The Irresistible Henry House (26 page)

He adjusted his expectations but couldn’t hide his dismay.

“How did you find me?” he asked her.

“That’s not much of a greeting.”

“Did you call Betty? Or Charlie? Did one of them call you?”

“What difference does it make? Why were you trying to hide?” she asked him.

“I wasn’t trying to hide,” he said. “I moved. I was getting a job.”

He looked into his artist’s mirror and saw too many emotions: anger, worry, pride, dismay, fatigue, defeat, and shame. If he had been forced to choose one, that last would have been the one.

“It’s not a good time for me to talk,” he said. “I’m working right now.”

There was silence, a punishing silence, and in it, Henry remembered the depths of her need, and her guilt, which made the need so impossible to assuage.

“So I’ll call you a little later,” he said.

Still silence.

“So goodbye,” he said, and hung up, detachment overtaking all the emotions in the mirror.

THERE WAS AN EASY BANTER and warmth among the people on the soundstages where
Mary Poppins
was being filmed. At first glance, it seemed to Henry as though every person who wasn’t an actor was attached to a piece of equipment, not only physically but emotionally: gently rolling their lights and cameras and ladders along like beloved pets.

Henry, along with an in-betweener named Christopher Cott, stood well behind the camera, in the dark pocket of Stage 2. Together, for most of their lunch break, Chris and Henry had been watching the filming. Dick Van Dyke, wearing a candy-stripe suit and assisted by wires, was doing take after take of a long slide on one heel. Other than the gaily painted raised platform on which he was sliding, the only three-dimensional things on the set were a table, a chair, and, occupying it, Julie Andrews. The background was a yellow screen, and the cartoon penguins would come later.

In between setups, Chris sketched—unnecessarily, Henry thought, unable to tell if Chris was being pretentious or merely shy.

“What was wrong with that take?” Henry whispered as the director yelled “Cut” again.

“I don’t know,” Chris whispered. “It looked fine to me.”

“Are they going to set it up again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know, fellas,” a voice from behind them said, “you don’t have to whisper.”

Henry turned to see Walt Disney standing just a foot behind them, wearing a cardigan sweater exactly like the ones he wore on his TV show. His face looked somewhat more haggard; his hair seemed somewhat more gray, and a little greasy; the collar of his shirt looked strangely too large. But the Mickey Mouse hairline, with its widow’s peak forming two arches, was the same as it always had been, and so was the twinkle in his eyes.

Henry felt something unfamiliar that he recognized immediately as awe. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Disney,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

“Henry Gaines.”

“Henry,” Disney said. “There is only one Mister in this studio, and he does our taxes. I’m Walt.”

WALT DISNEY HAD NO SONS. He had two daughters, one of them adopted, and in some ancient, addled part of Henry’s brain, he had always imagined this meeting would be the pinnacle of his life. He was far too old now to fantasize about Walt being—or even becoming—his actual father, but that didn’t stop him from experiencing Walt’s smile as a benediction.

“And you, pal?” Walt said to Chris.

“Yes, sir. Christopher Cott.”

Chris reached to shake Walt’s hand and nearly stabbed him with his drawing pencil. Walt chuckled.

“You know this scene is all being done to the song playback anyway,” Walt said, with the same tone of voice Henry had heard him use on TV to explain, say, how
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
had been filmed. “The only reason to be quiet is so you don’t disturb the actors. But you really don’t have to whisper.”

As Walt talked, the playback started again, and Van Dyke, seemingly as game for this take as he had been ten takes before, let the wires carry him forward.

Chris went back to his sketching, and a minute later, when Henry next turned around, Walt was gone.

The scene was continuing now, with Julie Andrews looking demure, then surprised, pretending to react to the place where the penguins were going to appear.

Beneath the music of the playback, Henry was startled for a moment to hear what sounded like a baby crying.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered to Chris.

“You don’t have to whisper,” Chris reminded him, with a rather satisfied smile.

Henry listened for another moment or two, until he became convinced of the sound—a sound, after all, that he’d heard throughout his childhood—and then he tried to follow it, leaving his post at the back of the soundstage.

