The Irresistible Henry House Part 6

"What are you looking for?" Sally asked her.

"Signs of concussion," Martha said.

"And what are they?" Sally asked ruefully, trying to give back the upper hand.

"Several," Martha said distractedly, but she seemed to be searching Henry's eyes for something less clinical.

From the nursery, they could all hear the sounds of the baby, Herbert, crying as he woke from his nap.

Sally started to hand Henry back to Martha.

"Sally! Sally!" he cried, and so, with barely convincing nonchalance, Martha said, "Well, dear, I think you should go on holding Henry for now. I'll just go see to Herbert myself."

2.

Nursery School

Two years later-almost two years to the day-a four-year-old Henry ran down the stairs as soon as Martha answered the ringing telephone at her desk. His still-chubby fingers barely touched the banister, and he jumped over the last step. Then he slipped into the nursery, and, for the first of many times to come, he climbed up into the crib where the newest House baby was sleeping. Her name was Hazel, and Henry called her Hazy.

Both Elsa, that week's practice mother, and Martha appeared in the doorway just seconds after Henry landed beside Hazy.

"Henry! No!" Martha shouted, and before he could even touch the baby, Martha had s.n.a.t.c.hed Henry out of the crib.

It was September of 1950, the end of a peak polio summer, a time in American life when every child, no matter his or her age or background, was seen-in equal shades of terror-as being both a potential victim and a potential threat. No one had yet discovered the cause of polio, let alone its cure, so children were kept apart from each other whenever possible, in case proximity increased the risk.

All summer, Martha had seen the photographs everywhere-in magazines, on newsreels, and even as part of the new health curriculum-of children with the disease who had been consigned to those enormous, coffinlike breathing machines that were known as iron lungs. The terror of Henry ending up in one of those contraptions-or worse, the terror of him dying-was one of the reasons that Martha leapt to take him away from Hazel. Though Irena at the orphanage had a.s.sured Martha that there had not been a whisper of polio there, Hazel had been in residence for only two days, and Martha did not want to take any chances.

The other reason, which Martha was less inclined to admit to the practice mothers, was that she thought she saw in Henry growing evidence of jealousy.

"Why is she crying?" he had asked Martha about Hazel the night after her arrival.

"Why do you think she's crying?"

Darkly, it seemed, he had answered: "She wants to go back where she came from."

During Hazel's bath the next evening, Henry appeared just in time to thrust a washcloth onto her face. He was uncharacteristically boisterous around her, especially when she was sleeping. And twice, Henry said he wanted to sleep in the crib with Hazel, a bit of solicitousness that seemed suspiciously enthusiastic.

Realizing she was in an entirely new area of child rearing, Martha furtively consulted the copy of Spock that she had never quite gotten around to discarding after the conference a few years back. She looked in the section called "Jealousy and Rivalry," and she saw an ink drawing of an ap.r.o.n-clad mother kneeling on the floor, a pot holder beside her, where, presumably, she had dropped it on her way to attend the crisis. In her arms was a fidgety toddler in a striped s.h.i.+rt and saddle shoes; beside him, a crying baby with spidery hair and tears flying like arrows off his face. Spock wrote that a mother might say to a jealous child: "I know how you feel sometimes, Johnny. You wish there weren't any baby around here for Mother to take care of. But don't you worry, Mother loves you just the same."

That night, when she tucked Henry into bed, Martha took a breath and said: "I know how you feel sometimes, Henry. You wish there weren't any baby around here for Emem to take care of. But don't you worry, Emem loves you just the same."

Henry looked at Martha, confused. "I just want Hazy to love me too," he said.

IN FACT, FAR FROM SEEING HAZEL as a threat, Henry saw her-or perhaps simply sensed her-as another potential alternative to the formidable singularity of Martha.

His attentions to Hazel were dramatic enough, however, for Martha to conclude that it would be prudent for Henry to start attending the Wilton Nursery School next door. So, as the Indian summer cooled into fall, Martha prepared Henry-and tried to prepare herself-for the first days of his life beyond the practice house.

