The Irresistible Henry House (13 page)

  11  
Silence

Whenever the doctors asked, it was difficult for Martha to pinpoint the exact month, let alone the exact day, when Henry had stopped speaking completely. Martha knew, because the school told her, that at the beginning of fifth grade he had still been talking occasionally to his classmates. But gradually a gray curtain seemed to descend on every side of him. In his increasing silence, he appeared to be frozen, like a character on a lunch box: something that was meant to be animated but no longer was.

Dr. Gardner still made seasonal visits to the practice house, always on academic pretexts and always with overtures to Henry that were simply too formal and stiff to be returned. Henry’s silence appeared therefore to be part of a long-standing reticence. But Dr. Gardner did seem to notice that it was more intense than usual, and while he viewed Henry with increasing frustration, he looked on Martha with increasing doubt.

Martha, on her swift trip from embarrassment to fury, never seemed to pass through concern for Henry’s well-being. She seemed to think his muteness was entirely within his control, merely a bit of pre-teenage rebellion he had cooked up in order to upset her or to make her look bad.

“Do you
want
them to take you away from me?” she asked Henry repeatedly. Ironically, it was the only question that tempted him to speak.

————

IN THE EVENINGS, especially when Martha was busy downstairs with the practice mothers and the newest baby, Henry would sit on the floor of his closet, painting or drawing on the walls. He blended copies of different superheroes into one of his own, whom he called the Ray. The Ray had no earthly ties. Like Henry, he had been born in 1946, but on a distant, dying star. He had come to earth in the spaceship that had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

Like Superman, the Ray could fly and had enormous strength, but whereas Superman could only see through objects, the Ray could see through minds. He knew exactly what people were thinking and exactly what people had done. With this power to detect truth and falsehood, the Ray could isolate crimes of all kinds: even those that had not yet been committed.

Temporarily sweeping aside the long pairs of pants that formed a curtain over his canvas, Henry would use the colored pencils in his art box to draw picture after picture of the Ray on the side closet wall. Softening somewhat the angles and curves of the Flash’s muscles and the shape of his face, Henry drew a superhero who had eyes like tunnels—deep and dark—with wavy lines of power emanating from their depths.

Henry drew the Ray flying like Superman, the beams of his special vision creating a swath of red light that illuminated the sinister city beneath him. Within that swath, he drew people engaged in terrible activities of all kinds: robbers holding up stores and gangsters shooting off guns and someone stuffing someone into a refrigerator.

Sometimes, Henry drew pictures of the Ray handing criminals over to the police, and sometimes he drew pictures of men and women looking afraid of the Ray, as if their crimes and lies would cost them a terrible price.

ONE DAY IN RECESS there was a cluster of fourth-and fifth-graders around Willard Estes, who was showing off a yellow-brown piece of paper with ornate writing on it that said DEED OF LAND. The deed, under the name of the Klondike Big Inch Land Company, had been offered on
Sergeant Preston
and was an official document stating that Willard was now the duly registered owner of a one-inch tract of land in the Yukon.

In Henry’s mind, dreams of escape now mingled, and one form of exit did not contradict another. On one wall of the closet were his fantasies of power and effortless flight: the Ray, soaring over the dark city, seeking out evil intentions and lies. On the second wall was his original verdant field—now with a patch of Yukon land in the distance, glimmering like the image of a well in the desert. Another six months later, there was a third form of exit, namely the automobile. With intense precision, Henry had copied the latest model Lincoln from the pages of
Life:
its flamboyant green gleaming hubcaps like armored knees; its headlights nearly as wise and searching as the eyes of the Ray.

The ad said:

Why be tied down to yesterday? The one fine car designed for modern living. Powered to leave the past far behind.

AT SCHOOL, MARY JANE WAS the only one who talked to him now. All the others were tired of his not talking back.

“I know you can’t help it, Henry,” she said. “This is just who you have to be right now.”

He nodded.

“But they don’t understand you,” she said.

He nodded.

“They don’t understand anything.”

He nodded.

“They could have turned out worse.”

She had meant it as a compliment, and he understood that. Mary Jane at ten still wore her confidence the way she always had: frankly, beautifully. Her confidence was the first thing—after her eye patch—that everyone noticed about her. It was as if the fact that she’d lost an eye entitled her to be more outspoken about what she could still see.

