Childhood

by André Alexis

  The small mysteries of the scene affected me, long before I knew them for mysterious. How blue the teapot looked on its table beside the sofa, and how still my parents kept. Yes, and

  1. How in the world did Henry make his living?

  (He had so much time for Katarina.)

  2. What exactly did their silence mean?

  (Not silence in general, not wordlessness, but this particular silence, the quiet of these people in this room, morning after morning?)

  The sensual details, the teapot, the white cups with steam rising from them, persist in my imagination. I don’t know why the young Thomas was so affected by them. I remember the teapot, but it brings me none of the comfort it brought my younger self. It’s a memory of comfort, now.

  As for Henry’s livelihood, it was, to an extent, mysterious, but it was even more banal. He bought and sold stocks, speculating on the market. He was a wondrously talented speculator, making a tidy fortune from relatively few hours’ work, but “mysterious” isn’t really the word for it.

  And finally, as to silence, well…perhaps I made it more intricate than it was. I’m not as sensitive to it now, but for my younger self, peace of mind depended on the quality of silence that pervaded the sitting room. In those days, I thought I could tell the difference between silence and quiet, quiet and wordlessness, wordlessness and hush.

  It was a question of sensing what had gone on just prior to my entrance on the scene.

  Wordlessness was speaking without finding the words, a language in the sound of crumpling newsprint, or the click of cup on saucer. For the first few months, Henry and my mother were wordless, or, rather, because he preceded her in intimacy, Henry was silent and my mother was wordless.

  Silence was other than the absence of words, and other than the absence of sound; a state in which the rattling of a newspaper was insignificant. It was also something other than stillness. Movement was unimportant. The lifting of a teapot, the turning of a page, a suppressed yawn…all of these had no meaning in silence, though they had meaning in wordlessness, and meaning again in quiet.

  After a time, Henry was quiet and my mother was silent.

  Quiet took place in the possibility of words, of words just before silence or words just after. It was a wanting to speak or a wanting to have spoken, fraught with the expectation that comes when movement, or the disposition of a body, might have meaning. I mean, quiet was expecting or waiting, without words, for words (in one direction), and listening or attending, without words, after words (in the other).

  Now, quiet I could live with. It was squarely in the realm of intimacy, a good sign. And, six or seven months after our arrival in Ottawa, when Henry was quiet and my mother was quiet, I could feel something like hush, the state for which I felt both hope and fear.

  I’m embarrassed, now that it means so little to me, but in my imagination hush was something like being together, without need for words or silence, movement or stillness. It was the silence towards which all their silences tended.

  You would think I’d be thrilled to catch them in such intimacy, and part of me was thrilled. The few occasions on which I discovered them like this, hushed, as I went out the front door, were almost enough to make me feel at home and reconcile me to being there.

  Yet, it was this very reconciliation that made me anxious.

  * * *

  —

  If you add the pressure of my anxieties to her already troubled circumstances, it seems miraculous that my mother ever managed to feel anything at all for Henry.

  Still, in the summer of 1968, some fourteen months after our abandonment in Manotick, I believe they were in love, in love despite me, despite their differences, despite Mrs Williams.

  I had kept close watch on them, furiously trying to interpret their words and actions, but, as it turns out, I had looked for all the wrong things. The moment I realized their feelings for each other had intensified, I was as surprised as if the two of them had only recently been strangers.

  It was a Sunday morning, and we were in the dining room.

  The morning itself was unusual. Mrs Williams and I had gone for kaiser rolls from the bakery on Bank. As with every Sunday during Mrs Williams’ tenure, we ate buljol, but on this day I’d helped her prepare it.

  The kitchen stank of salted cod. We’d thrown the leathery squares of codfish into a pot of boiling water, and when they’d boiled for some time we scooped them out, washed the scum from the pot, and then boiled the fish again.

  While we waited for the fish, it was my task to cut the onions, tomatoes, and green peppers into small pieces. Mrs Williams hard-boiled two eggs, and then, when everything was cooked, she drained the cod, pulled the flesh from the spines, and let it fall into a deep yellow bowl.

  While the fish was still warm, she poured olive oil over it, and I mixed everything (onions, tomatoes, peppers) together in the bowl so that my hands were slick and smelled edible.

  It was a pleasure, this helping out. I felt close to Mrs Williams. We juggled the kaiser rolls from the oven to a shallow wicker basket, one by one. And, when everything was ready, she sliced the eggs and arranged them carefully on the buljol.

  I was proud of myself.

  – That smells wonderful, my mother said as we brought the fish and rolls into the dining room.

  – We have a talented young man with us, said Henry.

  My mother smiled.

  We?

  That was the moment. Henry said “we” where previously there’d been only I, You, Me, Tom, Thomas, Kata, Katarina.

  There was nothing intimate in their table manners. Henry ate as slowly as he always did. It took good timing to see him lift anything to his mouth. My mother ate as she always did, precisely; fork ready, one hand in her lap, fork charged, food taken, fork down, repeat.

  But something had changed.

  – Thank you, Mrs Williams, my mother said at the end of the meal.

  – You are mos’ welcome, Miss MacMillan.

