The Irresistible Henry House (30 page)

“Talk about Disneyland!” she said. She had stopped under the main gate to the campus.

“What do you mean?”

“Colors,” Mary Jane said. “And shapes. Everything has a tail.”

“A tail like a dog?”

She giggled. “No, Henry. Not a tail like a dog.”

Abruptly, she sat down in the middle of the path.

“Not a good idea,” he said to her, and reached his hand down for hers.

She put her hand up, four inches away from his.

“Hey,” he said to her. “Over here.”

“I
am
over there.”

Her depth perception was off, that had to be it, Henry thought. Odd, given that with only one good eye, she had effectively had to compensate all her life for just this problem. She had always been, by necessity, the one to see things flatly and without adornment.

Henry’s mind leapt ahead with contingencies. So well trained by Martha, he searched for mental checklists of all the emergencies he knew how to handle: fainting and burns, rips and stains, gravy too thin and batter too thick; closed fireplace flue and leaking gas stove. He did not even really know what acid was, let alone what it meant to have dropped it, or what to do with someone who had.

AT THE FOUNTAIN, yet another hour later, Mary Jane sat on the ground, leaned back, and simply refused to move.

“Come on now,” he said to her.

“No!” she shouted. “Leave me alone! Don’t ruin it, Henry. For once I can see things you can’t!”

HE STAYED WITH HER. Whenever people came by, looking curious about her location by the fountain, he hovered closer to her, blocked their view, and said she was fine. At one in the morning, she started running across the campus, then collapsed, giggling, on a patch of lawn. He followed her. She lay on her back on the grass and moved her arms, as if making snow angels. The ground was cold, and somehow colder for being dark. Henry couldn’t decide if he hated Mary Jane or hated acid or just hated the moment, but he was never unclear about his job, which was to get her back home, safely.

“Henry,” she said. “You doofus.”

“Come on, Miss Fancy,” he said to her, and he picked her up on his back—her arms around his neck, her legs threaded through his arms—and carried her home.

BACK IN BURBANK, work continued on
The Jungle Book.
But Walt, fully immersed in planning for “the Florida Project,” was rarely seen in the Animation Building. Circulating around the studio were maps and plans for Disney World, a far larger and far more ambitious counterpart to California’s Disneyland. In Disney World, Walt explained in a new half-hour film, there would be not only a theme park and exhibits, but also an attempt to create an entire model city. Walt called it EPCOT, and he said it would use all the latest scientific methods to create a new way of life, a city free of slums; “We won’t let them develop,” Walt said. There would be fifty acres of climate-controlled streets for stores and theaters where pedestrians, according to the film, would “enjoy ideal weather conditions, protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity.”

“It’s not real life,” Mary Jane said. It was November, just a month after her acid trip, and Henry was walking her back to her dorm from lunch. They walked side by side, hands in their pockets, only occasionally bumping against each other with a laugh or a gibe.

“What do you mean?”

“EPCOT. It’s this totally pretend world he wants to create. Perfect little kitchens. Perfect little people. Perfect little streets. Just like the World’s Fair.”

“It’s bigger than that,” Henry said.

“Which makes it worse,” Mary Jane said. “Don’t you think it’s kind of fascist? ‘You will be happy, or else?’?”

“No war,” Henry said. “Peace and harmony. Isn’t that what you’re always for? What’s wrong with it?”

“Henry,” she said to him witheringly. “Just tell me this. What does EPCOT stand for?”

“You know what EPCOT stands for.”

“Say it.”

Henry sighed. “It stands for ‘Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.’”

“Right,” she said.

“So?”

“So no wonder you like the stupid thing,” she said. “It’s just one big practice house.”

SHE HAD BECOME AN ALMOST fanatically political animal. She claimed to have cared all along—about the rising threat of Vietnam, and the racial divisions of the South. She talked—especially when she was high, which seemed to be almost always now—about the War, the Pigs, the Movement, Che, Dylan, and MLK.

In December of 1966, she gave up all pretense of journalistic objectivity and joined an antiwar rally on the steps of Sproul Hall. A fight broke out, and there were arrests. Mary Jane was in jail and, like the others, had no wish to be bailed out.

It was Alexa who told Henry. He arrived at their room to find her sitting at the usual table, applying her usual primer of Pan-Cake makeup.

“What’s it all got to do with us, anyway?” she asked lazily. “I’ve barely had a class in two weeks. This is not what my daddy had in mind when he took out a second mortgage.”

“You don’t care whether you have the right to protest the war?” Henry asked her, taking a step closer, appreciating, for the first time, the feline readiness of her eyes.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“You look really pretty today,” he said, then paused. “And every day.”

