Childhood

by André Alexis

  I looked again at the chest of drawers and decided, since it could do no harm, to peek into them, just a look to see.

  In one of the drawers there were underclothes. Another was empty. The last one was filled with an assortment of things: a spinning top, a ring, address books, string, coins from another country, a magnifying glass, dollars, and, beneath all that, a handful of photographs and a bundle of letters held together with a red elastic band.

  The photos were of my grandfather, of him alone or with my grandmother.

  The letters, none in an envelope, were to my grandmother. They were from my mother. The first was written in 1961, when I was four; the last in February 1967. My grandmother had saved them, that I understood, but why had she kept them from me?

  I lay down on my grandmother’s bed, books, letters, photographs, coins, and magnifying glass spread out before me. I read my mother’s letters, bored by anything that didn’t mention me. I used the magnifying glass to inspect the pictures of my grandfather, to inspect the new illustrations I found in familiar books. And I so forgot myself that I fell asleep in my grandmother’s room, on her blue quilt.

  I don’t know if one ever forgives oneself for what others have done to you. It has taken me so long to forgive my grandmother, I haven’t had time for myself, but I like to think I slept beside her in that room, in her arms even, as we’d done before I was five, and that we were both forgiven, each by each, whatever it was I had done.

  * * *

  —

  Fourteen days after my grandmother’s death, my mother returned. She had only one thing on her mind, one thing to do: take me with her.

  Katarina arrived in a beige four-door something or other, accompanied by a bearded man with missing teeth, Pierre Mataf.

  I don’t know how she heard her mother was dead, or how she knew where I was staying, but I feel Mrs Schwartz’s concern for me behind my mother’s return. The car pulled up in front of the Schwartzes’ on a weekday, before Irene and I left for school, just after Mrs Schwartz had gone to work.

  She knocked at thé door. I answered.

  –Yes?

  In a soft voice, the first word I heard her speak, she said

  – Thomas?

  and leaned forward to hold me. Though it was unpleasant, I allowed myself to be enveloped.

  – We have to go, she said.

  I knew it was my mother, don’t ask me how.

  – Home? I asked.

  – Somewhere, she answered.

  I had a moment to say goodbye to Irene. It didn’t occur to me that I might never see her again (I have), that I might never see Mrs Schwartz again (I likely never will). I took my clothes and my comics.

  From my grandmother’s house we took an ancient suitcase from the basement and filled it with underwear, shirts, pants, socks, shoes. I wanted to take my favourite books.

  – Not too many, my mother said. We’ll come back for the rest.

  It was difficult to choose, but I took A Wonder Book, The New Arabian Nights, and, because I couldn’t think of leaving Jim Hawkins behind, Treasure Island.

  Before we left, I proudly showed her the things I’d found in my grandmother’s room. I thought it would please her to see the pictures of her father.

  – Isn’t that your dad? I asked.

  She took the photographs from me and looked at each one briefly.

  – Yes, she answered.

  * * *

  —

  With my belongings in the suitcase, we went out to the car. Pierre Mataf got out.

  – C’est ça ton fils? Il est pas p’tit pantoute…

  – Just open the trunk, my mother said and then, to me

  – Into the back seat, Thomas.

  – Can we say goodbye to the Goodmans?

  – We don’t have time.

  – But don’t you want to say goodbye to Mrs Schwartz?

  – Who?

  – Lillian Schwartz?

  – Never heard of her, Thomas.

  It was only then I began to doubt the identity of the woman who’d come for me. How casually she’d discarded the photographs of her father; how quickly she’d quit her childhood home.

  * * *

  —

  I realized my mistake as we were on the road to Orangeville. I had asked if she wanted to say goodbye to Lillian Schwartz. As we drove past yet another small town, I asked

  – Don’t you remember Lillian Martin?

  It wasn’t possible, for me, that Lillian’s version of their childhood should be a fabrication; inconceivable, but a source of anxiety nonetheless.

  –Who?

  – Lillian Martin…your best friend?

  – I don’t know what you’re talking about, Thomas. My best friend drowned years ago.

  – Je savais que t’apportais d’la mauvaise chance, toi, said Mr Mataf.

  – Comment est-ce qu’on dit “bugger off” en français?

  – Ah…en vrai français c’est “Allez vous faire enculer, madame,” mais…

  – Je comprends la langue française, I said.

  – Tant mieux, said Mr Mataf.

  * * *

  —

  Petrolia evaporated from my consciousness on the very day I left, but it resolutely persists in memory. I closed my eyes when I saw Margaret in the Goodmans’ driveway and kept them closed until Reeces Corners.

