The Irresistible Henry House (11 page)

  7  
You Must Want to Know

In fact, Betty had been awake for most of the night, and the young fellow was already with her. She had been standing by the bus stop when Henry got there, squinting into the morning sun, waiting for the next part of her life to begin.

Henry could tell that she was nervous, because she fiddled with the gold ring on her left hand.

“Can I talk to you a minute?” she asked him.

He shrugged.

“Did you hear what I said to Mrs. Gaines yesterday?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That you’re my son?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought you had.”

Henry tugged on his ear, the one with the extra teddy-bear flap. Betty reached out fondly to touch it, then drew her hand back when Henry recoiled.

“You are my son, you know,” she said.

Henry didn’t say anything—just strained to look over her shoulder to see if the school bus was in view.

“Do you understand that?” she asked him.

“You’re my mother,” he said, and though he tried to keep his face impassive, he felt something revving or roiling inside.

“Well, I thought you’d probably want to know why I left,” Betty said.

No. What he wanted—what he had wanted all night, awake in his bed, feigning sleep when Martha looked in because he had known he could not feign sweetness—was merely for this Betty not to have come yesterday at all.

“You must want to know why I left,” Betty said.

Henry pulled on his ear again, and at the exact same time, Betty pulled on her gold ring.

“Did my father give you that ring and then make you go away with him and did Emem hide me so I couldn’t come too and now are you back to get me?” he asked.

Despite her worried look, Betty smiled. “Oh, Son,” she said. “That’s too many questions to answer at once.”

The word
Son,
uttered with such apparent ease, floated up in the air, sweet and cozy, like a comic-strip thought, but then snaked its way into sibilance and evil.
Son,
a snake’s hiss. Not even Martha had ever used the word
Son
as if it were his name.

“Did my father really die in a train wreck?” Henry asked.

Betty looked startled. “Who told you that?” she asked.

“Emem.”

“Come on, let me take you to school,” Betty said.

“I ride the bus.”

“I know you ride the bus.”

“Grown-ups don’t ride the bus,” Henry said, looking urgently toward the small yellow-orange rectangle, now in view but still blocks away.

“What if I told you that I rode this very same bus to your very same school when I was your age?”

So
what,
Henry thought. So what.

“I know every stop on the way,” Betty said.

ON
GUNSMOKE
JUST THE WEEK BEFORE, Henry had heard Marshal Matt Dillon say straight out to some troublemaker: “All that is your business. I don’t see as how that concerns me.” That was what Henry wanted to say, but his throat felt hot and closed, as if the words would have to fight their way out.

Eventually, Henry would come to see Betty as the logical, nearly inevitable, means for escaping from Martha. For the moment, though, as he listened, his confusion gave way not to hope but to anger.

She talked her way onto the bus, this woman, and sat with him in the last row, where all the chewed-up gum spotted the floor. Henry studied the patterns of the pale beige splotches while Betty talked. He found two kitten faces and a Christmas tree; a fish, a snake, and a bottle. He tried to concentrate on arranging their shapes, figuring out how to fit them into one scene. A Christmas morning, maybe, with different presents under a tree.

IT WAS ONLY TEN MINUTES TO SCHOOL, but Henry’s face burned hotter every time the bus made a stop and he had to see in surprise, then hear in giggles, the reactions of his classmates as they came aboard. He was most embarrassed when Mary Jane Harmon climbed onto the bus. She sat next to Henry every day, but her usual look of expectancy was dashed today in an instant of silvery surprise. Though their friendship had been rekindled in the relative protection that school gave them from their still-bitter mothers, they had few opportunities to talk. The currents of nine-year-old boys and girls had swept them into separate pools, and the morning bus was one of the only places where—perhaps just because their classmates were too preoccupied or too sleepy to care—they were free to defy the usual laws of fourth-grade conduct.

As Mary Jane found a different seat, Betty talked on about how cute Henry had been as a baby and how much she had hated to leave him. Betty was good enough to whisper all this—and in fact the bus noise was so loud that even Henry missed a few of her words. But what he experienced was a rage so deep that it seemed made up of colors, as if, in his mind, someone was riffling through sheaves of construction paper: red, orange, purple, black.

“So my father didn’t die in a train wreck?” he finally whispered to her.

“No,” Betty said.

“So where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he in Austria?”

“Australia.”

“Is he in Australia?”

“No. The man in Australia was my husband. But he’s not your father.”

