Childhood

by André Alexis

  – Would you like anything, Kata?

  – No, thank you, she answered.

  – So, Henry asked, what’s the occasion?

  (She hadn’t told him?)

  – I found these things hidden in Thomas’s room, my mother said.

  – Did you?

  – Thomas says you asked him to take them.

  Pause, and then

  – I asked him to take them?

  – Yes. Did you?

  Standing beside the sofa, still as a mouse, I passed the most excruciating moments of my childhood; the final moments, actually. Henry said

  – Tom told you?

  – Yes.

  – Then I admit it, he said softly. Yes.

  I looked up in disbelief. He was looking down at me, not smiling, but not unkindly either. I thought he must have misunderstood the question.

  – You asked my son to sneak around my room and take my clothes? How could you?

  – I’m sorry, he answered.

  – Why didn’t you tell me you hated my clothes?

  Pause, and then

  – Tom told you I hated your clothes?

  – Of course.

  – I’m sorry, Kata.

  My mother stood unmoving and silent for some time before she said

  – Thomas, what you did was wrong. Leave us, please.

  That was the last moment when I might have admitted to lying. Henry stood at the other side of the fireplace, hands behind his back, graceful, placid.

  It hurt me to keep quiet, but I wanted them to suffer now that it had come to suffering. I walked slowly from the sitting room and slowly up the stairs, trying to catch the particulars of their contretemps, but there was only silence.

  * * *

  —

  Looking back on it now, I can’t imagine a more unhappy confluence of elements.

  My mother, though she clearly loved Henry, could not stand the idea of being manipulated. She may not have believed me when I said Henry was trying to play her, but his confession would have been enough to instil doubt where none could be tolerated.

  And then: myself at twelve.

  And finally: Henry.

  I still don’t know what to make of Henry. He was either ridiculous or admirable, depending. I sometimes think he acted out of consideration for me, that he wished to spare me the humiliation. That’s quite Henry.

  It may also be that he thought he couldn’t expose me without hurting my mother. It would have been painful for Kata to know her son for the thief and liar I was at twelve. He would have wanted to spare her that, and so he fell on the sword. And that too is Henry.

  Whichever it is, Henry ridiculous or Henry admirable, he never held this moment against me, never wavered in his kindness. In that, he was perhaps unintentionally cruel, because it has taken me years to forgive myself.

  I mean, I only now see my behaviour for what it was, and I am sorry that, although this wasn’t the end of Henry and Katarina’s living together, it was the end’s beginning.

  9 You know, it was Henry himself who told me that a number of the women who’d visited were men. I’d casually mentioned their extravagant perfumes when he told me. I wonder if he wasn’t being facetious. I couldn’t always understand his sense of humour.

  XII

  Over the past few months, my life seems to have become both simple and complex. It is outwardly simple.

  7 O’clock: Wake, wash, eat.

  9 O’clock: Write, with a break for Alexander.

  11 O’clock: More of the same (write, write).

  1 O’clock (PM): Write my letters to the Citizen.

  3 O’clock (PM): Promenade, walk, think of you.

  5 O’clock (PM): If I have gone to the library, I return, my head filled with words.

  7 O’clock (PM): The usual (read, wash), and I wonder should I call your number again.

  9 O’clock (PM): Feed Alexander. Food, for me, if possible.

  11:00 (PM) to 7:00 (AM): Sleep.

  It is complex in that the writing I do brings me a little closer to the dead but no closer to the living. It brings me closer to myself at times, but I have not always been my favourite place…

  It’s been a year since my mother died, a shade less since Henry passed. This spasm of memory has just about run its course, I think.

  * * *

  —

  I had broken the back of my own childhood.

  I was twelve when I turned away from the cloistered world of Henry and Katarina.

  Their relationship survived my thieving and my lies. It went on for months, but my feelings for the two of them died. I thought I knew their frailties and, unforgiving as one can only be at twelve, I began to think them unworthy of respect.

  It may have been self-defence that turned me away from them, away from any family that might spring up around them. It may also have been self-punishment or impenitence or a hardening of the heart, but, whatever it was, I was no longer interested.

  It wasn’t as if I suddenly found myself free, you understand, or even that, at twelve, I knew what freedom might be. Not at all. I was still unable to do without “belonging,” but I had discovered a “somewhere else” more hospitable than their “there.”

  Ottawa, the City Itself

  My mother and Henry were both out of place in Ottawa.

  My mother lasted some twenty years in the city, without ever feeling at home. She moved around, living here and there, looking for a place that felt other than temporary. But, though she bought a house at Osgoode and Henderson, she moved back to Petrolia, of all places, in 1990.

  Henry’s life and circumstances I’ve already described. Though he was at home, you could not have said he was at home in Ottawa, or not exactly. His home was elsewhere in time, one in which Lampman and Scott might have taken tea. But they were only ghosts in the city I discovered.

