Childhood Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Childhood

  “Outstanding…. A deeply moving narrative, not just about families and growing up but about the frustrating slipperiness of memory itself….”

  – Books in Canada

  “An exquisite novel that delivers lasting literary delight. Highly recommended.”

  – Library Journal (starred review)

  “Poignantly combines feelings of loss, regret, forgiveness and hope with a strong sense of place…. The reader is not only engaged, but engrossed.”

  – Times Literary Supplement

  “A splendid début…. A genuinely elegant work.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  “An impressive first novel…. Crafted, precise, understated, it is a memorable portrait of someone striving to order and control their emotional inheritance.”

  – Esquire

  “Compellingly written, graceful and original…. Alexis’ novel is superb….”

  – London Free Press

  “Wry, finely subtle and yet impressively complex, Childhood is a wonderful first novel.”

  – Edmonton Journal

  “Artfully imagined…. Penetrating, touchingly real….”

  – Now (four-star review)

  BOOKS BY ANDRÉ ALEXIS

  FICTION

  Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994)

  Childhood (1998)

  DRAMA

  Lambton Kent (1999)

  Copyright © 1998 by André Alexis

  Published in trade paperback with flaps by McClelland & Stewart 1998

  Trade paperback edition published 2000

  This ebook edition published 2020

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN: 978-0-7710-0667-8

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-0801-6

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between characters portrayed and persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover design and image manipulation: Brian Bean

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Book by André Alexis

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  History

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Geography

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  The Sciences

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Housecleaning

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  A Note on the Text

  About The Author

  To Thecla Kathleen

  Michele Lise

  Denise Ann

  And

  Horace Clayton Alexis

  Quels livres as-tu lus,

  en dehors de ceux qui conservent la voix des femmes

  et des choses irréelles?

  …

  Et les livres que tu écris

  bruiront de choses irréelles –

  irréelles à force de trop être,

  comme les songes.

  What books have you read,

  besides those that preserve the voices of women

  and things unreal?

  …

  And the books you write

  will rustle with things unreal –

  unreal because too real,

  like dreams.

  – JEAN-JOSEPH RABEARIVELO

  HISTORY

  I

  It has been six months since my mother died; a shade less since Henry passed. In that time, I’ve stayed home and I’ve kept things tidy.

  They have been much on my mind.

  I’ve been thinking about Love, you see, and theirs was the first and most puzzling romance I witnessed. I didn’t understand it at the time. I still find it odd, though now it also seems a sad thing to contemplate.

  Contemplate it I will, though, or contemplate it I must.

  I’ve decided to write, to do something between housecleaning and the dreams I have about your shoulders.

  Not that I’m idle.

  I do a great deal of reading and some cooking. Besides, you’d be surprised how much there is to be done in or around a room. It’s far from dull, I can tell you, but diversion depends on discipline. You have to break the day into manageable portions, and that takes a clock and a little resolve.

  It takes a timetable:

  7 O’clock: I am awakened by the alarm.

  8 O’clock: I clean my bedroom.

  9 O’clock: I feed Alexander (seed).

  10 O’clock: I read poetry.

  11 O’clock: I continue to read poetry.

  12 O’clock: I prepare my meal of the day. I eat it.

  1 O’clock (PM): I write letters (to the Citizen).

  2 O’clock (PM): I clean my bedroom.

  3 O’clock (PM): I prepare tea.

  4 O’clock (PM): I set out for a walk, and walk with you in mind. (We’ve known each other for over a year now.)

  5 O’clock (PM): I read the newspaper.

  6 O’clock (PM): I read philosophy.

  7 O’clock (PM): I continue to read.

  8 O’clock (PM): I meditate on what I’ve read.

  9 O’clock (PM): I feed Alexander (fruit, vegetables).

  10 O’clock (PM): I bathe.

  11 O’clock (PM): I prepare the next day’s schedule.

  12 (AM) to 6 (AM): Sleep.

  Of course, this gives you no idea of the wealth of my existence. It doesn’t take me an hour to wake from sleep. Nor does it take me an hour to feed Alexander. I can make tea in fifteen minutes, and there are days when I have no letters to write. I don’t confine myself to the reading of poetry or philosophy, and, although I do clean the bedroom twice a day, there are a number of ways to go about it, each with its own appeal.

  Still, none of this gives me the focus I’d like. I brood. I often brood.