It was only a few bars later—at best a minute or so—when Henry found that the source of the crying baby sound was in truth a crying baby. She was being held by a woman who was walking her around and trying to bounce her into silence, much the same way he had often seen the practice mothers do with the practice babies. The walk this woman was doing was having absolutely no effect, though. Henry came up behind her and made a silly face at the baby over her shoulder. Just as the crying stopped, Julie Andrews appeared, removing her costume hat and, in one graceful motion, trading it for the baby, who grabbed for her nose.

“That was so kind of you,” Andrews said to Henry in her lovely, perfect British voice.

“He was—she was—” Henry corrected himself as he focused on the baby’s pink shirt.

“She,” Julie Andrews said. “This is my daughter, Emma.”

“Emem?” Henry said.

“Emma,”
Andrews corrected in a Mary Poppins voice.

“Emma, of course. Sorry,” Henry said. “The woman who raised me was named Emem.”

“Your nanny?” Andrews asked with a sweet but ironic smile.

“No. I was adopted.”

Andrews nodded warmly. She mentioned Walt Disney’s adopted daughter, and she told him that the son of Pamela Travers, the author of
Mary Poppins,
was adopted as well. Years later, Henry would learn that, while this was true, it was also true that the author of the beloved classic children’s book had apparently never told her son either that he was adopted
or
that he was a twin, and Henry would find it fitting that the woman who had invented the Martha-like Mary would also have been capable of apparently Martha-like betrayal. For now, he merely nodded politely to Julie Andrews and marveled at the coincidence of these many adoptions. It was one of the slightly mysterious things that made him continue to feel that he had magically, and at long last, arrived in the right place.

WHEN HENRY GOT BACK TO his drawing board after lunch, he found a message scrawled by Phil Morrow.

See Me.

Martha, it seemed, had called while Henry was watching the filming. Joe Gatz, an unsuspecting in-betweener, had picked up the phone at first, but then she had talked him into finding Phil.

“She seemed concerned about you,” Phil said. He had a pencil in one hand and an annoyed dorm-father expression on his face.

“I’m so sorry,” Henry said.

“So you’re a runaway or something?”

“Something like that,” Henry said.

“Well, don’t let me tell you your business, Henry,” Phil said. “But this approach of hers is not likely to endear you to the members of the team here. Especially the ones who have to talk to her. You know what I mean? Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“Good one,” Henry said.

“Seriously. You’re a big boy now.”

————

THERE WAS A DRAWING CLASS that night, and on their way back to the Animation Building, Chris asked Henry if he was planning to go again.

“You bet,” Henry said. “And you really should, too.”

“Who wants to sit around after work drawing a bunch of fruit?”

“Fruit?” Henry asked.

“You know. Still-life drawing?” Chris asked.

Henry had to explain to Chris the difference between a still life and a life drawing.

“You mean there are actual women?” Chris asked.

“Well, one woman.”

“And what does she do?”

“She takes off all her clothes and poses.”

“Nude?”

“That would be the word for it.”

“No clothes at all?” Chris asked.

“Not a stitch.”

DURING THE BREAK, Annie came up to Henry. Her crossed arms belted the teacher’s cardigan, and one collar flapped gently over the other, curled like the outer edge of a shell. She had come to see his latest sketch, and he obliged her by drawing on a polka-dot dress and putting her up on roller skates.

But despite the prospect of lording it over Chris, Henry found that he had little desire to ask Annie to come home with him after class. He did not understand why—though he had looked forward to seeing her all week—he now didn’t want her with him, why the very sweetness and softness he had enjoyed seemed suddenly unalluring. Instead, after class, Henry shuffled out with the other artists, then walked over to the diner, where he knew Cindy was working. He asked her when she was getting off.

“Getting off my shift or just getting off?” she asked with a smirk worthy of Ethel Neuholzer.

But on their way back to the Tuxedo—riding their bikes side by side, just as he had with Annie the previous week—Henry learned that, despite Cindy’s somewhat superior air, she was only nineteen, a runaway herself and a Hollywood hopeful. He called her Cinderella and was disappointed when she told him that he was not the first to do so.

“And what do they call you?” she asked him as they lay back on his bed together, one hour at best after they’d opened his apartment door. He stared up at the ceiling, finding a squirrel-shaped blotch of dampness in the concrete.

“They call me Henry,” he said.

