Polio, Vera knew from her health class, could sometimes start with what seemed to be a simple cold or grippe. She’d learned, but now for the life of her couldn’t remember, how to tell what the differences were.
Vera dialed the doctor’s number, but his nurse said that he was out on house calls. He would certainly call in at some point, but she didn’t know when. With rising panic, Vera put Hazel in the crib and, breaking one of Mrs. Gaines’s cardinal rules, did not correct the baby when she put her thumb in her mouth.
This time Henry followed Vera into the kitchen, where she looked out the back door again, then picked up the telephone and dialed the zero and then asked for another number.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m wondering if you can help me. Do you know Martha Gaines from the Wilton campus? Yes, the practice house, that’s right. I’m wondering if you can tell me whether you’ve seen her today. Yes, has she been in the store? In the last hour or two? No? Would you have seen her? Yes, all right. Thanks very much. No, it’s just that I haven’t seen her for some time, and it’s getting late.”
Vera hung up, looking frantic.
Henry followed her back to the nursery.
“Maybe the grocery store?” Henry heard Vera ask, but by now he knew that she wasn’t talking to him. He settled again into the rocking chair, his head back on its arm.
“Vera, I’m cold,” he said, and she covered him with an extra blanket from the baby’s drawer.
“I’m just going to check one more time, to see if Mrs. Gaines is coming,” Vera told Henry.
He was watching Hazy in her crib when Vera left the room, and he was still in that position when he heard the wind slam the back door shut behind her.
MARTHA, MEANWHILE, was at neither the toy store nor the grocery store, but on her way back from the hardware store, where Arthur Hamilton had been recommending she buy an inhaler for Henry. She was halfway down Main Street, two blocks from the practice house, when she saw Vera running up the street in her direction. Vera was running, cold and coatless, with her arms crossed over her chest, the way shy girls did in gym class. Tiny white puffs of icy air formed in front of her open mouth.
“Vera!” Martha called.
“The key!” Vera called back.
“What? What are you doing here? Where’s Henry? Where’s the baby?” Martha shouted. A Pontiac sped by on the street in between them. Martha began to move faster than she had in years.
“They’re in the house! I got locked out! I think Henry’s got a fever! Do you have the key?”
By now, Martha was charging past Vera, her purse swinging back and forth on her wrist like a huge bell clapper.
A sense of panic—and a flurry of dead brown leaves—flew down the street behind them.
HENRY AND HAZEL HAD BEEN ALONE for only fifteen minutes, but word spread quickly that the practice house had been the scene of some sort of accident. In fact, there had been no damage.
With Vera first knocking, then pounding, on the back door, Henry had gone to the kitchen and found her face pressed against the glass. She had directed him to open the door, but he had simply not been able to do so; his hands, slick from the Vicks that he had somehow picked up from his own chest, had been too slippery to grasp the knob. Then he heard Hazy start to bawl, and despite Vera’s protests, he turned to walk back to the nursery.
Hazy’s face was bright red, her hair all matted and flouncy.
“Hazy,” Henry said, but Hazy kept on crying. “Hazy,” Henry said. “Be quiet, baby.”
Finally, Vera stopped pounding on the door, and there was quiet. Through the slats of Hazy’s crib, Henry eyed the baby, and she quieted down slightly. He was aware suddenly of the darkness in the hallway beyond the nursery.
Then he dragged over the rocking chair—a laborious process, especially because the gliders kept catching on the Oriental rug. In a moment, he had climbed up on its arm and, with surprisingly little hesitation, vaulted over the rail and into Hazy’s crib.
THE PHONE RANG a good deal that evening. What Martha said varied little. Henry was fine. The baby was fine. Nothing had happened. Vera had been locked out for a few moments, that was all. No, of course Henry hadn’t harmed the baby. In fact, Martha kept saying proudly, Henry had tried to calm her down. How many four-year-olds, Martha kept asking, would have had the sense and the sweetness to do for little Hazel what Henry had?
