by André Alexis
It was with a feeling of largesse, of generosity, that I asked Henry if we could make more gold.
– What would you like, Tom?
I explained to him, in great detail, how important it was for me to have more money, how sorry I was not to have discovered my generosity sooner, but, now that I had, he and my mother would be its chief beneficiaries. There were so many things I could do for them.
– How much do you need, Tom?
And, supposing it to be a simple matter of using three times as much raccoon manure, I asked for three times as much money: two hundred and thirty-seven dollars.
Without blinking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to give a twelve-year-old hundreds of dollars, Henry reached into the inner pocket of his suit coat and extracted five twenty-dollar bills.
– I don’t have that much just now, he said. Here’s a hundred. I’ll give you the rest this evening.
He hasn’t understood at all, I thought. I didn’t want his money. That would have been wrong. I wanted to make more gold – which we could do any time we wanted, couldn’t we? – and though the process was a little more convoluted, I would prefer, Henry, to transmute a little raccoon manure.
– Couldn’t we?
– Are you sure? Henry asked.
– Yes, please.
– As you like, Tom. You know where to find the magistery.
Indeed I did, and though it wasn’t yet spring, and the ground was wet, I crawled beneath the porch as if it were the sunniest place on earth, proud that Henry now trusted me to recover the stone on my own, proud again of my new-found maturity. I had in mind a leather wallet for Henry and fur-lined gloves for my mother.
Henry called me into the laboratory later the same day.
I was even more excited this time, though I was a little less interested in the mechanism of transformation. The beautiful skyline of beakers, alembics, and burners was set up as it had been, a Pyrex version of ultima Thule, but I was anxious to exchange our gold for money, right away this time, same day, please and thank you.
– It’s too wet for manure, Henry said. What shall we use?
– Anything, I said.
– How about cotton then, Tom?
– That’s a good idea, Henry.
When everything was ready, when the liquids were properly perturbed and the magistery floated gracefully, Henry took a handful of cotton wool from a drawer and, with black scissors, cut it into dust over the first beaker.
– Will that make three times as much? I asked.
– It should.
And when the particles of cotton had made their way to the magistery, they were transformed and, once the water washed over the white muck, there really did appear to be three times as much gold.
– Henry? Do you think we could go to the jeweller’s now?
– Of course, Tom, of course.
We went to W. A. Irwin Jewellery on Bank, because it was closest. Henry had given me a clean handkerchief, in the centre of which we’d let the gold fall. The ends of the kerchief were tied with string. I took it carefully from my pocket and set it on Mr Irwin’s glass countertop.
– How much can you give us for this? Henry asked the jeweller.
– What is it?
– Gold.
– How many carats?
– Twenty-four.
– Hmmm…
The jeweller, a tall, bearded man with dark-rimmed glasses, rubbed some of the dust into a clump.
– There isn’t much, he said, pouring the dust into the vessel of a delicate scale. Less than a quarter…It isn’t much use to me, really…Ten? I suppose I could use it for small work, links and such…Ten, if you throw in the handkerchief.
– Thank you, Henry said.
I was confused and disappointed. As soon as we left the shop, I asked why he’d accepted only ten dollars for so much gold.
– It wasn’t worth more, he said.
– But it was three times as much as last time!
– And what does that tell you, Tom?
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand.
– Mr Irwin must have cheated us.
– Not at all.
– But…
We walked slowly along Bank, past Cooper, on towards Somerset, past grey buildings that are even more grey in my memory. At Somerset, we turned west, away from home.
– What would happen if we could make as much gold as we wanted? Henry asked.
I looked up at him.
– We could buy anything we wanted, I answered.
– Not for long, Tom.
At Bronson we turned back, and then walked north on Lyon, east on Cooper.
– There’s no such thing as a magistery, he said.
On the bottom of each of the alembics, there had been a thin layer of wax in which motes of gold were embedded.
– But…
He had paid the first jeweller to buy our bit of gold.
What a pointless and cruel hoax, I thought. It took me some time to forgive him this betrayal, longer still to understand it, but Henry himself took no pleasure in my humiliation.
As we went into 77 Cooper, he said
– You should have taken the money, if that’s what you wanted.
My thoughts exactly, at the time, though not of late.
8 The only one I still remember was about “No Nose” Brackley. The story was that No Nose, who had no nose and was one of the ugliest men in Trinidad, still managed to attract women once in a while, though he wasn’t bright, and he wasn’t wealthy, and he was “low class”…
–…An’ it hav’ a woman was drinkin’ in Pepper Pot wit’ No Nose, an’ dis same woman decide she goin’ an’ take No Nose Brackley home for company, but she don’ wan’ to be seen wit’ he at all, because she livin’ wit’ a family quite up in St Clair where it high class. An’ she say how he musn’ touch anyt’ing, an’ stay away from de windows, because she ’fraid someone goin’ an see No Nose in de people home. Why de woman want dis nasty man, I don’t know. It have some women basodi, yuh heah. An’ he mus’ be say “Doo doo” an’ tell she “don’ worry,” because he spend de night by she…Nex’ mornin’ de poor woman wake up, an what she see? No Nose Brackley on she balcony. De man in he underwear, an he callin’ de neighbours
– Mornin’, neighbours. Is nice weader we havin’. Mornin’, madame. How de chil’ren?
