Childhood

by André Alexis

  He didn’t do these things every day, you understand, nor all that often, now that I think of it, but it takes very little Thomas Wyatt and only a few madrigals to make me question a man’s sense. And, it seems to me, if he’d loved her a little less, or less passionately, they might have been happier longer.

  And yet…

  And so…

  Henry Wing, a black man with Chinese blood, handsome, tall, forty years old, in love with a woman eleven years younger, at work on an encyclopedia of limited appeal, living on Cooper Street in the city of my dreams, my father perhaps.

  Considerate is the word for him, considerate and loving.

  X

  Now, once Henry dismissed the sirens, he led us downstairs to the dining room.

  – Mrs Williams, he called.

  The old woman with red hair, whose slippers and rolled-down stockings I now noticed, shuffled amiably in.

  – Yes, Mr Wing?

  – Mrs Williams, I’d like you to meet Miss MacMillan and her son, Tom.

  – Is a lovely boy you have there, miss.

  – And I believe he’s hungry, Henry said. What have we got that isn’t frozen?

  – Mr Wing, you know I does never freeze anything. It have some okra and rice in the fridge.

  – Would you like okra and rice? Henry asked.

  I said

  – Yes, please.

  I could only have said “Yes, please” to okra once in my life, and I remember it still. The texture was repulsive. The rice, though, was a thing with pigeon peas and pieces of something salty that turned out to be pigtail. I ate every grain, rescuing some from under the okra.

  – Thank you, Henry, my mother said when we’d finished.

  – Did you like it, Tom?

  – I didn’t like the green, sir.

  – Neither did your mother.

  So, we never had okra again, though Mrs Williams sometimes served callaloo, which is okra by other means. (Callaloo inevitably came with crab, however, and crab was the most exotic food I could imagine, and it was good.)

  It’s strange, now that I think of it, how easily I accepted as much of Mrs Williams’ cooking as I did. It was mostly Caribbean and, until I discovered Henry’s Trinidadian descent, inexplicably foreign. Yet, I took to plantain and roti, dasheen and doubles as if I were born to them.

  The food was appropriate to my new surroundings. Not that Henry’s home was Caribbean. It wasn’t, but it was more so than anything I’d known. My grandmother, after all, had swept Trinidad from her own life and surroundings. Here, in this household, buljol and sugar cake belonged.

  At least, I felt that way. My mother almost certainly felt otherwise. Perhaps, when she was younger, my grandmother hadn’t been quite so diligent in hiding her origins. In that case, the Caribbean aspect of Henry’s home, Mrs Williams in particular, would have been an unpleasant reminder of the place she’d fled.

  I write all that without conviction, though. My mother was unkind to Mrs Williams, but she may have had other reasons to dislike her. The thing is, I can’t think of her behaviour without remembering how little I understood it.

  * * *

  —

  The household over which Mrs Williams held tenuous sway was a reflection of its owner; in places extravagant, in places shabby.

  The sitting room on the first floor was, of all the rooms, my favourite. Its curtains were white. There were two scarlet tanagers, stuffed and mounted on the mantelpiece. There was a deep red sofa, under whose cushions I could hide. And, for moments of abandon, when I pushed the Persian rug aside, there was a wide expanse of varnished wooden floor, clean and smooth from sofa to dining room. In my stockinged feet, or standing on my pyjama bottoms, I could slide the length of it.

  Almost as wonderful, and certainly more mysterious, were the rooms across the entranceway: the library and the lab. The laboratory was usually locked, except when Henry was using it, but the library was open, unless Henry was reading in it. So, it was the library I came to know first.

