Childhood

by André Alexis

  So, when the doctor said

  – She has cancer

  I was confused.

  – Cancer?

  – Yes. It sounds as if you didn’t know.

  In the days that followed, I had time to meditate on what I didn’t know.

  We were not alone, my mother and I, though the house was quiet. The house was quiet and, during the day, most of the lights were off, so as not to disturb her sleep. My mother never again left her room, but her nurse, a cheerful, big-boned woman, insisted that there be soft light at all times, in all rooms, if possible.

  – Ohh, Mr MacMillan, it’s so much better to go out like we come in.

  Meaning what, I wondered, though I had no use for bright light, anyway. It wasn’t as if I wanted to read, and when I needed respite from my deathwatch, I went outside and walked around. She herself, the nurse I mean, kept the house tidy, saw to my mother’s needs, and, when she wasn’t at her duties, read in the kitchen, by lamplight: The Chamber.

  And my mother…

  My mother was as thin as my grandmother, her hair damp and white. The cancer, which began in her breast, was now so deep it had invaded her bones. She had broken an arm while turning in her sleep. It was better for her to lie still.

  For the most part, she slept, and I sat in an armchair beside her watching her struggle with the white topsheet, as if the sheet itself were her tormentor. From time to time, when she was awake and knew I was there, I held her hand, but I was so worried I’d break her bones, it gave me no comfort, whatever comfort it gave her.

  Though it was as much the dim light as the change in her appearance, it was disconcerting to see Edna in Katarina. I recognized my own mother by her eyes, her nose, her forehead, and her ears. It was in these small things she was my mother.

  I was not always myself for her, either. She called me “Father,” and “Henry,” and, once, “Mother.” (It’s odd to think that, in the two of us, briefly, two versions of my grandmother held hands before whatever it is that Death is.)

  Not that we didn’t speak in the two days we had together, she as herself, myself as Thomas. We did, but not much. Or, I should say, the moments during which we used words were brief. We spoke without them, or without exchanging them.

  At times she was

  aware of my presence, smiling

  aware of my presence, unsure of whom I was

  aware of my presence, smiling, unsure where we were.

  And I would speak.

  – I’m here, Mother…

  – It’s Thomas…

  – We’re in Petrolia…

  And the nurse, on her side of the bed, with gentle authority

  – Your mother needs her rest, Mr MacMillan.

  – She mustn’t exert herself.

  – Your mother needs…

  And my mother, once, softly

  – Thomas…who is that bitch?

  – It’s your nurse, Mother.

  And the nurse

  – I’m so sorry, Mrs MacMillan. You want to be alone with your son.

  And she left us alone.

  * * *

  —

  You would think, these being our last moments together, that my mother and I would speak of essential things. I’ve never had any luck with essential things, though. Besides, neither of us knew these were our last moments. We spoke about the weather, about the drapes, about the bedsheets, and finally

  – Are you comfortable?

  – Is it night?

  – Not quite yet.

  – Where’s Henry?

  – He’s in Ottawa.

  – I missed you, Thomas.

  – I missed you too.

  – Is Henry with you?

  – He’s not here…

  And then, on the verge of sleep

  – Did he tell you…?

  – Henry?

  – I’m tired, sweetheart…

  And it occurred to me to say

  – Wait…

  thinking there was something I meant to say, something like

  – Wait, I want to…

  or

  – Wait, I haven’t told you…

  but, unable to discover what else I wanted to say, I said

  – Sleep, Mother.

  So my last words to her were as unrevealing as hers were to me.

  * * *

  —

  I might have asked about my father.

  At the time, however, my father’s identity was not in my thoughts. I was concerned for my mother. I wondered if she was comfortable, if the light was painful to her, if there were not enough light, if the bed had always been this small…

  My father?

  I am, I think, Henry’s son, whoever fathered me, and yet…

  My father, given that I had one, would have resembled Mr Mataf much more than he did Henry.

  Mr Mataf was the archetypal man in my mother’s life. All the others, save Henry, were variations on him, some taller, some shorter, some more violent, some less resourceful.

  (Of course, it’s unlikely Mr Mataf actually was my father. For one thing, my mother was not constant. It’s difficult to believe she’d have maintained a relationship with any man from the year of my birth to the year she returned for me, from 1957 to 1967. For another, if Mr Mataf had known I was his son, he’d have behaved differently, I think, not just where I was concerned, but in general.)

  For Henry to have been my father, my mother would have to have met him, at the very latest, in 1956.

  There’s nothing improbable in that, but is it possible Henry knew he was my father and kept it from me?

  Why would they have withheld this, for thirty years?

  What reason could there be for such stubborn silence?

  No, I don’t think Henry was my father. Henry was among my mother’s final thoughts, that’s all, and that was less surprising to me than the tone of her voice. It was sad to hear her ask

  – Where’s Henry?