De woman so shame, she have to move from St Clair quite to San Fernando…
(If I made Mrs Williams tell this one over and over, it was not because I understood it, but because I loved the way she imitated No Nose as he stood on the balcony.)
XI
I have been writing this for months now.
I’ve been writing for four months, and I’m surprised at how much, and how little, of myself has made it to these pages; how much, though I’ve been writing of others, yet how few of my own details there are. I mean:
What was I like?
What clothes did I wear?
What was the sound of my voice?
Still, the only pleasure I take in writing, if you can call it pleasure, is the pleasure of being with others. So long as I am with Mother, with Henry, the details of my own life seem important.
Besides, at the time of which I’m writing, my life was their life. And, when Mrs Williams left, I was even more fascinated by the two of them.
Did they love each other?
I’ve written what I know of my mother’s early life, but little of that helped me understand if she loved Henry. He was not like Mr Mataf, after all.
Did they touch?
I was uneasy about their sexual life. I don’t like to imagine either of them naked, but they were both such sensual people, they couldn’t have lived together without touching, and, without really knowin
g, I knew that they touched.
But how?
Their sensualities were expressed in different ways. Outwardly, at least, my mother was not as “refined” as Henry. I don’t imagine she needed thirteenth-century Persian manuscripts, candlelight, or Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas to inspire her.
Henry, on the other hand…
* * *
—
When she chose him for refuge, my mother was in distress. We were on our way to Montreal and life with Mr Mataf. So, our long walk to Ottawa was certainly unplanned.
And yet, she entered Henry’s home with authority, knowing its layout, knowing where to find him, confident Henry would interrupt whatever he was doing to speak with her. She must also have known that Henry would take both of us in without protest. I can’t imagine her imposing otherwise.
These are crucial things to know about another person.
Perhaps, some time in the distant past, Henry had said, “Kata, if you’re ever in trouble, please let me help.” He must have impressed her with his sincerity, must have convinced her that “Let me help” meant let me help.
In that distant past, something essential must have been exchanged (confidence, trust, warm words…) and the twenty-nine-year-old Katarina, abandoned in Manotick, remembering their intimacy, made her way to Mr Wing, his home.
(I’m putting my own face on things, with this business of confidence and warm words. Isn’t it possible that the two met briefly, that Henry fell in love and offered whatever he could to win her over? My mother, recognizing her advantage and sensing she had the wherewithal to keep him to his word, familiarized herself with his home and left with a potent weapon: his infatuation.
And this she used when she found herself in trouble.
This is a darker version of Katarina’s state of mind, but if I’ve given the impression it was possible for my mother to behave this way, I’ve misled you, and I think I can rule out this parenthetical version of events before the end of my parenthesis.
To begin with, Henry was not blind. My mother couldn’t have convinced him it was possible for her to love unless it really were possible.
And then, my mother hated weakness, in herself, in me, in Henry. It would have repulsed her to live with a man who
a) couldn’t tell affection from manipulation
b) allowed himself to be so obviously used.
And, finally, though she was certainly manipulative, my mother was a talented and unpredictable manipulator, an artist who enjoyed her craft. What talent would it have taken to manipulate Henry if he were weak?
These days, when I consider her life, or those pieces of it I know, I think of my mother as a woman who learned early to fend for herself in a hostile environment: Petrolia. She broke herself in pieces, the better to hide the essential. She was one thing to her mother, another to her friends, and still another to strangers. She was a romantic ideal to Henry, and any number of things to me.
Aside from an accidental pregnancy – myself, though I don’t rule out the possibility I was a child of love – she made her way in the world without often losing hold of herself, though she sometimes tried desperately to lose it – in love, for instance.
All of this makes the simple duping of Henry unthinkable. It wouldn’t have met her needs. From the beginning, there must have been some affection between them.
Quod erat demonstrandum. End parenthesis.)
Of course, my mother’s age may also have played a part in her decision to stay with Henry. Now that I am on the other side of twenty-nine, I understand she was at that point in life when the future seems to hold fewer occasions for change. Putting herself in the home of a man who loved her may have been her way of courting change.
She certainly chose an interesting environment for it.
Henry’s home, his person, his behaviour…all of these were unusual.
Why would a twentieth-century man, Trinidadian at that, choose to live in a Victorian setting, with a gentleman’s lab, old-fashioned books, and courtly attitudes that would have marked him as “stuffy” centuries ago?