A STATE OF MILD BUT MUTUAL condescension existed-and always had-between the nursery school and the practice house. Martha saw the nursery school as a college service, a necessary inst.i.tution within an inst.i.tution, like the infirmary, or Buildings and Grounds. The nursery school was at but not of the Department of Home Economics, and though its teachers-a succession of Wilton professors' wives, whose children had usually been among their "students"-were perfectly well-intentioned, there was nothing remotely pedagogical about the approach they took to the children's days. They were, in Martha's view, merely glorified babysitters for the faculty and neighborhood brats.

Not surprisingly, in light of this, the women who ran the nursery school had always tended to look on Martha and her students as unbearably snooty, and it was with no love lost that Edith Donovan greeted Martha on that first September morning.

There were six other children in the Wilton Nursery School in the fall of 1950. Four were toddlers, still taking naps, wearing diapers, and doing things that to Henry were of little or no interest. But the other two were the same age as Henry, and he had watched them across the backyard with increasing curiosity for the last many months. Martha had never let him talk to them for more than a minute or two. "Germs," she had said, as if referring to the children themselves, and not to the threat they supposedly carried.

This morning, however, on the first day of nursery school, there was no large shadow on the ground beside Henry, no heavy hand on his shoulder hurrying him back to the practice house. Instead, after Martha had introduced him to Mrs. Donovan at the back door, and one of the toddlers had arrived at the front, Martha reluctantly followed Mrs. Donovan inside, leaving Henry in the backyard with the two older children.

"My name is Henry," Henry said to the girl.

"I know that. You live next door," she said. "In that house," she added, and she pointed at it, accusingly.

"Where do you live?" Henry asked her.

"In a real house," she said, although she didn't say it meanly.

Her name was Mary Jane Harmon, and she was the history chairman's daughter. She was six months older than Henry and the exact same height. Like Henry, she had pale skin, as if the protection of growing up on a college campus had meant protection from the elements as well. Her hair was wavy and somewhat spa.r.s.e, but white as vanilla pudding. But her shoes were brand-new, bright red Keds, and her eyes, as Henry saw them, were the same shade of blue as the game piece in the board game Sorry. He loved her immediately.

"I live in a real house, too," another voice added, and Henry looked from the blueness of Mary Jane's gaze into the tiny, dark, stuffed-animal eyes of Leo Friedlander. For no apparent reason, Leo jumped down from the back steps, grabbed a fistful of leaves, and threw them at Henry's face.

Henry bent down to pick up his own bunch of leaves, then thought better of throwing them and tried to make it look as if he had picked them up not to throw but to study. "When do we go inside?" he asked, just as Martha and Mrs. Donovan appeared again at the back door.

"Oh. Dirty," Mrs. Donovan said to Henry about the leaves in his hand, and Leo smiled.

"Leo did it first," Mary Jane said quickly, and Leo shoved her, accidentally-on-purpose, as they walked up the stairs.

It didn't seem to faze her. She looked back over her shoulder at Henry, as if he was the gift she had always wanted, and Henry, following Mary Jane up the stairs, ignored Martha's long, yearning gaze and merely waved a slightly dusty hand goodbye.

THERE WAS A THIRD SET OF WOMEN in the practice house now, and Henry saw them every day when he came home from nursery school. A woman named Celia gave him grape juice and called him Henny-Penny and liked it when he hugged her. A woman named Mildred saved him the red Life Savers and called him Heinzy. Marilyn always kissed both his cheeks and shouted "Thank you, thank you!" when he kissed both of hers. Vera called him Sweetmeat and gave him cookies. Kitty liked it when he handed her the diaper pin for Hazy and asked if she wanted him to help. Bev didn't call him anything special, or seem particularly interested, until the day that he asked her how her her day had been, and after that she hugged him, hard, and called him her special soldier, which he didn't understand but liked. day had been, and after that she hugged him, hard, and called him her special soldier, which he didn't understand but liked.

Except on Sundays, the women never got the chance to see Henry with one another, and by now he had developed a new habit for the Sunday crowds, which was to avoid lingering too long when everyone was together. Martha hoped this meant he was growing more attached to her, but in truth, without actually knowing it, he was trying to protect what he had with each of the others. He made sure that when more than one of the mothers was around, he never answered questions like what his favorite nickname was, or his favorite color, or his favorite book or card game or food. Stating his favorites, he understood instinctively, could mean making one mother happier with him than the others. It was safer not to admit he liked purple more than orange, or chocolate more than vanilla. Sometimes he wasn't sure what the real answer would be anyway.

