Free The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson Page A

whose fine-sprung clockwork showed through their lucent skins.
    He suffered migraines as a boy. They suffered them together, Henry and Ekaterina. First she got hers – coronas of pain which lit up her pillows and hurt Henry’s eyes – then he got his. Then she called him into her bed.
    â€˜If it wasn’t for worrying what would happen to you,’ she sometimes told him, ‘I’d end it all now.’
    He stroked her hair. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘Don’t press so hard.’
    What caused these migraines? He knew what caused his – the daddy-long-legs ambling across his brain when he lay defenceless in his mother’s tummy caused his, she’d told him that, warned him of his terrible beginnings, the psychic indignity, the disgustingness – but what caused hers? And why did she want to end it all?
    Was it his father? Henry knew there was a problem of some sort with his father. ‘Per se, he’s a wonderful man,’ he’d heard Ekaterina say about him. Henry thought he understood what she meant by
per se
. She meant the animal man as opposed to anything the animal man said or did, the husband and the father whose nature was enthusiastic and hopeful, whose face glowed with the adventure of being alive, who had only to enter a room for everything oppressive in it, even the darkness that would otherwise have lingered in the corners, to be dispelled. He made light, Izzi Nagel, even Henry, reluctantly pursing his lips for his father to wipe away the imaginary lipstick, conceded that. Not his mother’s sort of light, which went straight to your brain cells and illuminated their ache, but an altogether lighter form of light, weightless light, which made you forget on the spot what it had ever been like to feel heavy.
    Midway between his father
per se
and his father
per accidens
was his father the willing but inadequate provider, the upholsterer who made everything too big and charged too little for it. For his part, Henry looked forward to his visits to his father’s workshop with its smell of glue and horsehair, its half-finished chairs spilling springs, its huge cards of piping cord – Izzi Nagel was a great piper of furniture, an over-piper if the truth be told – and its view of the Pennines. It suited his father, Henry thought, to be stuffing cushions, carrying bales of Rexine from one part of the workshop to another, humming tunelessly with a mouth full of tacks. It became him to hammer, to be absorbed, careless of what anybody thought of him. How a man should be, Henry decided, secretly selling his mother down the river, relishing the apostasy. But he also knew that not everybody valued his father’s upholstery as much as he did. ‘It’s a great settee lengthwise, Izzi,’ Henry remembers a client telling his father in the street. ‘The only trouble is it takes up two rooms and the cushions are so high you need a ladder to climb on to them.’ ‘That’s only because the springs are new,’ Henry’s father explained. ‘They’ll wear in.’ But Henry knew bluster when he heard it. Izzi’s armchairs and sofas never wore in. They were built on too grand a scale. Somewhere in his soul Izzi Nagel was upholstering furniture for a tsar.
    What most definitely was not comprised by Henry’s mother’s
per se
, though, was Izzi Nagel the performer, what she (if not he) thought of as the entirely accidental man – the part-time fire-eater, origamist and illusionist. But in particular the fire-eater. At first she had worried about the damage he might do himself. Then she had worried about the damage he might do her. Now she worried about Henry. ‘It’s just a trick,’ he had tried to explain to her at every stage. ‘You could do it. Your mother could do it. Let me just show you how cold the flame is.’
    â€˜Don’t come near me with any of that,’ she had warned him.