by André Alexis
And off we went to find the Jensen.
The search for a book was inevitably as interesting as the book itself. We’d spend hours rummaging, pulling bright books from the shelves as we made our way through the library. For every Gravida, there was a Herodotus, a Marco Polo, a Natural History of Selborne.
Henry’s art was in guiding me to things that might be of abiding interest. I was already in the habit of reading anything that looked as if it would give the slightest pleasure, but over the years I was tactfully directed to things I’d missed.
To this day there are books I can’t pick up without thinking of Henry:
Flatland (I was 12 when I read it)
Gravida (14)
The Curves of Life (16)
The Brothers Karamazov (18)
Le parti pris des choses (18)
The Figure in the Carpet (20)
And once I’d finished a book, we would sit and talk about this character or that idea, about Fibonacci or a life in ten dimensions.
When we talked, I was usually the more tendentious, but Henry treated my opinions with respect, demurring only once when I called Smerdyakov good, but misguided.
– Don’t you feel for the dogs? he asked gently.
The only real arguments we had came not over literature but science. I could not find it in myself to respect the errors of great men. Aristotle’s version of biology struck me as ludicrous, and, yes, I could see the point of Lamarck’s flower-collecting, but I felt, or had learned, disdain for acquired characteristics, and, as to Hegel, well…what wasn’t impenetrable was rubbish and I, at twenty, wouldn’t have fed his Philosophy of Nature to a pig.
I take that all back now, of course, though as to Hegel, well…I’m still inclined to spare the pigs.
I don’t know that reading has helped me to live. I’m not certain it has prepared me for death, either, though Henry often mentioned that that was learning’s only good. I do know that, at twenty, I began to tire of it, or began to tire of the readings Henry suggested.
Once I’d chosen science as my métier, once I’d begun my Bachelor of Science, I avoided those of Henry’s books that were not connected to my pursuit; no novels, no poetry, and certainly no philosophy. I read only such volumes as were practical and edifying.
Edifying in theory, I mean. I don’t know that a textbook on molecular biology can be called more edifying than the Letters of Isaac Newton (a particular favourite of Henry’s), but I convinced myself it was. And I firmly closed another door between us.
Still, for many of the years before I left Henry’s home, reading was an aspect of our intimacy.
* * *
—
From time to time over the years, especially if he hadn’t seen her in a while, Henry would ask after my mother.
This was as painful for me as it must have been for him, because my mother began to see other men shortly after she moved into her own place. I inevitably disliked the men she saw and I’d say so.
– Well, Henry would answer, Mr So and So must have his good side.
How poorly he saw my mother’s flaws, or how few of them he allowed himself to admit. For instance, some of my mother’s lovers were genuinely abusive. There must have been something wrong somewhere.
And, since I myself could not love her as he did, Henry’s refusal to recognize my mother’s defects seemed foolish.
Naturally, as I grew older, I began to speculate on Love, on Henry’s love for my mother, my mother’s love for wretched men, their lovelessness, my lovelessness…what did it all mean?
Of course, as I took my own first steps in love, I became more tolerant of Henry’s blindness. Not that I understood his passion for my mother, not quite, but I found it less obscure.
I found it less obscure at sixteen, when my hormones began their treachery, but I was eighteen before I succumbed to feelings as intense, in principle, as Henry’s. (Let’s say I fell towards love. I don’t know that I actually loved, at eighteen.)
And the experience was mystifying.
First, the self-consciousness. My clothes are tight; my clothes are loose. Are my teeth straight enough? Do my feet sweat? Why wasn’t I born with more robust hair? What I wouldn’t give to be loquacious, to be strong and silent. I hate my mouth. I’d look better with green eyes, better with rugged shoulders. As if Nature were a shop where I’d bought all the wrong things: narrow-chested, weak-chinned, small hands, ears like palm fronds, hair in the wrong places, hairless in the wrong places.
And then, as if that weren’t excruciating enough, your mind goes off on a relentless tangent. It doesn’t matter what you smell, taste, or see, it all reminds you of Lucinda (Lucinda Papadoleus). A dog’s breath, in its very sourness, is a call to love. Black olives taste sweet. The moon is full and white when it’s full, full and white when it isn’t. And though I imagined my own body in its imperfection, hers I saw only in its radiance; the subtle curve of her nape, the graceful curve of her fingers, the delicate curve of her breasts, the precise curve of her nates.
It didn’t actually matter what I experienced, nor where I experienced it. It was all wonderful.
And finally, baffled as I was, my loins entered the fray. It felt as if I were following a radiator, and that’s before we were actually naked together, Lucinda and I. Frankly, I don’t know how I ever managed erection, or coition, or ejaculation. In fact, I think I was more often provoked into one or two of the three than I was into all three in proper order.
One learns to relax, however, and I was fortunate in my partner. Lucinda was understanding and sympathetic, but the sheer variety of miscues we discovered is astounding for such a simple and, in theory, instinctive recreation.