For his part, Henry knew that if he had absolutely had to talk—if, for example, his father suddenly appeared and asked him if he wanted to go have a catch—he could have talked. But there was nothing in his current life—not even Mary Jane’s niceness or the other children’s indifference—that made him feel he had to speak. And, quite to the contrary, his muteness gave him protection from Martha, a zone around him—like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Little by little, Martha’s questions decreased in number and intensity, as if she were some tentacled beast who’d been forced to retract and retreat. Henry’s silence gave him a refuge, an excuse not to participate, but it was also a weapon for keeping Martha at bay. Occasionally, he would remember that his silence was a lie, and he might even start to feel guilty. But then Martha would speak with fondness about some aspect of his infancy, some wonderful moment they’d supposedly had, and he would remember all over again the lies she had told him.

From time to time, she would take him to see a new doctor, and after they left she would start to weep and to lecture Henry about how, if he didn’t start speaking, the school would kick him out. Seeing Martha finger the edges of her scarf or twist a handkerchief in her hand, Henry was starting to think of that expulsion as a sublime promise.

  1  
Mentally Defective

The Humphrey School had been established in the western part of Connecticut in 1858 for the purpose of housing—and, if possible, educating—boys and girls with problems ranging from mild tics and chronic inattentiveness to blindness and cerebral palsy.

The school’s original name—as the current crop of students chose to remind each other whenever humanly possible—had been the Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots. In the early part of the twentieth century, that had been changed to the Humphrey Asylum for the Feeble-Minded, and then, in the enlightened 1930s, to the Humphrey School for Mental Defectives.

By September of 1960, it was usually just called Humphrey. That was when Henry House—registered as Henry Gaines, fourteen years old, functionally mute—arrived for his freshman year, despite the panicked objections of Martha but on the insistence of Dr. Gardner and the advice of the public school. As far as anyone knew, Henry hadn’t spoken a word since some time during the fifth grade. He was by now nearly six feet tall, skinny, stretched out, and, despite the season, already winter pale. His hair had grown somewhat darker, and its sharp contrast to his very light skin made it look as if he’d been sketched in ink but not yet colored in. He still wore khaki pants and still kept his hands tucked away in his pockets. He still had the kind of eyes that, even in silence—perhaps especially in silence—invited attention and evoked confidences.

————

THE SCHOOL HAD HIM EXAMINED by the campus doctor, who, like all the doctors back home, probed his throat, neck, and ears, and then said: “So you don’t talk, eh?” as if that simple question—or perhaps the tone with which it was asked—would magically unlock the strongbox that had been holding his voice.

The headshrinkers had him do puzzles, matching words to pictures, matching blocks to shapes, matching definitions to words. They had him do computations, solve equations, and fill in missing numbers in murky, capricious sequences. All of the testers concluded that Henry was highly intelligent and that his muteness was in no way a physical symptom. Like the vast majority of students at Humphrey, Henry was, in the words of the final examiner, “either socially maladjusted or emotionally disturbed.”

But he was free—if not from Martha’s expectations, then at least from her ever-oppressive, ever-invasive presence. While most of the two hundred students at Humphrey arrived scared, lonely, or outright hostile, Henry coasted in on a giddy tide of liberation. While most of the others would ask, repeatedly, how long it would be before they could return home, Henry, in his silence, began immediately to calculate the number of days, weeks, months, and years that he might be able to stay. From his earliest days on the campus, he understood two things. The first was that if he ever started to speak again, he would automatically risk being deemed healthy and sent back to Martha. The second was that, until he found someplace better, he was not going to say a word.

THE HUMPHREY CAMPUS, spread over two hundred acres, had once been a working farm. The barn buildings remained, flanking the entrance on the top of a quad and housing a small gym, an art studio, an auditorium, and a dining hall. On the opposite side of the rectangle were the administration and classroom buildings, infirmary and rehabilitation center. The residential dorms ran along the connecting sides: boys’ dorms on one end, girls’ on the other.

Henry was assigned to Matthews, the freshman boys’ dorm, which held three rooms of eight thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds, as well as a downstairs suite for the dorm parents. Henry’s seven roommates were a varied lot. Three had flunked out of their schools; one was a juvenile delinquent who had been arrested three times; one was a spastic who needed help dressing and doing most things; one had had polio and was still partially paralyzed; and the last one seemed fairly normal but wispily thin in a frightening, sickish way.