“Ever Henny?”

“No.”

“Hank?”

“No.”

“Hanky?”

“Stop.”

He looked to his side to find her face. The pillowcase was scratchy. Too much starch, he thought.

“Never,” he said. “No people ever call me Hanky.”

“I’m going to call you Hanky.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not.”

She laughed, and her breasts seemed to float, buoylike, over the top of the bedsheet.

He gave her a menacing look and could see that he’d scared her with it. He had learned to do that, and was almost sorry, but she was the one who apologized.

  3  
The Feminine Mystique

They wore their hair long and straight now, as if they had never bothered to have it styled and somehow were proud of that. They barely wore makeup. Sometimes they deigned to wear headbands, sometimes a ponytail pulled to one side, as if this bit of asymmetry was also a bit of rebellion.

There were only three practice house mothers in the fall of 1963. Two of them were named Barbara and one of them was named Diane, and Martha decided to call them all Barbara and wait for the Diane to speak up.

Martha had stopped believing that she was right—about thumb sucking, about sleep schedules, about child rearing in general. She had stopped believing that practice could be useful in an actual life, with all its sharp corners and unexpected vacancies. Most painfully of all, Martha had stopped believing that what she was doing at the practice house had any kind of future.

Unable to escape the wide, recent shadow of Betty Friedan and her
Feminine Mystique,
Martha understood that virtually everything that had gone on in the practice house for the last thirty years would now at best be misunderstood and, much more likely, reviled and revoked. Far from being proud of their places in the program, the Barbaras were clearly embarrassed that they had signed up for home economics at all.

Martha held the newest practice baby in her arms as she showed the Barbaras around. The baby had slept all the way home from the orphanage and seemed, wrapped in the usual blanket, to be in a larval state.

“Oh, precious,” one of the Barbaras said. “What’s its name?”

“Not
it,”
Martha said with some of her old firmness.
“She.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Gaines. What’s her name?”

Martha realized, with a wave of vertigo, that she had not yet named the baby.

She looked back at the girls, blinking.

“Oh,” she said. Her mind raced with
H
girls’ names. Helen. Harriet. Hope. They had all been used. Holly. Hannah. Hazel. She could think of nothing.

“Doesn’t she have a name?” another Barbara asked.

“Of course she has a name,” Martha said, and after another moment’s hesitation, she said, “It’s Henry. It’s Henrietta.”

THERE WAS STILL ONE FUTURE that Martha could imagine: a future in which she and Henry lived in a simple house somewhere, and he went to college, and she wrote a book, or helped in a nursery school, or gave lectures on child care. He could still go to college, Martha thought. There was bound to be a college somewhere that would ignore his lack of a high school diploma and focus instead on the fact that he’d held down a real job. He could still be a college graduate. And she could still be something other than the woman who used to run something that no one thought should exist.

Martha had a strong feeling that Henrietta would be her last practice baby. Partly because of that, and partly because the weather this autumn was so warm and beautiful, Martha assigned herself the daily job of taking Henrietta on the afternoon walk. The wheels of the carriage—once so white and buoyant—were now permanently gray. The navy blue sides had held up well, but the rim of the hood was tattered from a thousand little adjustments, and on this bright late October afternoon, Martha was glad to be able to push it back and let the baby see the sky.

————

IN CALIFORNIA, THE SKIES WERE SUNNY, too, but Henry was longing for rain. When it rained at the Disney Studio, employees in both the Animation Building and the Ink and Paint Building had an excuse to use the tunnel that connected the two. It had been built for the sole purpose of protecting artwork that had to pass between the two shops. Though extracurricular trips to the Ink and Paint Building—alternately known as the Rainbow Room for its splendid colors and the Nunnery for its splendid women—were made surreptitiously, rain allowed the trips to be legal, and therefore to last longer.

The first time Henry was asked to make a tunnel run, he didn’t realize that someone from Ink and Paint would generally come down to meet him halfway, and instead he walked the whole length of the tunnel, with its clean, tiled floor, slightly arched ceiling, and dim overhead lights. People walked through it as if it were a train station. They stopped and smoked, they talked shop, they gossiped and they flirted.

