Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

Totally absurd, given that after its failure to resuscitate either his father or his mother, Henry doesn’t have any faith in medicine, especially as practised by Aubrey Goldman, who omitted to warn his mother of the dangers of sitting in the front seat of a bus, and his father of the risks of taking mistresses; doesn’t hold with happy endings; and in God doesn’t believe at all. But exemption is his only theological answer to extinction. No life afterwards for Henry otherwise, no scholarship to a heavenly university, no transmigration of himself into the universe, no celestial essence of Henry insinuating itself into matter. It’s exemption or it’s nothing.

In order that he should enjoy what? More of the same? If anyone is going to be exempted, shouldn’t it be the joyous, the kind-hearted, the exuberantly fleshly even? To those who have loved life shall more life be given. By which law Henry ought to have been dead and buried forty years ago.

This, of course, is where the waitress comes in. Not only is she hanging on to Henry’s change, she holds in the palm of her hand Henry’s right to an eternal life. For his interest in her is proof that he is a deserving case. One of the exuberantly fleshly.

Sitting in a hospital waiting room once, in the days when he had loved ones to worry about and wait for, Henry filled out a questionnaire in a women’s magazine. Did he in a general way love wisely or too well — that, if not in so many words, was the test. When he met someone who attracted him did he A) think about her a bit (it was think about ‘him’ actually, but Henry could transcribe); B) think about her most of the time; or C) think about her ceaselessly to the detriment of everything else in his life. Furthermore, when he met someone who attracted him did he A) worry about whether she was suitable; B) move carefully initially, checking up on her and taking other people’s advice about her suitability; or C) throw all caution to the wind and to hell with whether she was suitable or not.

C — Henry answered C to every question, making him, when he came to check his score, an incorrigible romantic, great fun to be with, but not, as yet, a sound marital bet. He was also, he was warned, in danger of being hurt, getting pregnant and contracting HIV.

Does loving your grandmother erotically make you an incorrigible romantic? One of the exuberantly fleshly? No opinions as to that in Teenage Harlot . Henry knows the answer, anyway. You cannot love your grandmother erotically. Nature makes provision against such things. Age difference, for example. And a slap from your grandmother. But when a man loves his grandmother in a younger version of herself — in her baby sister say, in the body of Marghanita to be precise — where’s the harm? There is, as far as Henry is aware, no canon fixed specifically against loving your great-aunt erotically.

Back from Yoffey’s, the Stern Girls make him tea and give him biscuits and ask him what he is going to do now. Though Henry has declared he will never again return to his home, having in effect been expelled from it — the first of two expulsions in one dramatic day — his grandmother and her sisters explain it is not such a good idea for him to go missing, or for them to provide him with asylum until they have informed his parents. ‘Otherwise it would be kidnap, Henry,’ Marghanita explains.

‘Then kidnap me,’ Henry pleads.

One by one they take him to their bosom. ‘If only,’ Effie says. ‘Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to us,’ says Anastasia. ‘One day, one day,’ Marghanita promises him. ‘We don’t need to,’ his grandmother says, pressing the flats of her cool hands to his temples. ‘You already belong to us. You are our hope.’ But it is she who rings his parents.

Henry overhears the telephone conversation and knows his father, seconded by his mother, is putting obstacles in the way of Henry’s changing his address. There’s his tea. The Girls will make it for him. There’s school in the morning. Henry has his satchel. There’s the small disciplinary matter of the threepence change: Henry has been told what Henry must do. Yes, but Henry has tried asking for it, honestly he’s tried, the Stern Girls can vouch for that. And? And? Henry can detect his grandmother trying to find a way of turning what has happened to Henry’s advantage. But what has happened is what happened. Henry has been banned from the shop which stocks Henry’s father’s favourite horseradish.

‘Banned?’

‘Banned.’

‘For how long?’

‘I think the term was life, Izzi. But you know how these people use language — life doesn’t always mean life for them.’

Silence at the other end of the phone. At last, though he is nowhere near the phone himself, Henry hears his father saying ‘Okey-dokey’, and the receiver going down.

‘Trouble,’ Irina says.

‘We could lock the doors,’ Henry suggests.

But it isn’t trouble here his grandmother is afraid of. It’s trouble at the Yoffeys’. The Stern Girls have all taken ‘husbands’ from North Manchester and know what rough resolution an okey-dokey portends. An unwillingness to be okey-dokeyed is why none of them have husbands from North Manchester any longer.

They also know the fierce loyalty of which their uncouth in-law is capable. Banishing your own son from his own house in order to make a man of him is one thing. Having someone else banishing your son from a grocery shop for life is another. Outraged in his affections, Izzi Nagel is off to war, codeword ‘Okey-dokey’.

‘If we open the windows,’ Marghanita says, ‘I bet we will be able to hear what happens.’

Henry looks alarmed. The sound of broken glass and breaking bones — is that what his failure to pick up the threepenny bit is going to lead to next? Old man Yoffey dead on his sacks of potatoes, Elliot Yoffey struck dumb, that’s to say even dumber than usual, Mrs Yoffey a widow, and Henry’s dad on death row? Seeing his trepidation, Marghanita, laughing, puts her hands on Henry’s ears. Warm on his neck her laughter. If he turns round will Marghanita bury his eyes in her chest? Henry turns, and yes, Marghanita will.

Warm in his eyes, her chest.

As for the Yoffeys, that’s soon settled. Leave things to the men, the men will sort them. Threepence? We’re going to fight — two grown men, two pillars of our community — over threepence?! From behind the storeroom curtains Mrs Yoffey watches her husband pour a couple of small glasses of sweet red Middle Eastern wine. Here’s to you, Mr Nagel — call me Izzi. And to you Mr Yoffey — call me Leo. Thirty minutes and a phone call later Leo and Izzi are getting Henry and Elliot to shake hands. This is the first time that Henry realises Elliot is not just mute with him but mute with everybody. Mute by nature, mute in the medical sense, just as Henry is thin-skinned. Henry’s father, Uncle Izzi the illusionist, makes a threepenny piece appear from behind Elliot’s neck and magics it into Henry’s pocket. Henry who has seen this done a hundred times forces a weak smile; Elliot, for whom every instance of everything is the first, breaks into an idiot grin. Later that evening, while Henry is being tucked into bed by the Stern Girls — ‘All right, you can have him for one night,’ concedes Henry’s father, flushed with syrupy red wine and that consciousness of success which only a conciliator can know, ‘but don’t spoil him’ — Rivka Yoffey is being thrown over her garden wall.

Henry is twenty and very drunk on syrupy red wine himself when it occurs to him to put his arms around Marghanita and kiss her mouth. How old is Marghanita? Fifty? Fifty-five? Sixty? You can’t tell when you’re twenty. But what Henry can calculate is that when she’s a hundred, Henry will be sixty himself, give or take. Too far gone to worry, in other words. Not that he’s thinking of proposing marriage to her anyway. All Henry wants is to kiss her mouth and feel her breasts.