So, I was eighteen and my affections were, inexplicably, reciprocated by Lucinda Papadoleus, herself eighteen and from Winnipeg, a city I have admired ever since. And I began to see the point of Henry’s parable about Hornpayne. There were all sorts of complications in this, my first sexual relationship. And it was these that drove me to speak with Henry about love.
I assumed that he, if anyone, would be a willing guide to waters he’d obsessively sounded over the years. Instead, when I mentioned my feelings for Lucinda, Henry sighed and said
– It will pass, Tom.
The most disappointing words he ever spoke to me.
Not that he was wrong; Lucinda and I spent five months together and I spent the next six alone, recovering. It did pass, but I so resented Henry’s lack of sympathy that, as far as I remember, I never mentioned my personal life again; not a word about desire or love or trust.
I wondered, bitterly, what he might have felt if, when he spoke of my mother, I sighed and answered
– It will pass, Henry.
That is, I imagined my feelings for Lucinda were commensurate with his for my mother. I didn’t understand, at the time, that being young and in love, it was I who was blessed. “It will pass” was not a dismissal of the things I felt but an expression of compassion. First love dies before one realizes how extraordinary it is. It wasn’t
– It will pass, Tom
but
– (unfortunately) It will pass, Tom (but, if you’re lucky, there will be deeper love than this).
If I’d understood his words in this way at the time, I might have taken heart, but how could I have understood? With all the arrogance of my eighteen years, I did think myself blessed, and strong, and I was right, if “right” is what you call the almost total confusion of my strengths and weaknesses.
It was something like mistaken identity. Not knowing why I was blessed or why I was strong, not being whom I thought I was, what hope was there of knowing good fortune from misery?
It is only now, for instance, that I’ve begun to understand the singular dignity of Henry’s passion. To be hopelessly in love with a woman who has not even rejected you, to wait in patient lo
nging for her return, to wait without despair, keeping busy with the minute details of existence, with books, with endless experiments, maintaining an emptiness within, like sweeping a spare room, in the hope that…with the faith that…
All this I might have done, for a time, while in my twenties, or even in my thirties, if I had found the love of my life. But, to wait for decades? In one’s forties, fifties, sixties? For years I thought Henry a little contemptible, but as time passed, as time passes, his waiting moves slowly, in my imagination, from contemptible to something else.
Of course, I’m assuming that I now know more about Henry, that I understand at forty a man I could not understand at eighteen, but perhaps that’s assuming too much. Could it be that Henry Wing is both the ridiculous man I thought he was and the man who lived in loving dignity? Both? Neither?
Wouldn’t it be more honest to say, now: I never really knew him, I don’t understand him, yet I am deeply moved by the memory of his death.
* * *
—
As I mentioned, I spent hours and hours in Henry’s company, often sleeping in my own room at his house (our house), though my mother had moved out and I had another home, elsewhere. And again, of these ten years, the years before I moved into a place of my own, I remember so little.
What do I remember?
I remember Henry asking if there were any music I enjoyed, and I said yes, there’s Revolver – an album I’d heard, or heard of, in the years when British music was unavoidable. I’d heard of it, but the music of my time has never meant much to me.
Days later, when Henry bought Revolver, we sat together, respectfully listening to both sides of the album.
When it was done, he said
– It’s interesting, Tom, but it sounds like keening.
I was too embarrassed to admit that, yes, it was keening, and that I’d have preferred something older, Bach, say, or da Palestrina.
* * *
—
I remember catching him in the act of mending his suit jackets with needle and thread.
Mending isn’t always memorable, it’s true, but he did it with such precision. His jackets were draped on the chairs in the dining room. Henry was in shirtsleeves. He held up the arm of a jacket and inspected it. Then, after cutting away the threads of a previous darn, he meticulously mended an elbow.
His head was so close to the fabric I feared for his eyes at each pass of the needle, but he sang softly as he darned.
And when he finished, he went on to the next jacket, and the next, inspecting mends, pulling at buttons, and so on around the table, jacket to jacket, chair to chair, in a circle.
* * *
—
I remember some of the names of the “manservants” Henry had over the years: Peter, Richard, David, Sylvain…Patrick, Arthur, Robert, Drew, Edward, Samuel.
* * *
—
I remember helping him with his cyclopedia or listening to him enthuse about his latest discovery: occasionalism, oneirography, Nicolas of Cusa’s interminatum…
* * *
—
And I remember the moments that preceded my going away.
It was in the summer of 1978. I had decided, finally, to live on my own, away from Henry and away from my mother.
It wasn’t a going-away for good, you understand. I left most of my things where they were, taking only books, clothes, and Alexander, my first parrot, from Henry’s house; clothes and a bed from my mother’s.
I had packed my books into a dozen cardboard boxes. My clothes were in two old suitcases. Henry’s manservant, Sylvain I think it was, helped me bring the heavier boxes down from the third floor, while Henry himself brought down a suitcase and Alexander in his cage.
The day was beautiful, I think. It smelled of tar outside, and inside it smelled of cabbage soup, the only thing Sylvain cooked that even vaguely approached edible. The sun was so bright, it hurt to sit in the station wagon I’d borrowed, and I was worried Alexander would bake, though we weren’t going all that far, only to a basement at the corner of Lyon and Gilmour.