  It was thirty years before I saw Petrolia again, but even before I returned, I think I could have made a credible list of the things I lost:

  My grandmother

  First infatuation, a ten-year-old with a pixie cut and brown eyes

  A small room, a narrow bed, a window onto the Schwartzes’ backyard

  Dozens of comic books

  The woods in summer (smell)

  The woods in spring (sound)

  Fields full of: (flora:) thistles, milkweeds, chicory…

  (fauna:) monarchs, grasshoppers, crickets, ladybugs, shrews, moles, frogs, turtles, thousands of caterpillars, millions of ants…

  The smell of the bakery

  The hair tonic at Kells (and the white drape tucked in tight enough to strangle)

  The arena, the exhibition, cows…

  A community to which, despite myself, I almost belonged.

  Thousands and thousands of impressions out of which I could rebuild a version of the place, in three dimensions, from gate to gate.

  6 I’m always surprised by the force of instinct. It’s like the answer you didn’t realize you knew to a question asked while you were thinking of something else. Or perhaps it’s like a question whose answer has been on the tip of your tongue for days and then, unexpectedly, while you’re sleeping, the answer comes to you with such force it wakes you up. Or perhaps it’s not like a question at all. Perhaps it’s closer to an excruciating itch on an unreachable part of the body, an indescribable need that has gone on for so long it has become a dimension of one’s existence. No, actually, perhaps it is like a question after all.

  GEOGRAPHY

  V

  Erratic. I’ve been erratic lately.

  I’ve been spending so much time in the past, it’s difficult to return to the present for bread and libraries. I have been absorbed by memories of Katarina and Henry, and have become more lenient with myself.

  7 O’clock: I am awakened by the alarm and perform such duties as must be performed to begin the day (defecation, abstersion, depilation).

  9 O’clock: I write, with a break to feed Alexander and to clean house.

  11 O’clock: I continue writing, with an eye to a noontime pause in the action for (a light) lunch: celery.

  1 O’clock (PM): I write my lette
rs to the Citizen, which, frankly, never took much time and now takes almost none. I have to scour its pages to find anything commendable, or objectionable. These days my heart just isn’t in it, but I persist because it is a connection to the outside world and to the kind of misery that puts my own in perspective.

  3 O’clock (PM): I go over what I’ve written, and then set out for the library or for a long walk. (It doesn’t matter where I walk or how far. These days I walk in your company.)

  5 O’clock (PM): I return from the library and read. I read anything at all, and eat.

  7 O’clock (PM): I continue to read, but something other than what I was reading at 5. So if, from 5 to 7, I were reading a biography, say, then for the next two hours I’ll take up a book of poetry or history. Yesterday, for instance, I began at 5 with Smith’s biography of Robert Graves. (It reminded me of Henry.) At 7, I carried on with The Phenomenology of Mind (Bailie, trans.) (It also reminds me of Henry, with its dark night in which all cows are black, but the great charm of this book is that, though I’m reading it in English, it feels as if I were understanding it in German, a language I don’t understand at all.)

  9 O’clock (PM): I feed Alexander, again, and bathe, again. (If you’ll have me at all, my love, you shall have me clean.)

  11:00 (PM) to 7:00 (AM): Sleep.

  Wandering in the past, returning to feed Alexander…

  There’s a Cartesian smudge on all this, isn’t there? Mind in the past, body in the present? Yet, I prefer to think that when I write of the past my body is back there with me.

  It’s like those dreams you have when a clock is ringing and, in your dream, you turn it off, wake up, shower even. All the while you hear a mysterious sound like a bell, or like a telephone, or like the cry of a small child. And then, suddenly, perhaps in the midst of your shower, you realize it’s the sound of your own alarm clock, that you’re still asleep, though the shower was wonderful, and there was bacon cooking, and the sun was up over the city of your dreams.

  All of you is in that dream, your mind and your body. Both of them must come back to turn off the alarm, to get up. Just so, both of them must return from the past for me to feed Alexander.

  I prefer this idea to one that has part of me suffering in 1967, while the rest of me moulders here, thirty years later.

  * * *

  —

  I wouldn’t want you to think I spend a lot of time reading philosophy. Philosophy is only one step away from poetry, where private worlds are concerned, and it makes me almost as uncomfortable. Were it not for Henry, I wouldn’t be reading Hegel at all.

  Still, I was reading Hegel, and the ancient Greeks came up, as they always do, and it occurred to me that Heraclitus and Parmenides would have made miserable travellers.

  For Heraclitus, all is in flux. You can never step into the same river twice; no permanence except the permanence of change and becoming. What a dire thing travel becomes when home won’t persist. Once you go away, you can never return. “What price Florida?” you’d wonder.

  But really, in the Heraclitean scheme of things, even as you sit within it, home changes. No sleep, no rest, no blindness, no stasis can keep home home, so you might as well go.

  For Parmenides, on the other hand, change is the illusion. All is one, and there can be no movement, no becoming, no variety that is not a delusion of the senses. Travel is impossible. The only thing that persists is home. “Whither Florida?” you’d ask. And what a drab and desperate situation that would be. You’d thank God for your five senses, which, though they deceive, make travel possible…

  This is just the kind of speculation Henry would have loved, but what I’m trying to say is that I sometimes have as much trouble knowing where I am in Place as I do in Time.

