The Irresistible Henry House Read Online Free PDF

she walked the red-brick streets from the campus into town. The market had the new Green Stamps catalogue, just in time for the holiday season, and Martha picked one up at the counter, then moved on to the Spring Street church, where the annual manger scene filled the front lawn. Martha paused before it, wondering if the sheep and goats had been repainted, or if they just looked more vibrant because of the bright sun. The gold on the wings of the angel caught the light, and even the Baby Jesus seemed to have a pinker pair of lips. Jesus was nearly as big as Henry, his arms and legs chubby and outstretched, and his eyes wide open and smiling. Martha didn’t think any newborn would look like that, but she realized, not for the first time, that she had never seen a newborn. Not any practice house baby. Not even her own.
    Around the corner at the post office, Martha bought a page of Christmas Seals. At Hamilton’s Hardware, two blocks down, she readjusted her scarf when Arthur Hamilton told her he liked its colors, and she ogled the signs for the latest household wonder: a new Hoover that was said to vacuum up twice the dust in less than half the time. At the toy store, Martha stood by the window, admiring the new train display; it had grown less elaborate with each Christmas of the war, but now, with peace blooming, it was exuberant with fresh cotton snowdrifts, a well-frosted church, and new fir trees. For a moment, Martha tried to imagine what Henry would be like when he was old enough to play with trains like these, and then she thought again of her stillborn child, and then of her lost marriage, and then, banishing the thoughts from her mind, she needlessly pushed at the vertices between the leather-gloved fingers of first one and then the other hand.
    ————
    “HE’S GOING TO BE AN ARTIST, I just know it,” Betty said as Martha stepped into the kitchen that afternoon.
    Henry, his hands covered with applesauce, had smeared large circles onto the tray top of the wooden high chair, and he was now busily smacking the centers of them, as if they were rain puddles.
    “An artist!” Martha said, putting her bags on the counter.
    “Picasso! Rembrandt! Look at how he uses his hands!”
    Martha wanted to pick Henry up. She wanted to nuzzle him, to rock him, to feel the perfect fit, the weird completion, in the moment when Henry’s hands found their way to the nape of her neck. Martha wanted to carry him in a perpetual embrace, to have those tiny arms seek and choose her shoulders, her cheeks, her nose. Momentarily frozen by the desire, she stared at Henry, unmoving, until Betty finally looked up and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll clean him up.” Martha nodded. She gathered up her roll of Green Stamps, her new catalogue, and her Christmas Seals. “All six-month-olds use their hands,” she said to Betty. “That’s the main thing six-month-olds do.”
    “Ga!” Henry shouted, and Martha forced herself to go upstairs.
    IN THE EVENING, she sat at her desk, listened to her tabletop Philco, wrote notes on her Christmas cards, and neatly affixed the Christmas Seals. This year, the seals had a bright blue backdrop framing the image of a lamplighter. They were the perfect match for Perry Como’s hit about the old lamplighter who leaves the lamps dark for all the courting couples:
For he recalls when dreams were new,
He loved someone who loved him, too…
    Martha’s Christmas card list was not terribly long. Other than two cousins in Santa Anita whom she’d only met once, she had no family. Her father had died a decade before, and her mother a decade before that. There were no siblings, no surviving aunts or uncles. The list was mostly made up of Martha’s fellow faculty members—her colleagues in the home economics program, her neighbors at the Wilton Nursery School, Irena Stahl at the orphanage, and of course Dean Swift and President Gardner. There were a few former students with whom she’d stayed in touch, but if