A SOPHOMORE NAMED DAISY FALLOWS was waiting for Henry outside the art studio one night in October, her arms crossed, her red flannel shirt collar turned up, her red hair flying.
She was extremely small, and Henry had grown even taller since his freshman year, so it wasn’t until she came up close to him that he really could see her eyes, which, it turned out, were flashing and filled with fun. She tilted her lips up just perceptibly, but he had absolutely no doubt what she wanted, and so he kissed her, feeling for the first time in his life the soft tumble of another person’s tongue in his mouth.
It was more or less exactly the way he had imagined it would be, except for one surprise, which was Daisy taking his face in her scratchy gloved hands and saying, “I figured you were the safest, Henry, because I can trust you.” Then she looked back over her shoulder and giggled. “I mean, after all, it’s not like you’re going to talk.”
IT WAS CLEAR TO HENRY that Charlie knew he was spending extra time in the art studio. Sometimes, Henry would find a box of Lorna Doones or a bag of potato chips. It was also clear that these gifts must not be acknowledged, but, in a completely surprising way, it now seemed to Henry that someone neither intrusive nor possessive was watching over him.
Nothing in Henry’s upbringing had prepared him for the kindnesses that both Charlie and Karen Falk now regularly bestowed on him. To Henry, who was first invited to Reynolds West to have tea and to look at their prized Matisse lithograph, it had never seemed possible that home could be a place where one felt free.
Like the dorm parents in the other houses, the Falks had three small rooms on the first floor: living room, bedroom, and kitchen with dining alcove. To Henry, the apartment seemed palatial, partly because the Falks had emptied it of all the stodgy, traditional furniture that was standard in the other houses, and had instead surrounded themselves in a Bohemian blend of blond modern wood and light avocado fabrics, stacks and shelves of books and records, and different colors on every wall: black, brown, purple, and navy in the living room; red, orange, yellow, and rust in the kitchen; lavender, pink, mint, and robin’s egg blue in the bedroom. To Henry, being in the Falks’ home was like being inside his art box.
The traditional decoration was limited to just two objects. In the kitchen, there was an enormous campaign poster of John F. Kennedy that was red, white, and blue, under a black-and-white photo of Kennedy’s face. Sometimes, when Henry sat in the kitchen with Charlie and Karen, he would stare up at the photograph, with Kennedy’s white-white smile and his side part and poufy dark hair; and the face would splinter into shapes and planes and lines, until Kennedy became not a man but a collection of parts to draw.
The other piece of art in the Falks’ apartment was the Matisse lithograph: a wedding gift from some wealthy relative and clearly, without any doubt, their prized possession. It was not a large picture, not even a foot high and not even two feet wide, and it was not particularly colorful—at least not compared to the rest of the rooms and to Matisse prints that Henry had seen in Charlie’s art books. This one had only two colors: the mustard yellow of the flat background and the black of the lithographed lines depicting fourteen large-petaled blossoms floating abstractly behind a robed woman who sat with a child on her lap. Apart from the fact that neither the woman nor the child had any facial features at all, what made the image unusual was that the child was holding its handless arms stretched out to either side.
The Matisse held the place of honor above the living room fireplace, in which the Falks, one autumn Sunday, were letting Henry help them paint a fire.
“It’s called La Vierge et L’Enfant” Charlie said, gesturing up to the lithograph.
“That means ‘The Virgin and Child,’” Karen chimed in, helpfully.
Henry blushed slightly at the word virgin and looked at the floor.
“Virgin, you idiot, like the Virgin Mary,” Karen said.
Henry pantomimed the Christ figure.
“Exactly,” Karen said. “That’s why the baby is shaped like that.”
Henry stared at the lithograph, then went back to painting the fire, making flames of red, orange, yellow, and purple, licking up at the back and sides of the brick.
