Sometimes, when Henry put his face close to the old woman’s face in order to grab one of the toys she had stuck in her hair, she would murmur at him in her strange language. Her language was not like the goos and coos and oos of his other Bigs. Sometimes when she murmured it, Henry would stop his scrambling for a bit and look at her closely. Sometimes he put his hands on her face and peered right into her eyes, wondering if he could see where her murmur language came from.
The deep eyes of the old woman always startled Henry when he tried to peer into them. They were not like the eyes of his other Bigs. His Bigs’ eyes only saw him—they smiled at him, or they laughed. They gooed and cooed and made silly faces, all for his amusement. They admired whatever he did, even if all he did was knock his toys off the high chair, or something.
The old woman, of course, saw him too. Everybody saw him. But the old woman saw more than other Bigs. When he looked into her eyes, with his nose almost touching her face, he suddenly thought he saw the Other Place—the place where there were no Bigs. The sight startled Henry—it confused and upset him a little. He was a busy boy. He had many places to crawl, many things to bite, much to investigate. The place he had come to, where his Bigs lived, kept him fully occupied, and yet when he looked right into the old woman’s eyes and saw that she could see the Other Place, he felt confused, and not happy. Perplexed, he batted at his ear or rubbed his face unhappily, as he did when he wanted to go to sleep. Sometimes he made an indecisive sound—a sound part laugh and part cry. He wanted something, but he didn’t know what. He tried to remember the Other Place, but he couldn’t. He didn’t understand the old woman but he wanted to stay with her anyway. In his confusion he lay back in her lap and held the sleeve of her gown tightly. He let her give him his bottle, while the great sounds she controlled surged around them. Often, lying there with the old woman, sucking, he slid into sleep. When he woke he would have forgotten about what he saw in the old woman’s eyes. Usually he would crawl rapidly across the room and go after the big green plant again, the one with the bitter leaves.
22
Aurora grew very tired—in the time of her tiredness she roused herself only for Henry. When Theo came she could not even try to respond—it was all she could do to look at him. Melanie came from Los Angeles and hugged her and wept on her gown but Aurora could not respond to Melanie either. A woman came who seemed to be Patsy Carpenter, but, once she left, Aurora could not be sure that it had been Patsy Carpenter, nor was she really sure that she even remembered who Patsy Carpenter was.
Henry became the only person Aurora knew except Maria. Ellen wondered if she should stop bringing him. After all, Henry was a rowdy little boy, soon to be a year old. He was no respecter of persons, and Aurora was very frail. What if accidentally he injured her in some way?
When Aurora understood that they were thinking of keeping Henry from her, she wrote on her pad, with the last emphasis she could muster, “Bring Henry!”
Ellen was still uncertain: Aurora was so frail. But Tommy overruled her.
“If she wants him, take him over there,” he said. “Maybe they’re doing something pleasant.”
Then he flew off to Boston, to correct the computer system of a giant bank. Ellen wondered why she had chosen a life that was so lonely. She tried to make up with Jane, but Jane was nasty to her. Jane didn’t like it that Tommy was the boss of the business—she thought Teddy ought to be the boss, although he didn’t want to be. Teddy was happy just being the administrator—it was okay with him that Tommy was the recognized computer genius. It annoyed Jane, but Teddy had long since come to terms with the fact that the way he was annoyed Jane. Fortunately it didn’t annoy her quite enough to cause her to leave him.
23
One night Aurora dreamed all night of Henry. She wanted very much to see him. In the morning she took her pad and slowly scrawled on it, “Brahms Requiem.” It caused a problem for Ellen because nobody in the family had a CD of the Brahms Requiem. Besides that, most of the record stores in Houston were out of it. She had to go to four record stores before she found it. By the time she got to Aurora’s, Maria’s soap was half over. It was a blustery day. Ellen had tried to make Henry wear the smart French cap she had bought him. It was a red cap, and Henry looked smashing in it, but he didn’t know that, or didn’t care. He kept removing the cap in order to bite its bill. Soon he had baby slobbers over most of the surface of the cap, and it didn’t look quite so smart anymore.
24
Henry was in a good mood. Sometimes the old woman let him crawl around for a while before she started the sounds. He was nearly eleven months old, he could walk fairly well, but for speed he sometimes still preferred to crawl. He crawled all the way into the old woman’s bathroom, where there was a tortoiseshell wastebasket he liked to turn over. He could lift the wastebasket for a moment or two—then, when he dropped it on the tile floor, it made a loud, satisfying sound.
While he was dropping the wastebasket, making it ring against the tile floor, the sounds began from the other room. They were unusually loud and deep—the loudest and deepest they had ever been.
Henry walked back to the patio to see what was on the old woman’s mind.
“Wow, she’s really playing it loud today,” Ellen said to Maria, when the Requiem began to resonate through the house.
Maria felt sad. She knew her job was ending. Soon she might not have such a bright, nice kitchen in which to watch her soaps.