  For me, Ottawa was tall and busy, various shades of ash, green, blue, and brown. It was, once I’d adjusted to its scale, so vivid that I’m astounded there was ever a time it meant nothing to me. It has been everything to me since: my ocean, my desert, my plain.

  I threw myself into the arms of the city, and though cities aren’t made to keep you company, Ottawa was what I needed for respite. Besides, I rarely went out on my own. My companions, or those I remember, were François Gagné and Lucie Lefebvre, who went to Garneau though they lived close by, and Andrew Haller, who lived at Cooper and Metcalfe and went to Elgin Public.

  As you can imagine, I had no talent for happiness, and not much for friendship, but Lucie and François were unusual in ways I found disarming, and Andrew actually shared my interest in beetles. I remember our time together as agreeable; though, for the most part, I couldn’t tell you what we did.

  I was with Lucie and François when I first encountered Ottawa-as-Ottawa, before it was Ottawa-as-Thomas.

  Months after Henry had fallen on the sword, Lucie and I followed the canal to Rideau.

  The day was warm. The water in the canal was sky blue. We walked together, talking about something or other, when I suddenly noticed we were surrounded by people, all of them strolling along the promenade. And I was happy to be with so many. We went to the river and then up the steps, on along Rideau Street to the Market.

  At the Market, there were so many people, it was like drifting on a tide. The place smelled of fish, of cheese, of apples and cucumbers, tomatoes and green peppers, and, by the cages, of chicken shit.

  It was on this day that I saw a man take a chicken from its cage of wooden slats and wring its neck in one graceful motion, bird by the neck, a flick of the wrist. I was sorry for the chicken, but it was so artfull
y killed there was necessity in its sacrifice.

  It was also on this day that I saw a German shepherd pounce on a rat that had run out from the back of a shop. The dog shook its head violently from side to side with the rat in its mouth. I took a stick and chased the dog away, but when I went back to see if the rat were alive, the poor thing bit me and scuttled away, finding protection under a wooden pallet.

  I felt such concern for the rat, I didn’t notice my hand was bleeding until Lucie started to cry. And then, for weeks afterwards, I worried obsessively about rabies. I didn’t say a thing to either Henry or my mother. Instead, thinking the first sign of infection would be hydrophobia, I avoided water and drank milk and apple juice.

  I know it’s odd that moments like these should have drawn me to the city, but the day was an adventure, and the city is vivid in my memory: blue, green, and grey.

  My second encounter with Ottawa was even more banal.

  François and I walked far from home on a summer day. Far for us, anyway; along Elgin to Laurier, over the Laurier Bridge, past the university, which sprawled for blocks, its buildings mysterious and inviting, on all the way to Strathcona.

  We were arguing about who was better, Concombre Masqué or Iznogoud, Tintin or Johnny Quest. I didn’t care about any of them, really. I preferred Spiderman, which François had never read. In fact, I had brought along an issue of Spiderman, rolled tight, the sweat of my palm smudging the ink on its cover.

  I knew that François’ English wasn’t good enough for him to read the comic on his own, so I was determined to read it for him. It somehow offended me that he should not know J. Jonah Jameson or Peter Parker. It bothered me that he didn’t know Tony Stark or Reed Richards, either, but I couldn’t show him everything at once.

  François and I wandered around the park, from one end to the other, attracted by the noise of a ball game, discreetly following two teenagers, a boy and a girl walking hand in hand, who stopped every hundred yards or so to embrace.

  We must have spent hours wasting time and watching the river, so that, when we finally sat down by the rapids, it was late afternoon.

  I unfurled my Spiderman and smoothed it on my lap. Then, pausing only to admire the drawings, I translated each of the speech balloons.

  François was enthralled.

  – C’est qui Doctor Octopus?

  – C’est un méchant…

  – Oh! ’Garde-donc ses bras d’ pieuvre!

  I read it to him twice before the sun sank too low, the streetlamps came on, and it was time to go.

  – J’t’en supplie, Thomas, prête-le moi, he begged as we walked home.

  – Mais tu ne lis pas l’anglais…

  – J’t’en supplie.

  And I gave him the comic, knowing I wouldn’t see it again, not this copy. The waning sunlight, and the way Parliament looked from the bridge, and the soft light of the streetlamps, it was these things that bred a kindness in me.

  – Okay, I said, garde-le.

  * * *

  —

  Both of those excursions, with Lucie in the Market and with François in Strathcona, were like moments in the world after a time in darkness. I mean, I was conscious of not being myself in a place that included me. I mean, I was briefly, blessedly, unselfconscious, and that was how I came to recognize home.

  All of this, this turning towards Ottawa, is difficult to describe, because I wasn’t turning towards or, at least, I wouldn’t have said I was turning towards the city any more than I would have admitted to turning away from Henry’s house. Yet, I turned.

  How should I put this? You wouldn’t say a heliotrope knows light, but it moves towards light, and it was the same for me.

