The Irresistible Henry House (14 page)

He looked back at the page. “Dear Emem,” he read, and then wrote:

I’m sorry I haven’t written you sooner, but things have been very busy here. My dorm father told me that you have been calling the school, and I wish you would not do that, because it is a little bit embarrassing.

I live in a dorm with seven other boys. Some of them are very nice. I am very busy. I take English, Geometry, Biology, Art, Social Studies, and Phys Ed. My favorite subject is Art. My teacher is Mr. Falk and he is my favorite teacher.

I hope everything is all right back at Wilton, and that you have a good group of new students starting at the practice house.

I will write to you again as soon as I can.

From,
Henry

He was particularly pleased with the sign-off. He thought the “From” offered, by omission of the more expected word, exactly as much as he wanted to give.

ONE DAY IN NOVEMBER, a letter arrived in a bright yellow envelope and the open, upright script that Henry immediately recognized as Mary Jane’s.

She was still at their same public school, and she wrote with plenty of gossip, including updates on two of her closest girlfriends, who, it seemed, had taken turns wearing the same boy’s pin.

“Henry,” she wrote after delivering this bulletin. “Do you talk to anyone at all? I mean not just actually talk, because I know you can’t yet. But is there anyone there you can really trust? Or even sort of like?”

She enclosed a photograph showing the freshman members of the high school newspaper staff. There was Mary Jane, along with Willard Estes and a few students Henry recognized, as well as some he didn’t. They were mugging for the camera, wearing fedoras with cards that said PRESS.

“Thought you’d like to see the staff,” Mary Jane wrote. But Henry was certain that she wouldn’t have sent the photograph unless it showed her looking so unexpectedly pretty and newly mature. He wondered what the difference was. She was wearing a plaid skirt and one of those sweater sets she always liked, so it wasn’t that, exactly. It took Henry a moment to realize that her hat, slanted on an angle, almost completely shadowed her eye patch
—his
eye patch, really, the proof of his monstrous nature, and the reason he’d never, until this moment, been able to look at her without guilt. Now, with half her face in shadow, he could see, as if for the first time, Mary Jane’s breasts and hair and waist and, somehow most compellingly, the fullness of her innocent mouth.

AT FOURTEEN, HENRY WAS a mutiny of awkward contradictions. His cheeks were smooth, but his legs bristled with new hair. He had grown about six inches in the last eighteen months, but he had not yet begun to fill out. And his face—still lightly freckled, still dominated by his eyes—had only just started to develop angles, as if a sculptor was making his first, broad cuts in a rounded block of soft stone.

In short, Henry’s body was not entirely at peace with itself, nor was he at peace with it. And though being silent saved him from some of the usual teenage embarrassments, it did not save him from the usual teenage impulses. It surprised him fiercely, furtively, nightly—and in this he felt a gleeful sense of his own potential. Sex, if he could ever achieve it, seemed to Henry the ultimate way to grow up.

Meanwhile, Ben Terry, having bowed somewhat to dorm-room pressure, had lately taken to waiting for all the boys to fall asleep before engaging in his pressing, nightly, private recreation. Tonight, Henry lay in bed, determined to outwait him. He listened as the other boys’ bedside lights were clicked off one by one, and their pillow turning and sheet rustling stopped, and their breathing became even.

Eventually, in the darkness, Henry could hear the quiet flapping of Ben Terry’s sheets; his soft, occasional moans; and finally his urgent, adenoidal breathing. Henry reached for the blue transistor radio that Martha had given him, and with the flesh-colored plastic earpiece providing at least one kind of privacy, he listened to music from a distant Hartford station and began to move his own hand. He was imagining Mary Jane’s hair and her mouth, the smirk from the photograph, the tiny white flecks of light on her lips. He was listening to Nina Simone sing “I Loves You, Porgy,” her voice hot and dusty, heavy and full. Henry looked down at the ridiculous cowboy sheets that Martha had sent with him, then closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see them. “Don’t let him handle me,” Nina Simone sang, “with his hot hands.” Henry heard the simple two-four beat, back and forth, up and down, like a musical seesaw, and then the spray of steel brushes on the tight tops of the drums. He heard Nina Simone sing, “Someday I know he’s coming,” and then four long extra beats before she sang the rest of the phrase “… to call me.” And for every beat a stroke. “It’s going to be like dying, Porgy.” But it didn’t feel like dying. It felt much more like life.

