Free The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald Page B

new group of women—with different names and faces, colors and smells—came to take their place, but Henry himself moved upstairs to live with Martha, who now told him to call her Emem (for the two Ms in Mama Martha). Upstairs, in the extra room that was directly above the nursery, Henry now had his own bed, dresser, and shelves; his own sheets and lampshades, which were covered in cowboy fabric; and even his own closet, where he sometimes tried, in vain, to hide.
    During the days, it was always Martha who took care of him now. Between and sometimes during her own tasks and duties, Martha went for pretend drives with him in every kind of vehicle, showed him picture books, let him draw and finger paint, or chased him around the furniture, saying, “Emem’s going to get you!” Downstairs, the baby named Herbert occupied all Henry’s favorite places, and drew the attention from the other mothers the way the moon draws the tides.
    Henry asked frequently where Connie, Grace, and Ethel were, and Martha always answered by saying how lucky Henry was to have her all to himself now. Whenever he could, though—whenever Martha let him go downstairs with her—he would toddle up to the week’s practice mother with his hopeful, slightly anxious eyes and say, “Can do eet. Want tea?” Then he would reach out a little hand, and before Martha could say anything, he would be pulling the other mother upstairs, in a cloud of hope and charm.
    In later years, expounders of attachment theory would suggest that permanent damage could be done to any infant who was denied the chance to form one reliable connection, even in just the first year of life. Eventually, they would examine the approach to children in programs just like Wilton’s and conclude that to be treated like a human baton, continually handed off in the grueling relay of the first hundred weeks of life, was a situation that would have left any child’s heart untrusting and splintered, if not snapped. But three months into Henry’s third year on earth, it certainly hadn’t struck Martha that there was anything odd in the way he was behaving. In fact, never having concerned herself with any children older than the age of two, she had no working model against which she could compare him.
    An experienced mother of an older child might have thought it bizarre, for example, that Henry at two showed absolutely no signs of the usual separation anxieties. Far from clinging to Martha when other people were around, he would race down the stairs on Sundays to be with the whole lot of practice house mothers. With Martha all but forgotten, he could spend hours handing out pretend cookies and telling them pretend jokes and, perhaps most strikingly, asking them questions: “How are you today?” “You like singing?” “Which do you want?” No trip to the park with Martha, no special breakfast, no promise of toys or favors could compete with the lineup of multiple visitors below.
    “Henry tella joke,” he would say to one practice mother or another.
    “What’s the joke, Henry?” she would answer.
    “Lion, ROAR!” he would say, and he would follow it with the peals of laughter that inevitably pulled the women’s smiles away from the baby and back toward him.
    An experienced mother of an older child might also have found it odd that Henry never looked for Martha when he was in the other women’s company—or rather, that he looked for her no differently than he looked for anyone else. The women would have seemed, to an outside observer, equal and interchangeable parts in the engine that kept Henry going. The spark was his considerable charm. The women held and humored him. They trained their cameras on him. They passed news of his cutest expressions and precocious questions around like rare fruit.
    “Drinkee milkee.” “Brushee teeth.” “Are you happy now?” “Do you feel bad?”
    Jealously, Martha frowned on and tried to shorten these encounters, claiming to be worried