They were the last ones to get off the bus at the school. Henry thought about Father and Mother in the Dick and Jane books. Sure, there were times when Mother was in the kitchen without Father, and times when Father was in his basement workshop without Mother. But Father and Mother went together, just the way Dick and Jane did.

“When you learn about the birds and the bees,” Betty said, “you’ll learn that it’s possible to make a baby without actually being married, and that’s how your father and I made you, and then he disappeared, even before I knew I was expecting you.”

“You could have told him,” Henry said.

“No,” Betty said. “I couldn’t. Because I didn’t know where he was.”

“Why not?” Henry asked. It was almost a shout.

Betty sighed a little. She said: “He was just a nice guy who I went to the movies with, and I didn’t know who he was, Henry.”

“What was the movie?” Henry asked.

“What?”

“What was the movie?”

Betty smiled. “It was
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,”
she said.

“Where’s Brooklyn?” he asked.

SHE DIDN’T CALL HIM HANKY. That was the only good thing about her, he thought, and, for this moment, the only thing that brought him even close to liking her.

Before he went into the school, she made him stop on the steps. She took out a camera, and she said, “Smile, Son.” The hissing again. And then she took what seemed to be an entire roll of pictures. On purpose, he did not smile in a single one of them. The cluster of classmates who lined up behind Betty, making goofy faces and trying to get him to laugh, didn’t alter the parade of crazy, furious colors in his mind. Only when Mary Jane stayed after the rest of them were inside—waiting for him, needing to know who this woman was, offering her one blue eye, and the smile he’d always known he could trust—only then did the mad parade come coolly to a stop.

AT NINE, MARY JANE WAS skinny and quick, both taller and more athletic than Henry. Her black eye patch was like a permanent bruise, a constant reminder of their long-lost days of nursery school, but she spent every single recess out in the play yard, jumping rope. She could do a can-can kick, a leg over, and a flying cross. As long as she led with her good eye, she could jump into a row of three jumpers, and—even more impressive—she could jump backward to get out again.

Henry, by social necessity, usually watched these feats from a distance, just as he watched her walk the hallways with her girlfriends, stopping to hitch up her sagging tights or giggling over mysterious things. This morning, however, Mary Jane broke the usual protocol and pulled Henry into the coatroom.

“Who was that?” she asked him. “Why was she on the bus? Why was she taking pictures of you? Do you know her?”

“Sort of,” Henry said.

“Who is she?”

“She’s President Gardner’s daughter,” Henry said.

Her eyes widened. “From the college?”

Henry nodded.

“Well, what’s she doing here?”

Henry looked at the floor and tugged on his ear.

“Henry? Why was she here with you?”

Rupert Biggs ducked into the coatroom. “You’re going to be late for homeroom,” he said. He tore off his plaid jacket, jammed it onto an already full coat hook, and darted out again. The coat fell immediately to the floor, and Henry, moved by some primordial home economics instinct, bent to retrieve it and hang it up again.

“Henry,” Mary Jane said again. This time the word was not a plea for an answer but rather a statement about Henry’s ability to trust her with whatever that answer would be.

“You can’t—you can’t tell anyone,” he said.

“I never would,” she said, and he believed her utterly, but still hesitated, trying to find the right words.

She merely looked at him, waiting. He had noticed lately that she could convey with one eye a great deal more than most people could convey with two.

He glanced behind her toward the coatroom door, then turned back to her. “She says she’s my real mother,” he said.

“Your real mother.”

“Yes.”

“President Gardner’s daughter is your real mother?”

“That’s what she told me,” Henry said.

“I thought your real mother was dead.”

“So did I.”

“So Mrs. Gaines—” Mary Jane began, as always following Henry to the first place he was likely to go. “Yah.”

“So Mrs. Gaines knew all along?”

“Yah.”

“So Mrs. Gaines—”

“Is a big fat liar!” Henry shouted, bereft. He tried to say more, but he couldn’t, and then he tried to swallow, but found he couldn’t do that either. His eyes widened in panic.

“Henry?” Mary Jane said.

She took a step forward, as if to help, then looked back toward the hallway, trying to find a grown-up.

Henry managed to swallow, then catch his breath. But in his terror, he felt a shiver of nausea and dizziness. Instinctively, he turned away from Mary Jane, looking down at the ground and stuffing his hands into his pockets, as if trying to lessen the chance that any part of him would be touched.