It would take weeks before Henry could learn and keep straight the names and disabilities of the students in the other rooms—let alone in the other classes and dorms. But it was only a few days before Dave Epifano apparently stole the spastic boy’s Parker pen; before Marc Forman and Bryan Enquist were sent to the dean’s office for systematically cutting the tips off all their classmates’ shoelaces; before it was apparent that Stu Stewart, the skinny one, never seemed to eat at all; and before Ben Terry, the polio victim, made it abundantly clear by night that neither his left hand nor its favorite instrument had been in the least bit affected by his illness.

At all this, Henry experienced a sort of bubbling elation. After eight years of public school, he was certainly used to being surrounded by boys with competing egos and quirks—even used to encountering, as he did in his classes, girls with differing expectations and levels of tolerance. What was new—and somewhat thrilling—was the sense that his own problems barely made an impression on anyone else. In a world where theft, indolence, shaking, paralysis, and chronic masturbation were the norm, how was a little muteness going to get in anyone’s way?

“Hey, Gaines,” Ben Terry said late one night that first week, when he sensed that Henry was still awake and listening in the darkness.

Henry flicked on his flashlight and looked at Ben expectantly.

Ben grinned at him nastily, pitching a wad of used tissue into the wastebasket nearby. “Hey, Gaines. Sometimes I do it five times a day. Even if you could talk, you wouldn’t tell anyone, would you?”

THE PLACE WAS BEAUTIFUL. The trees on the hills in the distance were just beginning to change color, their fluffy shapes outlined vaguely in brown, as if they had somehow been dipped in tea. Fallen leaves paved the campus paths, a different-colored carpet to discover every morning, every afternoon. Martha’s protectiveness had always made the Wilton campus a forbidden country for Henry. But Humphrey was immediately his to master: his in a way that no other place—except perhaps the green field in his bedroom closet—had yet been. Just having breakfast in the dining hall, then walking to a class, knowing that there was no one to avoid or to dread, was wonderful.

Henry was making exactly that trip when he first saw Charles Falk. At least six feet three, he stood in a noticeable slump, as if his body had permanently accommodated itself to the task of bending down to hear what his students were saying. His hair—wiry and black, like a Scottish terrier’s—was long enough to seem like a matter of choice and not of neglect. His face—sallow but kind—reminded Henry of the scarecrow’s in
The Wizard of Oz.

When Henry first saw him, Mr. Falk had stopped on one of the paths to the dining hall, and a woman with an orange jacket and a long brown braid was balancing against him, emptying gravel from her shoe while she stood on one foot, laughing. It was September, but the light was still summer light, and Henry paused where he was walking, without really knowing he had, just staring at the way the couple’s bodies leaned into each other, like trees that have grown side by side. All Henry could feel at that moment was longing, though whether it was for the woman, or simply for the chance to be part of something that intimate, was not clear even to him.

Conscious of Henry’s glance, Mr. Falk looked back over the woman’s brown head, slumping and smiling in such a friendly way that Henry had to turn around to see if there was someone behind him, and then he looked back, embarrassed.

————

A WEEK LATER, when the school’s elective courses began, Henry discovered that Mr. Falk was going to be his art teacher.

“I’m not going to ask you to tell me why you don’t talk,” he said to Henry the first day. “I’m guessing everyone always asks you questions, and it must bug you like crazy.”

Henry smiled, his eyes brimming with surprise and gratitude.

“I
will
ask you to tell me,” Mr. Falk added. “But I’m going to ask you to draw the answer for me.”

Henry hesitated. Mr. Falk handed him a set of charcoals and a thick, novel-size sketch pad.

“But not today,” Mr. Falk added. “Today, we do lines and shading.”

Mr. Falk turned toward the full class. “All right, everyone,” he said gleefully. “Gather ’round and listen. Let me explain to you the laws of my classroom. They are few but they are essential, and woe to anyone who ignores them.”

IT TURNED OUT THAT THE WOMAN with the long braid was Mr. Falk’s wife, Karen. They had been married just the year before, and they did things in public—or at least on the paths of the campus—that were considered rather shocking in 1960. They held hands, sometimes kissed, referred to each other by first name, and insisted that the students do so, too—at least when no other teachers were around.

They were the dorm parents for Reynolds West, the sophomore girls’ dorm, and, with Charlie at twenty-six and Karen at twenty-three, they were universally sought after by their nearly contemporary charges. From the start, Henry wished that he could wake up some morning to find the Falks having miraculously replaced the Gordons, the strict and ancient couple who were dorm parents at Matthews.