  And a beautiful library it was. From floor to ceiling, the walls were hidden by bookcases. In the bookcases, there were thousands of volumes, some crammed two rows to a shelf. Though they were most of them leather-bound, there was the widest variety imaginable: a collection of short stories by Sigrid Undset and The Marvellous Adventures of Nils Holgerson were there beside Averroës and Avicenna, the Marquis de Sade beside St Teresa of Ávila, Lane’s The Thousand and One Nights with Spinoza’s Ethics, Gershom Scholem with Niels Bohr, The Saragossa Manuscript with books on insects, mammals, birds, stars…

  These books, and the thousands in the attic, in Henry’s bedroom, in the basement, in the reading room on the second floor, all of them fussed over and, in principle, dusted by Mrs Williams, were the sources for Wing’s Abstractions. They were also, for years, my main font of amusement, edification, and terror. I can’t describe the joy of discovering, for instance, J. B. S. Haldane’s Natural History of the Beetle, with its meticulous illustrations, or the nightmares that followed a reading of Lady Into Fox.

  During our first months at Henry’s, I was particularly diverted by the library. It was spring, then it was summer. I had no friends, and my mother and Henry engaged in hours of engagement. They did nothing but talk about the future. I couldn’t spend five minutes in their company without getting bored.

  So, I read.

  Neither of them seemed at all concerned by what I read. I remember sitting in the library’s armchair, reading with wonder, shame, and incomprehension Les Bijoux indiscrets, a novel about talking vaginas, when Henry came in, too quickly for me to hide the book.

  – Ah…Diderot, he said

  and went into the lab, locking the door behind him.

  They were impressed that I liked books. In the midst of their own upheavals, they were probably relieved that I was so easily occupied.

  Mrs Williams was even more impressed. She would sometimes shuffle into the library, dust rag in hand, and watch me read, something she couldn’t do herself.

  – Uhm hmm, she’d say after a while, if he eyes last long as he fingers is a doctor for certain.

  I pretended to ignore her, sinking deeper into the armchair, becoming even more serious, carefully turning the pages of my book, but I looked forward to her interruptions.

  After the sitting room and the library, the room I liked best was my bedroom on the third floor. I might have preferred the kitchen and Mrs Williams, were it not for the mice; not the mice themselves, which I loved, but the poor things cut in half in traps.

  The bedroom wasn’t entirely pleasant. It smelled of camphor, no matter how wide I opened the window. (To this day, I anticipate the smell, though there haven’t been mothballs anywhere near it for some time.) The closet was a room in itself, wide enough to walk around in. That was fine in the day, but at night I couldn’t help thinking there was someone in it, and it kept me awake, listening.

  My bed, though, my bed with its clean sheets, was a white lake. It was large enough for four or five of me and it was safe.

  In our years with Henry, my mother came in to wish me goodnight, every evening. At first, it was an unexpected intimacy. She’d sit by the side of the bed and we would talk about the day, like confidants.

  – I don’t know how much longer we can stay here.

  – Why not?

  – Henry’s wearing me down. It’s too much being here.

  – Where’re we going to go?

  – I don’t know, but as soon as I find work, we’ll find a place of our own. Is that okay?

  – I guess so.

  – And what about your day? What did you do?

  – Well…I read in the library…

  …I was sick…

  …I couldn’t…

  …I didn’t…

  …I did…

  I don’t
remember my answers as well as I do some of hers. Once or twice a week, I tried to impress her with some scrap of learning I’d taken in.

  – Did you know there were 250,000 species of beetles?

  – No, I didn’t.

  – And fireflies are…

  Most often, though, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Nothing ever happened to me. I did nothing worth talking about. So we would kiss goodnight, my mother turning off the light as she left, my room slowly flooding with moonlight and with such light as ran beneath the door.

  When we’d gotten to know each other, when he’d begun to teach me the elements, Henry too would wish me goodnight, sometimes with my mother, sometimes after her.

  – Goodnight, Tom.

  – Goodnight, Mr Wing.

  It was “Mr Wing” for a year before it was “Henry.”

  * * *

  —

  Henry seemed to have almost equal affection for Mrs Williams and my mother.