  8  
Cheese!

Martha’s sense of relief, meanwhile, had lasted only as far as the front porch of the president’s house. Walking down the old wooden steps, she suddenly felt that she had to see Henry in order to know, really know, that he was going to stay safely with her. Not exactly intending to, she simply walked from the president’s house and continued until she was entirely off the campus, disappearing into the town of Franklin, not even letting the week’s practice mother know that she had gone.

It was easily three miles to the public elementary school that Henry attended. Every morning for three years—until this fall, in fact, when Henry had begged her to let him go to the bus stop by himself—Martha had walked him to the yellow school bus. All those mornings, he had found a seat by the window and had always remembered to turn and wave a shy but shining goodbye.

Twice a year, Martha had gone to Henry’s school: the first time, on the first day, it was always to make sure he was registered; the second time, sometime in the late fall, it was for the parent-teacher meeting. She had never felt welcome. She had never felt relaxed. All around her were pairs of parents: the mothers in their pretty young dresses, the fathers in their suits and hats. Parents came in twos. That was the rule, and Martha had broken it, and only the fact that she had adopted this boy instead of birthing him out of wedlock kept Martha herself from being a total outcast in this world.

As it happened, Martha arrived today just as the children were being lined up on the basketball court for their yearly class pictures. Rows of slatted wooden folding chairs had been arranged next to one of the chain-link fences, and the children were shoving and teasing each other as the teachers tried to corral them into lines arranged by height. Martha searched for Henry’s class and found it quickly. As a fourth-grader, he was in the oldest class. Most of the girls had white anklets and bangs or hair clips and were wearing Sunday dresses. Most of the boys were wearing button-down shirts instead of polo shirts, and some were wearing ties as well. Even through her worry, Martha frowned at the thought that Henry had not told her it was picture day. She didn’t like the thought of Henry not telling her things.

She saw him file into his row in the middle of the line: neither the shortest nor the tallest but, as in most things, just right. He had his hands in his khakis pockets, as usual, and he was wearing a striped polo shirt. His Oxford shoes were dusty, and there was a fresh grass stain on one of the knees of his pants. Martha didn’t know the boy to the left of him, but the girl to his right was that Mary Jane Harmon, with the eye patch and the cruel mother. Both children, Martha noted proudly, were trying to get Henry’s attention. Her boy was popular, she knew that, and though it made her nervous, it also made her proud.

The photographer fussed and fooled with his tripod and his heavy blanket, readying one of his plates, and meanwhile the sun was in the children’s eyes, and Martha could tell that they were hot and annoyed, and she remembered just how little real affection she felt for children in general. Only Henry truly appealed to her—squinting, serious, handsome, hers.

“Henry!” she shouted, waving a gloved hand. She said it exactly as the photographer said “Cheese, please!” and so, in the fourth-grade photograph for the Franklin Elementary School in 1955, the entire class seemed to be looking distractedly off to one side.

Henry scowled at her—a true scowl—as he slowly crossed the basketball court to see what it was that had brought her here.

She was not his real mother. That much he had known for as long as he could remember. But she had lied to him—actually lied—had told him his mother was dead, denying him, in the same moment, both hope and trust. He could see her, sitting in the New Jersey sand, holding that stupid heart-shaped shell and making him feel that she was all he had.

Henry sensed that fingers were being pointed at him and giggles suppressed. Betty’s bus ride this morning had been bad enough. This visit was something it would take him months to live down, and he knew it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Martha.

“That’s not much of a greeting,” she said, reaching out for him.

He looked behind him.

“Come on, give me a hug and I won’t ask you for a kiss,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” he asked again, ignoring her request.

“I just wanted to see you,” she said, then added: “I was passing by.”

“Why were you passing by?” Henry asked.

“I had an errand.”

“What kind of errand?”

“An errand, Hanky,” Martha said. “You don’t need to know what errand.”

“Henry,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Henry.”

“I have to go to class now,” he said, and he turned to walk away.

“Hanky!” she shouted. Then, desperately: “Henry!”

He turned back.

“Come straight home after school,” Martha said.

His eyes narrowed slowly as he glared at her, as if his pale eyelids were a blanket of snow icing over the warm colors of the autumn earth.

THE PRACTICE HOUSE WAS often chaotic in the afternoons, when Henry came home from school. Martha was usually in the kitchen, cleaning or cooking while she kept an eye on the practice mother’s preparations for the baby’s dinner. Sometimes there was a wash going in the utility room as well, or some extra Household Equipment lesson in how to iron skirts with pleats, or how to treat blood and chocolate stains, or how to disguise small cigarette burns in polished wooden surfaces.