It was, for example, Dr. Gordon who stood at the entrance to Henry’s dorm room nearly every afternoon and barked “Gaines! Mail!” with increasing exasperation as the rushing stream of letters from Martha showed no signs of slowing.

The envelopes gathered on Henry’s desk like autumn leaves.

He opened perhaps one of every four. They seemed completely interchangeable. They all began in a similar way: “My darling Hanky.” Or: “My sweet little boy.” Inevitably, the first paragraph was about how much Martha missed him, how empty the practice house was without him, how she still thought it was a mistake for him to have been sent away, how no one would ever be able to help or understand him better than she.

There was always a passage to make him guilty. Veiled sometimes, but unmistakable:

“Some of the girls don’t understand that it takes more than love to take care of a baby.”

“Well, Tennyson said, ‘Better to have loved and lost.’”

Or she would quote some popular song: “When each weary day is through, how I long to be with you.”

The letters invariably ended with a plea for news.

“You have to tell me how you are.”

“I don’t ask for much, just a word or two from you.”

“The school tells me nothing, just that you are fine.”

“Why won’t you write to me?”

And, most recently and darkly: “Maybe you’d rather I didn’t write to you at all.”

HENRY HOPED FOR A LETTER from Betty instead. In the first week, he had sent her a card—just so she would know where to write to him now. The truth was that it had been months since he had seen her New York postmark, an emblem that had always been both confusing and exciting to him. The last time had been in June, on his fourteenth birthday. For four years, Betty had sent him cards at the practice house and never stopped writing “someday” to him. As each year passed, however, Henry’s wish to be rescued by his birth mother changed: sometimes it deepened; sometimes it paled. In her letters, she usually wrote bitterly about “the Wiltons,” by whom she meant her father and Martha—and how they were keeping Henry from her; often she described how costly it was to live in New York, and again and again she explained how she couldn’t afford to have Henry come and live with her just yet. But sometimes, too, she seemed to forget entirely that this was the plan, and she would write to Henry about how she had carelessly gone to see some Broadway show, or eaten in this or that restaurant, or shopped for shoes at Macy’s. Henry’s sense of his own future, consequently, had become no more comforting than his sense of the past. At times he even imagined that it would be better to have neither Martha nor Betty. How hard could it be, he often wondered, to graduate from high school and find a job and a life somewhere on his own?

In any case, the card to Betty had so far been the only piece of mail that Henry had sent. For three weeks, he ignored every one of Martha’s letters. While the other boys spent their occasional free time writing to their parents or siblings—in the case of Stu Stewart, there even appeared to be a canine correspondent—Henry, after finishing his homework, would usually just sit at his desk, looking out at the courtyard and the paths of the campus below, or staring at the increasingly flamboyant Connecticut hills. His dorm-room desk was a large, heavy oak one, very old, and nearly as deep as it was wide. Sometimes Henry merely studied the patterns in the grains of its wood, trying as always to find shapes, and sometimes he reached into the bottom of its three drawers for his art supplies. The art set that Betty had given him still had most of its paints and pencils in their original sections, even in their original order; they had just been considerably shortened by use.

Decidedly newer, though prized nearly as much, was the sketch pad that Charlie had given him during the first class. “These are your Falk Books,” he had told the class solemnly. In them, the students were expected to make one drawing a day.

One afternoon, while Henry was making his Falk Book sketch, Dr. Gordon materialized behind his chair, not one but three letters from Martha in his hand.

“Mr. Gaines,” he said. “Doesn’t the speed at which this correspondence is piling up seem a little alarming to you?”

Henry nodded in wry agreement.

“And yet my strong suspicion is that this will not change until you offer your mother some form of reply. The dean has had a complaint.”

Henry raised his eyebrows.

“Yes. From your mother. She wants to know why she hasn’t heard from you. She is blaming the school. She is saying she intends to come to the school in person if she doesn’t hear from you within the week.”

Dr. Gordon reached into Henry’s art box and pried up a blue colored pencil. Henry flinched at the invasion.

“And so, Mr. Gaines,” Dr. Gordon said, handing him the pencil. “I suggest that you write home.”

HENRY WAITED ONE MORE DAY, and then he sat down to write.

“Dear Emem,” he began.

Beyond his window, at the statue of Anderson Humphrey, Henry saw two upperclassmen standing together. The boy removed his own scarf with both hands and circled the girl’s neck with it; he pulled her in close as if to kiss her, but then he did not. Something in that gesture felt satisfying to Henry.