  What exactly did Henry’s “we” signify? Were the three of us to go on as family? And how did I feel about family, now that it was possible? It was one thing to imagine a warm life on Cooper, but what did I really think of Henry Wing? What, for that matter, did I really think of my mother?

  What did I feel, beyond what I was duty-bound to feel?

  At that moment, dawdling at the table, breaking my kaiser roll into the cod, I felt something like humiliation. I had yearned for…what, exactly?

  But perhaps Henry had meant nothing by “we”…a slip of the tongue…wishful thinking…whistling in the dark…As long as my mother and Henry’s relations were ambiguous, I could live in hope of family, without family, a thing I knew little about.

  Their relations weren’t ambiguous for long.

  In the days that followed, my mother and Henry were not quiet, not silent, not hushed; none of that. They spoke in a new register. Their pretexts for conversation – weather, dust, sun, etc. – were pretexts for saying “our weather,” “our dust,” “our sun,” “our etc.”

  Yes, of course. There isn’t a particle of earth insignificant to Love. I can say that with respect these days, but at the time it was disturbing to hear them speak intimately of things that didn’t matter. I don’t know which upset me most, their deeper feelings for each other, their new way of speaking, or the fact I’d missed the moment when they’d begun to love.

  (I’m relating the thoughts of my younger self. For all I know, my mother never loved anyone but Henry Wing or loved Henry from the instant she met him, so that our stepping into 77 Cooper was already a crossing into Love.)

  The two of them even looked different. Henry, whom I’d always thought handsome, was more so now; stiller, not at all ridiculous. My mother, her face beautiful, her brown eyes wider, her eyebrows darker…everything about her gentler and good-humoured, when she wasn’t aroun
d Mrs Williams. She even wore dresses. In particular, there was a simple knee-length paisley shift that made her look, well, female.

  And yes, of course I have felt something like the Oedipal thing for my mother, but I’ve never desired her in the way that, say, I desire you. It was into a world of fear, not desire, that her shift dress threw me, an abyss more religious than sexual, God help me. I mean, it was more upsetting that my mother might become sexual than that she was so. Nuance.

  Actually, I wonder if their appearances changed in fact, or for me alone. At this point, the question is unanswerable, but the other witness to their love, Mrs Williams, expressed an anxiety similar to mine.

  – Is like Miss MacMillan goin’ an’ marry Mr Wing? she said one day.

  We were both in the kitchen, she making bread and I looking through a book called Della Francesca ou les ébats de l’amour. The title is what attracted me; though, in all the years I’ve known the book, I’ve only managed to admire the illustrations, the text being too difficult for anyone but Henry.

  (Not that all of Henry’s books were so obscure about the nature of love. After his death, I found a number of exotic volumes, from Les Délices des coeurs, by Ahmad al-Tifachi, to Thérèse Philosophe, by Anonymous, in a dusty white bookcase beneath his bedroom window.)

  – Ent? Mrs Williams asked.

  – I guess so, I answered.

  I pushed Les ébats towards Mrs Williams and pointed to one of its illustrations.

  – Look at this, I said.

  Perhaps she felt she’d gone too far in asking me about my mother. She took the book from me. Her fingers stuck to the pages. She brought it closer with her wrists. She leaned over the page, then pushed the book away.

  – Very pretty, she said.

  * * *

  —

  Some four or five months later, when I accused her of taking my mother’s shoes, Mrs Williams said

  – It ain’ true.

  And Henry answered

  – I’m very sorry, Hilda…I’m afraid you’ll have to leave us.

  What else could he have said?

  In the world of Romantic Love, it didn’t matter if my mother was lying. It mattered only that she was Henry’s beloved, and that her very presence, being Love, was also Truth.

  In that world, it really didn’t matter that I had not seen Mrs Williams steal. I could have accused Mrs Williams of anything at all, of witchcraft, say, or of setting fire to the Parliament Buildings. So long as my mother gave thumbs down, it was all over for Mrs Williams.

  Nor was there any room for Mrs Williams to manoeuvre. If she had said

  – Is all true. Is I self take Miss MacMillan shoes

  there would have been even less to talk about. There was no court on whose mercy she could depend. There was only my mother, and my mother wanted her gone.

  – Thank you, Henry, my mother said when Mrs Williams was banished.

  And Henry answered

  – You’re welcome, Kata

  as if it had been possible for him to transgress the laws of their intimate world.

  And where exactly did this “intimate world” leave me?

  * * *

  —

  It left me nowhere.

  Not right away, but soon after Mrs Williams’ departure, I began to see that the thing I’d wished for, this intimacy between Henry and Katarina, had nothing to do with me. I felt insignificant in their little universe of Sun and Satellite. The two of them didn’t need me. Their happiness didn’t depend on me the way mine depended on them.

  I was wrong to think this way, of course. The proof of their love for me was everywhere. It was in the way they spoke to me, the way Henry put his arm around my shoulders, the way my mother touched my hair, patting it down before I left for school. How could they have loved all the particles of earth without loving me? Still, I took all their fuss for condescension.

  And so, perhaps in revenge or self-defence or frustration, I began to steal.

  It was thrilling.