  That’s a failing in one who’s trying to tell you about himself, I know, but I hope it isn’t insurmountable.

  * * *

  —

  The province through which I travelled with my mother and Mr Mataf is difficult to pin down.

  I haven’t seen all of it, of course; so much is only accessible to beavers. I’ve passed through the north of the province, on my way to small conferences in Gimli and Moosonee, and was amazed by the huts, houses, Ski-Doos, and decrepit stations hidden behind such mysterious names as Timiskaming, Obatanga, Batchawana Bay, Central Patricia, Sioux Lookout, Kashabowie…

  In my experience, though, the north and the south could share a motto:

  Ontario: Where You’re Ever Close to Water

  Which is appropriate for a province that looks like a fish with its head cut off:

  figure 1

  (Or like a fish with its head in Manitoba’s mouth.)

  There are so many lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, rivulets, freshets, creeks and cricks…more water than can fit on a map. It’s as if one had only to take two steps in any direction to swim, to fall through thin ice, to drown.

  That isn’t quite the way it felt, driving through Southern Ontario in 1967. There was a great deal of water, but what I especially remember are boulders, rocks, earth, and trees, those and the inexplicable relationship of my mother and Mr Mataf, its short scope.

  VI

  From the moment we left Petrolia, my small world splintered.

  I was with two strangers, in the back of a car that smelled of cigarettes; and because I was with strangers, every physical detail was important as a clue to my place.

  In April 1967, I was my mother’s son, but “son” was too abstract an idea. I had never been a “son” as such. I was “Thomas MacMillan,” but what use was that to me? None of the details that added up to Tom MacMillan had any real significance for my mother or Mr Mataf.

  If I had been the right kind of youth, if I had been outward and gregarious, I might have used this confusion to set the foundations of the relationship I wanted. With nothing given, there was opportunity to participate in my own definition. At that moment, in the automobile driving east, so much was possible.

  Still, though they didn’t know me, and I was unsure who Thomas MacMillan was, I brought with me things that made it difficult to set any kind of foundation. I brought with me ten lonely years, a habit of deferring to potentially violent people, a self-protective quiet, and overdeveloped powers of observation; none of them qualities to help one act in the world. Just the opposite. I brought with me things that made action a last resort.

  Besides, it was all I could do to decide how to interpret my mother’s behaviour.

  * * *

  —

  You know, in those moments I didn’t resent her, I loved my mother. I have seen her happy, sad, considerate, inconsiderate, loving, and vengeful, but I’ve never been entirely certain how to interpret her words or her behaviour.

  That wouldn’t be so odd, if the rest of the world had had similar difficulties, but I’ve known men who could play her like an instrument, men who couldn’t, or simply wouldn’t, see her convolutions, and these were the very ones who seemed to have her love and attention.

  I still wonder if my mother wasn’t puzzling to me alone; though, in my defence, I suspect she was deliberately eccentric when I was around.

  I remember that, some time after I left home, we were sitting in her living room talking about praying mantises. It was gardening season. She never failed to ask me about insects in the spring, either how to get rid of them or, in the case of mantids, how best to use them.

  I was at one end of her new, white-cushioned sofa. Without missing a beat in the conversation, she got up, went into the kitchen, returned with a jar of raspberry preserve and a spoon, and deliberately dribbled a spoonful of jam onto the cushion beside me.

  I assumed this was her way of disagreeing with me, so I changed the subject, suggesting that, perhaps, weed ki
ller might be best for a garden as small as hers. And, before you knew it, we were off on the subject of chemicals.

  Over the next two weeks, whenever I visited, I avoided mentioning the sofa and, naturally, sat elsewhere than on the stain.

  By pure chance I was with her when the serviceman from Capital Cleaners came in to “wet clean” the upholstery. It was then I discovered my mother had won, a month earlier, a free cleaning in a raffle, the first thing she’d won in her life. But as most of her furniture was then new, the prize was useless without some sort of stain.

  Perhaps if I’d asked, she might have told me why she was spilling raspberry preserve on her new cushion. But it seems I never learned how to ask my mother the right question at the right time. If I’d asked why she was spilling jam on the sofa, she’d have answered with something like

  – I forgot our dessert, sweetheart.

  For some reason, she thought me too serious to be taken seriously.

  * * *

  —

  Along with my mother, there was Mr Mataf to consider. My first, apprehensive, thought was that he might be my father.

  My apprehension had most to do with his appearance. He was, to my ten-year-old self, vinegary beyond words. To begin with, he was missing one of his front teeth and the incisor beside it. He was unshaven; he wore a buckskin jacket with fringed sleeves, and his skin was lighter than mine. He couldn’t have been much taller than I was then (five feet), because I distinctly remember being unable to avoid his breath whenever we were face to face; it smelled of wet dog. And, because I’d announced that I understood French, he spoke to me often enough. I did understand French, but I’d never had occasion to hear its Quebec variation, a wash of new words and almost familiar sounds. I had to pay particular attention to him when he spoke.