  Perhaps writing is the discipline I need.

  So I will write, precisely, about my mother and Henry, about Love, with you in mind, from the beginning.

  I had a sing
ular childhood.

  My parents went their separate ways at my birth and I was sent to live with my grandmother.

  My grandmother, Mrs Edna MacMillan, lived in Petrolia.

  I don’t think she was pleased to have me. She was past the age of easy tolerance, and she was cantankerous. (When I was five or six, I went through a phase about God making mountains He himself couldn’t lift, until my grandmother told me that He didn’t exist, so there was no use my going on about it.)

  Also, she used to drink a lot of dandelion wine. And, from the time I could tell a dandelion from a thistle, she sent me out to cull them from lawns and fields all over the neighbourhood.1

  She wasn’t a cruel woman, but she was erratic. You couldn’t always tell where you stood with her. At least, I couldn’t. And her only loves were the wine she made and the poetry of Archibald Lampman:

  From plains that reel to southward, dim,

  The road runs by me white and bare;

  Up the steep hill it seems to swim

  Beyond, and melt into the glare…

  And so on…

  It was a strange combination, wine and Lampman, but I once used the poetry against the wine, so I was grateful for it.

  My grandmother was sixty-five years old when I was abandoned to her care, a retired schoolteacher, thin as a compass, with an aureole of white hair. Her eyes were liver brown, and her nose was slightly bent to one side of her face.

  Outwardly, she was predictable. She usually wore one of two dresses: there was a long, short-sleeved summer dress with red and black flowers on a white background, and there was a long-sleeved winter dress with red and white flowers on a black background. She woke at seven o’clock every morning, and she drank a small tumbler of wine. If she’d had a bad night, she would drink two.

  Perhaps, in the distant past, this steadied her nerves, but, when I knew her, the wine didn’t help at all.

  When she was really depressed, there was no telling what breakfast would be like. I had Pablum for breakfast until I was seven years old, so the Pablum was a sure thing. Sometimes she fed me herself. Sometimes she put a bowl of Pablum before me. Sometimes she gave me a spoon, sometimes a fork. And once, in a fit of giddiness, she used her wooden spoon as a catapult and fired the warm Pablum at me from the pot.

  Much of how the day turned out was determined by breakfast.

  I’m not saying I was abused, but there were times when she’d hit me pretty hard with her wooden spoon, and times when she’d hit me with whatever was nearby. (I don’t know if anyone else has been punished with an egg-beater, but I was, once.) I can’t always remember why she hit me. There wasn’t always a good reason, but the time I’m thinking of, when I used her beloved Lampman against her, was one of those when I’d done something wrong.

  I’d fallen in the field across from our house and cut my hand on a broken Mason jar. Instead of asking for a bandage, as I should have, I’d gone to get one for myself. The bandages were on the lower shelf of the bathroom cabinet, and I could just reach them if I stood on my toes. What I did, though, was knock over a bottle of iodine. It shattered in the sink. My grandmother came to see what was going on.

  I was six or seven at the time, no match for her. She had been drinking, and she had a frying pan with her. I saw it rise above me. I put up my hands to protect my head. I don’t know what inspired me to recite poetry, but I did:

  Now hath the summer reached her golden close,

  And, lost amid her cornfields, bright of soul,

  Scarcely perceives from her divine repose

  How near, how swift, the inevitable goal…

  There I was, hands raised up, squeaking out the first verse of “September,” the only Lampman I knew by heart, having heard it from her hundreds of times.

  And the poem smoothed her out.

  – Clever monkey, she said

  walking unsteadily back to the kitchen and her kitchenware.

  It all seems improbable now, and yet I remember every word of the poem. The incident is all the more remarkable in that, at that age, I couldn’t have understood much of Lampman’s meaning.

  * * *

  —

  Petrolia wasn’t very interesting. I can say that now, having other places to compare it to. I suppose it was a fine environment for a child, though. There was a good deal of nature: the earth, mice, frogs, insects, the froth of spawning carp, turtles, and birds.

  The town was cold and white in winter. It was wet in spring, warm in summer, and cold again in autumn; just what you’d expect from Southern Ontario. There were few people, and fewer buildings. There was a golf course, a tile factory, a dam. And in spring, when the only river in town overflowed, it usually managed to take a small child with it.