It was true that, when Martha and Vera had gotten back inside the practice house, they had found Henry sitting in the crib, with Hazel lying peacefully on his lap. An hour later, his fever—which turned out to be just the last vestige of a normal grippe—had passed, and he seemed and would prove to be entirely healthy. But that evening, between phone calls, Martha took Henry’s temperature again and again, fussed and cried, and hugged him until he squirmed and pulled away.
Every time his temperature came up normal, she looked skeptical. She straightened his pillows. She gave him soup. She kissed him on his forehead, his hands.
“If anything happened to you—” she kept saying, but then she never finished the sentence, leaving Henry the not-unfamiliar impression that his well-being was somehow crucial to the progress of the world.
4
Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse
There was a new girl in the nursery school the following fall. Her name was Annabel. Like Henry and Mary Jane, she was five. She wore her hair in braids and a headband. She wasn’t as blond as Mary Jane. Her father didn’t work for the college, but they lived somewhere in town.
For most of the first week, Annabel watched quietly as Mrs. Donovan, Mary Jane, Leo, and Henry went about their normal routines. Leo and Henry talked about some of the things they had seen on TV. Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse got married again. Henry drew lots of pictures.
It wasn’t until the second week that Annabel first spoke to Henry directly.
“Push me?” she asked while she hung motionless and timid on the swing in the backyard.
Boldly, Leo stepped in, palms up at his shoulders, ready to shove.
“No!” Annabel shouted, understandably alarmed by the seeming menace behind Leo’s gesture.
“Leo, don’t!” Mary Jane scolded. “She’s scared!”
“I’ll push you,” Henry said. He stepped forward, leaving the concern for Annabel frozen on Mary Jane’s face, where—with Henry standing behind Annabel to push her gently up into a rainy white sky—it quickly melted into something more like shock.
————
THE NEXT DAY, Henry pushed Annabel on the swing again, and after that was over, Mary Jane said she wanted a turn, too.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Mary Jane spent a long time drawing, and then she gave the picture to Henry.
“What’s it of?” he asked her.
“A castle,” she said. “It’s where Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse live.”
“Who made you Miss Fancy?” Annabel asked.
“I did,” Mary Jane said.
“Can I be someone?” Annabel asked.
“You’re Annabel,” Mary Jane said.
“Tag! You’re it!” Leo shouted, and chased all three of them through the backyard, their Keds pounding the dry, cold dirt, their mouths open, their ears red.
Back inside, Henry drew a picture for Mary Jane and another one for Annabel, and so it went, on into the next weeks: Henry being entirely democratic with his attentions, a fairness that Mary Jane could not miss and in truth could hardly bear.
HE WOULD NOT MAKE a choice. At home, despite the drama he had shared with Vera, Henry had gone back to treating her no differently from the other practice mothers and Martha. At nursery school, he sat between Mary Jane and Annabel during lunch, tagged Mary Jane and Annabel equally often at tag, gave pictures to both of them now, and never said whose anything he liked better.
When he played in the block pile, he would not build his houses in the direction of anyone else’s with the goal of joining them. Instead, he quite often would be happy just sorting the blocks, enjoying the pleas
ure of the semicircle fitting inside the arch, the sound the blocks made when he stacked them, like single claps of applause, the simple beauty of two quarters making a half, two halves making a whole. When he did construct buildings, he made sure to leave lots of space around them. That way, he explained to the others, if one of them toppled, it wouldn’t knock the others down.
Outside, he could sit by himself for a long time, just noticing how some things looked like other things. Patches of light spotted the trees, as liquid and clear as puddles of paint. Five-fingered leaves fell down from the maple trees, open hand upon open hand.
ON THE LAST THURSDAY in October, Henry was in the playroom, building a tall tower from squares and cylinders. Annabel, stretched out on her stomach, regarded him through lazy, contented eyes.