Then the baby would wake up, and there would be a bottle and a rush of activity to get him ready for his daily walk. Henry didn’t mind the bustle, because it kept Martha’s focus elsewhere. As soon as the practice mother left, Martha would find him, though. No matter what he was doing, she would greet him with that same look—part pleading, part searching—as if the affection she feared he might develop for someone or something else would be physically imprinted on and read in his eyes.

Today was more intense than usual. Henry was positive that, if Martha looked hard enough, she would find the reflection of Betty there. Apparently he was right.

“Did you see Betty today?” Martha asked him.

Henry shrugged.

“Did she talk to you?” Martha said.

He shrugged again.

“What did she say? Where did she talk to you?”

“On the way to school,” Henry said.

Martha scowled. “On the bus?” she asked with evident horror.

“Yes.”

“Your regular school bus?”

“Yes.”

“And what did she say?”

He shrugged again. “I’ll tell you later,” he said, already knowing that he never would. “I’m missing the Mouseketeers.”

HE KEPT THE SET ON AFTER
The Mickey Mouse Club.
He watched
Kukla, Fran & Ollie,
and after that
Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
The Yukon, as usual, was covered in snow; the trees in the background were black and gray; Preston’s Mounties uniform was gray and white; Yukon King was gray and black. As Henry watched, his mind wandered. He thought about Betty, wondering if he looked like her, wondering if Australia looked like the Yukon, wondering what either place would look like in color. More darkly, he thought about Martha. He wondered what other secrets she’d kept, what other lies she had told him. He assumed that there had been many of both. Trust was not a muscle he knew how to use.

IT WAS AFTER DINNER that Betty showed up. Martha had known she would come again, but she had expected her earlier in the evening, and, washing the dishes and drying them, she had allowed herself to relax for the first time in two days. The ringing of the doorbell was a mild assault.

“Go wash up now,” she told Henry.

He felt fairly certain that it would be Betty at the door, and also that it would be better not to talk to her with Martha there.

But he sat listening at the top of the landing, his hands around the spindles of the balustrade.

“What do you want?” Martha asked Betty.

Even given the circumstances, it surprised Henry to hear Martha’s lack of civility.

“You know what I want,” Betty said.

There were a few moments of whispering, and Henry clutched the spindles more tightly.

“You know,” he heard Martha say. “You don’t know anything about raising a child Henry’s age.”

“Neither do you,” Betty said swiftly.

“I know this child,” Martha said. “I know every single thing there is to know about this child. And I know he wants to be with me.”

Henry could hear the hiss and strike of a match against a match-book, and he could even hear Betty exhale. “Why would he want someone who lied?” she asked.

“Why,” Martha replied, “would he want someone who left?”

THOSE WERE THE QUESTIONS. At the top of the stairs, Henry tried to answer them for himself. He tried to want someone. He couldn’t. He tried to imagine something. He couldn’t. If he wanted anything, it was to scream at Martha for lying, scream at Betty for leaving. He went to his room, sat at his desk, and stared at the shadows on the wall until he found shapes and patterns.

“ARE YOU TAKING ME WITH YOU?” Henry asked Betty when she met him at the bus stop the next afternoon. She seemed smaller than she had the night before. Her breath smelled sour and sharp, and he tried to keep away from it.

“No,” Betty said. “Not yet.”

“Then why did you come?”

Betty’s eyes got wet, and she looked down to snap open her pocketbook. Henry thought she was reaching for a tissue, but instead she took out a photograph. She handed it to him proudly, wanting him to look at it.

“Why did you come,” he asked her, not looking at the picture, “if you’re not going to take me with you?”

“I’m going to tell you the truth,” Betty said, with an emphasis on the first word. “I want to take you with me. My father won’t give me the money, and I don’t have enough of my own.”

“We could get a job,” Henry said.

“I
will
get a job,” Betty said. “And I
will
come back for you,” she said.

“What if I’m not here?” Henry asked.

“I’ll find you.”

A slow tear, like a drop of syrup, ran all the way down her nose. Henry thought maybe he didn’t want to go with her after all.

“I want you to keep this picture of me,” Betty said.

Henry looked down at it. It was black-and-white and had a generous crease in it, but Henry could tell that it was a picture of Betty, only when she was so much younger and prettier that it didn’t matter to him at all. He looked back at Betty, and in what may have been his first completely intentional act of cruelty, he said: “You don’t look anything like this anymore.”