  As soon as I discovered how kind she was, I’d sit in the kitchen as Mrs Williams made lunch or supper. I helped her clean up, or bent down for her when her back was bad and she couldn’t stoop for the pots and pans. I did all this whenever I was tired of reading, or tired of hiding; hiding for its own sake, I mean, since there was no one to come looking for me.

  There was usually something we could do together, but when there wasn’t, I sat and listened to her, enchanted by the way she spoke. She was a generous teller of tales; one story flowed leisurely into the next.8

  It was in this kitchen I first smelled cumin or bit into a pod of cardamom or, fearlessly, chewed a small piece of Scotch bonnet. Here also, I sliced ginger for a ginger beer so strong it was like drinking lye, and first smelled sorrel boiling down to what was my favourite drink. (I haven’t had it or Mauby for years. I never learned to make them, and when Mrs Williams left, Henry didn’t have the heart to make them himself.)

  Whenever he was waiting for a tincture of this to react with a tincture of that, Henry sat at the kitchen table with me. He quietly listened to Mrs Williams’ voice, opening jars of chutney, for the smell of them, and helping me roll tamarind pulp in sugar. Slight entertainment for a grown man, I thought, but he spent so much time in the kitchen, I understood he had real affection for Mrs Williams.

  Mrs Williams had run of the entire house. She had keys to the most private rooms: the laboratory and Henry’s bedroom.

  It’s true she took her time with the cleaning, and parts of the house always looked shabby, but dusting wasn’t the work to which she was best suited; and, really, there was no one to criticize her. Henry was happy with her, my mother was often out looking for work, and I liked her too much to complain.

  If Mrs Williams had a failing, it was in her attitude to my mother. She was a little spiteful. She couldn’t accept that my mother, however unwittingly, had usurped some of her ground and most of her authority. There was no doubt where Henry stood in the matter, either. I remember hearing Mrs Williams say

  – But Miss MacMillan wash she face wit’ Brasso? How she could tell me I musn’t use pepper in a peas and rice?

  – I know you’re upset, Hilda, but it hurts me to hear you speak that way. If Kata doesn’t want pepper, you should throw the peppers out.

  Henry wasn’t angry, but I could see Mrs Williams was offended. Perhaps she’d only meant to test the waters, to see how far the currents had changed, and Henry had shown her, without hesitation, the new boundary of her existence. Everywhere her authority was circumscribed by my mother’s, even here in the centre of her influence, the kitchen.

  – As you wish, Mr Wing. I was only askin’…

  I thought of Mrs Williams as ancient, but she couldn’t have been much more than sixty. Her face was dark and smooth, her eyes a soft brown, and some of her teeth were, intriguingly, false. Knowing how fascinating I found them, she sometimes left her teeth in a glass of salty water on the kitchen table. Her hair was red from henna, and she often wore a bright-yellow kerchief to keep it in place.

  When Henry told her to throw the peppers out, her face crinkled.

  – I was only askin’…

  And so, she threw a small basket of red and yellow Scotch bonnets out into the garden.

  Although that moment was the first in which I realized Mrs Williams was at daggers drawn with my mother, theirs was a long skirmish that took place just outside my ken, and its end came much later.

  By pure coincidence, I associate Mrs Williams’ defeat with the first visits I was allowed to Henry’s small lab.

  * * *

  —

  We’d been living on Cooper for some time.

  I was in Grade Seven at Elgin, a school with a stone exterior and narrow halls. The classrooms smelled of chalk dust and the desks were cold in the morning. I remember little else about it.

  It was my second year at the school. I was at ease at Henry’s, though it still felt as if my mother and I were on the verge of leaving.

  Not that my mother and Henry weren’t getting along; they were. Each had evolved a routine that depended on the other, and my mother relaxed in his company. For his part, Henry did his best to stay out of her way. He knew that his feelings, however subtly expressed, made her a little nervous.

  You know, God keep their souls, they were both of them strange, especially that year. A simple movement of the hand or head carried so much meaning, I couldn’t always tell what they felt for each other from moment to moment.