The old woman let Henry take the big combs out of her hair. Then she took a comb from him and combed his hair a little. His hair was curly—the comb made a scratchy feeling. Henry grinned. He took the comb from the old woman and tried to comb his hair himself. But the sounds were so loud it became hard to do anything but listen. He lolled back in the old woman’s lap. He thought that was probably what the old woman wanted, for him to lie there and listen to the sounds with her. She handed him his bottle but the sounds were so loud and interesting that after a swallow or two he dropped it. He had never heard such loud sounds. They seemed to be coming inside him—at least, they were as much inside him as outside him. He looked at the old woman to see if the sounds were inside her too. He started to wiggle off her lap, but she began to stroke his hair, and he stopped wiggling. She put one hand on his stomach—the great sounds seemed to be in her hand as she touched him. Henry carefully turned the big ring on her finger. Then the old woman took the big ring off her finger, and gave it to him. It was gold and green. Henry started to put it in his mouth, but the old woman stopped him. She made him hold up two fingers. Then she put the ring over his two fingers and folded his hand around it. From the way that she looked down at him Henry understood that the ring was a special gift and that the two of them were having a special time. He lay very still. He didn’t want to do anything wrong. Being very still was best at such a time. As he lay on her lap the old woman made the sounds even louder. The sounds became the world, became his life, for the course of the special time, and he and the old woman were in them together. The old woman offered him a finger and Henry took it and held it very tight. He wanted to stay with the old woman, and to have her stay with him. He did not want to be lost. The old woman stroked his hair with her old hand; Henry stopped feeling scared and became comfortable and happy. He and the old woman floated together, in the world of the sounds. Still, he held her tightly. Something unusual was happening—Henry wanted to be sure that he and the old woman stayed together. He did not want to get lost.
25
Eight more times, Aurora played the Brahms Requiem with Henry. She played it almost at top volume.
In the kitchen below, Maria felt ever more sad.
26
One day, to his annoyance, his Bigs forgot to take Henry to the old woman. He was irritated; he fretted, but his Bigs, who were very inconsistent, just didn’t get it. Henry was expecting to bang the tortoiseshell wastebasket and then to go sit with the old woman for a bit, playing with her combs and hearing the sounds. It was irritating
of his Bigs to forget, but there was nothing he could do about it except fret. Sometimes his Bigs were really stupid. Also, they were very possessive, especially his mother. She wanted Henry for herself and she didn’t take him to the old woman’s at all that day.
The next day his Bigs forgot again, only this time they took him to a kind of park. After he wiggled and squirmed for a while they finally let him down to walk in the grass. There were quite a few bugs in the grass, but they were fast bugs. It took him some time to catch one, though he did catch a little round one finally, only to have Jane, who often interfered with him, come and take it away from him before he could eat it.
27
In the next few weeks Henry often fretted—once or twice he even screamed his war cry—because of his Bigs’ stubborn refusal to take him to the old woman’s. It was a simple thing, and it annoyed him terribly that they kept forgetting. He missed the old woman and he missed the sounds.
In desperation, when fretting and screaming got no results, Henry began to bump his face against the floor. It was a tactic that filled his young mother with despair—if that didn’t make her get him back on schedule, nothing would.
“Oh, Henry, please don’t bump your face against the floor,” Ellen said.
“He’s probably just teething,” Jane said. “Maybe it feels good to him to bump his gums like that.”
Jane had grown tired of being cruel to Ellen and was being seductive again.
28
When Henry was twenty-four he moved to New York to try to make it as an actor. His Aunt Melanie, who had had a measly little career as an actress, but a pretty good career as a stage director, was working consistently off Broadway at the time. She gave Henry a little job as a gofer and made him start auditioning for every possible part: commercials, soaps, anything. He finally did get a part in a commercial, though it turned out to be a commercial shown only in Japan. Somebody must have seen it, though, because he got a call from an agent. The agent didn’t immediately get him any good parts—but at least he had an agent.
His girlfriend at the time was a girl named Sid, a dancer. Henry had the maddest love and the biggest lust for Sid that he had ever had for any girl, but Sid resisted—not totally, but she resisted a lot. She didn’t like it that Henry was so controlled. Sid was serious about music—her father played the French horn in the Philharmonic. Henry wasn’t serious about music—he didn’t judge it very well—but he did love it, always had, all kinds of music. He and Sid went to the symphony a lot. They had terrible seats, but they went.
One night when Henry had not been paying enough attention even to read the program all the way through, the Philharmonic played the Brahms Requiem. Suddenly, in the midst of the Requiem, to Henry’s surprise and Sid’s total amazement, Henry put his face in his hands and began to cry. His chest was heaving—he was overcome. Before he knew it, the music had taken him to another place—to an old place in his memory, to a place so old that he could not really even find the memory, or put a picture to it, or a face. He just had the emptying sense that he had once had someone or something very important: something or someone that he could not even remember, except as a loss—something or someone that he would never have again.
Walking home in the summer evening, Sid had not totally recovered from her amazement, nor Henry from the memory that had not quite been a memory. He was there—or mostly there—walking with Sid on Columbus Avenue. But some of him was in another place—some of him was absent. Sid knew it too—she held his arm and looked at him differently.
“Boy,” she said. “You were really upset.”
Larry McMurtry, The Evening Star
(Series: Terms of Endearment # 2)
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