A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  Mrs. Bowne brought us special treats. A jar of blackcurrant jam and sweet cakes. A tin of chocolate squares. A bag of malt balls. She held me on her lap and gently brushed my knotted hair with even, vertical strokes, indifferent to the whorling pattern of my scalp. She kept her own straight silver hair twisted up in a bun, exposing the skin of her neck, the texture like crinkled tissue paper.

  As a former primary school teacher, she believed that a strict program of education—involving the cultivation of impeccable table manners, a knowledge of the proper literature, good grooming, and, most of all, a faultless facility with the English language—was an absolute necessity. I sat for hours with picture books in front of me while she chopped vegetables beside me on a cutting board, stopping every now and then to underline a word with a carrot stick or celery stalk. Beanstalk. Butterfly. Black sheep—that one prompting a halt and a look of apology.

  Her views were mostly charitable. She did not share her husband Mr. Bowne’s notion of the White Man’s Burden: that it was only through heaps of instruction that those of darker hue could hope to keep their ignorant and undisciplined genes in check. In Mrs. Bowne’s opinion, it wasn’t me who was backward, it was society. It was more: “God forbid we send him into the unenlightened world, ill-prepared to conjugate.” I gave myself over to her completely. She was the smartest person I knew.

  At some point, she decided that alphabet flashcards would be the first step in my ascension. She showed me that language could be an architecture. The letters and words stacked on top of each other, shaping rooms, building spiral staircases around feelings, sculpting the fragments of my inside talk into something firm and concrete. As time passed, I began to crave the sound of her approval. “Bravo, Marcel!”

  Oliver gave Mrs. Bowne a talking-to. He said she was approaching my education with the zeal of a missionary, clapping and stamping her feet. He didn’t want me to become her Eliza Doolittle–Jungle Boy–Caliban.

  She looked flustered and apologized. Then she began to cry. “It’s just that the poor boy has so much to overcome.”

  Oliver apologized for being too harsh.

  She wiped away her tears and apologized for overreacting.

  While they sat there apologizing to each other, I remained quietly in my chair wondering, What was I meant to overcome?

  When Mrs. Bowne left, waddling under the weight of her baggage through a light rain, Oliver shouted after her: “See you then.” And: “You will come again soon, won’t you?”

  Was my intuition more acute than that of other children? Was I more or less fearful of strangers? Watching Iris makes me wonder.

  She has been with me for four days, and appears to have little discernment. Her trust in the world verges on the alarming. I suspect that if a masked man were to drive up in a van and offer her candy, she would accompany him gladly. This morning a French woman named Elizabeth (“E-lee-sa-bet”) arrived to take her out for a few hours and Iris virtually hopped into her arms. Kiyomi has arranged for this friend of a friend to be available so that I may work during the day. It’s possible she is good with children but she annoyed me from the moment she arrived. (Marcel? You’re not French, are you? Nose slightly raised in the air. Parlez-vous français?)

  Kiyomi calls every evening with an update. She tells me that her mother, Natsumi, is unconscious but stable. Her condition hasn’t worsened since the accident. Her skull was fractured but the bleeding stopped quickly. The pressure never built up on her brain. That’s good news. When I tell her that Iris seems settled and comfortable, she sounds unsurprised. “Iris has always been mature for her age. You know, single child, single parent. She was forced to be flexible.”

  Neither of us says anything, though I’m sure I can hear the whir of us wondering, Were we also flexible?

  Now, hours later, Iris is back from her time with Elizabeth. I stopped work early to prepare tea. There are old tulips on the kitchen table, wide cups tipped to the window and the blue sky. The air in the flat is filled with countless sparkling motes. When the sun clouds over, it’s as if a switch is thrown and the sparkles disappear. We are sharing broken rice crackers off a plate and Iris is grilling me about a dusty suitcase she has just unearthed from the guest room, sealed by twine and gaffer tape, and resting on the linoleum floor. I admit that it is a curious object.