LIKE THE PRACTICE HOUSE, the nursery school was a modest two-story home that had been purchased in 1924, during the college's first big expansion. Despite Mrs. Donovan's opening-day admonition, it was neither exceptionally clean nor particularly tidy, and this was one of the reasons that Henry-with wet sneakers, free-roaming juice gla.s.ses, and even the occasional indoor game of catch-liked being there.

The days at the nursery school lasted from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon. At the start of each day, the three older children usually played inside, building houses from blocks, or drawing, or stringing beads. Henry liked to draw most of all, and often he would give Mary Jane his drawings, somehow never minding when she asked him "What's it of?"

When Mrs. Donovan wasn't too busy with the toddlers, she would sit at the upright piano in the living room and play exuberantly while they all sang and danced. Mrs. Donovan was tall and angular, and when she played, she bent over the keys and rolled her shoulders forward, looking like a question mark.

Lunch, usually around noon, was a daily delight, featuring foods that never took long to make and that Henry had never sampled before. There were Van Camp's pork and beans from a can, or Ritz crackers with Velveeta cheese. There were sandwiches with the crusts left on, and bread-and-b.u.t.ter pickles, and potato chips. On warm days, there was Kool-Aid to drink, and on cold days, there was Ovaltine. For dessert, there was almost always canned fruit c.o.c.ktail, served in small Pyrex dishes with different-colored spoons.

After lunch, there was Rest Time, and Mrs. Donovan would open up little cots made of scratchy blue fabric, and the big children would have to lie there and listen to her read. Mrs. Donovan's reading voice was the exact opposite of her singing voice-hesitant and soft-and she seemed to lose her place a lot and read the same page twice. Still, no one ever came close to sleeping, even if they were bored.

In the afternoons, Mrs. Donovan would usually hold what she called Science Cla.s.s. Once, she helped the children plant Dixie cups with gra.s.s seeds, sand, and soil, and they watched over several days to see them produce their tiny green circles of turf. Another time, she let all of them-including the toddlers-pretend they were planets and act out the solar system, and she chose Henry-wearing a yellow towel, yellow rain boots, and yellow dish gloves-to play the part of the sun. It was Mary Jane who gave him her own yellow rain hat to complete the costume.

Toward the end of the day, the older children played out back, almost always led by Mary Jane. She had the kind of confidence that could start a conversation, invent a game, or demand a secret.

"Let's pretend you're a dog and I'm a cat."

"Let's pretend you're the babies and I'm the mother."

It wasn't exactly bossiness, not as simple as having to have things her way; it was something more like leaders.h.i.+p: the belief that her way would be best for all-that she knew what would be the most fun, or funny. Usually it worked out that way.

"Raise your hand if you like Amos 'n' Amos 'n' Andy." Andy."

"Raise your hand if you hate broccoli."

In answer to these directives, Henry almost always raised his hand, and Leo almost never did. "You're not the boss of me," Leo would say to Mary Jane, or "You can't tell me not to!"

Like Mary Jane, Leo had been at the nursery school for several years. He was the son of one of the physical education teachers, and he was tall, strong, and nasty, and, on top of that, a nose picker who used his thumb and forefinger to roll his various extractions into tiny, dry b.a.l.l.s, which he would then flick indiscriminately into the middle distance.

Apart from avoiding these small projectiles, Mary Jane and Henry had to cope with the fact that about once every half an hour, Leo would yell "Tag, you're it!" and chase the two of them through the backyard. If the toddlers were outside, Mrs. Donovan would kneel beside them, closing one skinny, protective arm around them, just like the arm of a padlock.

Sometimes it bothered Henry that Leo spent so much time talking to Mary Jane, even though he mainly insulted her. Leo said she looked like Howdy Doody, an a.s.sertion that neither Mary Jane nor Henry could refute, since neither yet owned a TV set.