For the fourth time in as many minutes, Mary Jane walked in from the kitchen, where Leo and she had been coloring. As nonchalantly as possible, she stepped over Annabel’s legs, picked up a few blocks of her own, and settled down on the scratched wooden floor. Silently, she started to build, laying rectangle upon rectangle, as if she was bricking a wall up. She was careful not to encroach on Henry but eagerly went on building her wall, essentially making a barrier between Henry and Annabel. He didn’t seem to notice. Annabel didn’t seem to notice.
“Henry,” Mary Jane said, and he didn’t answer, too absorbed in his own construction project. “Henry,” she said again.
She took a foot-long block and used it to sweep down the wall she had just made. Standing with the block in her hand, she sighed, exasperated and plaintive. “Henry, I’m trying to make a castle, you know,” she said.
Henry nodded vaguely.
“It’s where Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse live.”
“Okay,” he said.
Tears filled her eyes. “Henry, don’t you want to play Miss Fancy and Mickey Mouse?”
Annabel perked up at this. “We can both be Miss Fancy,” she said.
“No,” Mary Jane said. “You’re not Miss Fancy.”
Henry still hadn’t looked up.
“I can be Miss Fancy, too,” Annabel said, sitting up.
“No,” Mary Jane said again. “Henry,” she said, increasingly impatient.
“What?”
“Can we both be Miss Fancy?” Annabel said.
Henry, much to Mary Jane’s astonishment, merely shrugged and again said “Okay.”
Annabel stood up, radiant with bridal anticipation. Mary Jane turned red.
“No you can’t!” Mary Jane shouted, loudly enough so that Leo emerged from the kitchen to see what was going on.
“Can’t what?” Henry asked.
“She can’t be Miss Fancy too!” she said to Henry. Nearly two months of pent-up jealousy and more than a year of pent-up love dissolved Mary Jane in that moment. She burst into tears but stayed on the spot, daring Henry to change his mind.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because there can’t be two.”
“Why not?” Henry asked her.
“Because there can’t!” Mary Jane shouted.
THE BUILDING BLOCK—one of the semicircles that fit so perfectly inside the arches—should not have done the damage it did. Having been handled by generations of children, plunged into water experiments, and left out in backyard soil and morning dew, it had no hard edges and not a hint of a splinter left. And yet, possibly the force with which it was thrown, or the angle at which the corner of its base entered the deep blue center of Mary Jane’s left eye, made it an extraordinary weapon. At the moment Mary Jane started screaming—even before the blood began to stain her perfect face—Henry knew that by throwing the block, he had done the worst thing he’d ever done in his life. There would be days in Henry’s future when the women who wanted his love would try to trace him back to this moment—like rings around a pebble in water trying to embrace their source.
THE BLOOD CAME OUT of Mary Jane’s eye exactly the way that water-colors, if you used too much water, would rush down a page of paper and then pool in blotches rimmed by darker color. Blood flowed from the corner of Mary Jane’s eye, descended the half globe of her cheek, slid past the side corner of her mouth and then down under her chin, finally settling onto the collar of her shirt, which it was immediately hard to remember as any color but red.
“Henry, what did you do?” Mrs. Donovan shouted, seemingly more eager to blame him than to help Mary Jane.
Henry, meanwhile, went to Mary Jane and did what he always did when Martha said she needed him. He tugged on one of his own ears—the ear with the little extra flap of skin—and he brought his face very close to Mary Jane’s, so close that it startled her into a moment of quiet.
But then she started crying again, and she said: “I think you killed my eye!”
THE NEAREST HOSPITAL was in Titusville, which was about twenty miles northeast of Franklin. In the rush to get Mary Jane there, Mrs. Donovan pounded on the back door of the practice house and insisted that Martha take care of the children until their parents could come. Martha—almost as shocked by the sight of the little girl’s face as she was by the thought that Henry was responsible for it—merely nodded, in uncharacteristic submissiveness, and went next door. Later, she would claim that she had never given Henry permission to go along to the hospital. Mrs. Donovan would always claim that Martha had actually told Henry to go.
In reality, neither case was true. Henry had simply decided that his place was beside Mary Jane.