  “It mustn’t be opened,” I say, putting down the bills I have been sorting. “I’m storing it for an old roommate.” But Iris has an unconvinced look, so I tell her the truth. “It belonged to my mother. It’s just a bunch of old stuff.”

  Iris nods slowly and we both look at the suitcase uncertainly, as if it’s a bomb about to detonate.

  I don’t know what’s come over me, but next thing I know we’ve grabbed our winter coats and are heading towards Brompton cemetery.

  It is a cold but sunny afternoon. There are still a few hours of light left as we walk among the leaning slabs, listening to birds singing in the bare trees. The stones, worn down by the elements, are as thin as blades. Iris walks with loping strides as her mother did. Does. She is wearing pull-on boots, which gape around her skinny calves like buckets. I appreciate the fact that she did not press me to open the suitcase. Another child might have insisted, saying, Oh come on, what’s the big deal, just show me. But some instinct held Iris back.

  I watch as she picks up a branch to use as a walking stick and continues down the path. There are earls and architects and prize-fighters buried here. There are day-old babies and ninety-year-old women. There are Indian and Polish and Russian bones. We follow the crows, keepers of the graves. We leave the path and wander under the trees, the dry snap of twigs underfoot, needles of sunshine criss-crossing our path.

  Just as we approach the northwest corner of the cemetery, I have a moment of doubt. What sort of macabre person brings a young child to a gravesite? But Iris, child of Edward Gorey and ever flexible, has dropped her walking stick and run ahead. When she looks back, I point to the right, towards the Garden of Remembrance. My mother’s plot is at the edge of the lawn setting, one square metre with a small, tasteful memorial set into the ground. I notice that someone has recently swept the stone and left a bouquet of fresh flowers. But I’m not fooled by the deceptive tidiness, the ritual upkeep. There is nothing neat about death.

  I give Iris a gentle tap.

  “I just need to know. How weird is this? Extremely? Sort of?”

  “You bringing me here?”

  I nod.

  She pauses before answering. “Sort of.”

  While she wanders off, I pick up the bouquet and breathe in the smell of magnolia, a scent so sweet it makes me dizzy.

  It is time to admit that I’ve not coped properly with my mother’s death. It was summer of last year when she died. When I received the hospital call telling me what had happened, I took several days to make arrangements, then I buried my remorse in work, and, on weekends, under bottles of alcohol and a short fling with a petite makeup artist who flitted around my tired body like a butterfly. There was no thrill in it. I should have known from experience that nothing stays buried, it all inches its way back to the surface eventually.

  Lately, memories of my mother open up like ancient ferns. Last night, the memory involved the two of us eating strawberry ice, nothing gloomy, just a simple glimmering scene, a reminder that though we were lost to each other in the beginning and in the end, there were happier interludes.

  To my horror, I feel my legs fold and my knees lower to the ground. I try to look normal as Iris walks over, takes my hand and hoists me up with a giggle. Now she is leading me to the cemetery gates. Her small ungloved hand is smooth and cool. She is my knight, and I am her hunched and errant dragon. If I’m lucky she will lump my behaviour in the category of strange but benign artistic sensitivity.

  “Let’s go back to your apartment and do some yoga,” my knight says.

  I consider telling her I’d rather be left alone, preferably in a dark room, preferably with the bottle of vodka I have
stashed in the icebox. Instead, I say, “Yoga. Excellent idea.”

  PERHAPS IT WAS THE INSTINCT to shield that led Mrs. Bowne and Oliver to keep me out of school. For the first eight years of my life, they oversaw my education at home. Mrs. Bowne dealt with basic curriculum, Oliver with deportment. From Oliver I learned to conform in public. I learned that crowds were for blending in with. Don’t lift your umbrella too high above others or slurp your tea. Keep your elbows to your sides and off the table. Conspicuousness is a flaw and a flaw is something that has to be smoothed away. Death is a flaw, too. Being near it makes you conspicuous.