HE LEARNED ABOUT the Civil War in social studies, read
As You Like It
in English, sketched the cell in biology, attempted proofs in geometry, and, for the first time in his life, got to be a starting forward in basketball. Instead of languages—the school offered French and Latin for some students—Henry also spent three hours a week in Therapy, where a succession of doctors and caseworkers tried a succession of approaches that were, in 1960, considered to be advanced. They asked him to build houses on sand tables. They asked him to pick colors that went with certain feelings. Happily for him, they asked him, again and again, to draw. Draw your family. Draw your best friend. Draw yourself. Impressed by his evident talent, they failed to make much progress with their clinical interpretations. And though Henry had no problem with the art or the building or even with what he might somehow reveal about himself, he was resolute in his silence: cushioned and comforted by it.

The investigators were clearly somewhat frustrated. Finally, at the end of the first semester, they gave Henry his own tape recorder: a brand-new portable Ampro hi-fi two-speed reel-to-reel that weighed only thirty pounds and had a carrying handle on its case and a speaker built in. With this machine, they gave him a list of questions that he was supposed to try to answer daily: what had he eaten for breakfast and lunch, what were his homework assignments that night, what had he scored in the basketball game, what had he dreamed of the night before.

Dutifully, at least for the benefit of any nearby roommates, Henry would follow their instructions and unsnap the case each evening, lift off the lid, turn on the power, and push the piano-like key that said RECORD. Then he would watch the plastic reels turn, as pointless as the wheels of a stationary bicycle, and the skinny brown tape would transfer silence to silence. After ten minutes or so, Henry would push the key for STOP and then the key for REWIND, and then he would carefully place the cover back on and put the machine away.

One evening, when Henry opened the case, the take-up reel was not empty, so he pushed REWIND and then, somewhat warily, PLAY. As he suspected, the recorder had been used. The tape started with a variety of scatological songs, segued into a sweatily read passage from a well-known and much perused issue of
Playboy,
then featured someone saying “This is Henry Gaines” and then a gap, with a few staticky remnants, for what had clearly been an attempt at a monologue in Henry’s voice. After that evident erasure, the tape ended with the unmistakable sounds of Ben Terry doing what Ben Terry did best.

The silence Henry’s roommates had managed to maintain while they waited for him to listen to their masterwork devolved into great bursts of laughter and cursing, and Henry offered up his best wry smile. In truth, he was wounded, and he stayed behind when the others went off to dinner.

Alone in the room, he sat back down at his desk and looked at the list of the therapists’ questions. All traces of the evening light had faded, and Henry for the first time found himself wondering if he might be able to protect himself better with a voice than without one. The last time he had allowed himself to speak to anyone, he had been a boy of ten. With determination born of betrayal and nurtured by adolescence, he had stayed silent while around him—first in Pennsylvania and now at Humphrey—his classmates’ voices had broken and squeaked and slipped, bat-and birdlike, out of their throats. He wondered if he would sound anything like the deep baritone—he guessed it was Epifano—who had supposedly impersonated him on the tape.

With the unusual absence of chaos around him, Henry considered the first question.

What did you have for breakfast?

He pushed the RECORD button.

Eggs,
he thought. The word first formed in his head, a capital
E
and two round gs and a sinuous
s.
The word took on the shape of an egg, encapsulated in an oval, clean and bold.
Eggs,
he thought. The word would require him to open his mouth as if he was trying to show all his front teeth.
Eggs,
he thought. He made his lips pull back. The brown tape spun around and around. The red power light flickered warmly. But much to Henry’s intense surprise, he couldn’t make a sound.

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Attachment

Martha Gaines stood at the doorway of the practice house and expertly shifted the new baby to her left arm and opened the door with her right. It was September 1961, and the students would be arriving in an hour or so, and that would give her just enough time to record the baby’s measurements in a brand-new practice house journal.

“Welcome home, Huck,” she said to the baby as she stepped inside the house. She adjusted the baby’s yellow cotton blanket, but then, instead of carrying him straight to the nursery, she veered off to the living room.

Martha’s heart was broken, and her step was unsure.

Nothing was right. Heather, the previous year’s newborn, had contracted an acute infection at only thirteen months and, after a four-week stay in the pediatric wing of the Titusville Hospital, had been returned to the Franklin Orphans’ Home. Martha had had to wait until fall for a new baby, and even so, he was just as young as Henry had been.

Her jacket still on, her purse still slung over her left wrist, Martha sank into one of the armchairs and held the baby before her, in both hands, like an open book. The baby was asleep and showed no signs of stirring. Martha knew the immediate tasks, but for the moment they seemed impossible. Frozen in place, the baby before her, Martha stared ahead, transfixed by—but temporarily helpless before—what looked like a faint handprint on the living room wall.

By the time the students arrived half an hour later, Martha had pulled herself together enough to put the baby, unmeasured, into the crib, and to locate her attendance list. As they came to the door one and two at a time, Martha tried not to look as weary as she felt. The three returning students greeted her and each other with warm reunion hugs. The two new ones seemed polite enough, but it did not take Martha long to notice that one of them had a full cast on her arm.