Henry had no insults for Mary Jane. He thought she was beautiful, especially when she was laughing, or when she was hiding with him from Leo-lips closed tight, eyes wide open-in the s.p.a.ce behind the couch. Mary Jane was the first person Henry had ever liked who didn't make a fuss about what he said or did. Mary Jane didn't call him cute or darling, or repeat what he said, or write it down. But she made him feel good, and, other than his drawings, he never had to explain anything to her.

On Mary Jane's birthday, her mother brought homemade cupcakes to the nursery school house and special balloons that had other balloons inside them, shaped like Mickey Mouse's head. Mary Jane's was pink; Leo's was green; Henry's was blue. The balloons were filled with helium, and they b.u.mped and sprang along the ceiling, nudging each other like puppies as their owners guided them by their strings. Then Leo grabbed a pencil and popped the outer skin of his balloon, leaving the green Mickey inside it to shrink, rather gruesomely. Then he went after Mary Jane's. She squealed a little, grabbed her string, and raced back through the house. The chase went on for quite a while, several times past Mrs. Donovan and Mary Jane's mother sipping coffee; past the toddlers at their feet; past Henry, who knew better than to think it was all in fun.

When Mary Jane ran outside to escape Leo, her balloon left her hand and flew upward, into a sky nearly the color of her eyes.

The maple tree in the backyard, the one with the swing, provided a moment of shelter, arching like a parent over the lost balloon. Henry, holding his own balloon, stood beside Mary Jane, the two of them looking up helplessly.

It took only a few moments. It seemed much longer. Eventually, the pink mouse bounced free from the black branches and shot upward. Mary Jane took her loss stoically. She wept but did not cry out loud.

"Wait," Henry said, but he didn't give his balloon to her. Instead, he opened his hand, like a magician revealing a missing coin, and let his balloon fly up, too. They rose, nearly side by side, the blue chasing the pink against a cloudless sky, and for years to come, from that moment on, Mary Jane would try and fail to love other people the way she loved Henry.

THEY DID THINGS TOGETHER every day. Sometimes they sorted the autumn leaves into colored piles. Sometimes they made faces. In the make-believe game that they frequently played, she was called Miss Fancy, which she said with an elegant, drawn-out a. a. He was called Mickey Mouse. From time to time, they married. He was called Mickey Mouse. From time to time, they married.

In Henry's imagination, they were also sometimes d.i.c.k and Jane. Though he could not make out the words in the New Basic Readers yet, he could see that d.i.c.k, pus.h.i.+ng Jane in her wagon, wore a red and white striped s.h.i.+rt and a pair of khaki shorts just like his own. d.i.c.k's hair was also the exact same color as Henry's, Jane's hair was the exact same color as Mary Jane's, and their wagon was the exact same kind as the one that stood in the backyard of the nursery school. The characters in the book also had a little sister named Sally, a dog named Spot, a cat named Puff, and a normal mother and father, but these were details that Henry forced into irrelevance. As he knelt in the small s.p.a.ce behind the couch in the nursery school, turning the pages of We Come and Go, We Come and Go, he allowed himself to imagine that he belonged in a place like d.i.c.k and Jane's, where when people left they came back, and they pretty much stayed the same. he allowed himself to imagine that he belonged in a place like d.i.c.k and Jane's, where when people left they came back, and they pretty much stayed the same.

d.i.c.k pulled wagons. d.i.c.k looked out for Jane. d.i.c.k played ball. His mother gave him jobs to do, cooked him dinner, never asked for a kiss, never held him too tight, never wept in her room at night. d.i.c.k never needed comforting, and he never needed to comfort. His mother never looked into his eyes, long and pleading, the way Martha did, as if there was something that he alone knew and was supposed to tell her.

DAILY, MARTHA SAID she loved Henry. She called him Henrykins, Henny-Penny, Hanky-Panky, and, most often, My Boy. As in "How is My Boy feeling today?" "What does My Boy want for lunch?" From this it was clear to Henry that Martha thought he belonged to her. But she remained vague about his origins.