  Mrs. Bowne once told me the story of Oliver settling into the Bownes’ house as an orphan. It seems he had a tough go of it. His parents’ deaths had given him unwanted status. He was a target for wild and rough boys. The hurt he carried scared them. They needed to chase him away.

  Mrs. Bowne said, “He wants you to have an easier time than he did. He wants you to blend in.”

  “But blend into what?”

  “I don’t know. Just blend in the right way.”

  For Mrs. Bowne, the right way was British. A Thames riverboat, a Dover sole, pudding in a Pyrex dish, trifle rather than flan, Peter Rabbit rather than Babar the Elephant.

  Oliver wanted a life of acceptability for me as well. I learned from experience that he considered most jokes uncouth and saw music as a frivolity (though piano was better than violin). He was so full of restriction in those early years, anyone might have suspected him of orthodox religious leanings. Only lately do I recognize this strictness and sombreness as his way of mourning.

  I was happiest when he took me to work, to the London Bureau of the Chicago Tribune.

  We had our own routine on these days. We took the tube to Chancery Lane Station. We walked past the spot in Gough Square, near Fleet Street, where, I was told, he first laid eyes on my mother. Then we went by Ning’s coffee house and gazed in the window at her favourite table. When we finally arrived at his office, he cleared a place for me at his mission oak desk. I looked around and smiled at the other rewrite men. Their desks, spotted with coffee stains and cigarette burns, were shoved close together in a giant horseshoe. Oliver’s desk was at the farthest end of the horseshoe. It had a typewriter, a telephone, a wire basket for copy, and a metal spike for stabbing papers to keep them handy.

  As a rewrite man it was his task to take the day’s news, pulled from wire feeds and telephone dispatches, and reshape it in the Tribune style. Every morning he sat at his desk, sharpened his pencils, pressed a block of staples into his stapler, and adjusted his typewriter ribbon. The phones rang non-stop. People typed as though their fingers were Olympic sprinters, stopping only to reload another page, and when they finished they yelled, “COPYYY!”

  One day when Oliver had completed his work and I had finished a jigsaw puzzle, he walked me across the room to the international desk. Rays of sunshine poured through the windows like golden arrows, as if God had decided that what happened in this corner was important. Gleaming clocks told the time of various cities around the world and the clacking banks of Teletype machines streamed stories across the wires from everywhere. I remember he placed my hand on one of the machines. I had never before felt so much concentrated heat and whirring energy.

  “You should work here,” I said.

  Oliver shrugged and said he would rather stick to rewrites, with the occasional pickup story, because it got him home in time for dinner.

  “I’m happy to stay put,” he said.

  “You mean, until my mother returns?”

  He glanced down at my face, thinking for a moment. “Yes. That’s right.”

  My mother, I had recently discovered, was writing to us. Her correspondence appeared in the form of pale pink hospital stationery or picture postcards signed with the letter X. At first, when I was still too young to read, Oliver would leave his mail out in the open. Sometimes he would offer a scrap. (“She sends her love.” “She says happy birthday” . . . ) But now that I was six and reading a little, he had started to keep his mail close at hand, hiding or destroying items as soon as he was finished with them. One night when he fell asleep in his chair I crept over to the sidetable to turn off the light and came across an undiscarded pink envelope. I removed the letter carefully, puzzling out a few simple words. I am . . . She will . . . We now . . . I could tell that the letter was about my mother, not from her. At the bottom, it was signed with D.R. and then a squiggle.

  I turned off the lamp and made my way to the bedroom, where I slipped the letter under my mattress. The next morning when Oliver asked about it, I faked innocence: “What do you mean, letter? What letter?” I could see that he was angry. But I didn’t care. My mother had been gone for six years. There was so much I did not know.

  Meanwhile, when I took my usual walks with Mrs. Bowne I was beginning to understand what it meant not to be purely black or white. There were the strangers who gawked at me and tried to unlock the mystery of my lineage, who saw Ethiopia in my forehead, Polynesia in my hair, Nepal in my freckles. There was the fishmonger’s wife who thought I was handsome in a Mediterranean way, perhaps Maltese, or maybe Algerian. She liked to rub my hair, test the unruly bounce of it with her haddock hands.