I have sometimes thought Henry misguided or eccentric. I’ve thought him laughable or bizarre, all depending on my distances from him: temporal, physical, or psychological. Lately, though, I see in him another version of my grandmother.
They had different personalities, of course, but my grandmother’s fanatic attachment to Lampman and Dickens, her disapproval of anything that might link her to Trinidad…these things had their echo in Henry.
He was born in 1927, in Port of Spain. His parents died when he was young and, after their deaths, Henry was passed from relation to relation like a chair, until, in 1934, he was sent to live with the “third cousin of a second cousin of a first cousin” who had recently moved to Canada, of all places, and who needed, truth be told, inexpensive help for a corner shop he owned in Sandy Hill.
Henry’s distant cousin, a white-haired ogre named Maurice Wing, was bitterly disappointed to discover a reed-thin seven-year-old instead of the able-bodied youth he’d been promised, but he put Henry to work nonetheless: sweeping up, tending the register, putting things on shelves, taking them off.
Reading was the one pleasure he was consistently allowed, on the grounds that it made him a more trustworthy cashier. So, the young Henry was an obsessive reader, poring over the books Mr Wing sold in his shop, or books borrowed from the library, or books rescued from trash bins in the neighbourhood, books abandoned by university students.
Henry’s childhood was far from idyllic. He had no friends, no time for friends, and no company, save the baleful presence of Maurice Wing. He wasn’t often beaten, he was fed, and, in time, he came to respect Mr Wing enough to take his name, but…
When the man died and Henry inherited the shop at Templeton and Russell, he sold it as quickly as he could and moved on.
That handful of sentences holds most of the facts I have ever known about Henry’s early life. I don’t even remember his real name. In all the years I knew him, I was never young enough to have been told more, by way of bedtime stories, say, nor yet mature enough to take genuine interest in his life.
You’d think Henry would hold on to the Trinidad of his early happiness, but I suppose any version of the island brought with it the painful memory of abandonment. Canada, his new home, must have seemed vague and impersonal, if only because what he knew best was the inside of a small shop in Sandy Hill, not much to go on and too little to love. And so, as I see it, he took such parts of world and time as he found appealing in the books he loved.
The things to which he was attracted – from goldmaking to Couperin – were remarkable in their disparity, and he brought to all of them an almost mystical devotion. But they reveal so little of his origin I have come to think of them as a screen before his birthplace; not for others, for himself.
The first time I saw Henry Wing, he was in the company of what I took to be women. I’ve mentioned that they may have been men, and, if we were speaking of someone other than Henry, a fondness for transvestites might be thought a quirk. Yet he himself saw nothing unusual in the company of men dressed as women.
It’s not that he was naïve, nor that he imagined transvestism widespread or widely accepted. (He lived in Ottawa, after all, a city whose surface disapproves of its own depths.) If anyone had bothered to ask why he chose such extraordinary company, as I later did, he would have answered, as he did, that it was good to be reminded of women in the company of men.9
Henry was not a restless or secretive man. He was at ease in his own eccentric world and, though both he and my mother had mellifluous voices, his was the texture of his being.
And so Henry and so Katarina…
* * *
—
During our first months with Henry Wing, Katarina sometimes said she found the man exhausting. She led me to believe we would be staying with Mr Wing on
ly until she could find work or until we could afford a place of our own. But, as always with my mother, words were an unfaithful guide to her feelings.
For one thing, she did not immediately set out to find work. She made a show of looking, certainly, getting up early to buy the Citizen and settling down with it after breakfast. In those first months, it was as if her profession were Newspaper Reading. She wasn’t ready to make coffee for men in suits, or to spend her days answering the telephone.
Given the times, and her lack of formal education, I’m amazed by her conviction that she could find anything better. What employment was there for women, save waiting on tables or answering telephones? Moreover, she was, at twenty-nine, a little old to enter the fray, and disinclined to sit by the door and greet the clients of Mr Such and Such or the patients of Dr So and So.
(Of course, my mother being the woman she was, I was not surprised when, in the end, she found work that was not exactly secretarial, and a workplace that, despite her lack of formal training, methodically rewarded her talent and enthusiasm: Revenue Canada.)
In the early days, before she found work, Henry would stay with her in the sitting room while she read the Citizen. He brought with him a silver tray with white handles; on the tray, a squat Florida-blue teapot and two white cups. Though she rarely drank it, he would pour for her while the tea was weak (burnt orange) and then wait until it was black before serving himself.
My mother usually sat, legs tucked under her, on the sofa. Henry stood by the fireplace, thinking, no doubt, about the place of this or that idea in the scheme of his cyclopedia. He could stand for hours, unmoving, contemplating, or, if there was reading to do, with an open book whose pages he leisurely turned.
The two of them together like that, in silence…it was both comforting and disturbing.
That winter, I’d pass the sitting room on my way out the door.
– Goodbye, I’d say. I’m going to school.
And they would both look my way, smiling.