Once, after Dr. Gardner had come over and sat for a long time in the living room with Martha, smoking his cigar and talking low and secret, Henry asked her if that man was his father. Other than Mr. Hamilton at the hardware store, Henry had never actually seen a man talking to Martha at any length. So it seemed not so silly a question. Henry wasn't sure he understood about either mothers or fathers, but he knew, from the other kids and of course from reading d.i.c.k and Jane, d.i.c.k and Jane, that there was usually one of each kind of person somewhere in a boy's life. that there was usually one of each kind of person somewhere in a boy's life.

"Is Dr. Gardner my father?" Henry asked Martha, and he watched the tops of her cheeks turn the color of tulips.

"Your father?" she asked. He had noticed that Martha sometimes repeated what he said, though he wasn't sure if she did it when she was angry or only when she hadn't heard him in the first place.

"My daddy?" Henry said, just in case Martha hadn't understood the question.

"Don't be foolish," Martha said. "Dr. Gardner is the president of the college."

Henry wasn't sure he understood what one thing had to do with the other.

"They can't be a daddy?" he asked.

"Of course they can be a daddy," Martha said. "Where's your fire truck? Shall we play firehouse?"

"Is he a daddy?" Henry asked, ignoring, for the moment, the lure of the pretend flames.

"Yes," Martha said. "He's a daddy. Go get your truck. We might have to put out a fire tonight. But he's not your your daddy." daddy."

"Are you my mommy?"

"Do you want me to be?"

"Are you?"

"You're my boy."

It would take another five years before Henry would feel that Martha's answer, while not exactly a lie, was an unforgivable evasion.

3.

Alone at Last

Though most people feared polio more in spring and summer than in fall or winter, Martha had read that there had been a deadly outbreak of the disease in the Canadian Arctic just two years before, as well as some local cases even in the colder, supposedly less contagious months. So when, in December, Henry came down with what seemed an unusually bad cold, Martha kept him home from nursery school, barely concealing her panic. All she told him was that she didn't want the other children at the school to catch his cold, but he sensed, from the way she whispered to Mrs. Donovan and to the practice mothers, that there was something more serious going on.

Upstairs, he inhabited the pillowy landscape of Martha's bed, and she brought him chicken noodle soup on a pale green plastic tray with a doily and one of the white dinner napkins. She brought him juice with a straw that folded down on a little hinge. There were two pillows, not one, and the bed was almost as wide as it was long. Several times a day, Martha would sit on the side of the bed and cross her thick, stockinged legs at the ankles and play cards with him. Game after game of War, Rummy, Go Fish, and Old Maid. After each game, she would refill his juice gla.s.s and fill one for herself. Then she would make them clink gla.s.ses, just like grown-ups. "Here's to your health," she would say.

When his fever rose, she gave him orange-flavored chewable aspirin, which made his whole mouth pucker and his teeth feel like chalk.

Frequently she said things like "Alone at last," and "It's just the two of us, isn't this nice?" Henry wasn't sure if it was nice or not.

Sometimes he would fall asleep and wake to see her shadow on the wall and then turn to see her at her desk, writing out checks with her face scrunched up, or pasting trading stamps into books. Several times a day, she would reach for a small blue jar with a turquoise top and label. She would open the jar and dip two fingers in and then slather Vicks VapoRub onto his chest, rubbing and rubbing beneath his pajama s.h.i.+rt, looking into his eyes while the smell of the menthol mingled with her intensity. Henry, not for the first or last time, experienced the sensation that to breathe, he might first have to be engulfed.

CHRISTMAS CAME ON a Monday, but it snowed the whole weekend before, and all but one of the practice mothers were stranded at school for the holidays. Though Martha had been looking forward to having a break from the girls, she found herself relieved that there were extra hands to care for Hazel while she ministered to Henry. And then there was Christmas Day itself-for once not a practice Christmas for the students but the real thing. Henry heard the bustle of the mothers downstairs, but Martha told him he wasn't well enough to leave the bedroom.

"You don't want to get the baby sick, do you?" Martha asked.

"I wouldn't."

"I know you wouldn't on purpose," she said. "But sometimes you can get people sick without meaning to."

Henry ran his fingertips along the loose crisscross st.i.tches on the s.h.i.+ny border of the blanket.

"Anyway," Martha added mysteriously, "I have a surprise for you later, and I think you're going to like it."