When Henry stepped out at the other end of the tunnel, he felt he had emerged into a life-size paint box. Though most of the girls worked wearing white lab coats and white gloves, and though the walls were gray or white to prevent unintentional distortions, colors were omnipresent: in jars of paints, glass canisters of powdered pigments, centrifugal mixers, bowls, scales, beakers, test tubes, and rolling carts of coaster-size paint cups that were periodically offered to the painters, like snacks or sandwiches onboard a train. To Henry, the colors were as sensuous as food. That Disney mixed its own hues—as distinctive and immutable as the notes in the musical scale—increased the sense of rightness about the place: one right blue for the bluebirds; one right yellow for the tambourine.

There was also the unspeakable rightness of a girl named Fiona Coulson—tall, boyish, British, and apparently oddly disinclined to sit still long enough to be a good painter—who seemed to enjoy stepping away from her brushes to pick up the latest drawings or deliver the finished cels for checking. She happened to have a desk not far from the building’s entrance, so by early November, at even the hint of rain, Henry made it a habit to check the Out basket and see if there were things to take over. The first time Fiona gave him cels to take back, she said “Carry on” to him, and seemed pleased by her wit. She was not a terribly bright girl. But her legs and her British accent more than made up for anything that she lacked.

She called him Gainesy. She was twenty-seven years old, unfazed by her unmarried state, and she seemed to enjoy treating Henry like a novice, in every way.

“Is it all right if I kiss you?” he asked her one morning. The tunnel was cool, damp, and dark, and Henry knew instinctively that Fiona would like his asking for permission.

“Yes,” she said deliberately, as if she was talking to someone who’d never kissed a girl before. “It’s all right if you kiss me.”

She stood with exaggeratedly good posture, as if she had once been a dancer and still hoped to be confused for one. Everything about her seemed pushed forward and swaybacked.

A few people walked by them, and Henry waited for his moment.

He tried to remember kissing Daisy Fallows for the first time, thousands of days and nights ago now, when the challenge had been to pretend to be more experienced than he was. Now he faced the opposite task: to feign innocence he had long ago lost.

“That was nice, Gainesy,” Fiona said.

He faked shy intensity, and kissed her again.

“Will you do the pickup tomorrow?” he asked her.

“Yes. Carry on,” she said, amused with herself all over again.

HE AVOIDED THE COFFEE SHOP for several days and instead ate his lunch at the main commissary and, a few times, with Fiona at the Ink and Paint lunchroom, known to all as the Tea Room. He had not seen Annie for nearly two weeks; a male model had posed for them for the previous few classes. But Cindy caught up with him one evening just as he was starting home.

“Where’ve you been hiding?” she asked him.

“Behind a bunch of penguins,” Henry said.

“We’ve hardly seen each other.”

“I see you right now,” Henry said.

“You know what I mean. I spent the night with you, Hanky. I’m not just some girl, you know,” she said.

Some girl
was exactly what she was, in Henry’s opinion. She was some girl who happened to have been working at the restaurant the day he first stepped in. She was some girl who happened to have been the first girl at Disney he met. She was some girl who happened to have wanted him to want her.

They walked together toward the bicycle racks, then strolled on through the back lots. Side by side, with their bikes between them, they walked past the London rooftops where Bert and the chimney sweeps did their dance; past the park pavements where Mary, Bert, and the children popped into a chalk picture; and onto the set for Cherry Tree Lane. Behind the sweet whitewashed front of the Bankses’ home, there was, of course, no home at all. It seemed as fitting a place as any to try to appease Cindy with a kiss.

“You’re not a nice boy, are you?” she asked him.

“No. I’m not a nice boy,” he said, though of course to Annie that was exactly what he was and was expected to be, and to Fiona—well, he tried not to think of Fiona while he was here with Cindy. And to Mary Jane—well, he tried not to think about Mary Jane at all.

IN ART CLASSES BACK IN HENRY’S DAYS at Humphrey, Charlie had talked a fair amount about how to see things not as symbols but as shapes in relation to one another. Charlie had told the students that whenever they were having trouble getting something right, they should turn the subject upside down. Then they could draw without their eyes tricking their minds into believing things were shaped and sized differently than they really were. Henry was good at this.

Apples were not circles; chair legs were almost never perfectly perpendicular to chair seats; it was the eyes, not the nose, that bisected a human face—and so on.