  Was Ottawa my light, then?

  Yes and no.

  At first it was a wilderness, and then it was my wilderness, and then it wasn’t wilderness at all. I came to know it intimately, from Elgin and Cooper out, in waves.

  The act of discovery was my light. Although Ottawa was the principal thing illuminated, it was through Ottawa, or with it, or in it, that I found my bearings away from my mother and Henry, and without them.

  You see what I mean?

  Ten years passed during which the outside world mattered more to me than mother, father, home and hearth. I made a concerted effort to put distance between myself and my childhood.

  Not that I was successful.

  The Years with Henry

  I often wonder why Henry’s feelings for my mother were not enough to keep them together.

  It was reckless of him to admit having coerced me into theft, but it’s unlikely a strong relationship would have foundered on such a small snag. Even if he had convinced me to steal her clothes, my mother should have forgiven him, if she really had been in love, and I have reason to believe she was in love with Henry.

  (I’m assuming, as I always do, that cohabitation is a necessary complement to love, an expression of affection. Having had no real home of my own for most of my early years, I am sometimes despondent about the home I missed when Henry and my mother separated. I blame myself for a failure that may not have been a failure. It was only I who needed them to live together, after all. Their relationship continued, in its own way, until the end of their lives, and yet…)

  Their separation, if that’s what you call it, was not bitter.

  One day, my mother and I went out to look at an apartment. We’d gone out to look for apartments often enough for me to think the occasion unremarkable. I was bored.

  The apartment building, near Bank and Cooper, was not far from Henry’s home. It was old and grey, exceptional only for its metal balconies, so rusty they looked as though they might clatter down at any time.

  It was a little better inside, but not much: yellow walls, tall ceilings, two large bedrooms, big windows. It smelled sour, though, and the kitchen was small. We paced about the empty rooms for a while, but I assumed she’d say what she always said

  – Thank you. I don’t think so.

  Instead, she turned to the landlord, a man about whom I remember only the Brylcreem.

  – Two hundred is expensive, she said. I’ll give you one-fifty.

  And that was it.

  – What about Henry? I asked.

  – He has his own home, she answered.

  Nor was Henry surprised when she told him we were moving.

  – Is there enough room for the two of you? he asked.

  * * *

  —

  When the day came to move, he helped us. The three of us carried cardboard boxes along Cooper. We had little to take, my mother and I. In two years, I’d acquired a few more clothes and dozens of books. My mother may have had a few more things than I, but not many.

  In fact, the only real inequity was in sleeping quarters. My mother had bought a bed for herself, but there was none for me.

  Henry offered to buy one or to give us the bed I’d been sleeping in, but rather than take his money my mother suggested – she suggested – I stay with Henry until she could afford a bed for me. After all, our new home was so close to Henry’s it would not be like living apart. And it was only temporary, you see.

  – If that’s what you want…, said Henry.

  They looked to me, perhaps expecting some protest.

  – I don’t care, I said.

  Not that I wouldn’t have preferred to live with my mother. I had mixed feelings for Henry, guilt mostly, yet I wasn’t about to show my feelings to either of them.

  (I could never bring myself to return any of the things I’d stolen, and, over time, I lost most of them.)

  – Then it’s settled, said my mother.

  The problem of my lodging was settled, yes, and, though I was not happy, this new arrangement turned out for the best.

  To begin with, though it took only four months for her to buy me a bed, by
the time she did, I was so comfortable with Henry I continued to sleep at his home almost as often as I did at hers. During those first months, I saw her almost every day. She spent most of her early evenings with us and, when she left for the night, Henry left me to my own devices. That freedom was more than compensation for the loss of my mother’s company.

  And it was in these months that my bond with Henry was mended.

  * * *

  —

  These years with Henry, from 1969 to 1978, are even more sketchy than the first two. I find it difficult to recall specific moments, their sequence, or the emotions they provoked.

  For the first few days, I lived in dread of confrontation, convinced that Henry would reprove me for the lies I’d told, but there was not a word, not a sign. It was as if the whole thing had happened to someone other than Henry, or had been perpetrated by someone other than me.

  Instead, it was now that Henry told me about his own childhood: his parents’ death, his lonely days, rain from a blue sky, the green skin of a coconut, and the ocean, the ocean, the ocean…He made himself less threatening, less adult.

  We returned to the lab together, for the first time since the fiasco with gold. Here too he treated me as something of an equal, and though our work was less dramatic than goldmaking, it was more engaging in the long run.

  I still had the periodic table memorized, and I was just as fascinated by the elements, so it was relatively easy for him to teach me simple equations, the first being

  2H2 + O2 → 2H2O

  (each side of the equation with its proper complement of atoms, nothing lost).

  * * *

  —

  Over the years, when we weren’t talking about his childhood, or playing at chemistry, we spoke about life, from birth to death, by way of books.

  – You should read Gravida, he suggested one day when we were discussing dreams.