  My friends at the time, I mean when I was five or six, were Sandy Berwick, the Goodman sisters, and the Schwartzes, all of whom lived close by.

  Sandy’s backyard abutted ours. His father was Reverend Berwick. We were friends because I was the only child who could stand him.

  Our first meeting went something like this:

  I was in the garden pulling weeds. From his side of the fence, Sandy said

  – My name’s Berwick…What’re you doing?

  – Picking weeds.

  – For Mrs MacMillan?

  – For my grandmother.

  – She’s very old…

  – Yes, she’s pretty old.

  – Is she Christian?

  – I don’t think so.

  – Ohh…that’s awful…

  He walked away. He was wearing shorts and white socks that went up to his knees. He came back a minute later.

  – She has to be converted, you know, he said.

  Then he walked off again.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but it seemed significant. He had things in line. My grandmother was old. She wasn’t Christian. She had to be converted.

  * * *

  —

  The Goodmans were our neighbours on one side; the Schwartzes were on the other.

  There were three Goodman sisters: Jane, Andrea, and Margaret. They all had pixie cuts, which Mrs Goodman gave them the first Friday of every month. The three sisters were popular. There were usually half a dozen girls in the Goodmans’ backyard every day until five o’clock, and when they weren’t in the yard, they were in the basement playing with dolls or listening to records on their portable record player.

  The Goodmans’ basement was fascinating to me. The walls were panelled with slats that smelled of pine. Near the foot of the stairs there was a bar. Its counter was white arborite. Behind it were shelves of brightly coloured bottles. There were also mysterious gadgets: a piggy bank in the shape of a woman in a bathing suit, a bottle opener like a Lilliputian golf club, a mug with flesh-coloured breasts jutting from it, and plastic ice cubes with flies in them. Here and there, tacked to the wall, there were postcards from Florida and snapshots of Mr and Mrs Goodman on vacation.

  The basement was carpeted. There were easy chairs and an upholstered sofa. In a separate room, there was a Ping-Pong table. It all seemed so luxurious, so wealthy.

  In contrast, our basement was a dark and mildewed punishment.

  I didn’t go to the Goodmans’ often, because I was shy and because Mr Goodman didn’t like me, but it was at the Goodmans’ that I learned to skip rope, to turn double Dutch and Irish, to tell the difference between a doll in summer clothes and a doll in sportswear, to make papier-mâché heads and construction-paper silhouettes.

  And, as it happens, Margaret Goodman was my first love.

  * * *

  —

  On the other side, the Schwartzes lived in a red-brick two-storey house that was the smallest on Grove Street. It was also the most beautiful. The house was covered in ivy, and the property penned by an unruly hedge. In the front w
indows, one on either side of the door, there were white flowerboxes which, in spring, were filled with tulips.

  When I knew them, Mrs Schwartz was twenty-five and her daughter, Irene, was five.

  As far as I remember, Lillian Schwartz was the only person who ever talked about my mother: my mother as a child, the dolls she liked, the books she read, the park on King where she fell from the seesaw; my mother adolescent, beautiful in certain dresses, squabbling with her parents; and then her sudden departure, at the age of seventeen, with a man from Sarnia.

  In Lillian Schwartz’s version of her, I discerned something of myself. I imagined my mother thin, shy, and unhappy.

  Also, Mrs Schwartz never spoke down to me. She behaved as if I were a colleague. When she took a correspondence course on religion, for instance, I was pushed into the frightening universe of charmed weeds, dying saints, and the restless dead.

  To this day I can’t think of Philo of Alexandria without a shudder, but Lillian Schwartz was the adult I loved most, after my grandmother, and she was more trustworthy, in my eyes.

  1 In summer, the field across the street from our house was yellow with dandelions and spiky with thistles. It smelled of weeds and pine.

  Along with a basket for the dandelions, I’d take a glass jar with me, to catch grasshoppers and crickets. In fact, quite a bit of my time was taken up with insects: finding them, catching them, admiring their wings and antennae before setting them free.

  II

  Now that I’ve known so many unhappy people, I understand my grandmother’s misery.

  She had lived something other than the life she wanted. She had married late, then her husband left her. (He died, actually, but she held it against him, I think.)

  For years she had taught primary school, though she had no fondness for children, and she had whelped, if that’s the word, an ungrateful child. After a life like that, passed in a town so far from the world, what was there to do but subside in drink and wait for her pension cheques?