  I had no intentions as such, no conscious motives. There was something pure in my thieving, something so far beyond my ability to understand, it was as if I weren’t stealing at all.

  It wasn’t like collecting beetles, which I’d begun to do seriously. Every beetle I caught was carefully set in the display case Henry had made for me; every one was there for a reason, from ladybug to firefly.

  There was no rationale for the things I stole. They brought me no satisfaction. I stole mainly from my mother, though I wasn’t conscious of trying to hurt her in particular. I neither sold nor used most of the things I took. I hid everything, save for the money I stole from Henry. I used that to buy comics.

  It might seem to you that theft was an obvious choice for my “revenge.” And so it was, though my eleven-year-old self wasn’t entirely conscious of what he was doing. When the time came, when Henry and my mother could no longer hide their feelings, when Mrs Williams was banished, it simply felt appropriate to steal.

  The first thing I took was a change purse.

  I took it while Henry and my mother were in the sitting room. They were both on the sofa, drinking tea, listening to Couperin, no doubt, quietly talking about something or other.

  (In those days they talked about Elgin Public, Revenue Canada, Henry’s books and his great project, the state of the house, paint needed here or perhaps wallpaper there, the furniture, which my mother thought too old-fashioned, a car, though Henry had never learned to drive, my mother’s clothes, which Henry thought not altogether worthy of her beauty, my clothes, which I outgrew so quickly they despaired of keeping me covered…meaningless prattle, as far as I could tell.)

  I was sitting with them, idly listening, when I decided to go upstairs for a book.

  – You’re off, Tom? Henry asked.

  – I’m going to get a book.

  – What are you reading, Tom?

  – I don’t know, I answered.

  – You don’t know what you’re reading, sweetheart?

  (As if I were her sweetheart.)

  – I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t mean to be inquisitive.

  – Bring your book down, Thomas. You can read it with us.

  – Okay…fine.

  I went up the stairs as slowly as I could, not at all eager to return to their company. I may even have counted all of the banister’s uprights, something I liked to do anyway. (There are 33, 34, or 35 of them in all, 22 to the second floor, unless you count the first bole, which I rarely did, and 11 to the third, unless ditto, which ditto, except for variety.)

  For some reason, the door to my mother’s bedroom was ajar. That was unusual. She usually kept her door locked. I listened for footsteps and then, more by curiosity than design, I went into her room.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d been in the room, but it was evening and dark, and I had to turn on the lights to make my way around. The room was neat and spare. My mother’s bed, as wide and long as my own, was against the wall, with its smooth white coverlet, the brass headboard smelling of the polish she used to keep it clean. The room itself smelled of her perfume and of the perfumed powder she kept on the chest of drawers beside the bed.

  Her handbag was beside the powder box and, again curious, I looked into it: lipstick, a nail file, Kleenex, hairpins, eyeliner…the usual things, I imagine, but so many of them that the inside of the purse was a small chaos.

  At the bottom of the handbag, there was a wallet and a change purse. There were dollar bills in the wallet. I instinctively thought to take the money, but I had the change purse in hand when I heard a silence.

  The music had stopped. I panicked. I snapped the handbag shut, put the change purse in my pants pocket, turned the lights in the room off, closed the door, opened it again, leaving it ajar, as I’d found it.

  My retreat must have taken less
than thirty seconds. I was terrified I’d left some clue to my presence. Going quickly back to my room, I chose a worthy book, something to impress, if either of them still wanted me to read: once again, Les ébats de l’amour, by Henri Serres, a book that has had a singular influence on my life, though I’ve never read it through.

  I walked down the stairs, oversized book in my arms and, unwittingly, my mother’s change purse in my pocket.

  As I entered the sitting room, my mother said

  – That was quick.

  – I was reading, I answered.

  – What’s the book?

  – Della Francesca ou les ébats de l’amour.

  – Les ébats de l’amour? That’s…nice. Why don’t you read to us?

  – Do I have to?

  – Please?

  I made a show of annoyance, then sat on the floor, cross-legged, the book open in my lap. The change purse slipped a little, so I kept one hand on the book and the other on my pocket, to keep the purse from falling out entirely.

  “Le visage de sa mère était d’une pâleur effrayante.

  – O mon pauvre Pierre! Pourquoi ne fusses-tu né ailleurs, ou dans un temps moins amer?

  Le nouveau né, comme s’il avait compris son erreur, hurlait avec toute la force de ses poumons…”

  Façon assez particulière de décrire la naissance du mathématicien-peintre, n’est-ce pas? Mais c’est avec ce cri du peintre que commence le roman de Giocomo San Benedetto…

  I read on to the end of the chapter, scarcely understanding a word.

  – That was very good, Henry said.

  – Can I go to bed now?

  – It’s still early. Aren’t you feeling well?

  – I’m tired.

  – Go ahead, Thomas. I’ll be up in a minute.

  No sooner had I left the room than I regretted leaving. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I wanted to. I imagined they were talking about me. Could they tell I’d taken my mother’s purse? Was there still time to put it back?

  Once upstairs I was too distraught to wipe my face or brush my teeth. I hid the change purse under my mattress, pushing it as far to the centre as I could.