ONE MONTH LATER, on a frigid November night, in the back corner of the art studio, Daisy Fallows took a pack of Viceroys from the waistband of her pink denim slacks and gave Henry his first cigarette. Pretending he had smoked before, he nonetheless reeled from the assault on his throat and lungs, but he managed neither to cough nor to vomit, and instead concealed his imbalance by kissing Daisy and sliding a shaking hand under her sweater.
An hour after that kiss began, an hour during which they had explored, it seemed to Henry, every possible variation in the choreography of kissing, Daisy looked at her wristwatch and let out a little shriek when she saw that it was nearly two. Then she retied the shoelaces on her saddle shoes and went skipping out into the night, a burst of cold air rushing in behind her. Moments after that, a cigarette butt rolled into a puddle of turpentine, and a small excitement of flames leapt up toward a roll of canvas.
At least three minutes too late, Henry grabbed the first object he could find to try to smother the burning canvas, but what he found was a roll of newsprint, and that went up too.
EVEN AS HENRY WATCHED IN FEAR, he could not help noticing the extraordinary profusion of colors that the fire created. At each new cluster of supplies, there would be a hissing and popping, and then bright yellows, greens, and magentas would emerge from the flames, like overblown flowers. Then came the moment—Henry later would remember its details precisely—when he went from thinking that the path of the fire would stop to understanding that there was no way it could.
It was the moment when he realized that there were choices to be made. On the far counter of the room, and on the wall and shelves behind it, were most of the class’s finished artwork: pinch pots left out, ironically, to dry; canvases not yet hung; the Falks’ Matisse, surrounded by the copies and variations that Charlie had asked the class to make just this morning; panels of Henry’s and his classmates’ self-portraits, three months’ worth of fragments not yet assembled in any permanent way.
Transfixed, Henry looked before him at the shelves of paints, Cray-Pas, and palettes; the glass-paned cabinets holding the empty pineapple juice cans with their bouquets of brushes; the rows of articulated figures, seeming to bow their heads now as the flames blackened their wooden backs.
He could feel the heat—not frightening, really, but strangely inviting. It occurred to him, passingly, not to fight it. He had a thought of being subsumed in all the colors. If he escaped the fire, he would have to face Charlie and Karen. And the guys. And no doubt be expelled. And be sent back to Martha. The eyes of the women in his central drawing stared at him from the back wall, daring him to become unwitnessed. Instead, he took a deep, smoky breath, grabbed what he could from the far wall and shelf, and then ran back toward the door. Out in the snow, he tried to say the word: fire. The sound didn’t even catch in his throat. There really was no sound. But Henry knew he was the only possible siren. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the nearest dorm wasn’t near enough for sleeping people to be awakened by smells of smoke or sounds of fire or sights of a palette, however surprising, of brilliantly colored flames. Then Henry dropped what he’d rescued on one of the benches in the yard, ran to Reynolds West, and pounded on the door. There was no response. Finally, what began as a whisper broke into an audible croak.
“Fire.”
He said it again.
“Fire.”
He said it loudly. “Fire!”
Charlie started running as soon as he understood the word. Karen, with Charlie’s winter coat in hand, loped after him awkwardly, trying to fling the coat over his shoulders while the slippers she was wearing made her slide in the snow.
By the time they arrived at the studio, the heat was too intense for them to get near the place. They ran to Reynolds East to call the fire department, and from
then on, it was merely a question of waiting and watching while the red town fire truck, reminding Henry unavoidably of the one he and Martha had played with when he was little, rushed in on the usually off-limits campus lanes.
The hoses were taken out even before the truck had come to a stop. But it was clear there would be no chance of salvage. Even as the front side of the studio began to resemble the alligatored skin of a log near embers, Henry again noticed the incredible profusion of colors and saw that the sky behind the studio looked yellow and green. As the right corner of the roof caved in, he couldn’t help thinking that the building, still burning, looked as if its top corner was being erased.