  One day a boy at the park attacked me for no reason. He used his shovel as a catapult and fired mud at me from the pond. Nignog, golliwog . . . boy from a bog. What do you eat, what do you drink, how do you sleep? Mrs. Bowne swatted him away with her handbag and wiped off the mud with a handkerchief, but his dreadful words remained.

  An older girl I met at the same park informed me on another occasion that she couldn’t play with me any more. “You mustn’t touch my tricycle,” she said, wiping her handlebars. “My father says forners have germs and that you’re taking bloody jobs from British workers.”

  I blinked at her, then watched her cycling fiercely away.

  “Oh, phooey. Never mind their old tosh,” said Mrs. Bowne when I finally ran to her with tears running down my face. “Life will get easier.”

  “But will I be m-m-more like them and less like m-m-me when I grow? Can you t-t-teach me h-h-how?” I asked, between sobs.

  “Don’t be foolish. When you grow up you’ll be leading this country.”

  “You know that’s n-n-not true,” I said, miserably.

  “You’ll be a Member of the House of Lords.”

  Her silliness wasn’t erasing the hurt. I grabbed her hand and squeezed it as hard as I could. I wanted her to say something she really meant. I wanted to milk some truth from her fingers. I wanted her to give me a mother.

  She let me grip her hand until I felt the anger burn away.

  By age seven, I feared I would be crowned Prince of Lost Causes. I was not hardy. I was thin and physically awkward. I grew breathless if I ran more than a few yards. I could romp around the playground but I was hopeless with a ball. I bruised and scraped easily and became queasy during car rides. Oliver learned to keep the medicine cabinet well stocked: tannic acid for burns, acriflavine for cuts, cough syrup, nose drops, bandages, thermometer, a calibrated spoon.

  Vocabulary lessons became one of our few shared activities, but Oliver lacked Mrs. Bowne’s patience. He tried every incentive, going so far as to offer me money, sweets, movies. He wrote the words again and again on scraps of paper and taped them to the wall—baleful, countenance, elapse, stultify—but these dictionary words made no sense to me.

  After the lesson was over one day, I asked for a piece of paper. I made a few tentative marks. A circle, a few dots. The way the paper sipped and then gulped the ink from the pen—that was the best part. The ripple of Oliver’s open collar, the bean of his earlobe, that was how it started more or less. I felt the calm flood my body, dissolving the knots I carried in every muscle.

  The second portrait I ever drew was of a woman, her dark eyes set in a white circle. My mother’s absence became the charged field within which I would eventually become an artist.

  IRIS IS INQUISITIVE. I
have learned that unless I keep her occupied at all times, she is inclined to poke around. (The sort of restraint she demonstrated with my mother’s suitcase has passed.) Her custom is to delve. She does not speak so much as interrogate. What do you do and Are you good at your job and Do you have to work all the time and Why is your studio door locked and Can I see your drawings sometime and Who lives here with you and Don’t you ever get lonely by yourself and What about children and Where is your father and Can I meet him one day. She tips back in her chair and awaits my response. I say, So do you have more Spanish homework today and Why don’t we discuss that book you were reading last night—but she will not be diverted. I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.

  Today, I dressed up in my “funny old clothes” and took Iris for lunch at a popular Mediterranean deli around the corner. We were served by a waitress in a short blue dress and red ankle boots. Brown freckles and full lips. Long amber hair. Bare calves. She walked with the staccato grace of a beginner fashion model. I smiled at her, and she stopped her walk to smile back, a batting of her eyelashes followed by a sexy flick of her hair.

  I was lost in my little fantasy when Iris, without an ounce of bashfulness, and in a perfectly adult tone, said, “Do you have a crush on her?”

  “Iris, please,” I said, between sips of beer. “I’m just thinking.” But, a few minutes later, my eyes continued to follow the waitress.

  Iris interrupted again. “I don’t think you want to get involved with her.”