ALSO BY WAYNE JOHNSTON
The Story of Bobby O’Malley
The Time of Their Lives
The Divine Ryans
Human Amusements
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
Baltimore’s Mansion
The Navigator of New York
The Custodian of Paradise
A World Elsewhere
The Son of a Certain Woman
First Snow, Last Light
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2021 1310945 Ontario Inc.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The mystery of right and wrong / Wayne Johnston.
Names: Johnston, Wayne, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210145390 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210145447 | ISBN 9780735281639 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735281646 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8569.O3918 M97 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Cover image: Olga Tupikina / Getty Images
Cover design: Terri Nimmo
Text design: Terri Nimmo, adapted for ebook
a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Wayne Johnston
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cape Town
Rachel
St. John’s 1983
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Wade
Wade
Rachel
Rachel
Wade
Wade
Wade
Wade
Wade
Wade
Wade
Cape Town (1985)
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Wade
Wade
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Rachel
Wade
Amsterdam (1985)
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Wade
Rachel
Wade
St. John’s
Rachel
Hans
Rachel
Wade
Wade
Rachel
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For Angela, untimely torn;
For Carol, who was second born;
For Barbara, third born, like me;
For you, the youngest, Rosemarie.
Before I found the yellow wood,
I fell in with the Sisterhood.
The silent sirens of these coasts
were mortal once but now are ghosts.
They lost their way one winter night
when they misread the Cape Spear light,
the flash of blue that comes and goes
at intervals that no one knows.
Unschooled in what the lost must do,
they sang and lost their voices, too.
Although the sirens could not sing,
they watched and witnessed everything.
They could not sing but they could write—
they wrote their songs night after night
until they solved, in their last song,
the Mystery of Right and Wrong.
The song they wrote no one has heard—
they taught it to me word by word.
I know it well but no one who
can sing the way that sirens do.
—Rachel van Hout, The Arelliad
CAPE TOWN
RACHEL
One Saturday, when I was seven, I climbed up onto the roof of our house in Rosebank. I stood on the rail of the back deck, hoisted myself onto the flat roof of the porch, shimmied up the drainage pipe onto the main roof, where, on my hands and in bare feet, I clung to the clay tiles, scrambled to the peak of the house and wrapped my arms around the chimney. The rough bricks warm against my cheek, I nodded off to sleep. I was spotted by a neighbour three houses down and woke to the sound of my father shouting, “Don’t move, Rachel. Stay exactly where you are.” Still holding the chimney, I threw one leg over the peak of the roof and sat astride it, looking down at all the people who had gathered to look up at me. I waved and some of them waved back. Some looked distraught, some took pictures. Two fire trucks came screaming down the street and parked along the curb. As a fireman was ascending his ladder, I told him I wouldn’t let go of the chimney unless he promised to give me two rand once we were on the ground. He promised. I was rescued like a cat from a tree, the crowd applauding when we made it safely down. I saw my father give a two-rand coin to the fireman, who then gave it to me, though my father later took it back, had it framed and hung it on the wall of our front room. The caption read: “Rachel’s Ransom.” Side by side with the coin was a photograph of me up there on the roof, unconcernedly astride the house as if it was some enormous, well-tempered horse.
Among the many things pasted in the family photo albums was the brief correspondence that took place between me and the president of South Africa, Jim Fouché, in May of 1968. It began when, in school, we were asked to write a letter of appreciation to him. I wrote: “Dear Mr. Fouché, I am very glad to have you as a State President. Lots of Love and Kisses. XXXXX. Rachel van Hout.” My father sent my letter with a covering note in which he described me as “a very sincere little girl” and hoped the president could take a moment to reply. Mr. Fouché wrote back, saying that he was “glad to have such a nice little girl as one of my people,” and hoped I could visit his swimming pool so that “I can meet you and give you my kisses in return. Best regards and kisses. XXXXXXX Uncle Jim.” My father replied to Mr. Fouché, claiming that he had had the letter framed and that it was now hanging on the wall above my bed. My mother explained this lie to me by saying, “Your father likes to remember things as they should have been.”