SHE MAY OR MAY NOT have been a virgin. Before they had sex, she said that she was giving Henry “her greatest gift,” and he wasn’t sure if that was Southern Belle for
best sex ever
or
first sex ever.
He didn’t ask, which he knew was caddish of him, but he also knew the whole encounter was caddish. It didn’t stop him. She was, in fact, both generous and clumsy in their night together.

In the morning, they went together to bail Mary Jane out, but she had already been sprung by an organized group. She appeared on the jail steps, giddy from her night of solidarity and purpose. The whole way back to the campus, she spoke about the thrill of the arrest, the strengthening numbers, and the potential for real change.

It was only after they had gotten back to the room and Alexa had excused herself to take a shower that Mary Jane turned on Henry.

“You asshole!” she said.

“What?”

“You know what. You asshole.”

“What did I do?”

“You did
her.
Obviously.”

“So what if I did?” Henry asked.

“So what? You showed up here and found me gone and this was the only thing you could think to do with your time?”

“I still don’t see why that should matter to you.”

She looked at him with exquisite rage, the product of her sleepless night, her nobility, and her hurt feelings.

“Maybe,” she said, “you’ll figure it out on the way back to Burbank.”

HENRY ARRIVED BACK AT THE STUDIO to find that the reigning color was gray. Artists sketched at their desks, but at a noticeably slower pace, even when compared to the already careless approach they had taken all fall.

Henry called Fiona and asked her to meet him in the tunnel. Even she seemed not her usual self, however, cool as the tiled walls behind her—kissing him as usual but with her thoughts clearly elsewhere.

“Hey,” he said. “Haven’t you missed me?”

“Sure,” she said.

“So what’s going on?”

For a moment, almost hopeful, Henry wondered if he would be jealous if he found out that she had someone else.

But that wasn’t what she had to tell him. It was Walt, she said. Only the top men had known about the boss’s illness, but it turned out that he had had lung surgery just a few months before. Everyone thought he had recovered.

Now, she explained in a whisper—more sad than secretive—the word was that Walt had gone back to St. Joseph’s Hospital, which was right across the street from the studio.

“We have to leave the lights on,” Fiona told Henry.

“What do you mean?”

“At night. So Walt will think we’re working, whenever he’s awake.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING FANTASTIC about the studio when Henry looked back at it from Buena Vista Street that night. The lights glowed like the lights in the
Snow White
cottage, the
Cinderella
castle, the London rooftops of
Mary Poppins.
Henry stood with his bike on the road between the place where a great man was dying and the place where his creations would be kept alive. In the morning, he was told that Walt Disney had died.

IT WAS LIKE THE DAY OF Kennedy’s assassination, but worse: equally implausible but infinitely more personal.

Henry walked down Mickey Avenue, remembering his first day at the studio, the thrill of taking the drawing test, the taste of the pie that Cindy had served him. On every corner and in front of every building, people now sagged into each other’s shoulders, speechless with grief, or too talkative. He knew that both Cindy and Fiona would be seeking him out, and he had no desire to see either of them. As he had on the day of JFK’s death, he had the impulse to call Mary Jane, but he figured she would still be so angry about Alexa that he would have to do penance before he could tell her anything.

He walked all the way to the water tower, past any possibility for having to admit his pain.

He sat in the inappropriate sun and catalogued his losses. His father, of course, whoever he had been. Then Betty after his birth. Then Betty after the first year. Then Betty after New York. He had lost all the other practice mothers—both his own and the ones he had known in passing—and all their special languages and jokes and gifts. He had lost Charlie and Karen to the glee of their own giddy future. He had lost Martha, though that had been of his own choosing. He had lost Mary Jane after Lila, but then he had gotten her back, and now, because of Alexa, he had probably lost her again.

But this loss, Walt’s loss, had a different feeling entirely: calamitous and cold. It was an irreplaceable loss over which Henry had no control.

By the end of January, he had broken things off with both Cindy and Fiona. He endured their various reactions of hurt, rage, disappointment, and blame with utterly feigned remorse. He wanted to have no one. If he had no one, he figured, he would have no one to lose.

  1  
When She Talks

Just three months after Walt’s death, Henry stood in the doorway of Martha’s hospital room. It was already dark outside, but inside the room, it was bright daylight: the false daylight of fluorescent lights. Martha was sleeping. There was a smell.

It was not exactly feces or vomit, and not exactly chemical. It was closer to the smell of something you might find outdoors. A dark, brackish pond, maybe, or a dead animal on the side of the road. Henry froze for a moment, translating these scents into thoughts, and then he realized that the smell was of Martha’s body rotting. She was rotting like a dead animal on the side of the road, and she was still alive. He could see, even from the doorway, that her knuckles were black. Her arms were sticks, with black veins on them.

