Free The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald Page A

crying.
    Upstairs, the way a tide gradually takes a part of the shore away, Martha’s heart began to erode her reason, and she pulled a suitcase down from her closet and quietly began to pack.
    SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE they would go. There were no people to pull her toward one destination or another. No safe harbors or family reunions. Only New York, for some reason, beckoned. Everything Martha had feared about the place now seemed alluring: the crowds, the numbers, the confusion. Maybe in that chaos, she thought, she would find some peace and some order.
    And so she went to work. First she stacked clothes on her bed by item—the long-sleeved blouses; the short-sleeved blouses; the scarves, all folded neatly in squares, with their tags lined up in the lower-left-hand corners; the suit jackets; the skirts; the stockings; the girdles. All her clothes rising in tidy piles, a sensible city made from tweed and silk.
    Until the previous year, Martha had owned only one small overnight bag. For her leave, she had traded eighteen of her Green Stamps books for two large Hartmann suitcases that were midnight blue with cream trim and dark blue satin linings. She could pack several weeks’ worth of clothing in these and put Henry’s things in the overnight bag. But of course she would have to get trunks for the rest. And cartons or crates for her books, pictures, and knickknacks: her life. She thought about Arthur at the hardware store and felt sure that he would sell, if not give her, the trunks—and that he might even store them for her until she could find a new home.
    SHE WOULD NEVER KNOW what changed the president’s mind.
    Maybe, when she was downtown at Arthur’s, Ruby had come upstairs and seen the suitcases and the stacks of clothing, and maybe she had told Dean Swift she thought Martha was leaving, and maybe Dean Swift had told President Gardner, and maybe they had decided that Martha was too valuable to lose.
    Or maybe, and coincidentally, there had been some secret message from Betty.
    Or perhaps President Gardner had simply understood, in the late afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, that he had his own Christmas emptiness to fill.
    Whatever the case, when Martha returned to the practice house, she found Ruby waiting for her with an eager, slightly gossipy look—and a message that said Martha should go at once to the president’s house.
    Back in his living room, Martha braced herself for dismissal, threats of bad references, anything. Feverishly, her mind plunged into a hallucination of order, and, even as she waited for Dr. Gardner to speak, she began to re-sort her clothing mentally, and then to choose which toys of Henry’s to take. Why would it matter to Dr. Gardner if she raised the boy—as long as she disappeared from his view? Surely he wouldn’t come after her.
    “I’m glad that you came, Mrs. Gaines,” Dr. Gardner said.
    “Of course,” she answered.
    “And I’m sure you’d like to know why I’ve asked you here.”
    He never really told her.
    Henry House ended up staying in the practice house, not because President Gardner would admit that he didn’t want to lose his grandson; not because President Gardner said straight out that Martha could adopt the boy; not because President Gardner was in any way explicit about how long this arrangement might last, or under what set of circumstances it might change. Henry stayed only because President Gardner said to Martha that evening: “You know, I’ve been thinking it over, and I think perhaps you should keep the boy for now.”



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    One day late in the summer of 1948, the women Henry House had loved so much and who’d seemed so much to love him showed up together at the practice house carrying gift-wrapped presents and fancy food. They drank pink lemonade, ate chocolate cake, gave Martha and Henry notes and gifts, and snapped endless rounds of photographs. Then they took turns holding Henry, looking sad, and saying goodbye.
    Soon after that, a