“What happened to your arm?” Martha asked.

The girl giggled and, using the other hand to tuck some extra-long bangs behind her ear, said: “I was playing lacrosse.”

“Lacrosse.”

“I was trying out for the team. I wasn’t
going
to try out for the team, but then this boy who was watching—he said he thought that I ran very well. And so I—”

“Excuse me,” Martha said coldly. “What is your name?”

“It’s Lila, Mrs. Gaines. Lila Watkins.”

“Lila. And how were you thinking you would now handle this course?” Martha asked.

Lila’s facial expression changed from amusement to confusion.

“This is why I’m here,” she said. “This is what I signed up for, Home Ec. Right?” She looked around to the other girls, as if they could help her in some way.

Martha merely glared. Perhaps a decade ago she would still have had the patience for this. But patience was out of the question now.

The baby began to wail.

“Oh,” Lila said. “Is the baby here already? Can we see her? I mean, see him? I mean, is it a girl or a boy?”

“His name is Huck,” Martha said, “and his nap doesn’t end until one o’clock.”

“But he’s crying,” the other new girl said. “Shouldn’t we pick him up?”

Martha exhaled audibly. “If you don’t train him now, you can’t train him later,” she said.

Martha walked to the front door, opened it, and made a sweeping gesture with her hand.

“This isn’t playtime,” she said to Lila. “This course requires actual commitment and effort. Come back when you have two working arms.” She shut the door before Lila could offer any reply.

IT HAD BEEN FIFTEEN YEARS since Martha had carried Henry, wrapped in his green cotton blanket, into the practice house; fifteen years since she had surprised herself by kissing his tiny, perfect face and feeling the beginnings of an ancient hunger appeased. It had been thirteen years since he had stayed as her own—and one since he had been ripped away from her.

Since then, Martha’s days had been a study in self-discipline. There was almost nothing she did anymore that didn’t demand an act of will. The problem was not only Henry’s loss and the daily surprise of her loneliness. The problem was also physical. Whether it was rheumatism or arthritis Martha wasn’t sure, and she hated seeing doctors because they always seemed so condescending. But whatever the cause, the reality was that Martha’s body hurt. Sometimes it felt like her bones, and other times like her muscles. Sometimes it was her calves and shoulders, other times her back or feet. Movement, which had never been something she had achieved with grace, felt more and more difficult as the months and days went by. She was sixty-two years old now, and she would think twice before negotiating the stairs; then at the top, she would find herself winded. The bed seemed higher, the armchairs lower. Sometimes she would catch herself rubbing her hands, and only then would she realize how stiff and sore they were. Ache and exhaustion pervaded every part of her.

In growing measure, though, so did self-doubt. By 1961, Dr. Spock’s had been the prevailing voice in American child rearing for fifteen years. Martha now kept her copy of his book in plain view and had ceased to argue—much—when students inevitably and reverently quoted him. Martha’s original rules—the ones she had struggled so long to impart and enforce—had started to bend. She told herself that, like everyone else, she should be allowed to improve and refine her methods. But deep down, she was nagged by worry—a worry that had as many faces as there were practice house journals upstairs. If she had, in fact, been wrong in her methods, then what did it mean that she had sent sixteen babies raised by those methods—and dozens of would-be mothers—out into the world?

It wasn’t just Spock. The winter before last, Martha had seen a documentary called
Mother Love
in which a psychologist named Harry Harlow stated his belief that touch was more important than food in the forming of early attachments. His experiments showed that rhesus monkey babies clearly preferred cloth surrogates they could cuddle to wire surrogates that gave milk. When they were frightened, the baby monkeys shook and shrieked if they had only wire surrogates, but they ran quickly to the cloth surrogates for what Harlow called “contact comfort.”

Martha had tried to dismiss from her mind the images of those tiny baby monkeys, scrunched up on their terry-cloth surrogates, or straddling them in full-body hugs, or nuzzling their crude wood faces. She had spent two decades teaching that a baby needed to be fed and kept clean, not cuddled and coddled as if somehow just the state of being alive required some kind of sympathy.

But the notion that the attachments babies made in the first year of their lives could matter that much: this notion was starting to haunt her, especially with Henry having been shipped off to a special school. At one point Harlow had declared that a cuddly cloth surrogate could be every bit as comforting as an actual birth mother. But now, Martha read that even the cloth-mothered monkey babies had eventually gone mad. In the absence of a single, consistent, living mother, they rocked ceaselessly, banged their heads, and chewed off their own fingers. Some of them shrieked and shouted. But others simply fell silent.