  It was she who left him, after all. Had she wished it, he’d have been with her then, or she with him.

  What to make of a woman whose life was spent loving men with whom she couldn’t stay?

  * * *

  —

  From the moment I said

  – Sleep, Mother

  the room was quiet.

  Outside it was early afternoon and bright. The streets were childless. It was late summer. I walked through town: towards Reeces Corners, back again towards Oil City, over to the golf course and the tile factory…

  A long walk through a town that was neither mine nor, as yet, not-mine. I kept my head down, to avoid familiar buildings or faces, looking up only to admire the trees along the road.

  I returned when it was evening and dark for true.

  The streetlamps were on, as were the lights in my mother’s living room. The front door was open.

  In the kitchen, Dr Attale, the same man who’d greeted me on my arrival, was speaking to my mother’s nurse.

  – Her last was…?

  And, seeing me

  – Mr MacMillan, my condolences. Your mother has died.

  I noticed the initials on his black bag (H. C.) and the white of the nurse’s socks.

  They were looking for something erratic in my behaviour, both of them, but I have rarely felt so stable.

  – Thank you, I said.

  I went to the bedroom, because it seemed the thing to do. The nurse had brushed my mother’s hair, straightened the room, and opened the curtains. It was night and a lamp was on.

  My mother’s eyes were closed. I stifled the impulse to open them.

  The bedsheet was pulled up to her chin.

  Despite myself, I bent down and kissed her forehead and though I felt a great many things, I ma
naged to throttle my emotions.

  * * *

  —

  My mother died at 58 years, 7 months, 23 days.

  She was buried three days later, on a Tuesday.

  There was a small number of people at her funeral. I knew none of them, save for Irene Schwartz.

  – I’m sorry about your mother, she said.

  She’d come to see me as much as she’d come to pay her respects to Katarina. Irene held my hand and brushed her cheek against mine. Her skin was dry.

  – How is your mother? I asked.

  – You know, Mother lives in Minneapolis now.

  – I didn’t know, I said.

  And, for a moment, I was saddened at the thought I might not see Mrs Schwartz again.

  – I’ll tell her about your mother.

  We sat through the service, Irene and I. We went together to the graveyard and watched my mother’s coffin lowered into the same ground that held my grandmother and grandfather.

  (It will never hold me.)

  When the coffin had settled and the priest turned away, Irene said

  – Come visit us, Tom. My husband would love to meet you.

  – Of course.

  – My daughter looks so much like Mother…You must visit.

  – Of course, I said

  though I never did.

  * * *

  —

  The days immediately following my mother’s death, and before her burial, were among the most tranquil I have known.

  It’s true I had to contend with my mother’s lawyer, a man who kept me in his office for an hour before reading her simple will.

  And then, the day after my mother’s body was carried away, I made arrangements to sell the house:

  Family Home for Sale

  All Reasonable Offers Considered

  My mother’s house was tidy. There was nothing to clean and very little to straighten.

  So, once I’d completed the business of her death, I shut myself in.

  My mother had accumulated a cupboard full of soup; consommé, tins of beef consommé, bought on sale, I imagine, there being no logical explanation for so much of it. There were stale crackers, there was butter, and there was a jar of mint jelly. Not that it mattered to me. I was not hungry.

  I wandered about the house, spending time in my old room or in the kitchen or in the living room or, at last, in my mother’s bedroom. (How alarmingly easy it is, at times, to do nothing at all.)

  It was painful to enter my mother’s bedroom, difficult to stay, but I did stay.

  For a woman who was not obviously nostalgic until her later years, my mother had preserved a good deal of her own past.

  As in my grandmother’s time, a mirror hung above the chest of drawers. My grandparents still looked out from their silver frame. The room no longer smelled of lavender, but the bookshelves were filled with the same schoolbooks, hymnals, and books for children.

  And yet, none of these things, the bookshelves, the hymnals, or the chest of drawers, was as perplexing to me as her letters, still where I’d found them thirty years before, but now in amongst my mother’s things.

  You understand, it wasn’t the letters that confused me. I’d read them already; without much understanding, it’s true, but, still, their content wasn’t entirely unexpected. Rather, I found it sad that she’d kept mementos of her time in the wilderness. It must have pained her to read them.

  Dear Mother,

  I’m so grateful you can keep Thomas a little longer. I miss him so much. I really wish you could send me a picture of him, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in Saskatoon and I don’t know where we’re going from here.

  You can’t imagine how hard it is to be separated from your baby. I don’t think you can compare it to anything else. I’ll be coming back for him as soon as I find work. I know some people who have a car. We’ll drive back for Thomas as soon as I find work.

  I’ll write again when I have a new address.