In this way, Henry eventually came to see the three current women in his California life as well. It was as if he had turned them all upside down, to study how they were in reality. He could see in each the relationship of beauty to personality, neediness to generosity, humor to brains, silliness to insecurity. He could see their mouths and hands, their hair and clothes. He could see their attraction to him, and—understanding every aspect of them individually—he could understand where he found beauty in them. But he never let his eye trick his mind into seeing them whole, as symbols of anything greater than their parts.

ON A LATE FRIDAY MORNING in November, Henry walked through the tunnel to the Nunnery with a small and barely legitimate stack of drawings and, much to his delight, managed to meet Fiona on the other side.

“Come down with me for a minute,” he said to her loudly. “I need your help.”

“We’re fooling no one,” she said as she followed him down the stairs. “And we’re not the first, you know. They do call this the Tunnel of Love.”

“I don’t care,” Henry said.

Henry put the drawings on the top rung of a work ladder and stood close to Fiona, smelling her lemony perfume.

“I do in fact have to get back to the shop,” she said. The way she said it,
shop
almost rhymed with
hope.

“You do in fact have to let me kiss you first,” Henry said.

“They’re going to miss me up there,” she said. “It’s not even raining out.”
Not
sounded like
note.

“Say
shop
again.”

“Shope.”

“Say
not.”

“Note.”

He kissed her at length, moving a hand gingerly from the back of her head to the back of her neck, then across her shoulder and down to her breast, where he let it linger, as if he was nervous to do more.

The tunnel was cooler than usual somehow, emptier than usual, quieter than usual.

After a long time, Henry cupped Fiona’s breast and pressed against her, kissing her, his other hand high on the cool wall.

“What do you suppose is the longest time anyone’s ever stayed down here?” Fiona asked him.

“Not long enough,” Henry said.

“Odd that no one’s come through, though,” Fiona said.

“Yes. Quite,” Henry said, trying to mimic her accent. “Odd indeed. You sound exactly like Julie Andrews.”

“Have you met her?”

“Yes. Say ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’”

“Say goodbye for now,” Fiona told him.

The corridor echoed with her laughter, and with the promise of more silent moments to come.

OF THE NINE OLD MEN, Milt Kahl was the most irascible, and it was commonly understood that around his office in D-Wing, silence was an absolute. So when Henry came back from the tunnel and heard loud radio noises, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would risk inviting Kahl’s wrath.

The noise of the radio, however, quickly resolved itself into words.

Henry heard:

“The shots apparently came from the fifth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, possibly from an automatic-type weapon.”

He heard:

“Police were looking for a young white man dressed in a white shirt, with Levi’s …”

Chris ran over to him, all pretense of coolness gone.

“He’s been shot. Kennedy’s been shot.”

Chris pulled Henry toward the desk of an in-betweener who had a radio.

Into the utter blankness of Henry’s mind there rose a single image: the black-and-white campaign poster from Charlie and Karen’s kitchen. The promising eyes, the white teeth, the straw layers of hair.

Henry looked around the bullpen for a face—any face—that wasn’t contorted in pain, shock, or grim concentration.

“Just a moment, just a moment. We have a bulletin coming in. We now switch you directly to Parkland Hospital.”

Whatever conversation there had been beneath the radio now ceased. Henry heard:

“The president of the United States is dead. I have just talked to Father Oscar Hubert of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church. He and another priest tell me that the pair of men have just administered the last rites of the Catholic Church to President Kennedy. I asked the father, ‘Is Mr. Kennedy dead?’ And his quote, ‘He’s dead, all right.’”

Everything stopped. Office doors that were usually closed were opened. Everywhere—outside and in—people stood in clusters. The reason was the need to have proximity to the radios; the effect was the sense that no one could bear to be alone.

HENRY FOUGHT THE URGE to run back into the tunnel, as if that could reverse time. He wanted to talk to someone, but he didn’t know to whom. Charlie and Karen came into his mind, no doubt because of the poster. But then he imagined their shock, and their need to comfort the students around them at Humphrey. He thought about Mary Jane, but in light of her “don’t be ridiculous,” she was the last person with whom he wanted to risk seeming in need.