There was a photograph of Dad in the albums, taken when he was a young man in Holland and not yet wearing glasses, though he was already balding. He is looking just to his right, away from the camera, sporting a neckerchief, dashing, intense, unyielding, trying to look modest about his feats in the Dutch Resistance, which all who saw the photograph would know him to be famous for, would admire him for, things he wished had nev
er needed to be done and took no pleasure in remembering.
There was another photo showing Dad, in winter in Cape Town, smiling, sitting on a park bench surrounded by leafless trees and wearing a light coat that seemed to have a fur collar until you looked closer and saw that he was posing with a pet monkey wrapped like a stole around his neck. The monkey’s name was Chimp. Dad appeared in many pictures thus adorned by Chimp, whom the rest of us couldn’t stand. He was an unhygienic, ubiquitous nuisance, as likely to stretch out on the dinner table as to lie quietly beneath it at Dad’s feet.
* * *
—
“The four girls,” our parents called us, always emphasizing the four as if my father, Hans, and my mother, Myra, who always went by “My,” were the first parents who had ever had to contend with having that many daughters but no sons. We were, in order of descending age: Gloria, Carmen, Bethany and Rachel. Hans was the lone male among a feminine collective of five. “We gave up trying for a boy,” my mother often told people, whether she had just met them or had known them for years. “Hans was worried that, if we had a fifth girl in a row, he would feel like the last of his species.” Girls’ and women’s things were everywhere around the house. Bras, nylons, tampons, knickers, high-heeled shoes, purses, dresses, compacts, tweezers, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, earrings, necklaces.
The four girls. In the albums, we were often posed in descending order of age from left to right: the four girls riding on an elephant at Cape Town’s zoo, facing sideways on a bench just wide enough to hold us all, me at the far right peering out from beneath the brim of the large straw hat that, from the age of four, I couldn’t bear to be without; the four girls in front of the family car, or spanning the driveway, or perched like birds in the branches of a jacaranda tree in Pietermaritzburg, where Bethany was born; the four of us acting as flower girls at a wedding, dressed in white, wearing small crucifixes on chains around our necks, though the only thing the van Houts did religiously was go to lunch on Sunday.
We sailed away from South Africa on the Edinburgh Castle in late July of 1969—first class from Cape Town to Southampton, courtesy of a new and obscure university, such was its desperation for qualified faculty. The voyage, which followed the western coast of Africa north to England, took two weeks. In the albums, there were many mementos of the journey, including a photograph of my sisters and me taken at a party at which all the children in first class were issued personalized Neptune diplomas, signed by the captain, certifying that we had crossed the equator. Chubby-faced and beaming in the photo, my sisters and I are again wearing white dresses and have wide white hairbands, the four of us posing side by side, our Neptune diplomas at waist level, our resemblance to each other uncanny despite the discrepancies in height, our eyes as alike as those of quadruplets. We swam in the outdoor pool, which stayed open until late at night, and spent the balance of our time in the games room and the massive dining room, never going to our cabin until we were so tired that even thirteen-year-old Gloria had to be carried there by Dad.
There were photos of us bobbing for apples on the ship, me on my knees, head submerged in a plastic tub of water, my frilly white underpants showing; the four of us competing as a team in a tug-of-war with four other girls. But there were no shipboard photos of our parents. My mother had cried for days after my father told her we were leaving South Africa for Canada. Gloria didn’t want to go either, because she had a boyfriend. I don’t remember how Carmen and Bethany felt about it, but I was young enough to think that we were leaving everything, good and bad, behind.
It seemed to me that the migration of the van Houts, ultimately bound for a remote island in the North Atlantic, was an epic one, especially as we travelled by sea and were therefore so long in transit. Four girls uprooted from their childhood home and taken half a world away. Cultural displacement—a lot of things were attributed to that.