  Bye for now,

  Kata

  That, written in 1961, is the first of the letters my grandmother kept. The rest, all of which I have before me now, are much the same, all promising my mother’s speedy return, some asking for money. In several letters she sounds remorseful, in others resentful, hopeful, contrite…

  The tone of the letters is much as you’d expect from a young woman who despised her mother. There are few details about her whereabouts, even fewer about the people she is with. In only one letter does she actually give an address: 77 Cooper Street, but in Vancouver.

  Perhaps most disappointing is that when, in 1965, she began to write little messages to me in her letters home, they were as unrevealing as her words to my grandmother. I sometimes think it was kindness that prevented my grandmother from reading these letters to me. It would have been upsetting to hear that my mother was on the verge of return when she was not.

  I don’t mean to suggest that these letters were meaningless to me, that while I waited for my mother’s funeral I rediscovered a few worthless, time-yellowed pages, thirty sheets in all, that I might just as easily have left behind with the other things I left behind: clothes, books, furniture, umbrellas, tins of consommé.

  Nothing could be further from the truth.

  While I was alone in the house, I read my mother’s letters over and over, not anxiously, not even with nostalgia, but meticulously. I picked through my mother’s words as Mrs Williams used to pick through heaps of white rice to find blackened grains, or worse.

  I would have liked to discover some hint of my origins, I suppose, or a vivid depiction of her struggle to return, of her state of mind.

  For two days I had the letters spread out on the kitchen table; each within reach, their pages smelling of the wooden drawer where they’d been sequestered. I read them over and over until, after a while, I was as familiar with their spaces as I was with their words, and each of her words was flooded by possibilities. For instance, “Dear” and “Mother”…

  “Dear Mother”: that was conventional, it’s true, but it was impossible to tell whether she meant “Dear Mother” or “Dear Mother” or both or neither or some combination of the two in which “Dear” attained the importance of “Mother” or moved away from it. Resentment, deep regard, love, mistrust: a host of possible emotions flowed over or settled into each word, like water on limestone. As you can imagine, if words as banal as “Dear” and “Mother” had such volutes, I had no chance with more complex words, like “grateful” and “Saskatoon.” After a while, I lost the sense of them entirely.

  For two days I spent hours in the kitchen, curtains open in the day, lights on at night, standing over my mother’s letters or sitting before them, a child looking for…

  A child looking for its mother? No, not quite that. I wasn’t filled with panic or longing. I was, for the most part, calm. Still, there was a moment, late the second night, exhausted from reading…there was a moment when I was, briefly, overwhelmed.

  I’d been looking at my mother’s words for so long, they actually disappeared. It was as if bleach had fallen on the words my mother wrote. The rest of the world remained: the table, the light, the darkness outside the kitchen window.

  I began to despair. I was convinced my stability was lost, when I noticed that though the words had gone, the punctuation hadn’t. The almost insignificant ticks my mother had made on paper, the periods and commas, remained.

  This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me often, you understand, and even at the time I knew my mind was pulling my leg, but I saw the periods and commas not as punctuation but rather as the short breaths my mother had taken.

  Dear Mother (breathy

  I’m so grateful you can keep Thomas a little longer (long breath) I miss him so much (long breath) I really wish you could send me a pictu
re (breath,)…

  And it suddenly occurred to me that the little ticks that live in the carpet of a page, the periods and commas I mean, were the only precious things in her letters. They were the silences by which I’d known her for years. Had I been able to see them, I’d have erased her words myself, the better to see the punctuation.

  For one ecstatic moment, somewhere near the middle of a quiet night in early September, two days after her death, I could see and hear the soft sound of my mother’s breathing: through me, above me, within me.

  You understand, I needed sleep.

  And I fell asleep with my head on the kitchen table, the pages of my mother’s letters scattered about; lights on, lights out.

  * * *

  —

  This wasn’t a decisive moment in my life. Nothing was revealed, nothing resolved, and, naturally, when I awakened, I could see the words my mother had written.

  Still, it was something. It was the first episode of farewell, let’s say. And the next morning, as I shook Irene’s hand and answered

  – Of course

  I had no desire to see anything more of Petrolia.

  I was already gone.

  * * *

  —

  I left the next day: Wednesday.

  I had hours to myself on the way home. Southwestern Ontario curled up behind me, like an old map.

  My imagination was filled with versions of you, of my mother, and, in particular, of Henry. I scarcely noticed the landscape, though, on the skirts of London, the touches of red and yellow distracted me for a kilometre or two.

  Henry was first in my thoughts for a number of reasons:

  I would have to tell him of my mother’s death. (I might have told him at once, by telephone, but I’d put it off.)

  I wanted to comfort him on the death of the woman he loved.

  Henry was now the only person I knew whose memories of my mother somewhat coincided with my own.

  I wondered how he’d known about my mother’s cancer and why he hadn’t told me.