Gradually, students and teachers began to gather, tumbling out of their dorms, pulling their bathrobe belts tight against the cold. Some wore slippers, others boots; some had thrown sweaters over their pajamas; a few were fully dressed. They formed a semicircle, no different from the ones they’d formed on the bonfire nights in the early fall, when they’d all roasted hot dogs, sung school songs, and put on skits.
By the time Daisy appeared in the circle, it seemed to Henry that it had been weeks or months since he had seen her last. Later, she would complain to him that his look was first angry, then blank, and he would pretend to be sorry for both, but in truth he would want to get as far away from her as he could. It would take him years to figure out that the intimacy of sharing a secret guilt was more than he could bear.
For the moment, his only thought was whether Charlie was going to turn him in and send him back to Martha.
WHEN THE SUN ROSE, it seemed there was no color left anywhere in the world, as if the fire had consumed not only the watercolors, oil paints, and acrylics in the studio but also all that they could have created. The gray of the smoke and the gray of the ash and the gray of the late autumn skyline all seemed to settle around the ground where the studio had been. The smell—throat-stinging, bitter—was of chemicals and ash.
At about seven in the morning, the dean climbed up onto one of the stone benches and announced that all classes would be canceled for the coming day, and that students should spend their time in their rooms, relaxing as they wished to, and making up for lost sleep. The dean suggested it wouldn’t hurt if some students used the time to tidy their rooms, study for upcoming tests, and ponder whether they had any clues as to what or who might have started the fire. Then the dorm parents began to usher the students back to their rooms. The firemen stood ready for any last bursts of flame. But there was really nothing left to burn. All that remained of the studio was the soggy gray and brown earth, a few pieces of glass, and the metal file cabinets. Eventually, as students looked on from their windows, the firemen climbed into their truck and carefully—perhaps even somewhat abashedly—backed out of the quad.
Returning to their apartment after making sure that all their girls were accounted for in Reynolds West, the Falks settled into the kitchen, where Karen put up a kettle for tea and Charlie took out and filled a pipe.
After a long silence, she said: “It had to have been him.”
Charlie barely nodded.
“Charlie. It had to.”
“I know.”
They sipped their tea.
“Want to eat something?” she asked him.
He shook his head.
“Do you think he did it on purpose?”
“Of course not.”
“He was the one who yelled ‘Fire,’ though.”
“I know.”
“Do you think he could talk all along?”
“No. I don’t know. No,” Charlie said.
“What’s upsetting you most? The Matisse? The studio? Or him?”
“What to do,” Charlie said, and stood up, absentmindedly reaching for the cups and putting them in the kitchen sink, not quite realizing that his wife was still drinking her tea.
“Thanks,” she said sarcastically.
“You’re welcome,” he said, missing her point completely.
It was not until they walked into the living room that they saw the Matisse hanging over the mantel, safely back where it belonged.
4
When It Comes to That
The photograph of Henry in the square frame—the personal hearth beside which Betty had warmed herself on so many lonely nights—remained, six years after she’d moved to New York, in its special place on her Barbizon Hotel dresser. Bare-bottomed and shiny-eyed, Henry still held his pose—just scarcely up on a chubby arm, turning back toward the women, the attention, the light. By now, however, in the fall of 1961, the photo had been joined by several others, in simpler frames. One was from the roll Betty had taken in Franklin that long-ago autumn, when Henry had squirmed on the school-yard steps, unwilling to offer a smile. Another—this one an eight-by-ten glossy—showed six laughing women, Betty among them, pretending to christen a copy machine in the new Time research library.