  At night, my mother was as likely to say

  – I think we should be moving

  as

  – Would you mind if we stayed?

  When she found work at Revenue Canada, we actually spent time, on weekends, looking for places to rent.

  Yet, despite my mother’s ambivalence, Henry and I grew very close.

  When he learned of my first lessons in chemistry, he was pleased.

  – Well, he asked, what did they tell you about chemistry?

  We had learned about osmosis and chlorophyll and photosynthesis. Mr Parker, our science teacher, drew green plants, a yellow sun, white clouds, and a blue sky in coloured chalk on the blackboard.

  – Osmosis and photosynthesis? Henry asked.

  – Yes, both of them.

  – Was it interesting?

  – Yes. The plants turn carbon dioxide and water into…

  We were in the library, and I was holding the oversized book on flowers that had stimulated our conversation. It was after school, but an hour at least before my mother would be home.

  – If you have a few minutes, Tom, I’d love to show you something.

  Taking the key from his pants pocket, Henry unlocked the door to the lab and led me in.

  It wasn’t what I expected, but it was far from disappointing. To begin with, it was spotless. The white linoleum floor, the white walls, the white ceiling. Everything was immaculate. There was one window. It looked out onto the house next door and, beneath the window, there was a deep aluminium sink with gleaming faucet and taps.

  In the centre of the room was a long, narrow, and solid wooden table on which there were beakers, glass tubes, and what looked to be black rubber stoppers.

  Against the wall were metal shelves crowded with jars and more beakers, glass containers of every shape filled with a bewildering variety of powders, liquids, and solids. And, hanging like a family portrait beside one of the shelves, there was an elegant, three-dimensional periodic table: a shallow, white plastic grid in a wooden frame. In every square of the grid, there was a sample or representation of an element, along with its name, atomic number, atomic symbol, and atomic weight.

  Henry took the periodic table down from the wall and put it in my hands.

  – Tom, this is the most important thing in the lab. I’d like you to keep it for a while. If you learn the names and numbers of all the elemen
ts, we’ll shake some of them up together. Would you like that?

  – Very much, I said.

  The idea of experiments fascinated me, as it would any eleven-year-old. Just the thought of mixing chemicals in vials, of making nitroglycerine, of watching liquids unexpectedly change colour and bubble over. It was more exciting than anything I could think of.

  It took me little more than a week to memorize the symbols, names, and numbers. To this day, I can look at things, at a silver bracelet, say, and think “47, Ag, 107.868, Argentum,” as if the periodic table were before me.

  I wasn’t immediately allowed back into the inner sanctum, though. Days after I swore I’d memorized them, Henry quizzed me on symbols or numbers.

  – Tom, I can’t remember which element is 70, can you?

  – Tom, what was the symbol for iron, again?

  – Tom, iridium’s 42, isn’t it?

  Only when he was satisfied I’d mastered the table did Henry set aside a day and a time for us to make sodium chloride.

  – Sodium chloride?

  – Salt.

  Salt? What a disappointment. Of all the things we could create, salt was the least interesting.

  – Okay, I said.

  – You don’t want to make salt?

  – I guess so.

  – It’s humble, but it’s a beautiful compound. Well, we could start with something a little more appealing. How would you like to make gold, for instance?

  – Gold? Can we make gold?

  – Of course, Henry answered.

  He smiled and put his arm around my shoulders.

  – We’ll do it the old way, he said.

  The “old way,” as it turned out, was to transform a baser element into gold through a series of encounters with the elixir. Transmutation is what it was called, every element having, in principle, the potential to become gold, the highest element.

  Henry spoke of this as if there were nothing less mysterious. To help me understand the process, he added that the elixir, or grand magistery, worked in the most banal way. It taught the elements beneath gold (from hydrogen to platinum) of their potential, and reminded those above it (from mercury on up) of their highest moment.