An experienced mother of an older child might have thought it bizarre, for example, that Henry at two showed absolutely no signs of the usual separation anxieties. Far from clinging to Martha when other people were around, he would race down the stairs on Sundays to be with the whole lot of practice house mothers. With Martha all but forgotten, he could spend hours handing out pretend cookies and telling them pretend jokes and, perhaps most strikingly, asking them questions: “How are you today?” “You like singing?” “Which do you want?” No trip to the park with Martha, no special breakfast, no promise of toys or favors could compete with the lineup of multiple visitors below.
“Henry tella joke,” he would say to one practice mother or another.
“What’s the joke, Henry?” she would answer.
“Lion, ROAR!” he would say, and he would follow it with the peals of laughter that inevitably pulled the women’s smiles away from the baby and back toward him.
An experienced mother of an older child might also have found it odd that Henry never looked for Martha when he was in the other women’s company—or rather, that he looked for her no differently than he looked for anyone else. The women would have seemed, to an outside observer, equal and interchangeable parts in the engine that kept Henry going. The spark was his considerable charm. The women held and humored him. They trained their cameras on him. They passed news of his cutest expressions and precocious questions around like rare fruit.
“Drinkee milkee.” “Brushee teeth.” “Are you happy now?” “Do you feel bad?”
Jealously, Martha frowned on and tried to shorten these encounters, claiming to be worried that the new baby, Herbert, wasn’t getting the attention he deserved. Privately, she blamed the practice house mothers for luring Henry, not Henry for luring the mothers. Martha was besotted enough to be nearly overwhelmed by the novelty and the magnitude of what might come next in his life, and by the hope—growing tentatively into faith—that she would have the chance to see it. It was as if, all her life, she had been served the same first course of the same meal, and now she was finally being given a chance to sample the rest. She had no intention of sharing, even as she had no ability to discern what it was that she wanted to devour.
“WANNA GO DOWN,” Henry said to Martha one afternoon in September, as she tied the shoelace on his left Buster Brown for the third or fourth time that day. The autumn sun was just finding its way through the upstairs windows and varnishing the floor.
“No, not now, Henry,” Martha said. “Baby’s trying to take his nap.”
On the radio, the Andrews Sisters were singing their latest hit:
You call everybody Darlin’,
And everybody calls you Darlin’ too
“Wanna go down,” Henry said again.
“No, Henry, Emem said no,” Martha said.
“Wanna see Sally,” Henry said.
“It’s not even Sally’s week downstairs today,” Martha said, though Henry was sure he had heard Sally’s voice just before.
If you call everybody Darlin’,
Then love won’t come a-knockin’ at your door…
“Wanna see Sally,” Henry said again, with a sad, strained look on his small face, and, after stepping on and once more untying his shoelace, he slowly began to move toward the door.
“Henry,” Martha said in a warning voice. “Stay here.”
“Can do eet,” he said. “Wanna see Sally.”
And as the years go by,
You’ll sit and wonder why
Nobody calls you Darlin’ anymore.
“Henry,” Martha said again, following him quickly out to the landing.
“Can do eet,” he said one more time, and then he fell down the stairs.
He fell with his limbs splayed in all directions, as if he was an armload of firewood tossed down from the landing.
HE WAS STILL FOR ONLY a moment or two—just long enough for Sally to come running from the nursery and for Martha to fly down the stairs. It seemed unlikely for a two-year-old not to have been killed by such a fall. And yet, with the exception of the mushroom cap-shaped bump that rose immediately on his forehead, he seemed to be unharmed.
“Want Sally!” he cried, and he refused to look at Martha, even when she picked him up like a baby and cradled him in her arms.
He strained toward Sally—a nineteen-year-old farm girl who was as embarrassed by Henry’s preference for her as Martha was wounded by it.
Trying her hardest to seem impassive, Martha handed Henry to Sally and began her examination: feeling his ankles, wrists, elbows, knees—and then, once she was satisfied that his bones had not been broken, staring deeply into his eyes.
“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 snatched 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 assured 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 apron-clad mother kneeling on the floor, a pot holde
r 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 shirt 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 institution within an institution, 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 sparse, 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 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 glasses, 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-butter 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 cocktail, 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 singin
g 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 Class. Once, she helped the children plant Dixie cups with grass 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 leadership: 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’ 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 balls, 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.
The Irresistible Henry House Page 7