But the photograph that now sat in front of all the others was actually just the cover of a two-inch-square book of matches, one of those pricey, enforced souvenirs from a nightclub called the Latin Quarter. The photo, in black and white, showed Betty under the possessive arm of a man named Gregory J. Peterson. Peterson was editor of Time’s arts section, where Betty had been working since being hired as a full-time researcher. He was a tall man in his late forties with prematurely white hair that he swept away from his eyes at regular intervals with a grand, patrician hand. And he had become—despite his position, his wife, his three children, and his unpredictable, often unpleasant moods—the undisputed focus of Betty’s life. So far, the only times she had sensed any interest from him had been on a few of the magazine’s closing nights, when a bunch of writers and researchers would follow him to some loud, bright restaurant and compete to see who could make him laugh. The night at the Latin Quarter—the night of the matchbook—had been one of those nights when it seemed as if everything Betty said and did was delightful and full of meaning to Greg. He had looked at her with such intensity. A kind of appreciation, she thought.
And so on more and more evenings, rather than going to bed with dreams of reclaiming Henry in her head, she fell asleep replaying conversations she’d had with Greg, wondering at the things that had caught his attention, trying to find the pattern, the key. Sometimes she would wake from a dream and then lie very still in the dark, small room, allowing herself to imagine what it would be like to be with Greg always, nestled under his arm, having it understood that he’d chosen her—and not just for this meal or for that story.
Other times, turning on her bedside lamp, she would pick up the book of matches. The image of the two of them—spanning the shiny cover—was printed across the thick, wide cardboard matches inside as well, so that if one were to use any of the matches, it would be like ripping planks from a muraled fence. Betty knew that she would never light a single one.
SO IT WAS NOT FOCUSING on Henry that brought her any closer to her hope of reclaiming him. Nor was it continued discipline with her drinking, her study of current events, or even her habits at work. What pushed her closer to her dream of reclaiming Henry was the still formidable—and now more fashionable—presence of Ethel Neuholzer, the lively, snack-toting girl who had taken that first picture of Henry so long ago.
Ethel, it turned out, was working for Life magazine, Time’s popular sister publication, and it was after both magazines’ move to their new building on Sixth Avenue that Betty first encountered—or re-encountered—her. A forty-foot-long bronze and glass geometric mural was being installed in the lobby, amid much confusion. When Betty first saw her, Ethel was standing at one of the steel-lined elevator banks. She was wearing black capri pants and a black turtleneck—like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, except about twice the width. Hanging across her chest was a pair of professional cameras, one with an enormous lens. At her feet was a large black equipment bag and what looked like a leopard-skin coat.
She was talking to a young man whom Betty took to be her assistant. “I want to find a way to get the
sense of the scale,” she was telling him.
Impulsively—perhaps a bit overdramatically—Ethel sprinted across the lobby and then squatted at the other end, making a frame with her hands, through which she looked intently. “Let’s try this,” she said, and then, through the pretend viewfinder she had created, she saw Betty looking on.
Ethel glanced away for a moment, then back, and then smiled and started walking quickly along the gleaming elevator bank toward Betty.
“I saw your name on the Time masthead,” Ethel said wonderingly. “But I really couldn’t imagine that it was the same Betty Gardner.”
Betty shrugged, but before her shoulders had even lowered, Ethel had locked them in an exuberant embrace.
“I’m photographing this thing for the magazine,” Ethel said, unnecessarily. “Do you like it? I don’t think I get it.”
“You work for Time?” Betty asked, confused.
“No. Life,” Ethel said. “But don’t be too impressed. This is just for the newsletter.”
“Oh.”
“They did actually make me a full photographer about five years ago,” Ethel said. “But they still send me out to do the piddly stuff.”
“Miss Neuholzer?” the assistant asked.
“I’m in your way,” Betty said, and started to leave.
“No, listen, I’m sorry,” Ethel said, and linked her arm through Betty’s. For a moment, she looked exactly the way Betty had remembered her: soft, kind, and lively. Then, as if reading Betty’s thoughts, Ethel reached down and rummaged in her big black purse to pull out a snack. But instead of a Clark Bar, she extracted a can of Metrecal.
“Metrecal?” Betty asked.
“Don’t get me started,” Ethel said. “But listen. Want to lunch sometime and eat real food?”
“That’d be nice.”
“No, I really mean it. Better than that. Where are you living?”
The Irresistible Henry House Page 16