Before she put Mary Jane in the car, Mrs. Donovan wrapped a wet dish towel around the girl’s eyes, and in her plaid skirt, with her hands stretched out to feel for the car door in front of her, Mary Jane looked to Henry exactly like Jane playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey in one of the Dick and Jane books. Except that now there was blood on Mary Jane’s collar, shirt, and hands.
————
AN INJURY TO THE EYE by blunt force—the doctor explained to Edith Donovan at the Titusville emergency room—will sometimes produce no more than a small bruise, a black eye, or dizziness and headaches. At the other extreme, he said, it can fracture the bones that surround the eye, force the bones’ splinters to enter the cornea, and require immediate surgery. The latter was what happened to Mary Jane Harmon when Henry threw the block at her.
In the dim green corridor of the hospital, Henry stood by as Mrs. Donovan called Mary Jane’s mother and told her what had happened. Meanwhile, two men wheeled away a small narrow bed with Mary Jane on it.
“Is she sleeping?” Henry asked Mrs. Donovan.
“Yes.”
“How did they make her sleep?”
“They gave her medicine.”
“Where are they taking her?” Henry asked Mrs. Donovan.
“They’re taking her to fix her eye,” she said.
“Are they going to operate on her?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, cut her eye open?” Henry said, and he watched whatever color was left in his teacher’s face drain away.
He tugged on his ear and brought his face close to hers, and then, with a gesture of infinite gentleness, he put his hand on her shoulder.
She hugged him so hard that he lost his balance and fell against her legs, and then she picked him up, and held him, just the way Martha sometimes did.
“WHY DID YOU DO IT?” Martha asked Henry that night, kneeling beside the bathtub as she took a washcloth and scrubbed his knuckles, scrubbed his kneecaps, scrubbed behind his ears.
“I don’t know,” Henry said.
“You have to know. You can tell me,” Martha said.
Henry grabbed the bar of Ivory soap, then sank it under the water and watched as it popped back to the surface.
“Henry?” Martha said.
“What?”
“Why did you throw that block at Mary Jane Harmon?”
“I don’t know why.”
Martha’s eyes narrowed, so that she looked a little bit like a fish. “Was she mean to you?” Martha asked. “Did she say or do something nas
ty?”
“No,” Henry said.
“Because I know how little girls can be with little boys,” Martha said.
Henry plunged the soap down again, this time with a bomber sound effect that he had learned from Leo.
“Don’t do that,” Martha said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m talking to you.”
Henry looked at her.
“Did she say something mean?”
Henry just shook his head and discovered, in his silence, a new form of escape.
FOR HER PART, Mary Jane woke the next morning to a room filled with flowers, drawings, and homemade cookies; to doctors and nurses saying how brave she was; to the strange, special self-esteem that can alight on a child in a hospital bed. It would take months for anyone to find out that the damage to Mary Jane’s eye would be permanent, and it would take years for her to realize that what had so provoked Henry was her trying to force him to make a choice. She would, however, always remember the look on his face just before it turned to anger: a look that, even at five, she had recognized in some instinctive way as one of unspeakable helplessness and hurt.
MARTHA MADE HENRY WAIT a whole week before she would let him go visit Mary Jane.
“She’ll think I don’t love her,” Henry protested as they sat upstairs Friday evening, Henry coloring while Martha pasted Green Stamps into her books.
“She’ll know you love her,” Martha said vaguely.
“No she won’t!”
“Why don’t you make her a card?”
“I’ve made her a card every day in school,” he said.
“That’s very nice of you.”
“I never used red. I didn’t want it to look like blood.”
“We still can’t go yet,” Martha said.
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because her mother doesn’t want us to,” Martha finally said.
Henry looked disbelieving. “Is Mary Jane dead?” he asked.
“No, of course she’s not dead,” Martha said. Her face looked a little bit crumpled, as if there were words in her mouth but there was something stopping them up. “I’ll see if we can go this weekend.”
The Irresistible Henry House Page 9