– Du perroquet grillé, Sylvain said. Miam miam.
When the boxes were packed away and I’d buckled the belt around Alexander’s cage, I went back into the house to say goodbye.
As I came in from the sunlight, I couldn’t see properly. Henry was in the foyer, waiting, but there was something amiss. He seemed uncomfortable.
– You haven’t left anything you need? he asked.
– No, I answered.
– You’re certain?
– Of course…
Henry looked unnaturally thin in his grey suit; head bowed, rubbing his glasses on the sleeve of his jacket. He looked ancient, not like Henry at all. It was as if, in walking from sun to shade, I’d crossed decades.
– See you later, Henry, I said.
He put on his glasses and we shook hands.
– I’m sorry I wasn’t your father, Tom.
What this had to do with anything, I couldn’t imagine.
– Yes, well, I don’t need one, I answered.
And then, once again
– See you later.
His hand was as dry as newsprint, or perhaps mine was damp. In any case, he smiled and he was Henry again as I left.
* * *
—
The idea of “Father” had already begun to dissipate as I shook Henry’s hand goodbye. It has almost entirely faded now, though I suppose I do feel a kind of intellectual curiosity. There are biological, historical, and perhaps even sociological questions to be resolved, but no emotional ones, not really.
– I wasn’t your father, Henry said.
And I remember how he said it: softly, accent on “wasn’t,” his hand in mine.
Is it possible he lied? He had lied to me about the transmutation of elements, but there he’d had good reason, or at least reason. He wanted to show me that if gold were so easily made, it would be worthless; that the idea of gold is infinitely more precious than gold itself.
He would think so, being a connoisseur of ideas, but never mind…
He had no reason, that I can see, to lie about his part in my birth.
The Years with Mother
You might think, if you’ve read this far, that our relationship (mine and my mother’s, I mean) would deteriorate over these ten years – from the accidental end of my childhood (1969) to its official passing (1978). And, for the longest time, my feelings for her were certainly adulterated, usually ambivalent; happily ambivalent, painfully ambivalent, ambivalent but optimistic, ambivalent and frightened, ambivalent and guilt-ridden.
For years I wasn’t any more comfortable with her than I was with Henry; not ideal circumstances for a rapprochement.
And yet…
One of the best things about my mother’s later life was that, though she loved Henry, she thought herself happier away from him, and she seemed more at ease with smaller doses of his affection.
She had that luxury. Nothing she did spoiled Henry’s feelings for her. She saw him as often or as little as she liked, for supper, for brunch on Sundays, to discuss my problems at school, to ask if I might stay with him when she was sent on one of her dreary government-sponsored courses in Chicoutimi or Trois-Rivières or Rouyn-Noranda…
I say she thought herself happy and seemed at ease. Ease and contentment aren’t the states I associate with my mother. Given her taste in men, I don’t see how she could have attained them. With my mother, I always felt, no matter where we were or what we were doing, an underlying restlessness. As far as I can remember, the only moments this wasn’t so were when she first sat with Henry, in silence, and on her deathbed when she was with me, again in silence.
Still, away from Henry she sometimes behaved as if she were unburdened and, it seems to me, she developed a sense of humour.
It’s possible, of course, that her sense of humour was constant and that it was I who learned to appreciate it. That would be just like my mother, constant in the most mercurial of instincts; but, in my own defence, I must say she had an unusual sense of humour.
For instance, an older woman in our neighbourhood owned a large black dog, a Newfoundland. The dog was intimidating but friendly, and the woman let it sniff about the streets on its own.
And then, a handful of youths moved into the house beside hers. From that time on, whenever we passed the woman on the street, she’d complain about their noise, which was deafening, their language, which was foul, and their filth, which was disgusting. It was all too much for the poor woman and, besides, the youths kept a vicious dog that terrorized the neighbourhood. That is, it terrorized the neighbourhood until, one day, the Newfoundland seriously injured it in a fray.
We were all of us grateful.
And then, not long afterwards, the Newfoundland was beaten to death, its body left on the sidewalk. The dog was almost certainly destroyed by the youths, but there were no witnesses to the killing.
You can imagine the older woman’s despair.
Anyway, we were speaking of the incident at supper one night, my mother and I, both of us horrified by the dog’s death. Distracted, she pushed my supper onto my plate and, distracted, I looked down to see what it was. (It didn’t usually pay to look.)
– What’s this? I asked.
It was something charred, smothered in cream of mushroom. And my mother answered
– I didn’t want the poor dog to go to waste, Thomas.
For a second, I almost believed her. She’d spoken so softly, so feelingly.
It says much about my younger self that I believed, however fleetingly, my mother had collected the dog’s body, skinned it, and served it in Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom. (It says as much about her cooking.)
Although I was put off my food, I laughed. We both did. We laughed together, though it was odd to hold such conflicting images in my imagination: the dog’s blood-spattered body on the pavement and, at the same time, my mother desperately trying to skin the animal for supper.