Every night, on the Edinburgh Castle, Dad read to us girls from something he’d been writing for years and called The Ballad of the Clan van Hout, the first time he read from it when we were not at home. He started with the opening passage because, he said, leaving South Africa reminded him of when he moved there from Amsterdam after the Second World War.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout, by Hans van Hout
THE PLEDGE (1962)
The guest room is the Ballad Room—
of all the rooms I like it best:
a guest room though we have no guests.
We meet here almost every night,
a banker’s lamp the only light;
the four of you upon the bed
where you lie head by head by head by head.
I now begin The Night Salon—
I feel a bit like Lord Byron
reading to a room of women
overcome by adoration,
swooning on the Ballad Bed,
four cherubs on a snow-white cloud,
each one of you so smitten
by the words that I have written,
little angels in pyjamas
considering my every comma,
reflecting on my choice of rhymes,
cherubic critics of my lines.
My girls, this is my pledge to you
that every word I write is true.
I dedicate to all of you
The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
(for I am he, let no one doubt
who took the time to write it out).
Who tells this tale as well as me?
Who knows a life as well as he
who lived the life he writes about?
The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
is yours and will be when I’m gone,
solely, wholly yours alone—
these lines are for the four of you
(but not for Mother, though they’re true).
Four muses! May you guide my pen:
(I think of Milton, who had nine—
the four of you inspire rhyme
far more than nine inspired him.)
The Iliad, the Odyssey:
I call upon your poetry
that I may meet the task ahead—
the Truth will out, as Shakespeare said!
You must read it to each other
(never speak of it to Mother),
the story of our family,
the four of you, your Mom and me,
until you know it word for word—
I mean it, girls, so mind my words—
until you know it word for word,
until you know it inside out,
The Ballad of the Clan van Hout.
This is a task of no great size—
rhymes are a cinch to memorize.
So memorize it line by line
(but never, never write it down…)
and page by page, and verse by verse.
(…or keep a copy in your purse!).
Say it softly to each other,
say it underneath the covers
(but not at the dinner table),
in your sleep if you are able.
When My van Hout is not about
the four of you can shout it out.
Say it aloud or in your head
when you are in the Sisters Bed,
the big bed that you all sleep in,
the biggest one that’s ever been.
I’ll read it to you every night
so that you’ll get the words just right.
So say the words along with me,
or memorize them secretly.
I love it in the Land of Hout
when all my girls just lie about
the bed at night, eyes wide open
with delight as you listen
<
br /> to me read to you about us,
not Peter Pan or Mother Goose,
not Heidi, or some kangaroos.
I read about the world you know,
things near at hand in our land,
our house, our merry band.
What better thing to read about
than the secret Land of Hout?
I spend my days awash in verse—
I write or mentally rehearse
a verse that I wrote long ago,
a verse that Gloria will know
and faithfully recite with me,
or interrupt, correcting me,
should I quote me unfaithfully.
My other three are mesmerized
by words that you don’t recognize.
You hear the sound, you hear the rhymes
and you join in from time to time.
You look from Gloria to me
and chant with us uncertainly,
afraid of making a mistake
that will force Gloria to break
a line, to go back and restart
to prove she knows it all by heart.
Rachel guesses the meaning of words
from what she’s seen and what she’s heard:
the looks on her sisters’ faces
are enough in many cases—
the squeals of laughter, gasps of fright—
the silence when the House by Night
appears, or demons climb the wall
and slide like ghosts into the hall.
You know the words so well it seems
they are the soundtrack of your dreams.
(The room is a tiny chapel,
not lit by flickering candles
but by that single banker’s lamp
from which a golden chain hangs limp.
Green, and tilted at an angle,
it casts its light upon the bed—
there isn’t light enough to read;
saying the words, I close my eyes
and see what I have memorized;
our voices in this solemn room,
five voices chanting in the gloom.)
Mother Myra must not hear it,
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 1