Henry felt his stomach cramp, and he breathed lightly through his mouth. He took a step into the room and saw his reflection framed in the small window that showed the night sky. He looked exactly the way he was supposed to look: a tidy, responsible, young man of twenty—not one of those mixed-up hippies—coming to be at the bedside of his dying, beloved mother. Except that Martha Gaines was neither beloved nor his mother.

He hesitated, not knowing whether he should wake her or come back later.

A nurse entered, white and crisp against the black window. He turned.

“Are you the son?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“Is it just the two of you?”

He nodded again.

“I figured,” the nurse said. “When she talks, you’re all she talks about.”

He tried to grin, and she smiled back sweetly.

“She’ll be awake soon,” the nurse said. “She never sleeps too long or stays awake too long. Why don’t you sit and wait?”

Henry moved to the corner and slung his coat over the royal blue vinyl chair. The nurse tapped one of the milky plastic bags that was hanging from a metal pole. She lifted the mustard-colored pitcher from the rolling tray table and swirled it in one hand, then put it back down, satisfied by its fullness and the sound of its still-formed ice. Moving to the side of the bed, she lifted Martha’s blanket, looking for Henry knew not what. He caught a glimpse of Martha’s uncovered belly—shockingly flaccid and wrinkled, hanging heavily, like an elephant’s skin. He looked away.

Martha stirred. The nurse smiled down at her and said, “Mrs. Gaines, you have a nice surprise here,” then left.

Henry wanted to run after her and beg her to stay.

“SO,” MARTHA SAID, her left arm unfolding shakily to reach for the hospital bed’s controls.

“So, Emem,” Henry said.

“Sit me up,” she said, still fumbling for the button.

Henry took the six steps over to the side of her bed. He reached his own hand next to hers, easily finding the button with the headboard and the up arrow. As he pressed it, her hand found his, and he felt the impossibly stony coldness of her flesh.

“So you came,” she said.

“Of course I came,” he said.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to.”

“I told you I was going to,” Henry said.

“I didn’t know whether to believe you.”

“You should have,” Henry said.

“That’s all right,” Martha said, almost carelessly. “You don’t always believe me, either.”

Henry was startled. “I came as soon as I could,” he said. “I had some work to finish at the studio.”

Martha forced a conversational smile. “Tell me about California,” she said.

“Well, it’s warm,” Henry began.

“I’d like that right about now,” Martha said. She rubbed her hands together as if that could make them warm.

“Do you need another blanket?” Henry asked, looking toward the door. “I can go find the nurse and get you another blanket.”

“No. She’ll be back.”

“Do you want some water? Your lips look dry.”

Martha made an effort to lick them. Even her tongue was shaky.

“Do you, Emem? Want some water?”

She shook her head, looking worriedly across the room.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The picture,” she said.

He followed her gaze to a bad landscape of a fisherman on a dock.

“Terrible,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring you something to hang there instead.”

She shook her head, stifling a cough.

“Not that,” she said, and pointed again to the painting as the cough began to wrack her.

Henry looked again, then smiled. The picture was clearly crooked. He walked over to it and adjusted it slightly, trying to ignore the sounds that Martha was making. He continued to fiddle with it unnecessarily until she had managed to stop coughing.

“Better,” she said, and they shared a practice house smile. Henry knew what to do now. He made a quick circuit around the room, gathering stray bits of paper, wrappers from gauze pads, empty juice cans, Styrofoam cups filled with stale water and bent blue plastic straws.

“I taught you well,” Martha said.

Henry allowed himself the memory of the Christmas they’d spent alone together, the one when he’d been too sick to go downstairs, and Martha had given him the television set. They had watched Walt Disney for the first time that night, and she had laughed beside him, adjusting her scarf as always, fingering the gold pin at her neck.

“Is it just the two of you?” the nurse had asked him, and he had nodded yes. That was certainly what Martha had wanted, but she had wanted it too much and too late. There had always been other mothers, moving about in other rooms.

“I wish Betty had never come back,” Henry said suddenly, impulsively.

Martha’s eyes, which had been half closed, darted open fiercely, hungrily.

“Why do you say that?” she asked him.

“I don’t know, Emem. If she’d never come back, maybe things would have been different.”

“I never asked her to come back, you know. I never wanted her to come back,” Martha said.

“You should have just taken me away somewhere,” Henry said quietly. “Then I’d never have had to find out that you made all that up, about my real mother dying.”

There was, finally, a silence. Henry realized that he had just had the most honest conversation with Martha of his life, and that she was almost dead. He waited for her to say she was sorry. She didn’t. He said he was sorry.

“Sorry?” she asked. “For what?”

“I don’t know. For being so angry, I guess,” he said.

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.
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.