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 k
nowing 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.”
9
Eastern Standard Time
Only five days later, Betty Gardner boarded a train heading east, to New York City, where her father had decided that her unfortunate past might be less objectionable, or at least less noticed.
With the help of a former Wilton professor, Dr. Gardner had arranged to have Betty try out as a researcher at Time magazine. It would be a new start, he told her, insisting that she be grateful for the opportunity.
Until the moment Betty left, Martha felt as if she was virtually incapable of any emotion but fear. And even after Betty’s departure, Martha couldn’t help feeling that the visit had left a pall, a layer of emotional ash that had changed forever the way that Henry was going to look at things. Martha blamed this largely on Betty and even, to some extent, on Betty’s father. It did not occur to her that there was any other blame to be assigned.
IN 1955, PASSENGERS ARRIVING at New York’s Penn Station walked off their trains, up to the glorious concourse, and into a reality that rarely fell short of whatever superlatives they had heard in advance. The celestial ceiling, with its vaulted arches and its web of wrought-iron window frames, was churchlike and dizzying, fearsome and immense. Hanging in the smoky air between the ceiling and floor—like a man-made sun—was the famous clock, with its heavy Roman numerals, precisely squared-off minute marks, and, in capital letters, its nonnegotiable message: EASTERN STANDARD TIME. From tall white poles around the vast room, modern loudspeakers hung in clusters like giant, incongruous lilies of the valley. Thousands upon thousands of people strode through the concourse without hesitation or apparent fear.
Her two suitcases on either side of her, Betty stood for at least ten minutes, taking the whole panorama in. It occurred to her that she had not felt this much like a child since she had first arrived in Australia and gone looking for Fred’s address at the Melbourne post office. Thank God she was not a child now, she thought: A few moments later, she had gathered her bags and taken a seat in an all-but-empty bar called Brown’s.
An exhausted-looking waitress came over to take her order.
“Gin and tonic,” Betty said.
“Any particular kind of gin?”
Despite her fear, her fatigue, and even her sadness, there was something to be said, Betty thought, for a city in which even a tired-looking waitress asked you what kind of gin you wanted.
SHE HAD LEARNED to drink gin in Australia. She had learned to drink everything there, discovering the sweet and sharp contradictions of booze: the cushiony insulation and the flat, hard taste. She had needed both the softness and the hardness for dealing with Fred, who drank even more than she did and with far less apparent consolation. Neither of them had had a clue about how to build a marriage, let alone a life. It became clear after a while that they would each protect their own secrets and garner more. What little they’d had in common before the war had long since been outgrown. Betty had become a mother and Fred a soldier, and both had been deserters. Yet neither of them could acknowledge just how useless with shame their hearts had grown.
“First time here?” the waitress asked as she brought Betty’s drink.
Betty nodded and stirred the gin and tonic with a heavy plastic brown swizzle stick.
“Where’re you from?” the waitress asked, apparently grateful to have some company.
Betty took a sip and welcomed the coldness and warmth, flowing simultaneously.
“I’m from Australia,” Betty said.
“Australia? Well, you couldn’t have taken the train from there.”
Betty smiled. “No, I was visiting my son. In Pennsylvania.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Damned if I know,” Betty said, and drained her glass, feeling the ice cubes kiss her top lip. “Bring me another, okay?”
She studied the cocktail napkin, ate some peanuts, tried to get one more taste of gin from the still-large ice cubes. She thought for the first ti
me about what she would say when people in New York asked her about her past. It struck her that she could lie and that there was almost no reason not to lie. But with this waitress, for some reason, it seemed even more tempting, almost exotic, to tell the truth. Looking into those tired, pale eyes, Betty had an instant and grateful understanding of the freedom that would be granted her by the anonymous city.
“He came from a one-night stand, my son,” Betty said after a long sip from the fresh drink.
The waitress looked over her shoulder carelessly, then sat down. “And they made you give him up?” she asked.
Betty nodded. “When he was just a year old,” she said.
“You weren’t married?” the waitress asked.
“I was. But not to the father.”
“Oh.”
The waitress leaned on her hand, a heavy elbow on the small table. “But you had the baby a whole year?” she asked.
“Well, I wasn’t living with him, but I got to see him a lot.”
“You’re lucky,” the waitress said. “My cousin had to give hers up before her milk was even dry.”
Betty’s impulse to share her story changed almost harshly into the need for her story to be understood.
“Lucky!” Betty said. “One night. One guy. And pregnant like that.”
“Yeah,” the waitress said.
Then Betty told her about Martha, the practice house, and Dr. Gardner. She told her about the long, pale Australian nights and the futility of Fred’s attempts first to get, then to keep, a job.
“And did you ever tell him about your son?”
“No. Yes. No.” Betty laughed at her own confusion. “At the very end I did,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we’d tried for eight goddamn years to have a baby of our own, and he kept saying I just wasn’t made to be a mother.”
FORTIFIED BY THE DRINKS and emboldened by her confessions, Betty left a large tip for the waitress and dragged her bags out onto the street. It was mild for October, sunny and clear. Graceful cane-shaped streetlamps arched along Fifth Avenue. A billboard several blocks away advertised Knickerbocker beer. Two-toned taxis in every color drove by, and it took Betty a while to realize that when the lozenge-shaped signs on top of them were lit up, that meant they were empty, not full.
The Irresistible Henry House Page 12