue, but that was the only similarity to home. There were virtually no people, no cars, no sounds.

"We'll do piles for things to give away, things to throw away, and things to leave for the college," Henry said.

"And what about things to keep?" Mary Jane asked.

Henry shrugged. "I guess," he said.

The clothes were easiest. Henry swept all Martha's undergarments and hosiery into one trash bag. The s.h.i.+rts, sweaters, and skirts were all immaculate as ever-spotless, perfectly folded, with sheets of tissue paper around and between them, as if they had just been purchased. Henry handed these to Mary Jane, and Mary Jane packed them in boxes. In Martha's desk drawers he found neatly stacked supplies: pads, pens, stamps, envelopes. The bottom drawer seemed jammed shut, and when Henry finally forced it open, he found at least a hundred of her Green Stamps booklets, filled and never used. It was the closest he came to crying.

"We need some music," Mary Jane said.

Henry turned on Martha's ancient radio, its signal strong and bizarrely modern, coming from the old wooden cabinet. Mary Jane sang along, off-key, with the Beatles' "Penny Lane" and the Turtles' "Happy Together."

I can't see me loving n.o.body but you for all my life ...

"Are you going back to L.A. right away?" she asked him after they had decided the shoes were not worth keeping.

"I don't know," he said. "I'm not really sure I want to go back."

"I thought you were doing The Jungle Book," The Jungle Book," she said. she said.

"I am."

"So?"

"It's not the same."

"Same as what?"

"The same as it was with Walt."

She stretched out now on the part of Martha's bed that was free from clothes. "What would you do instead?" she asked him.

She had a cigarette in her hand, and it bothered Henry suddenly that her shoes were touching Martha's pillows.

"I don't know," he said.

"Would you come back here?"

"No. Why would I come back here?"

"I don't know. Teach art. Chase students. Hang out with your grandfather."

"Are you high?" Henry asked her.

"Not enough," she said.

She put out her cigarette. From Martha's bedside table, she picked up a green porcelain box in the shape of a cabbage. "Christ, look at all this s.h.i.+t," she said, and somehow, surprisingly, Henry found that annoying, too.

HE WAS STARTLED, though he shouldn't have been, to find Martha's gold Omicron Nu pin. She had left it in a small cedar box, along with her Timex wrist.w.a.tch and several pairs of simple gold earrings. Clearly she must have known that she wouldn't be coming back to this house-or going any place where time or affiliation or ornament would matter. Henry paused, uncertain, the box open on her dresser.

"What should I do with these?" he asked Mary Jane.

"Keep them, of course," she said.

"I think you should take the earrings."

"Don't be an idiot, Henry," Mary Jane said.

"I'm not being an idiot. I bet she'd want you to have them."

"She'd want me to be swallowed up whole by the earth, and that's what she always wanted," Mary Jane said.

"I see your point," he told her.

She laughed.

"But what about what I want?" he said. "What if I want you to have them?"